Lawence Pintak – Lessons from the Mountaintop – Transcript

Lawrence Pintak Interview

Summary:

• Lawrence Pintak is an award-winning journalist, former CBS Middle East correspondent, and scholar with a PhD in Islamic Studies who has spent three decades as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism
• His book Lessons from the Mountaintop: Ten Modern Mystics and Their Extraordinary Lives profiles ordinary people from diverse traditions—Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Druidry, Kabbalah, Christianity, and Hinduism—who have gone down profoundly deep spiritual paths
• A central finding across all ten mystics: no matter which spiritual path you take, when you reach the mountaintop you arrive at the same place—but getting there requires being anchored in at least one tradition
• The mystics consistently report that doctrine serves as scaffolding for the journey, but eventually falls away as direct experience deepens; what remains is an awareness of universal consciousness connecting all beings
• Pintak draws on his war correspondent experience to examine human nature, finding that spiritual practice offers a framework for understanding suffering as part of an evolutionary process rather than arbitrary punishment
• All traditions profiled share common threads: we are part of a universal consciousness, words and vibration have creative power, other dimensional beings exist, and spiritual breakthroughs require both patience and commitment

Key Takeaways:

• All paths lead to the same mountaintop, but you need an anchor. Every mystic profiled emphasized that while all traditions point to the same ultimate truth, practitioners must be rooted in one tradition to make genuine spiritual progress. Without that anchor, spiritual breakthroughs can be destabilizing rather than liberating.
• Doctrine is scaffolding that eventually falls away. Sacred texts and religious teachings serve as entry points to the spiritual path, but as practitioners advance into genuine mystical experience, the doctrine begins to dissolve. This is why mystics have often been persecuted—their direct experience threatens religious power structures built on belief.
• We are all part of a universal consciousness. Across Sufism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Druidry, and Hinduism, these mystics share a common realization: individual identity is ultimately an illusion, and we are waves temporarily arising from an infinite ocean of consciousness.
• The process is long, but glimpses are available to everyone. All ten mystics emphasize that spiritual realization takes sustained commitment over years or lifetimes—yet brief glimpses of truth are accessible to anyone who settles down, listens, and takes the practice seriously. These glimpses leave lasting impressions that fuel continued growth.
• Discernment matters in spiritual experience. Not everything heard in meditation or mystical states comes from a trustworthy source. The benchmark, as Father Michael Holleran suggests: Does it create compassion? Does it motivate good? If so, follow it; if not, let it go.

Full interview, edited for readability:

Lawrence: No matter which path you take, when you get to the mountain top, you are in the same place, and getting to that place requires you to be anchored in at least one, or in a tradition. You can learn from other traditions, but you need that anchor. If you don’t have that anchor, if you’re not rooted in a tradition and you have these kinds of spiritual breakthroughs, you don’t know what to do with them and it can really screw you up.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people, or about spiritual topics, or scientists who study the interface of science and spirituality. Most of you have seen episodes, but if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, there are 740 of them now – go to batgap.com and look under the interviews menu, where you’ll see them arranged in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and then there’s a page explaining other alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Lawrence Pintak. I’m going to read his whole bio here, because if I ask him to tell us this stuff, I’m sure he’ll leave out a lot. He’s very modest and…

Lawrence: I think that’s the first time anybody’s accused me of that. [Laughter]

When the Student Is Ready, the Guru Appears

Rick: Right. So, but anyway, I think you’ll find it interesting to see what his background is, because it’ll help to put our whole conversation into a better-informed context. Lawrence is an award winning journalist, scholar and media development expert whose career spans reporting from four continents and leading major initiatives in journalism education worldwide. He served as the Founding Dean of Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University and as Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at the Aga Khan University in East Africa. Lawrence holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and is known for his deep expertise at the intersection of journalism, religion, democracy and international affairs. In addition to his work as a Middle East correspondent for CBS News, Lawrence has authored several influential books, including one we’re going to be discussing today, entitled Lessons from the Mountain Top; Ten Modern Mystics and Their Extraordinary Lives. He also has a book coming out this month, I believe, entitled America and Islam: Soundbites, Suicide Bombs and the Road to Donald Trump, and he’s written a book called The New Arab Journalist: Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil and several other books. His commentary and analysis have been featured by major outlets such as the New York Times, Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. Recognized for his commitment to press freedom and journalistic integrity, particularly in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, he was named a Fellow for the Society of Professional Journalists in 2017 for extraordinary service to journalism beyond the newsroom. Pintak’s lifelong curiosity has led him to explore the spiritual dimensions of world religions, particularly through three decades as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. He has written extensively about religion, media and policy, contributing to both academic and popular platforms, and his work continues to shape conversations at the crossroads of faith, global politics and the media. First question: Did your interest in spirituality precede your career as a veteran war correspondent, or did being a war correspondent trigger the no-atheists-in-foxholes phenomenon?

Lawrence: Neither. Actually, it was meeting my wife that triggered my interest in spirituality. She’s Indonesian and when I met her in Indonesia – she had come from a Muslim family, I was a, you know, lapsed Catholic, we went to church a couple of times a year and that was pretty much it – but when we met we knew we were supposed to be Buddhists and we ended up going to Bangkok and getting married at the Marble Temple. But we can loop back around to war and awareness later.

Rick: Huh, interesting. So were you already a war correspondent when you met your wife?

Lawrence: Yes, yes. That was long after I’d been a war correspondent, I went to the Middle East – well, I went to Africa in the late seventies- to date myself- and then the Middle East in the eighties. My spiritual awakening, as you would put it in your lead in, would have come in the nineties, in the mid-nineties, so it was long after that. Though, of course, covering war, seeing so much death and destruction, raises questions about the meaning of life and why we’re here and what we are and how we’re shaping all of existence.

Rick: Yeah, when you say your spiritual awakening, describe that a little bit. Do you mean just your initial foray into spirituality, or was there some kind of experiential shift actually?

Lawrence: Well, how can I put this? I didn’t have that moment when suddenly everything around me disappears and I see it all as an illusion. But what I did have happen was… I mean, first of all, there was this draw, inexplicable draw, to Buddhism when I got to Indonesia, which is the world’s most populous Muslim country. So there was no quid pro quo there – but my wife and I met and we both felt we should be Buddhist and we went down that path. But in Indonesia at the time, Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism was effectively illegal. Buddhism writ large – Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism of Southeast Asia, South and Southeast Asia – was allowed and we went to various teachings etc. But something was missing, and I began to read some books about Tibetan Buddhism and I was immediately drawn in. Initially my wife wasn’t, and then she picked up one book, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which was written by Andrew Harvey and Sogyal Rinpoche, and she was suddenly hooked. But Tibetan Buddhism is a lineage that requires the guru. It requires the teacher because the initiations into the practices are said to be a psychic initiation. So without a guru you got nothing. And one evening my wife said, basically, “We’re screwed. What are we going to do? There’s no Tibetan lamas here, they can’t come here, we’re screwed.” The next night – this was long ago, when there were telexes – the telex in our bedroom came alive and there was a message from someone we did not know in Hong Kong, saying that there’s a Tibetan lama here who has had a call in meditation to come to Indonesia. Would you possibly host him? Okay.

Rick: I love those kind of stories.

Lawrence: So, as you know, in Buddhism and Hinduism and other traditions there’s this idea that when the student is ready, the guru will manifest. Well, he pretty much did.

In Buddhism and Hinduism and other traditions there’s this idea that when the student is ready, the guru will manifest. Well, he pretty much did.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. Great story. I guess you’re not in war zones anymore, right? You’ve distance yourself from that scene?

Lawrence: I don’t cover it on a day-to-day basis, but I do sometimes go in and out of them to do projects and do some reporting, but I’m not at the front line like I used to be.

Rick: Yeah. I’m wondering how getting into spirituality and doing some kind of spiritual practice, some kind of meditation, I presume, changed your perspective on being in those dangerous and violent circumstances.

War, Human Nature, and the Lords of the Flies

Lawrence: It does, you know, on various levels and it raises as many questions as it begins to answer. You hear a lot that deep down inside, humans are good. Right? That deep down inside we’re all good people, we want good things, etc., etc. My experience in covering war was that was not the case, that as soon as the rules of civilization are discarded, for whatever reason, we genuinely become the Lords of the Flies.

Rick: I was just thinking of that book as you were forming that sentence.

Lawrence: Absolutely. And you know, you only needed to go to the toilet roll aisle during COVID to see how quickly we can turn on each other, and I saw so many examples, certainly on the macro level. I mean, you see horrendous things when you’re covering wars: the Iran-Iraq war, for example. This is the 1980-95 Iran-Iraq War, and it was just like in World War One: battlefields with trenches running at each other across the minefields, etc. And I remember going out into…

Rick: Poison gas, right?

Lawrence: Poison gas, absolutely. I remember going out to the front at one point after there’d been a human-wave assault- which is what they called them- from the Iranian side. This is going to sound ridiculous, but as far as we could see, it was just a carpet of bodies piled on top of each other, because they just run out into the minefields and at the machine guns and fell and fell and fell. And as far as we could see off, into the distance, into the blowing sands, it was just bodies. And this is long before I became spiritually interested, shall we say. But you have to wonder, how can we do this to each other? And then there were times in Lebanon, for example – one of the various wars in Lebanon – there we met a couple, a Lebanese couple who ran a cheese store in Alexandria, Virginia, and they had come to Lebanon- this is 1983 – they’d come to Lebanon for a family wedding and then the Israelis invaded and they got cut off and they lost their business. They were there for months and months and months, and so they ended up staying. And there were these wonderful people. And every time we go to that village we kind of adopted that village as a microcosm to watch what happened there. And every time we went to the village they insisted we sit down for a big lunch and entertained us, etc., etc. And then another round of war broke out and everyone in that village that we were having lunch with every day, etc., went into the next village and killed everybody. And so you just say: What are we doing here? But then you also run into people who are amazingly spiritual. I was lucky enough to meet John Paul II and you stand holding his hand, you were enveloped in what the Hindus called darshan, his spiritual energy, standing with Mother Teresa in the Vatican, etc., etc. So you have these contrasts. You’re meeting amazing people who embody spirituality, but then you’re seeing what the rest of us are doing and it’s hard to justify or rationalize.

Rick: Yeah, my personal belief – and it’s certainly not a fact, but it’s the way I choose to see things – is that we are essentially good, all of us, but you have to go really deep and a great many people – often seems like the majority – have that goodness occluded or buried by numerous layers of crud. We can consider what the crud might be consist of. It’s just really, really covered up, and so whatever manages to manifest in the person’s thinking and behavior after going through all that crud is very dimmed and distorted and polluted.

Lawrence: And we take on that crud, right? We get immersed in that crud and it’s hard not to, these days. You know, I’m a lifelong journalist and I really kind of cringe every time I sit down at breakfast and open up my laptop or my iPad and look at the news. It’s like I don’t even want to look anymore because I know how awful it is and I don’t want to take on that negative energy. But we also can’t ignore what’s going on, obviously.

Rick: Yeah. Another one of my little pet perspectives is that if you could zoom out far enough, if you could really see the big picture, you’d realize that everything ultimately is in the interest of evolution, and that might include some very tough-love experiences that people have to go through, you know, because some people say, Well, there couldn’t possibly be a God, because look at the Holocaust or look at Sudan or whatever they want to mention. But there are probably every day somewhere in this universe inhabited planets being blown up by asteroids and everybody dies, but their bodies die and their souls, in my worldview, continue to evolve in some way, shape or form, in some place or other, and that would apply to everything on earth. And so I guess the question arises: Why does it have to be that way? Why does it have to be such a shit show? If God is really compassionate and everything, why do humans have to create so much suffering for one another? Or is God creating it?

God as an Energy Field

Lawrence: Well, then you get into the issue of what is God, right? So if you’re looking at it in a dual sense and you see a creator being up there watching us and/or manipulating us, then yes, it’s a valid question. You know, how can God allow Gaza or whatever it may be? Sudan? But if you look at the idea that we are all God, that we are all part of that same pool of energy, that same pool of consciousness… One of the people I interviewed and got to know in the book, Father Michael Holleran, who’s a Catholic priest, spent 20 years as a Carthusian monk and he’s now a Zen Roshi. Amazing human being. He says God is an energy field. This isn’t what you normally hear from the pulpit, but if you look at it from that perspective, that we are all part of a single consciousness but we are all – as I told you before we started rolling and looking out at the North Sea – there are waves, and this idea that you or I are a wave that then disappears back into that sea, that consciousness, and those bits of wave are learning and evolving and we’re all at a different stage in that evolution, and so that gets back to your idea that we are all progressing, that we are learning from what’s going on and that ultimately it’s going to get better.

He says God is an energy field. This isn’t what you normally hear from the pulpit.

Rick: Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is from Saint Teresa of Avila, who said it appears that God himself is on the journey. And by that we don’t mean Jesus, we don’t mean some puppeteer in the sky, we mean just what you describe: the all pervasive energy, intelligence, creativity which orchestrates the universe and which doesn’t have any holes in it. It’s omnipresent, as the scriptures say. Therefore, it permeates us as much as it permeates Gaza, as much as it permeates heaven or, you know, every other place. I’m saying “it” so I don’t get into the awkward he/she business. Anyway, go ahead and play off of that.

Lawrence: Well, yeah, I agree with you and it gets back to that idea that if we are God, that God created all of this, that the energy field manifested in the physical in order to learn and grow and play – you know, the Hindi idea, Leela, right? So we’re all playing it at some level – some in a tragic way, some in a more playful way. I’m also fascinated by the Jewish idea- mitzvah and Kabbalistic idea, particularly – that every good deed creates a good angel, but every negative deed creates a nasty angel that’s essentially a demon and that feeds on itself. So it creates more negativity, it creates more negative energy and we get sucked into that negativity. Or, if we choose, we focus on the positive and get sucked into or become part of and help manifest the positive. It also gets back to people who go off on the mountain top. You know, we go back to the title of my book, right, we’ll get that in eventually. One of the people that’s profiled in the book is Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, who was the second Westerner ordained as a nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and she ultimately spent 12 years on a mountaintop, literally 12 years in a cave on a mountaintop. And you know, part of you says: Well, what good are you doing for the world up there? I mean, Tibetan Buddhists take the Mahayana Bodhisattva pledge to never achieve enlightenment until all beings are enlightened, help all beings, etc. Well, what good is your sitting on a mountaintop? Well, as she would respond, or various Hindu yogis would respond: We’re changing our energy and, through that, changing the energy of existence, which does contribute to the evolution of all things. It’s a fascinating idea.

Rick: No man is an island. And you could think of collective consciousness as a giant sponge, like you said, you know. Whatever you infuse into that sponge is going to influence the whole, positively or negatively. And you mentioning Michael Holleran – I found him fascinating. I’d like to interview him. One of his things is he has subtle perception. He seems to see angels and subtle beings – and there was that Druid lady in, I guess it was Scotland or something?

Lawrence: Emma Restall Orr.

Rick: Who also sees this stuff. And I’ve interviewed a number of people who do and what they say is that there’s a lot more life that we can’t see than there is that we can see, in the form of, not microscopic, but subtle beings of various sorts who dwell among us and who are just in different dimensions and, knowingly or not, we interact with them and with those dimensions and there’s this kind of reciprocal influence that takes place. There’s a quote in the Gita someplace that says: You support the gods and they’ll support you. And there are also all kinds of stories about how you can feed the negative energies- they become more powerfu

Lawrence:  or you can feed the positive energies, they become more powerful. So it’s almost like there are battles taking place on all levels, gross and subtle, in synchrony with one another.

Lawrence: And as you know, various Eastern traditions believe that there are these dimensions you’re talking about that are concrete. I’ll use that term – but they’re finite places in different dimensions that you can be reborn into. So the god realm – think Mount Olympus – that concept of god-beings is one of the places we can be incarnated into. Likewise, you know, the hell realms, which are really nasty. So all of these exist, as you’re saying, exist simultaneously, and for some people they’re able to penetrate that veil between different dimensions. And there are places on earth where that veil is thinner and it’s easier to penetrate – a place like Bali, for example – it’s easier to penetrate that veil, whereas other places it’s pretty hard and unless you’re really advanced, it’s not going to happen.

Rick: Yeah. And I would say there are certain places where one or the other polarity has the upper hand. Some place like Bali, I’m sure, is very heavenly and you feel like, Oh, this is like paradise. And other places, oh, I am in a hell realm. You know, it’s really rough.

Lawrence: Well, you know it’s interesting you say that. At one point, after I got into all this stuff, I moved to Cairo. I moved back to Cairo. I’d lived there when I was with CBS. But I moved back to Cairo and I found it very hard to meditate there. And you know, I like to try and meditate every day. I’m not, you know, some advanced meditator or anything, but I just found that the energy was so heavy, compounded by the pollution – which, you know, literally, messes with your head, physically. It just it made it very hard to meditate there, whereas other places, you know, you can shift into a meditative state very easily.

Rick: Yeah. I was in Sedona one time and I had gone swimming with some friends and then we were sitting around and it was getting dark and we’re all just kind of sitting around and I was just kind of involuntarily drawn into a very deep meditation. I couldn’t open my eyes and talk if I wanted to, and obviously that would not have been my experience in many other places. So, yeah. And there are temples like that in India where people have been going there for a couple thousand years and the atmosphere is palpably thick with purity and sattwa, you know.

Lawrence: And you can contribute to that too. Often someone will have a meditation room. Shems Friedlander, who’s another person profiled in the book, a Sufi – when I knew him before I realized that he was such an influential Sufi, I knew he was a Sufi and in his house he had a room that was his meditation room and he didn’t want anyone else to go in there. And I absolutely understand that and feel the same way [about] places where I meditate, because it changes the energies. Ram Alexander, somebody else in the book, who spent 10 years at the feet of a female…

Rick: Anandamayi Ma.

Lawrence: Right, right, in India – talked of when she told him to move into the monastery – not the monastery…

Rick: Ashram or something

Lawrence: Ashram, thank you. The Brahmins who were living there didn’t want him anywhere near them because his vibration was at a completely different level than theirs – I mean down – and it messes with with their energy, with their vibration. So it’s a very tangible thing.

Rick: Yeah. Which brings up another point, which is that people can become really fussy and self-centered and kind of neurotic about their spiritual trip.

Lawrence: Absolutely. I won’t get into specifics but in the social media stuff I was doing around the book, one of the people… I had created a couple of instagram posts and he sent it to his organization and they just had a kitten over the fact that I was… He was very irreverent about stuff that happened and the crux to the book is demonstrating that these are ordinary people, not, you know, advanced, not on the spiritual bestseller list and not running a massive organization everyone’s genuflecting to. But the point was that there were things in there that they just found irreverent and were horrified by, because so many people in this realm that we we both operate in are really serious about their stuff and just take it a little too seriously sometimes. And… lighten up, right? But then there’s the whole issue of the spiritual leader him- or herself. I heard a conversation you did a few days ago, a few weeks ago, with someone about spiritual leaders who go bad and the idea that it all goes to their head. And I think it was Ram Alexander who said there’s no one with a bigger ego than an advanced yogi who’s teaching other people, right?

Rick: Well, it shouldn’t be that way.

Lawrence: It shouldn’t be that way, and he was being a little cynical as well. But but there are people we can both name -and we’re not going to -many people like that.

Rick: Yeah, someone used the term “premature immaculation.” [Laughter] I think sometimes people overestimate their level of attainment. I’m told that in certain Zen circles, if you have a profound spiritual awakening, presumably an abiding one, you’re told, Okay, now wait a decade before you start to teach. We’ll see how this ripens.

Lawrence: Right and it also gets back to: What is enlightenment? What is breaking through the illusions? And in the book various of these people talk about the fact that you will get… and one of the things I found very refreshing in doing the book was the extent to which, once I really got to know these people, they talked about the inner workings of what was going on with their meditation, etc. But the common refrain is that you get a glimpse of something. Some people will eventually break through it all and then it fundamentally changes and never changes back. But for most of us, even if we’re at an advanced meditative stage, we may get a brief glimpse. As the former Druid you mentioned a moment ago said, We’re sparks, but between the sparks there’s an empty space and that’s where God is. And we’ll get a glimpse of that empty space and then we’re back to where we were, but now we’ve had a sense of it, so we can move forward.

Rick: Yeah, and those glimpses leave a residue, they leave an impression and the residue can build and build. So I think for most people there are numerous intermittent glimpses, but then preceding – perhaps not always – but preceding an eventual permanent shift.

Lawrence: I was going to say, and across the board… I don’t mean to keep coming back to the book, but I talked to 10 people. These are ordinary human beings, as it were, not on the spiritual bestseller list, not household names, but [who] went down a deeply, profoundly spiritual path, and all of them talk about how long this process was and how they had to remain committed to it, how easy it would be to shift off, and some ultimately will tell you, Yeah, I got that breakthrough and it stayed with me and it has fundamentally changed everything. Others [are] a little more modest about it, but the bottom line is that they tell us, the rest of us, that you can reach through that veil, you can get that brief snap of inspiration. Andrew Harvey, who we mentioned before, was a renowned mystic, obviously, and [who has] written many, many books, says that this is within the grasp of all of us. We just need to sit down, settle down, listen and be serious about it and not be spiritually promiscuous. Because, again, one of the things that all of these people talk about is not that their tradition has truth, has ultimate truth, but that all of them say that, no matter which path you take, when you get to the mountaintop you are in the same place, and that getting to that place requires you to be anchored in a tradition. You can learn from other traditions, but you need that anchor. Tenzin Palmo said if you don’t have that anchor, if you’re not rooted in a tradition and you have these kinds of spiritual breakthroughs, you don’t know what to do with them and it can really screw you up.

You can reach through that veil, you can get that brief snap of inspiration.

No matter which path you take, when you get to the mountain top, you are in the same place, and getting to that place requires you to be anchored in at least one, or in a tradition.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a lot of nuance to this topic. It’s not necessarily the best strategy to just glom onto one thing and stick with it for your entire life, but then again you don’t want to flit about every weekend to a different teacher, a different teaching, a different practice. So there’s some kind of balance that can be found, you know. But whatever the balance, I think that what you said about consistency is important. You’re not going to take ayahuasca or something or other and be enlightened next weekend. It’s it’s a long-term endeavor, it’s really a lifelong endeavor. A lives-long endeavor.

Lawrence: Absolutely lives-long. Yeah, exactly. But it doesn’t mean that you have to glom onto the first tradition that comes along. You know, the fact that back in Indonesia, suddenly this Tibetan lama ended on my doorstep, I don’t think was any coincidence, right? I think there was some karmic connection from previous lives. And whether you have that kind of a connection to a teacher, you may have a connection to a particular tradition, but until you’re exposed to that tradition… Many of the people I talked to in the book were brought to their tradition by picking up a book. You know, again, it wasn’t coincidence – but right place, right time – [they] picked up a book and realized Yes, this is my path. Or Shems Friedlander, the Sufi sheikh, who in the late sixties and early seventies was Art Director at Columbia records in New York. He was a player on the New York scene, dancing with Janis Joplin, John and Yoko would come to the house for dinner, etc., etc. But he was a spiritual explorer. He was hungry. There was something he wanted and this was at the time when all this Eastern stuff was coming to the U.S. And so he sampled all of these things and with all of those first teachers. And then he met the Sufis, the whirling dervishes. You know, the guys that you’ve seen spinning with their big dresses. Well, that’s a meditation, it’s a moving meditation. And a group came to New York and he was introduced to them and Bang, that was his path. Suddenly he connected to where he was supposed to be. So he didn’t just keep exploring forever. He didn’t say, Oh, I’m going to go to this weekend workshop and that one… Oh, I didn’t get enlightenment this weekend so I’m going to try that tradition. He found his tradition ultimately. So it is important to make sure you’re going down the right path, too. Shop around a while.

Rick: Right. Shop around and see what really resonates with you. Different strokes for different folks, as Sly and the Family Stone sang.

Lawrence: Indeed.

Rick: That’s one of the main themes of your book, you know – all the paths up the mountain lead to the same peak, and it’s good not to be exclusivist or fundamentalist about one’s own teaching.

When Doctrine Falls Away

Lawrence: Right. And even the doctrine, you know, the idea that the Catholics believe this, the Hindus believe this – and the Hindus are writ large, obviously they believe a lot of things – but each tradition has a set of doctrine. But what these people are saying [holds up his book] is that once you advance down this mystic end of whatever tradition it is, the doctrine begins to fall away. The doctrine is scaffolding for us to get on that road, or for those who aren’t necessarily on a mystic path to believe in something, to get a sense of a religion, to become spiritual at the level that they are ready for. And this is the message you keep hearing in various religious texts, as well as from people like these mystics. There are layers of understanding within every tradition. So Muslims believe that there are seven layers of truth within the Quran. [There are] similar belief systems in the Kabbalah realm of Judaism, etc., etc. And so even in Christianity, and many of your audiences are going to be Christians of some sort, we see these mystics like Michael Holleran, who’s profiled in the book, and others, like Bernadette Roberts and Cynthia Bourgeault, who have gone down a profoundly mystic path within Catholicism or within Christianity, and their version resembles in no way, shape or form what you hear from the pulpit on a Sunday. Christ is in all things. Resurrection… Yes, we are resurrected, in that we are literally resurrected into Christ, become part of this Christ consciousness, etc., etc. But again, the doctrine has gotten them down a road, and then they’ve advanced beyond the doctrine and the doctrine starts to fall away, which is why Sufis, for example, are illegal or persecuted in many places in the world – Saudi Arabia primary among them – because they don’t take the Quran as the word of God per se, as the only word of God. It is a level, a version, and then they could penetrate deeper into it. Just as even in the Quran is the seal of the prophets, Muslims say the last prophet. But even in the Quran, the voice of God says: I have sent many prophets to many people, some of whom you know and some of whom you don’t. And you hear that again in various other traditions, that there have been avatars that have come. Ramakrishna says: I don’t care whether it’s Buddha or Christ or whomever your avatar is that you follow, it’s all the same guy. And Thomas Keating said: You can call him – I’m misquoting him, sure – but you can call him Bubba.

Once you advance down this mystic end of whatever tradition it is, the doctrine begins to fall away. The doctrine is scaffolding for us to get on that road.

Rick: You can call him Butch, wasn’t it?

Lawrence: Butcher, Butch, that’s what it was, thank you. It doesn’t matter, because it’s all faces of the same God, faces of the same consciousness that we are a part of.

Rick: Yeah, which hearkens back to what we were talking about 20, 30 minutes ago, which is that, if God is all pervading… There’s a line from the Incredible String Band – I don’t know if you remember the Incredible String Band?

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick: “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.” They might have gotten it from some other source, but if you think of it… electricity, obviously. I’m in a room where there are several lights and there’s a computer and a camera and there’s an air conditioner blowing and it’s all the same electricity just powering all these different mechanisms or instruments and so, like that, I think to a lot of my listeners this would be obvious. But it’s the same consciousness, and it’s reflecting through a mosquito and through a turtle and through you and I, and through Jesus or Hitler or whoever. It’s the same consciousness reflecting and, just as with sunlight shining on different media, the reflections are going to be very different according to the quality of that medium.

Lawrence: Absolutely. And the perception of the perceiver. We try to get our head around this idea of it all being an illusion on an ultimate level, right? On one level it’s physical. Knock on my desk and you hear it through the microphone. It’s physical. But on an ultimate level, you know, we’re told it’s all our perception, it’s how we see it, and someone who has reached some level of enlightenment, who has penetrated that illusion, sees it differently. And in doing the book, listening to these various iterations of what that means, the one that most fascinated me and took me a long time to get my head around was Emma Restall Orr, who you mentioned earlier, who was one of the leaders of Druidry in the United Kingdom and wrote various books on Druidry, etc. And what I found fascinating about her – the reason I profiled her – was that she then moved beyond Druidry. She moved into a place of her own mystic path in which all of the doctrine – to the extent that there is doctrine of Druidry, all that fell away. But the critical piece was this idea of her describing shape shifting and just talking about it as an everyday thing. You know, she turns into a bobcat and she goes running off with this other guy, who turns into a wolf. And all of these people I talked to over the course of many months, or in some cases years, and I listen to this and I listen to this, and I’m trying to picture, what is it we’re talking about, right? Is it the Incredible Hulk? Is it Princess Whatever in Shrek, you know, turning into the ogre? Is it some guy sitting in the corner in meditation, who’s on a psychic… Help me, psychic trip?

Rick: Psychedelic?

Lawrence: No, no, when you…

Rick: Oh, out of body experience?

Lawrence: Yeah, yeah, you project your consciousness.

Rick: Astral projection?

Lawrence: Right, astral projection. So is it that? And she worked on explaining it to me, and she was having a hard time explaining it to me, and ultimately it came down to – I’m convinced it came down to – the fact that she had broken through the illusion. And once you’ve broken through the illusion, the physical doesn’t matter. So you can project yourself off there [gestures far away] and you can, at some level, be physically over there in another body, while some other aspect of you is here, because if it’s all an illusion, you know, it’s just like the yogis who can walk on water, etc., etc. If we don’t buy into what we’re seeing, we can use it in any way we want. Anyway, that’s my take.

Rick: Yeah, I would imagine that if you had a camera pointing at her or if you were quietly observing from the corner, you’d still see her physical body there, but she’s going off and having some adventure, perhaps inhabiting the body of an actual animal or perhaps something else, I don’t know what. There was a story about Shankara, where he hadn’t had any experience of worldly pleasures, you know, sex and stuff, and for some reason he had to debate this woman who was an expert in that and he felt unqualified. So it so happened there was a king who was just dying and Shankara went into a cave and just sat in lotus and samadhi and went off and inhabited the body of this king just as he died. And so the king sits up, Whoa! and back to life. And then the queen – I guess this king had several queens – and they all thought, wow, this guy is very charismatic all of a sudden, really bright, kind of a lousy lover, apparently. No experience in that. [Laughter] But then Shankara, as the story goes – who knows if it really happened – as time went on he kind of got more and more caught up in the experience and began to forget that he was Shankara. And then the queens realized what had happened and they were going to go and have Shankara’s body destroyed so that they could keep this nice, bright king. Shankara’s disciples realized what was afoot, and so they went there to the king and started chanting some scriptures that Shankara had written or something, and that kind of woke up his memory of who he really was. So the king drops dead, Shankara is back to his body just as they’re about to set it on fire and… End of story. [Laughter]

Lawrence: Very interesting. Yeah, I mean, Emma talks about… Your point is right, you know. Is the body still sitting there? And that’s what I kept asking. And she said Yes. But when you then come out of that meditative experience or that shape-shifting experience, the body will often hurt, the bones will be misshapen until they move back into the proper places, etc.

Rick: Yeah, it really did a number on her body.

Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, is it psychosomatic? What, right?

Rick: Two points that kind of stuck with me from what we discussed so far that I just want to re-enliven here for a second. One is that there’s a verse in the Gita which says “No effort is lost and no obstacle exists. Even a little of this dharma delivers from great fear.” And so I just want to leave the impression with people that any amount of spiritual practice is beneficial and so, do something and keep doing it, and if it doesn’t seem to work, if you’re not seeming to get any benefit after a while, then, you know, maybe consider doing something else. But the effort or just the intention or the motivation to start on the path… You know ,there’s that British mountaineer – I forget his name… Murray, I think his name was – who said that just once you actually take initiative, then all kinds of circumstances begin to form to help you on your way, which wouldn’t have if you hadn’t taken the initiative. So I think that’s true on the spiritual path as well.

Lawrence: Absolutely.

Rick: You want to comment on that before I go onto the second point?

Lawrence: Yeah and you know, we’re talking here about serious, heavyweight mystics, which neither you or I… well, I’m not – I don’t know whether you are – I mean, I meditate, but I wouldn’t consider myself a heavyweight mystic like these people.

Rick: I’m only 155 pounds!

Lawrence: But to your point of “practice something,” that doesn’t necessarily even mean meditation. I mean, just you do good stuff – that’s a path, right? Be compassionate toward other people, be helpful toward other people. Don’t step over the homeless guy on the street and walk in the bar, or whatever it is. So there’s many, many, many paths and many levels to the path.

Rick: Yeah, and that segues right into my second point, which is that we were talking earlier about self-absorbed spiritual people who are a little bit, you know, really fussy about their own routine and their own environment and all that stuff and kind of uncaring of other people. And there were a number or several people in your book. The one that most comes to mind is that woman who called herself a nunk, who could have just sat in a cushy circumstance and enjoyed her inner experience but really felt compelled to go among the homeless and suffering. Then you have people like Mother Teresa, who’s tending to all these really down-and-out people in Calcutta and saying that she sees Jesus in each of them. “I serve this one, I’m serving Jesus. I serve this one, I’m serving Jesus.” So there are a lot of well known and not so well known spiritual people throughout the ages who haven’t worried about getting their hands dirty helping people. Jesus was an example of going among the poor and the sick and so on. And it’s not only good for them, but it’s good for you, as a spiritual aspirant, to do seva, selfless service.

Lawrence: Absolutely. I mean, again, you don’t have to be able to meditate to do that. It’s putting yourself… shifting a mind… Maybe it’s not shifting, maybe you’re naturally compassionate like that, but it’s fostering a mindset that is: What’s good for me is good for everyone. If you look at this idea, you take on the idea that we are all God and every religion says God is within us, right? Even the core doctrines of Christianity or Judaism talk about God being within us. We don’t necessarily take that in the way a mystic takes that, but if we accept the idea that, as Mother Teresa said, that person is Christ, that person is Christ, that person is Christ, then that shifts your mindset and sets you down a road.

Rick: Yeah. And it’s literally true, because, as we were saying earlier, if everything is God, then “everything” also means this injured animal or this sick person or whatever. As Jesus said, Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me. So I’m going to start going through some points that I’ve noted down about your book, and don’t limit yourself to points I bring up. If anything comes to mind at any point, just feel free to bring it up. Question number one: Are there spiritual themes in some of your other books besides Lessons from the Mountaintop? No, is the short answer.

Rick: No problem, just curious. You’ve mentioned the idea of religious doctrine as a scaffolding that falls away as practitioners of all traditions reach higher states of awareness, and this reminds me of the theme of spirituality as a scientific endeavor, where beliefs are not the main thing. The beliefs are just hypotheses which can be used as springboards for experiential or empirical investigation. And oh, go ahead.

Lawrence: I mean, they’re metaphors. Like Michael Holleran in the book at some point says: Do we really think that Moses walked up a mountain top and there was a bolt of lightning and God gave him these things? These are all metaphors for how we can take on information, how the power of the broad consciousness, God, whatever you want to call it… And some of it is distorted. Holleran also talked about the idea of: Do you really think God struck down everybody so the Jews could come in from Sinai into Israel? He said that’s not the God that Jews, Christians, anyone else worships and that’s not the God that is familiar to us. So these things are meant to be lessons. Do we really believe Adam was there and they tore a rib out of him and it became his wife? These are all metaphors and they help us learn, and they help us grow, and they help us move on to the next metaphor, and that, maybe, is another step closer to truth we’ll never get to. And, again, none of these people who’ve been down profound paths claim to have found THE TRUTH. But we get closer and closer to truth. Bernadette Roberts, who is a Christian mystic – not one of those profiled [in the book] – says that if we actually got to that point and broke through it, were enlightened, our minds would blow up. She said it in a better way than I just said it. But we can’t handle truth, and you see that in a variety of religions, saying that ultimate truth is just too far beyond. It’s not something that we can absorb. We have no context for it.

Rick: Yeah. Sri Ramakrishna said something like, someone who gets enlightened is like an ant who approaches a mountain of sugar and takes one grain of sugar back to his ant hive, or whatever they’re called, and says: I found it, yeah, I’ve got it, and there’s more. There’s, there’s a mountain, I’m going to go back and get the rest of it, but you never get all of it.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick: Also, getting back to the notion of the scientific revolution or science, it arose from an age in which you could be burned at the stake for saying something that contradicted the established beliefs, so there was heavy emphasis on belief. So science came along and said: Well, wait a minute, let’s just try to shift this in terms of what we actually experience and gain some consensus agreement on the way the world works, rather than just accepting some belief which was often nonsensical. And I think there’s there’s a lesson for that in spirituality, and I think the people you profile in your book are, in a way, scientists as much as spiritual aspirants, because their primary orientation is experience, and belief is just icing on the cake.

Why Mystics Have Always Been Persecuted

Lawrence: And this is why mystics through the ages have been persecuted – because if Teresa of Avila can sit in her cell and talk to God, she doesn’t need the infrastructure of the church, and that’s threatening to the church. And ditto Sufis, and threatening to Al-Azhar, etc. So this direct experience, first of all, will often contradict the established doctrine, so that’s a threat and, of course, if you don’t need the intermediaries of the clergy, then that’s a huge threat to the power of whatever religion we’re talking about.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a joke where God and the devil are walking down the road and God sees something shiny and puts it in his pocket and the devil says, Hey, what’s that? What did you pick up? And God said, Oh, it’s just the truth. And the devil says: Give it to me, I’ll organize it for you. [Laughter]

Lawrence: Exactly, exactly. The devil and the issue of the organized church or organized religion persecuting mystics… There’s also the issue of: What are they hearing and where are they hearing it from?

Rick: Who’s “they” in this context?

Lawrence: The mystics.

Rick: I say: What are THEY hearing?

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: It could be the devil talking to them or something.

Lawrence: Right, and this would be certainly… You know, a fundamentalist Christian is going to say that any anything you hear whispering in your ear is going to be a demon, right? Because God doesn’t have time to talk to you. But the question is… Today you and I can walk into – well, there are few Barnes and Nobles left, but theoretically – we can walk into a bookstore and there are whole rows of “channel” stuff, right? Ancient aliens and spiritual masters and God, obviously, conversations with God. So where’s all this stuff coming from? And that was one of the questions I asked some of the mystics. So when you are hearing, when you are interacting, what’s the benchmark? How do you know where this is coming from? And Holleran put it, I thought, best. He said: What is it telling you? Is it good? Is it creating compassion in your heart? Is it motivating you to do good things or not? And if it’s not, then ignore it, it’s bad stuff, etc. And if it’s good, follow it and see where it goes.

Rick: Yeah, the Buddha said something very similar. He said, Don’t believe something just because it’s in some book or somebody tells you. Even if I tell you, don’t believe it. Weigh it against the criteria you just outlined and if it really seems like a good thing, then okay, it’s probably worth pursuing.

Lawrence: Yeah, we still don’t ultimately know where it’s coming from, but who is that speaking? What is it they’re telling us?

Rick: Yeah, and I think a lot of things you just mentioned do tend to be pablum. There can be a lot of goofy stuff that people claim to be channeling and all kinds of things, and maybe it’s not even bad, but it’s not necessarily coming from some higher source. It could be coming from a vivid imagination.

Lawrence: Right. These 10 mystics, for the most part, are not writing down stuff that they’re hearing and trying to publish it, etc. They’re on a spiritual exploration. They’re not being guided in that sense. Even those who are interacting with angels or other higher beings aren’t doing it in terms of: Oh, I’m going to relay what you’re telling me to the rest of the world. The only one that touches on anything like that is Jill Hammer, who is a Kabbalist. She is a professor, lives in Manhattan, is a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary, but created a lineage of Jewish – built around the Kabbalah and the divine feminine – Jewish priestesses, basically revived this idea of Jewish priestesses, and she writes Midrash. You probably know what that is, but for the audience…

Rick: I don’t. I’ve heard the word but I forget.

Lawrence: Midrash is the idea that we take an existing text, recognized text, and we reread it and reinterpret it. And she will do another take on a Lilith and Eve in the Garden of Eden and she will write either poetry or prose that describes another version of this ancient truth that came down through the text. And, as she puts it, she’s listening to the white space between the lines and there’s actually a… We talked about layers of knowing in the Quran, etc. The same thing is true in Torah, among Kabbalists, the idea that the Torah has multiple levels, and there is what’s called White Fire Torah, which is the secret teachings that are hidden in the spaces between the letters of the Torah. And she is doing something similar, so she is doing inspired writing. And I said to her: Are you channeling or is this your imagination? She said: I don’t know, and I wouldn’t put a term, a label, on it, but I sit down and I’m inspired to write this version of the story. And this is an accepted thing, Midrash, in Judaism particularly.

Rick: Yeah, it is in Hinduism too- there are Bhāṣyas, they call them, which are commentaries on the Upanishads or whatever, and then there are Bhāṣyas on the Bhāṣyas, you know – commentaries on the commentaries – and many different commentaries, and it’s like they’re continually kind of parsing out these scriptures and not considering them to be done deals.

Lawrence: Right. I’m not sure where the line is, but there’s the texts, the commentaries on sacred texts that are done by the scholars in variety of traditions, that are theoretically coming from their knowledge of this stuff and their research and bringing it up to date. And then there’s stuff that’s inspired spiritually. And where the line is between that, I wouldn’t begin to guess and I don’t know what someone who did commentaries on the Quran or the Hadith would say about where they’re getting their inspiration – I’m sure it’s just my innate knowledge – whereas Midrash is openly seen as inspired writing. Yeah, I think it’s an important distinction because someone can be intellectually brilliant and without much experience and can write all kinds of commentaries about something, but the fact is that knowledge is different in different levels or different states of consciousness and over the course of five decades someone on a spiritual path can read the same book over and over again and it’s going to be a new book each time they read it, because they’re approaching it from a different level, hopefully closer to the level at which the author of the book or the person the book was about was actually experiencing.

Lawrence: Absolutely.

Rick: I think a question came in. Oh, no, no questions have come in. Oh, ok. So just for those listening, if you have a question during this interview, go to- I’m sorry, I set it up wrong when I was fiddling around in the beginning – if you have a question, go to batgap.com and look under the Interviews menu and you’ll see a menu item down there called Questions for Guest or something like that. Click on that and then you can submit your question. So many things to set up in the beginning I often screw something up. What did you say, Irene? Oh, there’s like 66 people on. But anyway, do that if you want to submit a question. Ok. So I have a bunch of main points here which were from the conclusion of your book, where you you summarize the main lessons of the book, and you and I have already talked about a lot of these. But let me just run through them quickly and see if there’s anything you want to add about any of these points. So one is: We’re all part of a universal consciousness.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: Start talking if you want to say more.

Lawrence: Yes, yes, we are. And the summary that you’re referring to at the end is pulling together everything we’ve learned from all of these mystics, and these are themes that cross all of their traditions. They may disagree on what that consciousness looks like, etc., they will call it different things, but absolutely we are all part of the same consciousness, the same pool of energy, as Michael Holleran put it.

Rick: I was always an astronomy buff. I used to go to the Hayden Planetarium in New York on my birthday when I was a kid, and things like that, and I can’t help but feel that the universe is teeming with life, even if there’s only one intelligent civilization in each galaxy. There are trillions of intelligent civilizations in the universe and there’s probably millions of them in each galaxy, and so a lot of times when we talk about this stuff, we’re very earth centric, you know – this tradition and this thing and this history going back 2,000 years or whatever, but I’m sure that conversations like this are happening throughout the universe and there are traditions of all kinds throughout the universe and these same basic principles that you and I are discussing would be pertinent there also. There are people on, you know, Alpha Centauri saying that we’re all part of the universe of consciousness. I don’t know. I use as my desktop screensaver pictures from the Webb Telescope and the Hubble Telescope and things, just to keep the perspective of what a small speck we live on in the vast ocean of life, really.

Lawrence: And again, most of these people that I talk to absolutely buy into the idea that there are other intelligences out there and that they will have their version of truth and it will be shaped and packaged to fit them, to fit their circumstances and their perception and and their level of development.

Rick: Yeah, so not only is it absurd and narrow minded to say my way is the only way here on earth, but in light of the size of the universe, it’s exponentially more absurd.

Lawrence: Absolutely. And you know, and the Buddhists – I’m not sure specifically about Hindus, but the Buddhists talk about tens of thousands of millions of worlds, all of which are out there with consciousnesses that we could be incarnated into and one day we may meet.

Rick: Yeah, the Hindus say similar things. Okay, so related to this is the second point: We’re all connected, we’re all part of a universal consciousness, and we’re all connected through that universal field.

Lawrence: Right, and there are visualizations of that in each tradition. Obviously we have Indra’s Web that connects everything in the universe, with each of us as a jewel on a node in that web. There’s the analogies of the ground of being, the sky mind; the ocean keeps coming up as a version of that, and within the mystic end of Catholicism, it’s the Christ Consciousness that it is all pervading.

Rick: All roads lead to the mountaintop. And we might add that some roads could be more circuitous than others, but maybe you get on the road you’re supposed to be on, and even if it takes you a while to go up the mountaintop, then you get there eventually.

Lawrence: And someone who’s a scholar of Kabbalism, when I was talking to her about Jill Hammer and I mentioned the name of the book, the working title at the time, she said: Oh no, mountaintops are for men, caves are for women. So I found that interesting. But of course we had Tenzin Palmer, who spent her 12 years in a cave on a mountain top. So not all women.

Rick: You can be spiritually bi, I guess. Cave and mountain sacred teachings are a metaphor. You covered that pretty well. Our world is a construct. That’s an interesting one. Sometimes the word maya is interpreted as “illusion” and I’ve heard explanations such as: It’s not that there’s nothing there, it’s just that you’re not perceiving what it really is. You have a very altered perception of the reality of things. But there is something there. What do you think about that?

Breaking Through the Illusion

Lawrence: Yeah. Well, I think ultimately they’re saying there is nothing there other than this pool of energy, as it were, this Brahman or whatever, the ocean mind, etc. But there are also levels to this, so it is an illusion. You and I are looking at computer screens and that’s a very real thing to us, and on one level they’re saying that ultimately that’s not there, we can see through it. But also as you break down those walls you’re moving into different places. The ultimate place you’re going to move into is this pool of energy, this cloud of energy, but it’s not like it’s just an empty space on the other side of the computer screen. But, you know, what the hell do I know? [Laughs]

Rick: What do you think about these people who say that we’re living in a computer simulation that some kind of alien civilization has created?

Lawrence: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well…

Rick: Sci fi movies about that. I don’t but…

Lawrence: But yeah, who knows? But then you get into – as I’m sure you’re doing shows on – the whole issue of quantum physics. I was just reading something this morning, a new study that argues that… [there are] various studies about the fact that time is a construct, space and time are both constructs, and then the multiverse view. But there’s a new study that just came out arguing that the idea of deja vu is actually a result of the multiverse concept, that there is no time, there is no space. So we are accessing our memories from what to you and I, in a linear sense, is the future, but because it’s all simultaneous, we connect with that.

Rick: Interesting.

Lawrence: So yeah, the whole quantum physics thing opens up – and, you know, it’s six shows for you – it opens up all sorts of new takes on what it is we’re talking about and what it is these ancient traditions have been talking about for centuries or eons.

Rick: Yeah, some people say that the idea of reincarnation and multiple lives is not linear. It’s that all these multiple lives are happening simultaneously and our human filter just puts linearity on it.

Lawrence: Exactly, exactly. And there’s even those… Who is it? I want to say Jeane Dixon, and that’s not right, but anyway, someone in the New Age movement claims that she’s trained her students to be able to access their other simultaneous incarnations and learn from them and bring back knowledge from those. So, there’s all sorts of stuff going on.

Rick: Yeah, another interesting hypothesis. There was something else I was going to say- maybe it’ll come back to me. Okay, our world is a construct… Forgot it. Our world is a construct anyway. So we’re more than our tiny ego. Okay, we’ve kind of covered that. It’s interesting how ego bound most of us are when the reality of who and what we are is actually so vast. It’s like the whole ocean is squeezed in a drop, somehow.

Lawrence: Right, and this is, again, at the core of every religion, this idea of going beyond the self, going beyond the ego – and those two words vary according to tradition, but basically “self “or “ego” I’m using interchangeably in this context. But there’s something more than this version of Lawrence Pintak and this version of Rick Archer and an intrinsic part of breaking through the illusion is breaking through the illusion of the self. You can’t fully take on the idea that we are all part of that ocean mind, until you accept that the – again I’m watching the ocean here and that little wave now disappears back into the ocean and so it’s just popping up briefly and then disappearing. And that idea that we are more than ourself, even in religions that believe in a finite soul, the mystic ends of those religions – Catholicism for example – accept or argue that we are part of this Christ consciousness and we are not an individual self and that we’ll get that when we die, we’re going to be incarnated into that greater consciousness. But you can’t… Until you accept the fact that this isn’t all there is to me or that isn’t all there is to you, we’re never going to get to a place where we break through the illusion.

Rick: Yeah, some people say, I’m a wave, I’m just not only a wave; and others say you’re not even a wave, it’s just the ocean and any notion of wave-ness is just some remnant of ignorance.

Lawrence: Well, you look at the Buddhist concept of reincarnation and, you know, we all know the Dalai – all except Larry King when he interviewed him – but we all know the Dalai Lama comes back as the Dalai Lama.

Rick: What did Larry King say?

Lawrence: He said So, do you think in the next lifetime you may come back as a rabbi? Literally. [Laughter] He also asked him: So does that mean you’re celibate? That was the other question. So, you’ve got the Dalai Lama there, you can ask him anything in the world for a half hour and that’s what you ask. This is many years ago. Anyway.

Rick: He asked Marharishi Mahesh Yogi that same question and Maharishi insisted that he was, but it turned out he wasn’t. But anyway, go ahead.

Lawrence: We’ll give the Dalai Lama the benefit of the doubt. But but on a common belief system the Dalai Lama comes back as the Dalai Lama, right? That’s kind of what he does. But you know, the truth is that, in Vajrayana Buddhism at least, it’s not that individual self that comes back, it’s some aspect of that. They go back into that stream of consciousness and some aspect of that stream comes out, which is why you get the concept of multiple incarnations of a given lama: their wisdom incarnation, their compassion incarnation, etc. Because the idea is that it’s little tributaries coming off the stream. They merge back into the stream and then there’s a tributary that comes off as a new consciousness and it contains part of that previous guy, but part of other folks as well. Tenzin Palmo, again one of the women profiled in the book, she has vowed to come back in a female body until we all reach enlightenment. Because this is the idea of Mahayana, that you’re coming back as a bodhisattva to bring everyone to enlightenment. But she has specifically said: I’m coming back as a female. But she’s also said to audiences, “But that doesn’t mean me, Tenzin Palmo – it’s some aspect of me. It’s not my consciousness, full stop, that’s coming back. And again, even in Catholicism, for those who believe in reincarnation, they believe in reincarnation and the concept of coming into this greater Cosmic Christ and potentially coming back again, but some aspect of that coming back.

Rick: Yeah, I found that fascinating in your book and I’ve pondered that from time to time as it comes up. The Hindus seem to have more of an attitude that your subtle body is sort of discrete, albeit subtle, entity which reincarnates again in a different gross body. But it’s pretty much the same package reincarnating in a gross body. But that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have all the same skills and characteristics and everything in your next life, because different ones can manifest in different lives. So you know, Novak Djokovic is not necessarily going to come back and be a champion tennis player. He may be a she and never play tennis and do totally different things and so on, but it’s still the same soul, just kind of working out a different package of its karma.

Lawrence: On this issue of souls and karma, etc., one of the many things stuck with me from these years of talking to these people – one of them that stuck the most – was in talking with Michael Holleran about the idea of Christ consciousness etc., I said, So, what differentiates? Because he was recognizing or acknowledging that the Buddha and Krishna, etc., all these avatars are valid teachers, and I said: So what’s the difference between them and Christ? And, in his view, they achieved enlightenment at some point in a lifetime, whereas Christ was incarnated enlightened. The whole kit and caboodle came down into a body. And I said: But, you know ,the Buddha went off and wandered and had to learn stuff before he became enlightened. And then we have the missing – what is it – And he went off into the wilderness. And Michael, literally, you know, did one of these [hands flailing]. He said: What is this? How do I deal with this idea that Christ is saying, What am I doing here? And getting used to being in a physical body? I thought it was a very cool take. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s an interesting version of a story.

Rick: Well, in the Hindu tradition, that is, by definition, what an avatar is. It’s not a human being who gets enlightened, it’s some kind of aspect of God who takes on a human form to perform some particular mission. And they might start out like Rama, not realizing that that’s who they are, and then they eventually wake up to it. But that’s who they have been since birth. They’re not a human being needing to get enlightened. So Christ would fit that definition, and in the Hindu tradition there have been many of these. And the Buddha, I guess. I don’t know if the Buddha… Maybe Buddhists, consider Buddha to have been an avatar? I’m not sure, I don’t know.

Lawrence: No, no, he achieved enlightenment in that lifetime as Shakyamuni. I mean, he had been on this path, obviously, for eons, but ultimately achieved enlightenment in that life.

Rick: And of course, you know, as I talk about these things I’m not espousing a particular belief system. These are just to me interesting hypotheses to play with that I have no absolute knowledge of.

A Master Class in Mysticism

Lawrence: And that was why writing the book was so fascinating for me. I decided to write the book because I had initially looked at doing a documentary about Shems Friedlander, the Sufi sheikh, and the backstory there is that Shems had been a colleague of mine at the American University in Cairo and, as I said earlier, I knew he was a Sufi, and a very, very serious Sufi. But it wasn’t until years later – and now it’s maybe 8 or 10 years ago – my wife and I were in Turkey and saw him and then I learned that he was the right hand to one of the leading sheiks in Turkey and that he had been tasked to bring Sufism to America back in the seventies, etc., etc. I had no idea. He was so self-effacing that I knew nothing about this, and so I became fascinated. Initially I looked at doing a documentary, couldn’t get backing for it, and thought: Do I do a book on him now? It’s fascinating, but you know it’s not quite a book. And then I realized, wait a minute, I know several other people who are fascinating like this, Tenzin Palmo I’d known for 30 years, etc. And so I decided to do the book. And so some of these traditions – obviously Tibetan Buddhism particularly- I knew a lot about. Others I knew a fair amount about, some I knew nothing about. And so, first of all, finding these people was an interesting process, because I had a very clear vision of who I wanted, what kind of person I wanted to profile and that was not somebody on the spiritual bestseller list, not somebody leading retreats at Esalen, etc., etc. It was somebody who was completely under the radar. Maybe they’d written a book or two, but for a niche audience, a few people who knew them. And they were ordinary people who’d gone down this profound path. So finding them… I interviewed, talked with many, many people, was led to different people – talked to them, wasn’t quite right, fascinating individual but not quite what I needed. And anyway I settled on this group of nine people and then one who was already dead. And learning about their path, learning about their traditions, was such an eye opener for me, again, even about traditions that I thought I really knew. And it was bittersweet to finish the book. Normally it’s: Thank God, I finally finished this book, right? Send it off to the publisher. This one… I don’t really want to stop talking [to them] and I don’t have to stop talking to them, but you know, in the same way. And it was also a real – we talked about energy before – a real energetic shift for me. All of my books had been about the Middle East and Islam and U.S. policy and communication gap between the West and the Muslim world, etc. And [as] CBS correspondent I covered the Middle East for years and then I continued to write about it for Foreign Policy and whoever else for many years and it really got to the point of Groundhog Day. And as we’re speaking today live, there’s yet another theoretical deal to solve the Gaza crisis and, you know, how many deals to solve the Palestinian crisis have I covered in the 40 years of covering the region? And I got to the point where I just don’t want to deal with this anymore. And then layer on all of the negative energy around what was going on in America, etc. And I said, this [writing the book] takes me down a complete… This takes me into the place where my heart wants to go. And so I immersed myself in it and I wrote it in a different way than I normally write a book. Normally, I do all of the reporting on a book over the course of a year, two years, three years, and then I sit down for a month or two and write the book. With this one, because I was doing a deep dive into each tradition, I wrote each chapter individually. So I would have a series of conversations like this with the individual person for months and in some cases a couple of years, and at the same time do a deep dive into their tradition, read all the texts, read all the doctrines, take on their meditative practices and so we get real, deep, meaningful, heartfelt conversations. And then, when I finished I would write that chapter, the first draft of that chapter, and move on, because my little mind can’t keep all these traditions, the details, straight. And it would just have become a big mess. So it was a master’s class in the mystic end of all of these traditions, and getting to know these people was so inspiring. And then, right as I finish the book, as I sent the book off to the publisher – after you know, various back and forth on copy editing, etc. – and then, literally two days later, was Trump’s second election and Gaza had been happening in the background as I was finishing the book. And I had said to myself before Gaza broke: I’m just not going to write about the Middle East anymore. I’m done, I’ve had it. Nothing I write in 40 years has had an impact. And even when I was on television talking to millions of people nothing had an impact. Nothing’s going to have an impact. And then Gaza happened and so I got calls. People wanted me to do talking head stuff and then articles. So I said, All right, I’m going to write two articles. I wrote two long articles and I said that’s my last word on it. I don’t want to talk about it again, and went back to Lessons from the Mountaintop and finished it. And then, as I said, two days later it was Trump’s second election, and my publisher, Bloomsbury (of other books) called me literally even before you were even awake, Rick, that morning after the election – she’s in London and I’m in the U.K. – she called me and she said: I want to do a new edition of America and Islam. And I thought, No, I’m not going down that rabbit hole again. No, no, no. But then she pushed, and I decided: Well, this book is done and there is another. That election opened up a logical final chapter, final set of chapters, for the book. So I did a new edition of America and Islam with four or five new chapters, bringing in Gaza and bringing in his election and the irony of the fact that all of them – not all, but many, many, many Muslims – voted against Trump the first time around because he ran on an anti Muslim platform and Islamophobic platform. And then this time around many Muslims voted for him. There were even organizations – Muslims for Trump – because they were feeling so bitter toward Biden and Kamala because of Gaza. But, of course, two weeks after the election… They said he’s changed, he’s going to solve the Middle East for us, and two weeks after the election he announced the most pro-Israeli cabinet in history. And they all said, Oh my god, we got taken for a ride. No kidding. So anyway, so I did do the new edition of the book and that comes out the end of this month. But that’s my last word on the Middle East!

Rick: Famous last words. Well, a lot of farmers voted for him, too, and since then they haven’t sold a single soybean to China. And many other such stories.

Lawrence: Yeah, yeah, many stories.

Rick: Yeah, well, anyway, you should do what I do. You’re never finished. You just get to talk to new people all the time. Great fun.

Lawrence: Well, and in terms of the Middle East, it’s all the same people over and over. That’s part of the problem, on both sides.

Rick: But you can talk to spiritual people all the time.

Lawrence: Well, right, exactly. And I’ve moved on to another spiritual book that I’m working on. So, yeah, I’m going to stay in that space.

Rick: Yeah, it’s more gratifying ultimately. But, big picture, you know, taking spirituality and the shifting of cultures and civilizations, and the possibility of some kind of age of enlightenment or something that ancient traditions have prophesied… What do you think’s going on?

Suffering, Learning, and Evolution

Lawrence: I think it’s just all part of the cycle. I think we’re – as you said early on in this conversation – you said we’re learning and we’re evolving, and I think that’s what it comes down to. And you know, some people are evolving at a different rate than other people and, sadly, other people are caught up in that. I certainly buy into the idea of karma. I don’t necessarily buy into the idea that people in Gaza did something wrong in a previous life, so that’s why they’re suffering. I don’t buy that kind of karma. But I think it gets back to us learning and evolving as people, and some people end up at the receiving end of the bombs.

Rick: Yeah, I think that it’s too bad that learning has to involve so much suffering. But the fact of the matter is it does, and it’s natural. It’s human and natural to want to make sense of it and to try to fit it in the context of a meaningful worldview in light of there being God and there being evolutionary purpose to everything that happens and so on. You kind of have to continually ponder it because there are so many challenging events that take place that make you rethink your assumptions. But I nonetheless remain optimistic in the big picture in the long run. You know, humanity has been through all kinds of crazy stuff over the years. Steven Pinker talks about how things are actually a lot better than we think if we compare it to everything that we’ve been through over the millennia.

Lawrence: All things are relative. But you know, I find it easier to take on the idea that there’s all this suffering in the world if it’s through the prism of we’re learning, we’re evolving, it’s going to get better, than if I believed in an all-powerful God who was pulling the strings. Then I’d be saying: What the hell? What are you thinking?

I find it easier to take on the idea that there’s all this suffering in the world if it’s through the prism of we’re learning, we’re evolving, it’s going to get better.

Rick: Yeah, well, when you say all-powerful God pulling strings, that kind of isolates God and isolates us. Like we were saying earlier, you can’t isolate God. It’s God pulling his own strings, if you want to put it that way.

Lawrence: Right, but I’m just saying if I came from a religious tradition that believed in an all-powerful God – you know, there’s that guy up there that is deciding all this and the classic, How can a merciful God blah, blah, blah. The questions I asked in catechism class at nine years old, as so many people did. If I believed in that, I’d have a real hard time understanding what was going on. If I believe – and I’m not saying I’m right – but if I believe that we are all part of the single consciousness, it is an evolutionary process that makes all of the rest of it a little easier to take on – not justify, but take on.

Rick: And it’s not about punishment, it’s about learning. If you buy into the law of karma, then things don’t happen arbitrarily or accidentally or capriciously, but they don’t happen cruelly either. They’re not happening to punish people for their previous behaviors. There’s an evolutionary purpose to whatever everybody experiences.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick: And of course I’m just espousing a theory here, but we try to make sense of the world and so this is kind of the best I’ve got at the moment.

Lawrence: Yeah. Maybe just go up on the mountain top and sit it out.

Rick: Yeah, really. One of your other main points, main lesson points, is: Words are powerful. What is that? What were you referring to in that one?

The Vibrational Power of Words

Lawrence: Well, if you look across traditions, you see again and again the idea that we’re, you know…From the Bible – now I’m going to draw a blank, of course, but the first line of the Bible is…

Rick: The word is with God.

Lawrence: And God was the word.

Rick: God was the word, right.

Lawrence: Yeah, the idea that the word is God. And you then you see, in the Kabbalistic approach, you see the idea that existence is a temple. It’s an ethereal temple that mirrors the temple in Jerusalem, a temple. We are in a box, in a temple in infinity, but that box is created by holy words, by holy letters. And you see this reference to words and language and letters throughout traditions. And of course mantras are an intrinsic part of that, the vibrational power of mantras, just as in this Kabbalistic version of existence, the vibration of the letters is what’s creating the illusion of reality that we’re living in.

Rick: Okay, well, I’m not even going to comment on that, because that was a nice complete thought and I’ll leave it at that. “We are not alone” – what was that about, from the book? Are you talking about extraterrestrials or subtle beings or what?

Lawrence:  Well, I mean, could be. But I mean subtle beings, the idea that again, as we talked about early on, anything from angels to… I was talking, for example, with Tenzin Palmo, the Tibetan Buddhist, and we were talking about dakinis, these are what are called sky dancers – or the translation is “sky dancers” – and they are ethereal beings in a different dimension. And she said matter of factly one day about being in this particular nunnery: ‘Yeah, we used to see dakinis all over the place. We don’t see them as much anymore.” It’s like, wow!

Rick: “We,” meaning all the nuns in that thing?

Lawrence: Well, you know, the nuns who are at a certain level of…

Rick: Interesting.

Lawrence: Yeah. And so, again, every religion, you know… The Muslims have the Jinns and obviously Hinduism has loads of…

Rick: Tons of stuff.

Beings in Other Dimensions

Lawrence: Yeah. So this fundamental idea that we are not alone, that whether it’s a spirit guide of some sort, whether it’s bodhisattvas. I’ll stick with Tibetan lamas, for example – Tibetans believe we are consciously incarnating in a new body. So you have these lineages of incarnate lamas. There are beings that have achieved enlightenment on another level and have decided to come down. It’s like it’s an avatar, right? It’s not “God” in the sense of Krishna, maybe, or Christ, but at a certain level have come down to incarnate to help people. That’s the belief system. So there are all sorts of dimensional beings that are there that we can interact with if we want to, and that are there for good and also there for bad. There are bad ones.

Rick: Yeah. I think it’s important point for people to understand. Some people brush off this sort of idea to say, “Oh, the whole world is illusion. Who cares if they’re there or not, if even if they are there, they’re as illusory as everything else.” But I’m always interested in the way the world works. I was never a really great student. I was too much of a messed up kid. But as I started on the spiritual path and came along on it, I got more and more fascinated with all kinds of things, and these days I’m more fascinated than ever. But I think if you really want to understand the universe, if you really want to understand life, especially from a spiritual perspective – because most scientists would dismiss this as nonsense – you should seriously consider the notion that there are all these other dimensions and they are inhabited by hosts of beings of various kinds, and that some of them, perhaps, are just in their own realm and are not interacting with us at all, but many overlap with our dimension and influence human affairs and can be to our advantage, can be helpers.

Lawrence: Or the opposite.

Rick: Or hindrances, yeah.

Lawrence: And as somebody once said, Just because they don’t have bodies doesn’t make them any smarter than us or more enlightened than us. So if you look at these realms, if you believe in these realms, if you believe the doctrines of these various traditions that talk about these kinds of beings… If you accept the idea of an angel and that it’s somehow holier and here to help us… But then other realms have… the God realm, for example, we talked about. All what’s happened is they’re like us, they’ve been incarnated in that realm and they have bigger egos and they have longer lives. Doesn’t make them somebody we necessarily want to listen to or learn from. So there’s an issue of discerning all of this as well, if you buy into it.

Rick: Yeah, as a friend of mine said, Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re smart.

Lawrence: Right, exactly.

Rick: Okay, I think a question came in. Yes, indeed, a couple of them, now that I have told people about the questions. This is a question from a fellow named Mark Cunningham. “After doing a deep dive into all these mystical religious traditions for your book, which practices and approaches resonate most with you and led to the most spiritual progress?”

Lawrence: Well, I am at home in Tibetan Buddhism. I am an avid student of all of these other traditions. I have a PhD in Islamic Studies. I’m not a Muslim, I’ve never practiced Islam, but Tibetan Buddhism is where I feel at home. I will go off and do meditative practices of various traditions, particularly as part of this book, and they all had an impact on me. My wife and I went off to an island in western Scotland. That was like walking through Tolkien’s veil into Middle Earth. It was all hazy and there was just this energy about it that I hadn’t felt any place – other than Bali – and I was doing the practices of this Druid that I had written about, and post-Druid. I was doing her practices, and it was absolutely the right place to do that and it absolutely felt right at the time. Do I go back to those practices? Not really. I am very aware of those practices now. So I am… In her worldview, energy isn’t just in beings – us, dogs, ants, as you said before – but also in things, in trees and bushes, etc., rocks, right. So I’m much more aware of what she calls “minded nature.” When I’m in the woods or when I’m in the back of my house with a tree… But when I want to sit down to meditate, I will usually go back into a Tibetan meditation, and my shrine here to my right here is a Tibetan shrine and I do offerings every day there, not because I think that is ultimate truth, it’s just where I feel comfortable. It’s all about energy and comfort and it’s, as we said earlier, you need to be rooted – and I’m not telling YOU you need to be rooted – but I mean we need to be rooted, I’m convinced, in a particular tradition in order to then learn about other traditions and take on values and, in some cases, practices from them. I will still occasionally do practices from other traditions. When I, for example, was with Shems Friedlander, the Sufi, in the tekke, the Sufi place of worship in Istanbul, I sat there completely immersed in the dhikr, the name of Allah and the music and the prayers and the whirling dervishes to my left, etc. That was an amazing spiritual experience. If I were back in Turkey, would I go to a tekke again? Absolutely. Or somewhere else there was one. But that’s not my home practice. My home practice, my rooted practice, is Tibetan Buddhism.

Rick: Yeah, good. Have you met Robert Thurman?

Lawrence: We have corresponded endlessly but we’ve never actually met.

Rick: He’s a character. I’ve done a couple of interviews with him. Question number two – this is from Shankar Shankar in the United States: “The discussion in the beginning about whether all humans are innately good or not was interesting. At the root level it is perhaps just instinctive behavior controlled by the body, mind and conditioning. Can you comment more about his observation?” Presuming he means your observation about all humans being innately good or not.

Lawrence: Oh, YOUR observation about humans being innately good. [Laughs]

Rick: Well, I guess maybe he just wants us to dwell a little bit more on that topic, I don’t know.

Lawrence: You know, I don’t know. I would love to think humans are innately good. It’s just that my experience has been that they’re not. That’s just the sad fact. A friend of mine who was an NBC correspondent, Martin Fletcher, based in Israel, wrote a book relatively recently about his experiences with wonderful people that he’s met in war zones and other nasty places. So there absolutely are wonderful people out there. It’s just that I think our instinct is, once the rules of civilization are taken away, we just fend for ourselves and aren’t necessarily – and again I’m using the royal “we,” as it were, “we” in general ,generalizing – we tend to just think about ourselves and not other people. Just my experience. I would love to be proven wrong.

Rick: I think to discuss the question, we have to ask ourselves: What does innate mean? It means your innermost nature. So what is your ultimate innermost nature? Because we’re like Russian dolls. There are deeper and deeper and deeper levels. So if we could really get down to the real nitty gritty, the real ultimate essence of everything, what is that? And is that innately good, or is it neutral, or is it bad or what? And I’ll give you my answer and you can give me yours. But I think that it ultimately has an evolutionary agenda or trajectory, or something, which has given us the universe we now have, starting with a Big Bang, if there was one, and nothing but hydrogen, and now we’ve got, as Brian Swim said, You take hydrogen, leave it alone for 13.7 billion years and you end up with giraffes, rose bushes and opera. [Laughter] So there is this evolutionary sort of force or energy or something that continues to evolve the universe and that seems to me to be good and that’s ultimately innately what drives us, ultimately what we are. But obviously, as we said earlier, it can get very distorted.

Lawrence: And I think this gets back to the issue of shedding the ego, right? So your Russian doll analogy: As we get rid of these layers and break through and recognize that we aren’t our ego, there is something more, then we break through to a place where we are more in sync. Once we recognize that we are not this individual person, but part of that huge ocean mind, as it were, then we’re going to care about other people, right?, because it’s all us. So I think you’re right, ultimately – I’m talking on the relative – ultimately, once we all reach enlightenment, yeah, it’s all going to be peaches and roses.

Once we recognize that we are not this individual person, but part of that huge ocean mind, as it were, then we’re going to care about other people, right?, because it’s all us.

Rick: Yeah, and there are perhaps worlds like that, like some of these higher realms, where that’s the way it is. But, you know, variety is the spice of life, and if you’re going to have a relative universe, you have to have polarities, and so there are worlds where that appears to be the opposite. But in the big picture, there’s this evolutionary machine going on.

Lawrence: Right. The sci-fi movies always have the ethereal beings that are almost angelic, who are wonderful and live in utopia, and then the bad guys who are always reptilian or something. So there’s always that dualism and maybe it’s out there.

Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of Darth Vader. When he died, turned out to be Luke’s father and took his mask off, and, hey, he’s not such a bad guy after all. [Laughter] And there are stories, actually in the Vedic tradition, of beings born as demons, who are actually very highly evolved souls, but they needed somebody to play the demon role and have a fight with Rama or whatever, and then when Rama kills them, they get enlightened.

Lawrence: Right. Well, there is this theory that the devil’s actually just doing God’s bidding because God needed that dualism, right?

Rick: Right, exactly. Okay, so we have a little bit more time if you feel like going on a little longer.

Lawrence: Sure.

Rick: I fed your book into one of the AIs and it gave me some main points on each chapter and it also gave me a sort of a key emphasis of each chapter.

Lawrence: Okay.

Rick: Obviously there’s going to be 10 of them, so we have to time ourselves a little bit, but I could read you these and see if you like what it came up with and see if you feel like commenting on any of them. So, chapter one: Friedlander’s teaching: Remembrance and divine love are paths for spiritual growth. Recognizing God in others is essential for unity and peace.

Lawrence: It’s what we were just saying, right?

Rick: Chapter two, the next chapter: True belonging is found by looking beyond external rituals and into the core experience of the divine.

Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. That chapter is Michael Holleran, who we’ve spoken about, who practices what’s called “double belonging.” He is a Catholic priest but he’s a Zen Roshi. The viewer was asking what my root tradition is… He says, I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a Zen Roshi, but I’m not a Buddhist. I have not said the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha are my path. He says, I’m a Catholic priest but I draw on Buddhism. So drawing on other traditions to evolve, absolutely.

Rick: Mirabai Starr gave a talk at the one of the Science and Nonduality conferences entitled “Bees in the Garden,” and she talked about how we’re not being dilettantes, but we can actually be like a bee who goes from flower to flower and kind of extracts the best each flower has to offer.

Lawrence: ’Yeah. Again, as long as you just don’t become spiritually promiscuous, as we say, right?

Rick: Or you could put it this way: You know the old story of dig one deep well, rather than 10 shallow wells, or maybe you could possibly use 10 tools to dig one deep well. Okay. Next chapter: “At the Feet of the Mother.” This is the Anandamayi Ma chapter: The maternal aspect of divinity nurtures spiritual seekers, and surrender to the Divine Mother brings transformative grace.

Lawrence: Yeah, but I would add that certainly the divine feminine piece here is very important and some of us are drawn to a feminine being, but I think the core of that chapter is the guru, the importance of the guru, whether male or female, that he or she plays such a transformative role in the life of a seeker if it’s the right guru.

Rick: Yes, and she was a good one. She was really off the off the charts.

Lawrence: So I hear.

Rick: Yeah, I have a few friends who met her. Next chapter, “The Ogini and the Scribe,” Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo and Nick Ribush: The true benefit to others comes through internal realization. Spiritual vows can be fulfilled across lifetimes and genders. l:Absolutely, and here we have Tenzin Palmo, the woman we’ve talked about, the meditator, shall we say – 10, 12 years in a mountaintop and then created a lineage of female yoginis. So she is out of a tradition – which also happens to be the tradition I’m in – which is focused on meditation. Milarepa, the murderer who then achieved enlightenment in one lifetime, is the icon. Whereas Nick Ribush is from a tradition within Tibetan Buddhism that is scholarly, is focused on text. And he is one of the key people, arguably the key person, who created Wisdom Publications that gave birth to all of the stuff you see on the bookshelves these days. And the point is that they both have a valid path to truth, enlightenment, whatever term you want to use. Both paths are equally valid and both are equally real.

Rick: Tenzin Palmo was a real trooper. I mean, she was sitting in that cave, snowing outside, the cave had flooded, she’s soaking wet. She doesn’t have any food. God, she really went through it.

Lawrence: Yeah. So they would bring food up to her twice a year and one year they couldn’t get through. So she was six months without any food from the outside. She was convinced she was going to die and ultimately got to the point where: Well, Milarepa said he wanted to die in his cave, so I guess it’s okay.

Rick: Amazing.

Lawrence: And I’ll just add, I met her in Bali in the mid-nineties and she had pretty much just come out of the cave. She didn’t tell us her story until we got to know her over a couple of weeks. And you would have expected somebody who just spent 12 years in a cave to be just floating out there somewhere, right?, completely disconnected from reality. She was the most down to earth – and remains the most down to earth grounded person. No BS, not tied up in the dark doctrine, good sense of humor, just an amazing person.

Rick: Yeah, if I were her, having just come out of that cave and now I’m in Bali, I would have just been: Oh my God, I’m in heaven. Now let’s go to the beach. [Laughter]

Lawrence: Exactly.

Rick: The next one, “The Jewish Bard,” Jill Hammer. Key lesson: Spiritual descent into the earth/womb and ancestral connection deepen divine experience. The feminine is vital to Jewish mystical consciousness.

Lawrence: I would argue that it’s vital to Jewish mystical consciousness partly because of her work. Various people I talked to, doing the chapter, said that the feminine, the female, had been just exiled from Jewish mystical tradition.

Rick: And lots of traditions for that matter.

Lawrence: And lots of traditions of course. So she’s played a big role in bringing that back.

Rick: That’s great. [Next:] “The universe is my mirror,” Swami Atmarupananda, central theme: We are divine by nature. Realization of this truth brings liberation, and all major faiths reflect aspects of the same underlying wisdom.

Lawrence: Yeah, within the Vedantic tradition it’s a big umbrella, it’s a big tent, and if you believe in a central God, there’s a place for you. If you believe in a completely non-dual situation, there’s a place for you. But ultimately, all traditions have truth at their core.

Rick: Next one: “Beyond Druid Emma Restall Orr.” Main idea: Connection to land, spirit and ancestors is a core mystical path. Spiritual realization requires honoring both ancient traditions and personal experience.

Lawrence: Yeah, it’s interesting. Druidry, as she and the head of the Druid order now both told me: “We’re making it up as we go along. We don’t… There are no texts, there are no ancient texts. We don’t know what the original Druids did.” We all tend to associate the Druids with Stonehenge and the circles, but the reality is anthropologists aren’t even sure that the Celtic peoples, that the Druids were, had come to the UK by that point, the British Isles by that point. But Druidry’s taken on a tradition around ancestors and around the earth, and certainly around mystic connection with nature. But then Jill went beyond that. She realized that all of this doctrine falls away and she is very deeply focused on just the energy of the land and the Awen, what they, the Druids, call the Awen, the energy of everything that is intrinsic in everything. And she’s then gone down a path helping people to die and helping people once they’ve died to make the transition.

Rick: Nice. Okay, finally: “The Traveling Nunk” – and nunk is a kind of a merger of “nun” and “monk,” and that was an interesting one. The lesson here being: Spiritual growth often requires journeying beyond boundaries and integrating diverse traditions with compassion and openness.

Lawrence: Sister Clear Grace Dayananda coined the term “nunk” for herself and someone else. She describes herself as queer, she’s BIPOC, and she came from a very poor background and she was living a normal life. She was regional representative for Starbucks or something, and then she had her awakening, ended up in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition, but after a couple of years at Deer Park, the monastery, she realized she was surrounded by white bodies, most of them moneyed, who really had no connection to her and, she felt – with many of them – no connection with the real dharma. And so she went back out into the streets ministering to the poor and the hungry. She fixed up an old van, drove around the U.S. for two years just stopping wherever, helping people. Now has set up a sangha in New Orleans. She has a very non-traditional approach to the teachings, very ancestor based, very much honoring the lineage and the elders, etc. But she also is emphatically a mystic in the most profound sense. She tells you that she ventures in her mystic practice – we talked about the various realms – she tells you that she ventures into the hell realms and ministers to the hungry ghosts trapped in the hell realms, and her work among the hungry on this plane is reflective of her work in the hell realms.

Rick: Interesting. I interviewed a guy a few months ago named Jurgen Ziewe, who has these vivid astral or out-of-body experiences, astral projection or something, and he says he has visited all these realms. And not only he but some others, he said, venture into those realms and help people out of them.

Lawrence: Interesting. She doesn’t say she’s helping them out of them. What she says – and this is, I found it very interesting…

Rick: She ministers to them.

Lawrence: Well, only in terms of her presence. She says, My presence creates just that split-second of awareness for them that there is something beyond the suffering that they’re suffering now.

Rick: Interesting. Yeah, Jurgen might say that too. There’s another guy interviewed named Father Nathan Castle, who is a priest, and he stumbled into the ability to help stuck souls cross over. He had this dream where some guy was sitting on the radiator of a car going up in flames and he later realized that that had actually happened to somebody, and he managed to visit this guy in purgatory or wherever he was stuck, and he was able to help him. And then at a certain point somebody came from a higher realm and took him away. You know, the escort showed up and took him on to… And he’s kind of made this a thing now, which he’s done with many, many stuck souls.

Lawrence: Emma Restal Orr, who ministers to the dead and dying, says that we, the loved ones, can prevent someone from moving on by saying Please don’t go, darling, you know I’m going to miss you so much, etc. Etc. And so she asks the loved ones to just freaking leave and let this person make his or her transition. And then, likewise, she said we dissolve back into the universal consciousness at death, though she doesn’t quite put it that way, but she says we dissolve, we just disappear, basically into the energies. But there are stuck souls who stay stuck to their grave because people keep coming and putting flowers, and they keep staying there for those people. Something to think about.

Rick: There was a story in Autobiography of a Yogi where someone in Yogananda’s ashram had fed a pet deer too much milk and the deer was dying because it had gorged on this milk and Yogananda was holding it in his lap, grief stricken and petting the deer and begging it to not die. And the soul of the deer came and said: Hey, let me go, I’m ready to go, you’re holding me up.

Lawrence: Exactly.

Rick: All right. So I’m glad we did that last bit because it gave people a nice overview of your whole book.

Lawrence: You know, as I said before we went on air, I’m used to doing interviews with news organizations, mostly about my Middle East stuff – that end up being 10, 20 second soundbites, so chatting for two hours is quite a luxury.

Rick: Well, you couldn’t do this in 20-second soundbites, this kind of thing. Well, thank you everybody, and we’ll see you for the next one.