Leanne Whitney Interview

Summary

Leanne Whitney discusses pure consciousness, yoga, and the differences between Eastern liberatory traditions and Western psychology. The conversation also examines Jung’s limitations, the role of embodied practice, and the dangers of pursuing knowledge without grounding it in a larger sense of reality.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is pure consciousness, and how is it different from brain-based theories of consciousness?
• How can yoga practice lead to direct experiences of deeper consciousness?
• What are the strengths and limitations of Jungian psychology compared with Patanjali’s approach?
• Why can scientific and technological progress become dangerous when separated from spiritual understanding?

Key takeaways

• Pure consciousness is presented as the fundamental reality underlying mind and experience.
• Direct practice can reveal realities that intellectual study alone may not reach.
• Jung approached Eastern wisdom through Western assumptions that limited his understanding of it.
• Human knowledge becomes dangerous when it ignores nature’s interdependence and boundaries.
• Spiritual insight should be integrated into everyday life rather than treated as an isolated experience.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people and discussions about spiritual topics and so on. I’ve done hundreds of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to BATGAP.com, look under the Past Interviews menu, and you’ll see all the previous ones organized in various ways.

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My guest today is Leanne Whitney. I’ll just read her bio here. Leanne has a PhD and is an independent scholar in the fields of depth psychology and consciousness studies. She specializes in the intersection of Western psychology and the Eastern liberatory traditions. By “liberatory,” we mean traditions that promote, allow, or encourage liberation. That’s what that word means.

For over 25 years, Leanne has researched the mind-body connection, and over the past 15-plus years, its integration with pure consciousness. Trained in depth psychology, yoga, and craniosacral therapy, Leanne works in her private practice with clients one-on-one to resolve mental, emotional, and physical blocks that obscure the ever-present alignment of the authentic Self, with a capital S.

Working with clients online as well as in person, she practices internationally, spanning four continents. Her clientele is diverse racially, socioeconomically, and in sexual orientation.

Leanne is the author of Consciousness in Jung and Patanjali, which I’ve been reading, as well as several academic papers. Her published papers include “Innate and Emergent: Jung, Yoga and the Archetype of the Self Meet the Objective Measures of Affective Neuroscience” and “Jung in Dialogue with Freud and Patanjali: Instinct, Affective Neuroscience and the Reconciliation of Science and Religious Experience,” both for the open-access journal Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy.

So, if that all sounds kind of intellectual to you, and the fact that she has a PhD scares you, don’t let it. If I’m able to read, appreciate, and understand this book, I think anyone will appreciate this conversation.

Leanne and I were just talking for a few minutes beforehand about some themes that we would like to discuss in this interview. We’re both kind of excited about those themes, and I think everyone will pick up on that excitement as we have this conversation. So, thanks, Leanne.

Leanne: Thanks, Rick. Nice to be here.

✨ A spontaneous pure consciousness event

Rick: Yeah, it’s good to have you. Okay, so let’s start with a little bit of your personal background, just so people know who you are and why you went in the direction you did with your research and your writing and everything.

Leanne: Okay. Well, first, I started studying the mind-body connection in my 20s because I became very ill. In retrospect, I can look at it as a sort of psycho-spiritual breakthrough that impacted me physically. At the time, I couldn’t have said that, but now, in retrospect, I can say that.

Then, in my early 30s, I had what is known in the religious studies literature as a pure consciousness event. I had never studied any of the Eastern liberatory traditions. Indian philosophy was completely foreign to me.

It happened in a yoga asana room. The event happened during asana—or, well, not during asana at that moment, but I had just finished. I knew nothing of pure consciousness or pure consciousness events, so it came out of the middle of nowhere. That set me on the path.

Rick: What was it like? What was the experience like?

Leanne: It was like a burst of light that was self-luminous, all-knowing awareness.

Rick: Eyes open or eyes closed?

Leanne: Eyes open.

Rick: And you were still able to see people in the room and stuff, or was the light sort of over it? Did it just become your whole experience?

A Bindu-Like Burst of Light

Leanne: I was actually looking in somebody’s eyes at that moment, and there was just a burst of light. The one way I can describe it is almost like a bindu chakra just burst open.

So, nonduality—the understanding of nonduality—became incontrovertible. Actually, it was the understanding of pure consciousness, the truth and absolute nature of pure consciousness. It was not a long period of time, but it was very impactful.

It was like a burst of light that was self-luminous, all-knowing awareness.

Rick: It could be that some chakra burst open at that moment.

Leanne: Yeah.

Rick: I imagine you liked the experience. It didn’t scare you or anything?

Leanne: It didn’t scare me, but I didn’t have a context for it, so it very much shook the conditions in which I had previously been immersed. I mean, it shook them—just imagine an earthquake of a very large magnitude. I’ve spent really the last period of time reconciling that experience with the conditions in which I was brought up prior to that experience.

Rick: Yeah. There are great poets and so on who had just a flash of experience like that, and they spent the rest of their lives writing poetry about it without ever even having any more experiences. A lot of times people have these things out of the blue. They don’t know why; they haven’t been doing anything that would be conducive to such an experience. It just happens.

You had just been doing some asanas, so that helped.

Leanne: Right. I had been practicing asana regularly for probably eight months at that time.

Rick: But no kind of meditation—just asanas?

Asana, Nadis, and Access to Pure Consciousness

No meditation and no philosophical context to understand that when you move the nerve centers, you are actually opening the possibility. That’s why asana is one of Patanjali’s eight limbs. In some respects, we could say asana is no joke. If you enter the yogic practice and move those nadis and those nerve centers, then a pure consciousness event really becomes available, for sure through that practice.

Leanne: No meditation and no philosophical context to understand that when you move the nerve centers, you are actually opening the possibility. That’s why asana is one of Patanjali’s eight limbs. In some respects, we could say asana is no joke. If you enter the yogic practice and move those nadis and those nerve centers, then a pure consciousness event really becomes available, for sure through that practice.

Rick: Yeah, I’m not sure, but I heard that there was a great sage in India called Tat Wale Baba, and I heard that asanas were his main practice. He was awesome. He kind of blew people away with his presence and darshan, so it’s possible.

I think, generally speaking, most people say it’s good to pull several legs of the table at once—not just work on the body with asanas, but do meditation, do pranayama, and do various other things. Usually, that’s what ends up happening when you get into something like this, right?

Leanne: Well, right, because I had no scriptural study at that point. Pranayama and asana kind of go hand in hand. When you’re in an asana room, you’re learning the breathing practices, but as far as the yamas and the niyamas, I can’t say that they were really infused in the asana practices that were being taught to me at that time.

Rick: Right.

During the course of this interview, I want to talk with you about yamas and niyamas, and we can get into them in some detail. So, did this kind of flash of an experience inspire you to be more diligent, or to learn some kind of spiritual practice and do it regularly?

Leanne: Oh, for sure. I mean, it radically reordered my life. There was no going back because it was incontrovertible. Pure consciousness is absolute. It knows. It’s self-luminous; it’s self-knowing.

I then engaged in study and practice in order to merge my everyday reality with what seemed at the time to be very obscure knowing, because pure consciousness is so strikingly absent in all of Western thought. As a woman totally conditioned and brought up in Euro-American culture, I had no reference for it. So I spent another decade and a half trying to merge the Euro-American reality with this knowledge that pure consciousness is absolute.

✨ What pure consciousness means

Rick: I think most listeners here will be familiar with what we mean by pure consciousness, but in case they’re not, let’s just talk about that a little bit. What is pure consciousness, in your understanding and experience?

Leanne: Well, I can tell you the qualities of it, which we’ve been discussing already. It’s self-luminous, singular, eternal, and absolute. Through orthodox Indian philosophy, there’s a term, Brahman, that’s often equated with pure consciousness.

It really eludes a simple English translation, but it is translated as pure consciousness or being-consciousness-bliss, the absolute, sometimes.

Rick: Sat-chit-ananda.

Leanne: Sat-chit-ananda. Yeah. “Sat,” with a capital S—Self. So, by pure consciousness, I really am alluding also to that term, Brahman.

Rick: Right. And you’ve also alluded to the Western understanding of consciousness, which I think is predominantly that consciousness is somehow produced by the neurochemistry of the brain, although no one can really explain how. But I think when you say pure consciousness, you mean something very different from that.

Leanne: I do. I mean pure consciousness as the reality of being, which is why one of the definitions of Brahman would be being-consciousness-bliss. Being and pure consciousness are synonymous, if you will.

Consciousness as Knowledge, Not a Brain Byproduct

As a reality, consciousness is to know—to know. It has knowledge structured in it. Whereas in the West, many of the fields in the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, through a Western lens, are looking at consciousness as an epiphenomenon or a byproduct of brain function.

This idea of pure consciousness is very different. Brain, mind, and anything phenomenological are activities in consciousness, so to speak—as consciousness. I always find that preposition very hard. But pure consciousness is superior to any phenomena that would then reflect it or that it would use as a vehicle for manifestation.

Rick: Yeah. A common analogy is that if you compare consciousness to the electromagnetic field—we’re not saying that they are the same thing—radios, televisions, and cell phones can detect fluctuations in the electromagnetic field. In a similar way, consciousness is universal, omnipresent, and fundamental, and all the various forms in creation reflect it to one degree or another.

A mosquito reflects it as a mosquito can, a dog as a dog can, and a human being as a human being can. As human beings, we have the capacity to improve upon our ability to reflect it, and that’s what spiritual practice is all about.

Leanne: Absolutely, about cleaning the lens of perception. You bring up a very interesting point, because if you turn away from it and don’t reflect it, it’s still there vibrating. So it still has you in its grip, regardless of what you’re doing with your instrument of perception. It still has you and your perceptual eyesight.

Rick: Yeah. So it’s there. When you’re asleep, it’s there; when you’re dead, it’s there. It’s just there. In fact, speaking of Tat Wale Baba, someone once said, “Do you sleep?” And he said, “What would happen to the universe if I slept?” Meaning, identifying as pure consciousness, how the universe would crumble if that foundation of it were somehow turned off.

Leanne: Well, exactly. And that brings up my whole work in depth psychology, really. My attempts are to bridge the approaches to consciousness between the East and the West by conceptualizing an unconscious that is ontically real.

Western psychology does exactly what you were just pointing away from. It turns the universe off, in a sense, and then human beings take ownership of consciousness and reflect it, bringing consciousness to the world. Do you see what I’m saying there?

Rick: Clarify that a little, but in the process, define the word “ontic,” because you use that a lot in your book, and I don’t think it’s a word people are familiar with.

Leanne: Ontology is theories of being, so ontic would be the reality of being.

Rick: So, for instance, the point we’ve been making about pure consciousness being the sort of foundation of everything that’s on the—would you say that’s an ontic reality?

Leanne: Yes. Carl Jung—Jungian-oriented depth psychology is what I mostly work in, in those fields. Even though Jung doesn’t have very clear metaphysics to his psychology, he doesn’t make any metaphysical claims, so to speak, really, his unconscious is real. It’s the reality of being. The creator is unconscious, and human beings become conscious and bring knowledge back to the creator.

Rick: That’s an interesting idea. I read about it in your book. I guess if the creator is unconscious, then how did the creator create? It’s kind of like a pulling-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps arrangement.

Human Supremacy and the Jeopardy to Nature

Leanne: It’s that—yeah—out of chaos, out of just going out there. We just haphazardly happen to come into consciousness ourselves, basically, which puts human beings in a more superior frame. And there’s where the jeopardy comes in with nature. It puts us—you see where it puts us? If human beings evolutionarily all of a sudden gain consciousness, and we are superior to Nature herself and her own fundamental reality of consciousness, we become superior to nature.

I think right now, in our time, we can see the ravages of that thought process.

Rick: Yeah. So you think Jung was somewhat aligned with that notion that human beings are in some way superior to nature?

Leanne: He was aligned with it because of the culture that he grew up in. He was doing his best to find his way back to it, but he was blocked. One of his blind spots was actually seeing the cultural piece. He couldn’t see how enmeshed he was in the thought, the philosophy of the unconscious as an ontic reality. He was so enmeshed and immersed in it, and that was his ground from which he was working. He didn’t take note of that, and he kept it in.

For sure, we can say that emotion and the feminine nature are all things that Jung was grappling to bring forward to humanity. Yet he kept hitting his own Achilles heel because he didn’t see how the philosophy he was working under just kept cutting him off at every turn from what he was actually, I believe, trying to bring forward.

Rick: And, of course, he was aware of Eastern thought and yoga and stuff like that, but I guess he was never a serious practitioner of anything of that nature, right? He just studied it a bit intellectually.

Leanne: Yes. He did practice asana, for sure, at different times, when he was in emotional overwhelm. He absolutely studied Patanjali’s classical yoga because he gave lectures on it. He studied Kundalini Yoga.

But I want to say he didn’t experientially practice it. He more intellectually studied it, as opposed to experimentally practicing it in order to be able to speak to it from that embodied place.

Jung, Patanjali, and experiential knowledge

Rick: Yeah. You and I were talking before we started the interview about a metaphor that perhaps is a little unfair to Jung, but maybe not. Someone like Patanjali and other sages in the East who had experiential methods for exploring consciousness and exploring deeper levels of reality are like scuba divers, who can dive around deep in a pond and see what’s down there.

Whereas someone who can just think about it and who doesn’t have experiential methodologies is more like an ice fisherman sitting on the ice and kind of hoping there are fish down there. Maybe he’s got a little hole in the ice, and he’s fiddling around trying to catch some fish, but he really can’t explore the depth experientially because he doesn’t have the tools to do so.

Leanne: I want to say that Jung’s tools brought about his theories on synchronicity. In his culture and time, it took tools to speak toward parapsychology and that kind of phenomenon. It still goes against the grain today even to speak about parapsychology and psychic phenomena.

So he had tools, yes, but he didn’t have that ground of pure perception. He was always immersed in the contents of consciousness.

Rick: So whatever tools he had, they never gave him a glimpse of pure consciousness, as far as you can tell?

Leanne: No. He kept—oh, this is superconsciousness. I mean, in every way, he’s around it at every turn. He’s almost trying to call it. But because he’s so immersed in the culture, time, and philosophy of the unconscious, he can’t see his blind spots.

The contents were just so engrossing to him that relinquishing the contents, to relax into what we would call through the Patanjali lens Nirbija Samadhi, or even Asamprajnata Samadhi, was not possible. Jung’s levels of absorption always had some kind of content, some kind of object, some kind of conceptualization to them.

He was under the belief that if one continued to meditate toward the Asamprajnata or the Nirbija Samadhi that Patanjali points to, one would actually go unconscious by meditating and dropping all objects. Jung felt that Patanjali and the Buddha had let their intuition overreach itself.

Rick: Well, to be fair to him, I think that initially—I was just talking to some people last week who said, “Well, we went to this thing, and it really improved the quality of our meditation. When we meditate, we go into samadhi, but we’re not aware that we’re in samadhi until we come out of it. Then we’re aware that we were in it.”

Then I said, “Eventually, you become more and more aware of it as you’re in it.” One of the guys said he’s beginning to experience that.

But I guess Jung just thought that Buddha and Patanjali and the others were—it sounds like he was trying to fit them into his worldview and not really taking the leap to believe that they were onto something he hadn’t realized.

Leanne: That’s right. He was trying to fit them on his terms, into his worldview, which is this idea that the West—or, if you will, Euro-American culture, and I’m not a huge fan of that term—was in the midst of constructing knowledge. Therefore, anything that came before couldn’t have been as evolved because knowledge was evolving. So, therefore, they had a lock on how that evolution was happening, churning it through their own intellect.

Rick: Yeah, there is sort of this conceit, isn’t there, about how wonderful and advanced we are, and how all the other cultures must have been primitive in some way.

In a way, we know a lot of things that the Buddha didn’t know or that Patanjali couldn’t have known. They couldn’t have taken a rocket ship to the moon or explained quantum mechanics or many other things that we’ve come to understand. But they obviously had an expertise in an area in which the West is deficient, at least in my view.

Leanne: Yes. Here might be the rub in that, though. Okay, they didn’t have that. Fair enough. But if our search is divorced from the field of pure consciousness—if our desire to go to the moon, or to go micro or macro, is divorced from the field of pure consciousness—then what can knowledge bring to you?

Maybe that’s also that Veda quote.

Rick: It is. People didn’t hear me say that quote because we were off camera. There’s a quote from the Rigveda that says, basically, the impulses of the Veda, or the impulses—the laws of nature—which govern creation and are responsible for its manifestation, reside in pure consciousness. If you don’t know that field, those laws can’t help you. They can’t do anything for you.

Leanne: They can’t, but because they’re laws, they’re going to get you. So if you want to go to the moon, if you want to keep digging up the Earth and taking her oil, you just can’t keep ripping off material reality and looking into phenomena for an answer. Because of those laws, you’re going to back up against them. You’re going to destroy yourself.

Rick: Yeah, totally. And that’s what we’re doing.

✨ Science, technology, and the ground of consciousness

So let’s just put a fine point on this. We’re in a critical phase of humanity, with global warming and a million other things that could destroy us: nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, all kinds of things which, if they went awry—and in many cases are already going awry—could exterminate not only our species but most species, maybe down to the cockroaches or something.

This is really the fruit of scientific knowledge, all the things I just mentioned and many others. So what is it about scientific knowledge that can give us such mixed blessings? Obviously, it has helped in many ways. It has eradicated smallpox and done a million other beautiful things, but it has brought us to the brink of extermination. What is it? Why? I think you’ve just said it, but I want to elaborate on that. Go ahead.

Leanne: Sure. Okay, we can go to the moon. Why wasn’t looking at the moon from the Earth enough? What did you need to find up there? And now you’ve created all of that metal and whatever you needed to get up there.

Okay, fair enough. But if it’s at the expense of the totality of the whole system, it’s not worth embarking on. I don’t mean to pull out that one instance, but I need an instance to say that if you pull that kind of examination out of the totality, you may hit a boundary.

She has boundaries. She has laws. You can’t break it down. You can’t pollute your water supply. You can’t toxify your air supply and think your species will stay alive. You can’t kill your habitat. She has boundaries.

She has boundaries. She has laws. You can’t break it down. You can’t pollute your water supply. You can’t toxify your air supply and think your species will stay alive. You can’t kill your habitat. She has boundaries.

And if we don’t realize that knowledge—that dharma, those laws—are structured in pure consciousness, we’re going to keep spiraling on this building up of knowledge at the expense of the knowledge that sits right in our heart, right in our gut, and right in the field between us.

If we don’t realize that knowledge—that dharma, those laws—are structured in pure consciousness, we’re going to keep spiraling on this building up of knowledge at the expense of the knowledge that sits right in our heart, right in our gut, and right in the field between us.

Rick: Yeah, I think it was Thoreau who said, “Go ahead and build castles in the air; that’s where they belong, but just put foundations under them.” And I would say I kind of dig technology and stuff. I think it was kind of cool that we went to the moon. I mean, it gave us Tang, among other things. If people don’t remember, Tang was an orange-flavored powder you could put in water. They actually developed that for the astronauts.

But I think it’s natural for human beings to want to know more and be more, and expand their territory of influence and all that stuff. But if you don’t simultaneously dig your foundation—build your foundation—and we’re alluding to pure consciousness here, then these efforts can be very misguided.

Leanne: Right. And that’s why, for me, the logical consistency that I see in Patanjali Yoga psychology, or the six orthodox Hindu philosophies, is that they call it the ground. Yes, it’s quite literally the ground. If you leave the ground, and you’re divorced from it, and you’re in the seen without any kind of reference to the seer, now we’re in trouble.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a line in the Gita which says, “For many-branched and endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed.” And so, you can go way out on limbs and not see the connection between the limb you’re on and all the other limbs, or spokes of a wheel, if you will. But if you can sort of get to the resolute hub of that wheel, then you see all the spokes emanating from you and functioning from there. You function in harmony with all the diversity of life functioning out on some branch. You violate laws of nature unwittingly.

Leanne: I couldn’t agree more. Absolutely. I mean, it’s just another way of making the same point. It’s beautiful and tragic at the same time, because we’re not understanding that. You and I are having this dialogue, but, speaking to Euro-American culture, we don’t understand that. We’re way out on branches. We have the sap divorced from the tree, so to speak, and that is leaving us in the situation that we’re in, with the leaders that we’re putting into office and the environmental—

Rick: Degradation.

Leanne: —that we’re facing. Yeah, and—

Rick: But the fact that we’re talking about it is good. And I think that we don’t want to pat ourselves on the back too much, but we might be avant-garde. We might be harbingers of a broader understanding that will eventually become more commonplace in the culture, and that could really reorganize things in a more beneficial way.

Leanne: Right. Well, my whole body of work, I would say, is a voice for bringing pure consciousness into Western thought. I mean, it’s so strikingly absent. Reading Jung really brought it to light for me, because at every turn, it’s almost like he’s seeing it, he’s getting it, but he’s not getting it because he’s so immersed in his own culture. So that’s why I use him sort of as a touchstone in this dialogue. I take this dialogue between him and Patanjali to show where they diverge, and I think they diverge at very important points that we need to really understand.

Rick: Yeah. Well, we’re going to keep talking about it, you and I, for the next hour and a half. And I do see this kind of conversation and understanding seeping into the culture more and more. There are spokesmen on either side. I mean, obviously, there are articulate people who have an atheistic viewpoint but are nonetheless brilliant, and they keep butting up against people who are saying the things we’re saying. Dialogues are taking place.

And, yeah, I’m sure you’ve read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Leanne: I haven’t, actually, no.

Rick: Oh, okay. He popularized the term “paradigm,” and how a paradigm becomes the predominant worldview of a scientific discipline. And he analyzed in depth the mechanism of paradigm shift: how anomalies come along that keep clashing with the established understanding. Initially, they can be dismissed and ignored, but eventually the anomalies become predominant enough that the paradigm has to shift. And this has happened time and time again in various sciences.

So I think there are a lot of anomalies to the materialistic worldview that regards matter as dead stuff, the universe as a random accident of some sort, and consciousness as merely a product of the brain. When the brain dies, that’s it—lights out forever for that person. There is a lot of evidence that refutes those perspectives, and I think it’s building and creating pressure on those who adhere to them. Eventually—well, someone said science progresses by a series of funerals—but sooner or later, the paradigm will shift in society at large. It has to.

Leanne: I mean, I agree. I hold out hope for that. But what comes up for me when you’re saying that is that orthodox science seems also to be very married to, can I say, predatory capitalism? It’s well-funded. It’s very hegemonic. I mean, it’s very entrenched and fundamentalist in many ways.

Now, because these two systems are married, especially in fields like psychiatry and psychology, what’s being funded is medication and medicines for people’s anxiety. So instead of encouraging people to say, “Hey, maybe the worldview was a little off, and maybe that’s why there are a lot of sick people—psychologically sick people—because an unhealthy worldview can’t possibly have healthy citizens,” well, as of yet, that’s not—I mean, it is happening, but it’s happening on the fringes.

And it will take a lot to move that marriage of money and fundamentalism, to get it to shift. I’m not saying it’s not possible. I absolutely hold out the vision that it is. I’m just saying it is very entrenched.

Rick: Yeah. In your book, you quote Jung as having said that scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism arose from the failure of religious structures and traditions. And so I think what he’s saying there is that somehow the religious structures and traditions, if they were primarily responsible for providing the experience of transcendence and enabling people to live that in daily life as the foundation of their life, appear to have failed, because that experience has not been very common. It seems now to be experiencing a resurgence, but it hasn’t been very common.

Experiential Verification Beyond Religious Fundamentalism

And as a result of that, which you and I have just been saying, scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism arose from it. What is religious fundamentalism? It’s the adamant insistence that a particular belief is correct, without necessarily having the experiential verification of that belief. And that’s why religious fundamentalists are so rigid and strident. They feel defensive because their experience doesn’t underpin their belief.

Leanne: Right. It really strips, if we could use the term, authentic power from them, because it puts power in the theory. It takes power out of the body, out of the whole mind-body connection—the wisdom of that system, which we still have a long way to go in order to really express in a coherent mind-body psychology in the West.

But by using a priest or a god that’s outside oneself, where’s the human power in that? As you’re saying, there’s no direct experience in there. You’re having an experience with the book, with the texts, with the theory, but you’re not having a direct spiritual, emotional, physical experience on the ground, right?

Rick: So what I would like to suggest here is that anything any religion ever talked about, or any philosophy or any such thing, any metaphysics, can be taken—and perhaps should be taken—as a hypothesis that can actually be investigated.

The whole issue of whether God exists, whether angels exist, or anything else—it’s not something to believe or disbelieve. And I don’t think the founders of religion really wanted you necessarily to believe what they said. They wanted you to experience what they were experiencing, and maybe they were providing means to do that when they were alive. But perhaps those means got distorted and lost over time. And perhaps we’re at a stage now where people are rediscovering them and being able to investigate experientially all of these religious, spiritual, and metaphysical claims.

Anything any religion ever talked about, or any philosophy or any such thing, any metaphysics, can be taken—and perhaps should be taken—as a hypothesis that can actually be investigated.

Leanne: Right, yeah. I think there is a big shift in people looking outside religion, so to speak—organized religion—and finding other organizations, or looking more toward nature, or looking to their own direct experience through meditation and yoga practice.

I thought of one thing because of what you said a little bit earlier. I don’t want to segue if you have something else.

Rick: Oh, we can keep segueing. We can always segue back if we want.

Leanne: Okay. To me, the arguments between Buddhism, orthodox Hinduism, and non-orthodox Hinduism are pretty significant. Now, I don’t know if that’s what you were alluding to when you were talking about these dialogues that are happening today, and atheism, because I know I’ve heard quite a few speakers who are Buddhists, so to speak, and certainly meditate, but they’re definitely atheist.

Rick: Sam Harris.

Leanne: Right. You and I were thinking of the same person?

Rick: Yes. Yeah, who, in my opinion, is a fascinating guy. I listen to his podcast, but boy, he’s a tough nut to crack. Anyway, keep going.

Leanne: And they hang on to this notion of no-self. But if you look at the evolution of Buddhism, the self—something absolute, which is the real, which is self-sovereign and self-knowing—is brought back in through the Tathāgatagarbha sermons and texts, which derived from the sermon on Buddha’s last day on Earth. And that’s brought into Mahayana Buddhism.

So I do think it’s important to look at the evolution of Buddhism and not just certain texts in Buddhism. There’s a lot of text there, and I certainly haven’t studied them all. I obviously went after the ones that I wanted to utilize to bring a marriage back between Buddhism and yoga, because the Buddha was someone who practiced yoga, and you can see a lot of similarities between Mahayana Buddhism and Patanjali Yoga.

Rick: I happen to have one file on my desktop that I hadn’t put away. I always like to keep a clean desktop on my computer, but this one was sitting there, and it’s “The Buddha on No-Self.” And here, I think this is from Timothy Conway, who’s a good friend of mine and has been on Buddha at the Gas Pump a couple of times. He said that what the Buddha meant by anatta was not “no self,” but “not-self.”

He clearly and repeatedly taught that the five aggregates of personhood—body, sensations, perception, samskara reactions, and personal consciousness, vijnana—are not who I am, are not myself. He did not say there are no persons. And this is quite contrary to what so many misunderstanding Buddhists, including many teachers and academics and Neo-Advaitins, teach today. They interpret anatta as no persons whatsoever, which is a recipe for depersonalization syndrome.

Leanne: That’s right. That’s right. And also, in that Tathāgatagarbha sermon, when the Buddha explicitly says, “If you keep going around in the no-self concept, it’s like a moth going to a flame.” You just keep getting burned at some point. Yes, it’s emptiness of the conditions, but then there’s a resting in something deeper that’s absolute.

And you can find it in Buddhism, but a lot of the atheists who are, could we say, co-opting Buddhism for their own means, are not taking a look at the whole evolution of that discipline in its various factions. But it’s important.

Rick: Yeah. The whole thing about atheism came up, so let’s talk about it for a minute, just for fun. I can’t presume to be able to articulate atheism the way a full-fledged atheist would, but as I understand it, the term means that you don’t believe in God.

If I were to talk to Sam Harris, I would probably say, “Well, I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in,” because he keeps taking potshots at very silly religious traditions, some of which are kind of strange.

But to me, when I look at anything in creation—even my fingernail—and contemplate what I’m actually looking at in terms of the subtle and microscopic structures there, how orderly they are, and how they abide by certain biological and physical laws, it is so obviously not a random accident. There’s obviously some sort of intelligence governing and orchestrating it. And that is true of the entire universe, as far out as you want to go. You can take any little, tiny point, and there it is. So, to me, God is kind of hiding in plain sight.

Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. Some people do say, “This is a game of hide-and-seek.” I think the Sanskrit term is ṛta. That is the divine order, or the power of the divine imprint, right? In the Yoga Sutras, there’s the truth-bearing imprint.

That intelligence and order you’re talking about are so present here. If this is pure consciousness and here’s the mind, it’s either mirroring it in this nice, yummy marriage, or it’s splitting off. But that imprint remains, no matter how far away you get from the ground, because it’s built into the intelligence of the system.

You light up the imprint, and then the mind comes back to rest in its true nature. I don’t know what meditators are doing, if not somehow accessing or attempting to access that imprint.

🩺 Stillness, conditioning, and embodied integration

Rick: I think that’s what most meditations aim to do. Let’s segue into that. The second verse of the Yoga Sutras, yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, means that yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. You talk about that quite a bit in your book. It’s probably one of the reasons it’s the second verse of the Yoga Sutras; Patanjali considered it significant. So let’s consider the significance of it. I’ll let you take it from here.

Leanne: Right. We could say he sums up his whole psychology and philosophy in that one line. Does this work? I’m saying this is pure consciousness, and here’s the mind when it’s married to the pure.

When the mind starts moving and fluctuating, and it’s no longer silent but is in its thought forms, that union becomes avidyā. There’s blindness, non-wisdom, and misunderstanding. We become blinded through the vibration when the vibration is divorced from its ground in pure consciousness.

Really, he takes 195 lines to continue to say the same thing. And 195 is already so short. But it’s so succinct for him to sum it up in that way: still in the silence, in that pure being, aliveness is felt, it’s embodied, and life is known, instead of being represented through a thought form or a construct.

Rick: Let’s use a metaphor to make it clearer for people. The sun represents pure consciousness, and it’s shining on a very still lake. I’m sure we’ve all seen this kind of thing, where the light bouncing off the lake is blinding because the sun has been reflected so well by the water.

Stillness of Mind and the Reflection of Pure Consciousness

But if the wind picks up and the water starts to get turbulent, then the reflection is no longer as clear or blinding. The idea is that if the mind is agitated, it can’t reflect pure consciousness very well. Patanjali advocates stilling the mind in order to restore that clarity and come back to the clarity at the very foundation of our life or our mind.

Leanne: Right. If I could just bring the cultural piece back in, we’re a culture that lives in a lot of agitation. I love technology, too, but even now there’s the instinct to keep picking it up. You have red dots on your applications.

Rick: I don’t have one of those, by the way, just so you know. I have an old clunker, a flip phone that sits in the car.

Leanne: When you speak about agitation, you bring up a very rich point. Going back to the cultural piece, as a culture we live in a very agitated state of mind because everything is running toward the capitalistic markets—or at least a lot is running toward the capitalistic market, the way I see it.

The mind runs: How can I objectify myself to put myself in the market so I can make money? Money has become equated with well-being, and therefore my accumulation of capital is equated with my well-being.

There’s a lot of agitation that takes place inside that paradigm, inside that culture and thought structure. A lot of my clients are heavily filled with anxiety because they’re having a spiritual practice, but they’re still trying to fit themselves into a culture that is so chronically busy.

This goes back to the point we’ve been making almost for the past hour: pure consciousness is strikingly absent in Western thought. It’s not even there as a ground for people to touch into. So a lot of people without spiritual practices, or without any knowledge of pure consciousness, are trying to find a ground within the agitation, within that which isn’t stable, immutable, and absolute. Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. They’re trying to find an absolute, or a rock to anchor to, in something that’s relative and transitory.

I heard recently that only 66 years elapsed from Kitty Hawk, when the Wright brothers first flew their little plane, to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. Obviously, there has been a huge acceleration of technological progress. I suspect that since Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, we’ve made at least as much progress, if you want to call it progress. In any case, the pace of life has increased tremendously.

Realistically, can we expect that to stop? Can we expect to go back to an agrarian society where we’re all just sitting around and things are slower-paced? I don’t think so.

Let’s say a donkey has to carry a load. You have two options: lighten the load or strengthen the donkey if the load is getting too heavy. I don’t know if we can slow down the pace of society or the pace of change. So I think we need to supplement it, or build the foundation under it, to allude to a metaphor, in terms of this pure consciousness you’re talking about. That way, one can manage the pace of change and the constant barrage of stimuli we’re subjected to.

Of course, you can limit your own barrage. You don’t have to watch television all the time or look at your cell phone all the time. Nonetheless, society is in a very agitated and busy state. I don’t think you can squelch or suppress that; you have to infuse it with the silence of pure consciousness in order for things to become rebalanced.

Leanne: I hear that. But if the so-called change falls on the individual, the individuals make up the collective, so let’s dialogue through this.

The individuals are making that effort toward silence and stillness, which has everything to do with their nervous systems: decompressing anxiety, being able to breathe, and functioning without stress.

Now, what you’re saying is that they’re going to have to reenter the stressful environment. That pace is going to keep going the way it is. Hopefully, they’re going to be able to reenter it with a calmed nervous system and negotiate that stress in a way where their nervous system stays anxiety-free.

Rick: I think that’s what I’m saying. Obviously, there’s a lot of agitation and stimuli that you don’t need to indulge in, and many people do indulge in them while looking for some kind of fulfillment. Once you start finding inner fulfillment, you can dispense with a lot of that stuff.

Nonetheless, you may need to have a job. Most people do, and you need to go to work with people who don’t meditate or whatever. You can’t just live on welfare and hide out in a cabin someplace. Most people can’t. For most people, there needs to be some way of managing the pace of life and strengthening the nervous system so that it can deal with the necessary stimuli without getting stressed out by it.

Leanne: I wholeheartedly agree with that. That would be some kind of incremental change. Is there a radical change ahead for us? That’s possible, too, only in the sense that if our food supply, water supply, or air supply is tainted, there’s going to be more of a radical shift than a gradual shift.

In that case, the frenetic pace you’re speaking of would actually shift—not back to an agrarian reality as it was before, but certainly toward something closer to it.

I don’t know if you know the New Thinking Allowed channel with Jeffrey Mishlove.

Rick: I listened to both of your interviews with him.

Leanne: Okay. He interviews people about psychic phenomena, and he’s really into psychic phenomena. He has a degree in parapsychology. I believe it was an interview he did with Stephan Schwartz where Stephan took remote viewers and had them look into the future. They did see a return to nature.

That isn’t to say that’s what’s going to happen, but that is what was shown. I forget the sample size he used.

Rick: Well, I agree with you. There are so many things that are untenable and unsustainable that, if we’re going to survive, need to somehow cease to function or cease to exist.

But we’re not going to forget all the knowledge we have, all the things that science has taught us, unless there’s some huge destruction that destroys all the records of human knowledge that have accumulated. We know a heck of a lot more than we did 100, 200, or 1,000 years ago, so that knowledge is still going to be known.

I think a return to nature will probably mean a return to balance, where we’re able to possess this knowledge in a way that doesn’t shoot ourselves in the foot—in a way that can render it benign rather than destructive.

Leanne: Well, right, because it returns to the question we asked earlier: Is the knowledge that we have useful? Is it even beneficial?

If you have a Monsanto or some corporation that has the power to take over the food supply, taking what was organic and healthy and changing or mutating it into something that the body can no longer process in a way that’s viable and healthy for it, then what good is that knowledge?

Yes, there’s this whole bank of knowledge we’ve built up, but I think it will come to a point where we have to ask: Is that knowledge heading us toward something beneficial, or is it heading us away from our true nature, from sitting in something authentic and natural that allows our species to survive?

Rick: Yeah, right. At the same time, I agree. It seems like what needs to happen is that the ambient level of consciousness of society has to be such that anyone who tries to use knowledge in a destructive way will be so out of place that they won’t get the support or have the ability to do it. We’re speaking kind of idealistically here, but—

Leanne: I know, I know. But when you look at world leaders, I think that’s a really important point. And that speaks to what should happen in schools. Understanding the college of how the mind works—I mean, these are fundamental things, especially with all the shootings that are happening now in our culture. How does the mind work? What is the psychosomatic unity? That should be sort of one-on-one knowledge through elementary school, so everybody has a grounding toward that unification of body and mind. What I would say is pure consciousness, which is a very necessary component.

Rick: Yeah. Wouldn’t it be feasible to teach stuff in schools that would enable kids to have access to pure consciousness from an early age? It’s actually being done through the TM movement, through stuff like what Caverly Morgan is doing up in Portland and elsewhere. It just needs to become widespread. And if it did, then the culture could really shift.

Leanne: Right, right.

Much more understanding of the mind-body split that we’ve suffered under for so long could also heal.

Rick: Yep, yeah. So it’s not hopeless, our predicament. The solutions are there—not only spiritual solutions, but many technological solutions as well, in terms of cleaning up the environment, developing alternative energies that don’t pollute, and health-related technologies, and so on. If you keep referring to corporations and greed, a lot of these technologies are suppressed and opposed because they don’t line anybody’s pockets, at least not the people who have control.

Leanne: Right, right. But as you’re saying, they are emerging, and they are there. If they get the support, they can come out of the margins and into the mainstream. That would be very beneficial, probably for the masses.

Rick: So you and I keep doing what we’re doing, along with everybody else who’s doing this sort of thing, and maybe society will evolve into that. I feel funny because I feel like we’re proclaiming ourselves to be the transformational agents of the world, but maybe we are in some small way.

Leanne: Well, the dialogue is necessary. Yeah, that’s for sure. Wherever the dialogues can take place, you could say that dialogue and transformation, at this stage, go hand in hand, because the dialogue is so important at this point.

🩺 Yoga as integration and healing

Rick: Yeah. Okay, back to Patanjali. At any point, feel free to throw in other things—Jung, anything else you want to talk about—as we go. In terms of Patanjali, he wrote the Yoga Sutras, and it has four chapters. He talks about various stages or degrees of samadhi. Some of those stages pertain to what we were saying: initially, pure consciousness can be a glimpse, but eventually it can become integrated or stabilized. It’s a continuum; in the midst of activity, it’s not lost, no matter what you’re doing. Do you want to comment on that before we say anything else?

Leanne: Yeah. I would say that yoga is a philosophy of integration. Yoga is a process, and ultimately yoga is both a process and a view of reality in its integrated wholeness. Yoga is that union.

Anything that has been split off—whether it’s the mind-body split, me from you, us from them, the universal from the individual, or the transcendent from the immanent—all those splits, through the process of meditation and samadhi, or absorption, have the opportunity to, I want to say, reintegrate, even though in some sense they’ve never lost that integration.

What happens is that the sickness, the illness, is what happens. That’s why they are so integrated and can always find their way back home, because that original imprint never loses its thread. That’s why pure consciousness is pure. It’s pure; it can’t be defiled. There is no other; there is no ultimate object. It is itself.

When we take the mind and co-opt consciousness—potentially in one of the yamas—what is it? Non-stealing, non-covetousness. In Euro-American culture, that’s kind of what we did. We have the ego as the seat of consciousness, and so we steal it, so to speak. We’re thieves. As you break off, what you get now is the dissociation between the mind and the body, and the illness in that system, if you will.

But because pure consciousness is the intelligence and the self-knowing awareness, do you see what I’m saying? The integration is already there. The integration is the thread that you follow back in for wholeness and healing.

Rick: Yeah, that evokes a couple of thoughts in me. One is the word maya, which is usually translated as “illusion,” but literally means “that which is not.” Shankara has the famous story of the rope being mistaken for a snake, which creates all kinds of turbulence, fear, upset, and everything else, just because the vision is not clear. But the rope was never a snake.

All this craziness, ignorance, suffering, and everything else that seems so real, if you really get right down to it, has always just been a misperception. And that is actually, as the Brahma Sutra —or as the Panch —says, all this is that still, already. We’re just not seeing the world as it actually is. Therefore, mistaking it, we live in fear, we live in upset, and we live in torment.

All this craziness, ignorance, suffering, and everything else that seems so real, if you really get right down to it, has always just been a misperception. And that is actually, as the Brahma Sutra—or as the Panch—says, all this is that still, already. We’re just not seeing the world as it actually is. Therefore, mistaking it, we live in fear, we live in upset, and we live in torment.

Leanne: One hundred percent. So when we turn that lens back around and come home, so to speak, and rest inside the absolute—because it’s always there, it was always there, it doesn’t leave, and there’s no way to break off from it—there’s just suffering that happens. Suffering, we could say, is a huge marker. It’s just a big red flag: “Yo, you turned in the wrong direction.”

Rick: Yeah. There was one fundamental principle of meditation, the way I learned it and practice it, which is that it’s actually enjoyable for the mind to settle down, for there to be a cessation of the fluctuations in the mind. As we get closer to pure consciousness, so to speak, and it begins to be experienced more fully, we experience the ananda aspect of it—more and more, greater and greater bliss. So the mind will naturally fall into that if given the correct angle and allowed to do so.

Leanne: Yes, absolutely. That’s also what indicates the mind-body unity, and why Brahman, I believe, is translated as being-consciousness-bliss. It gives the embodied aspect to it.

When the naysayers look at Hindu philosophy, they think of it as ultimately transcendent and otherworldly, as something other. I believe that the bliss aspect you’re pointing to is the indicator: No, that’s not what they’re saying at all. They’re saying it’s right here, right now.

Rick: It’s a very practical thing when you get right down to it. Maybe there are people who’ve taken it in an otherworldly direction, but as we’ve been talking about this whole time, it has incredibly practical implications for day-to-day life, as most of us live it.

Leanne: Yes, and that brings me to Tibetan Buddhism, just for a brief second. These realities aren’t better than each other. In Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about the nirmanakaya, the sambhogakaya, and the dharmakaya.

The dharmakaya is that knowledge of pure awareness, of the self-sovereign, unchanging, pristine cognition. But the nirmanakaya, which is what Patanjali would call the worldly experience of the dualistic world of subject-object consciousness, is embedded in it.

These are sort of nested realities that we can see through the higher yoga tantras or the meditational practices. When we see through them, the choice becomes available again: Which direction am I going to turn toward? Am I going to turn toward brahmacharya, sitting in that knowledge of Brahman, as opposed to asking, “Do I stay here, or do I turn away from it?”

Now, if I’ve learned that this is suffering, I’m not going to make that turn.

Rick: In your own experience, you had that nice glimpse of pure consciousness 30 years ago or so. You seem like a very happy, integrated person, so I suspect that you’ve cultured that experience and allowed it to become clear and foundational in your life. Is that true?

Leanne: Yes, I would say so, because that moment was so absolute. In some sense, it became foundational then. But what I had to do was practice in order to align my body in the way that we’re speaking of. I’m not saying I never have anxiety in a moment—I mean, all you have to do is talk to my 14-year-old son—but yes, have I purged a lot of conditions? Absolutely, absolutely.

Rick: Yeah. Did you ever have a moment, or a sort of watershed moment, where you felt like there was this awakening and that things were different thereafter? Or was it something that just kept growing incrementally, so you can’t really pinpoint any such moment?

Leanne: I would say they were both. That pure consciousness event was a watershed moment. From there, all the conditions—the part of me that was completely saying, “How can that be?” because I’m so in this reality of subject-object consciousness—then became incremental, moving toward the mirror coming back to rest in pure consciousness. Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, it does. Let’s talk more about the mechanics of how this integration takes place. For instance, Patanjali talks a lot about vasanas, samskaras, vrittis, and kleshas, all of which are terms related to the conditioning of the nervous system, and also the reversal of that conditioning through yogic practice.

Leanne: Through the lens of Jungian depth psychology, we’d call those complexes. There are areas of great similarity between yoga and Jungian psychology. We’re both concerned with the healing of human suffering and religious experience as an embodied experience.

In both systems of thought, those complexes and the affect that sits at their core have to be addressed. In the Yoga Sutras—the threads of yoga—you have to pull those threads of conditioning, belief systems, and constructs. There is an affective core inside, which also impacts the nervous system. As those threads, those complexes, are depotentiated, one is able to take a comfortable seat in the body. Does that make sense?

I think it’s important to understand that those habit patterns are fears. They’re fears, and they have us; we don’t have them. When they get triggered, they take us down a path. Before we start this process of transformation, all of a sudden we’re reactive and going down a path that, in some sense, we have no control over. The complex has us, and it takes us into whatever that condition is.

So it’s about being able to spot them and then, over time, depotentiate them so we can integrate whatever thought forms were enmeshed together. They can become integrated into the field of pure consciousness.

Rick: Yeah. And so I think what we’re saying here is that all this conditioning has a neurophysiological basis, which is chemical and structural in its nature, and that bringing about changes in the mind correlates with transforming the physiology in a deep way.

And I think perhaps, when we talk about samskaras or deep impressions, they’re not just mental impressions or subtle-body impressions. If modern physiology had the ability to do so, they could actually be detected in the nervous system. But I don’t think it does have that ability. Well, it does in a gross way. I mean, you can do MRI scans of the average person, or someone with Alzheimer’s, or someone who’s been taking certain drugs, or someone who’s been meditating for 30 or 40 years, and you see really big differences in the way their brain looks.

The term neuroplasticity is very popular these days: being able to actually change our brain. So we’re talking about something physiological here as well as mental.

Leanne: Oh, absolutely. Freud was right on this track. Even with his first case of Anna O., he says energy had gone along the wrong lines, so to speak, and that had built up in her system. That’s what the initial clients in psychoanalysis had shown them: these patterns. Freud was actually a neurologist, and then he became a psychoanalyst.

So, yeah, the early days of depth psychology were a confluence of psychology and neurology, and now it’s coming back in a very, very strong way through the field of affective neuroscience. Affect has long been part of depth psychology as an empirical means of entering the psyche. In other words, when that aspect just grips us unawares, that’s showing us the places where the complexes are held in things that are invisible to us.

And we see that in Patanjali’s yoga as well. He speaks about grief, and he’s pointing to the sorrowless luminous. So I think affect is another way of bridging yoga and Jung, bridging Eastern and Western consciousness. Affective neuroscience may be a way, in my opinion, for us to bridge science and religious experience in the West.

Because affect is life as it goes—I’ll give it a feminine term there. Affect is beyond conscious control, so it’s life as it’s coming forward. So if you look here, as this turns away and affect builds up along certain lines, it’s going to come, and there’s a law to it, so to speak. It will come and wake us up—not in the way that we’re talking about waking up to spirituality, but shake us up, I guess I could say, because it comes in bursts.

We can repress it, maybe for a period of time—oppress it, suppress it—but at some point, it has its say and it breaks through. And so affect may be a way now for us to look phenomenologically into, I believe, spiritual phenomena. If what Patanjali is pointing to is the sorrowless luminous, then it’s beyond grief.

So if the affect of grief is symbolic—actually, I can feel this as I’m saying it to you—of that split from the home, from the ground, then that gives science a way in toward reconciling science and religious experience.

Rick: I just want to interject here that for those who are watching live—there might be 150 people on right now—if you would like to ask a question, go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. There’s a forum at the bottom of that page through which you can submit a question. And that’s true anytime I’m doing an interview over Skype or over the Internet.

So, briefly define the word affect. I’m not so familiar with that term myself. You just used it a lot.

Leanne: It’s basically an emotional response.

Rick: Okay. And so you’re talking about conditioning here, and you’re talking about emotional responses based upon deep impressions in the nervous system that condition our behavior. Is that what you’re—

Leanne: Affect is just a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature. There’s brilliant work that’s been done by a man who’s now passed away, Jaak Panksepp. I’m not a huge fan of studying through other animal species, but he looked at several other species, and he found across all mammals—actually, I think he even found them in birds and reptiles as well—seven subcortical emotional centers common to all sentient beings: seeking, maternal care, joyful play, grief, rage, fear, and lust, I think.

Also, through this research, it shows that the brainstem is instinctively conscious, whereas the cortex derives its consciousness from the brainstem. The brainstem has an affective core. So we’re looking across all different species to see how those seven emotional centers reside. It’s part of our makeup. It’s part of the laws.

Rick: So Patanjali actually alluded to this or addressed this? And how does what you’re saying now relate to the idea of enlightenment or waking up? How would an enlightened or awakened person function with regard to these emotional centers as compared to an average person?

Leanne: Okay. Now, enlightenment and awakening—all these terms today—

Rick: Well, I hesitate to use the E-word ever, but even “awakening,” you’d have to spend half an hour defining what you’re talking about. But let’s just say we all have some kind of idea of what these mean: some kind of realized level of realization or, let’s say, self-realization. Someone who has sort of landed in the recognition and an abiding sense that they are pure consciousness. They’re not merely an individual biological entity.

Leanne: Okay, I like that. I like that as a definition, for sure. But because I had that pure-consciousness event, what I didn’t have was an embodied way to actually ground that pure consciousness in my own system. To me, that’s a whole different—

Rick: That’s a lifelong project.

Leanne: It’s just a whole other gestalt. I think that’s what Patanjali is pointing to. He talks about kaivalya. He doesn’t even mention moksha; it’s kaivalya, which is to rest upon oneself.

Rick: Also, the word means “alone,” I think. It has to do with oneness—the sense that I am alone in this, in that I am That, and That alone is—

Leanne: Yes, absolutely. It can be translated as aloneness, and I’ve also seen it translated as “to rest upon oneself.” So, Brahman—

Rick: I don’t think there’s a contradiction there, actually.

Leanne: No. So Brahman—pure consciousness, singular, eternal, absolute, immutable—through the psychosomatic practices of Ashtanga Yoga and purifying the nervous system, cleaning the complexes, getting at the affective core—see, how to get a comfortable seat in the body. I mean, that’s one sutra. Now you’re beyond the obstacles. Now you take a comfortable seat in the body, so that embodiment is part of Patanjali’s psychology and philosophy.

I don’t know that that’s true of all Hindu philosophies or practices. Kashmir Shaivism, I would think, yes. And I don’t know if I’ve lost the thread here, but why it’s important is because affect points to the embodied aspect.

Rick: Yes. Okay, I want to talk to you about Ashtanga Yoga and the yamas and niyamas. But first, a question came in from Siguna Mueller in Austria. She asked:

“You were talking about culture impacting Jung, so that his thoughts and insights were only circling around pure consciousness. Can it be that it is not so much about the presence or absence of thoughts or conceptualization, but about their quality? In one case, they’re about something driven and dominating. But there are other thoughts, as if they are only a partial manifestation of something deeper. These types of thoughts are light, exciting, full of energy, and they don’t create motion or constriction. Or do you think that every type of conceptualization is taking you away from pure consciousness?”

Good question.

Leanne: Great question. And no, I don’t think so. I’ll speak through Patanjali’s lens when he talks about the vrittis, and he talks about pramana—right knowledge. So there are thoughts that are in alignment, thoughts, dharmic thoughts, if you will, that are in alignment.

So, no, I would say all vrittis make waves. I don’t think we can argue that point. But there are vrittis that are thought forms that are in alignment. What we want to be careful not to do is get stuck in the thought form. So even though they’re in alignment, that’s what could happen, I feel, with so-called spiritual progress or being on a spiritual path. At every turn, the mind wants to co-opt it and take ownership of it. And that, to me, would just be the caution with that kind of thought form: you want to make sure that you’re not co-opting it through thought and that it’s being brought deeply into the body.

Rick: Yeah. And actually, there are a lot of scriptures that say, “Hang out with the right people, put your attention on the right stuff, contemplate knowledge, contemplate higher knowledge. Don’t put your attention on things that are going to drag you down. Don’t hang out with people who are going to drag you down.”

So there are definitely thoughts that are conducive to liberation, or mental activities or foci of attention that are conducive to realization, and those which are detrimental to it.

Leanne: Right. And Shankara rightly pointed to the study of scripture, I believe. I mean, the study of the Upanishads to him was a central path, or the path. Reading and digesting those scriptures is a form of thought, but that’s pramana. That’s pramana—correct cognition.

Ethics and the Yamas and Niyamas for Spiritual Teachers

Rick: And that leads us into the yamas and niyamas. I’ve been instrumental in helping to form something called the Association of Professional Spiritual Teachers, which has drafted a code of ethics that teachers can perhaps ascribe to if they feel comfortable with it, in an attempt to raise the standard of expectation of what spirituality looks like and what kind of behavior a spiritual teacher might be expected to display.

Because there have been some really crazy things happening. And in my case, I’ve been engaged in discussions with people, some of whom say, “This is nonsense. Spiritual teachers can be full of rage and grief and all kinds of stuff like that, and you can’t judge their level of consciousness by their behavior.”

But I think Patanjali, and of course most other traditions, say, well, there are certain behaviors which you should engage in and certain other behaviors you should abstain from if you’re serious about spirituality, because you need to amass purity. A more pure mind and body are more amenable to awakening and realization.

So what are your comments on the yamas and niyamas, and the whole thing about behavior, morality, or ethics and spiritual development?

Leanne: It reminds me of that idea of crazy wisdom: “No, those teachers, they’re just full of crazy wisdom.”

Rick: Which is a literary trope that had no historical basis in fact, by the way. But hey, we’ll go on.

Leanne: I mean, when I hear someone say a spiritual teacher will be filled with rage—well, look, anybody can teach from any place, and teaching is great. And teaching is the verb, right? We don’t want to be a teacher; it’s about the teachings coming through.

But when the teachings come through an instrument of purity, then the teachings just land in their purest form. I mean, I think that’s kind of very easy to understand. And Patanjali, I believe, puts the yamas as just the first limb. And those limbs aren’t meant to be steps, as Maharshi would say. They’re like limbs of a body; they all—

Rick: Grow simultaneously. That’s what he used to say. Anga means limbs, Ashtanga means eight limbs—the limbs of our body grow in proportion, simultaneously.

Leanne: That’s right. And then we have the yamas as the first limb: nonviolence, truth, non-stealing, and non-covetousness. The question becomes, where is that rage arising from, and why? To me, it becomes incumbent upon each of us individually—that purification process is so finely tuned. I’m either doing it or I’m not.

If I’m out there being a fraud, well, God bless. I don’t know how—I don’t know how it’s helpful. To me, that’s somebody getting caught in the teacher archetype. They want to be a teacher, but are they facilitating the teachings? And that, to me, is what’s so beautiful about the Upanishads. No one’s name is on them. They’re just teachings coming through these seers who see the world this way. It’s beyond any personal form; it’s the universal coming through the personal, but it’s beyond any personal form because it’s ultimate, absolute reality.

So why would I take ownership of it? I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but my question becomes, what is that rage? I would have to know what that rage was about. I mean—

Rick: Yeah, I mean, Jesus kicked the money changers out of the temple, so he had his moods, but he wasn’t engaging in inebriated orgies or the kinds of things that some well-known, and even well-respected, spiritual teachers have done, for which behavior there’s been the rationalization of “crazy wisdom,” or that we just can’t understand their inscrutably high level of consciousness or something.

I take exception to that, and I’m doing whatever I can, in my small way, to help clarify the understanding in contemporary spirituality of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what’s conducive and what’s not to spiritual development. I think Patanjali was onto something with his attempt to lay down certain guidelines—not to be moralistic, but to help seekers cultivate their mind and body to be more fit receptacles of spiritual wisdom.

Leanne: So I think what you’re saying is, look, I don’t know that we can have an easy answer across the board. Perhaps that’s why chapter four potentially says yogis’ behavior is beyond black and white, right? It’s not so easily categorized because—or as Robert Thurman would say—there is a place for righteous anger.

Yes, I mean, clearly, in this conversation, I think it’s clear I’m coming up against predatory capitalism pretty hard. It rubs me severely, in a way that I get angry for sure. Anger is one of those emotional centers, but in a way that I feel is righteous anger, that fires me to speak towards it.

I’m not going to lie complacent against it on my couch and not, as a cultural critic, go for it and speak to it if I feel like this body of Earth is being toxified through that system.

Rick: Yeah, that makes sense.

I don’t know if you’d chase Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of a restaurant or something like that, but there’s a point to righteous indignation and anger, and getting a little bit of fire in your belly with regard to these things—not being pushovers.

Leanne: Right, right.

Rick: A couple of questions have come in, and then I have some more stuff I want to talk to you about. Seamus Broderick from Ireland asks, with regard to self and no-self, I was thinking that perhaps it is the language—the word “self,” the linguistic self—that’s ultimately unreal. What I mean is that the symbol-formed person and personality are essentially a fiction, but the body and pure consciousness are both real. What do you think?

Leanne: I think that’s a beautiful way to phrase it. And it brings up a really interesting point. Jung was engaged in a fundamentally conceptual and linguistic form of consciousness, which perhaps we could say most of the West is engaged in. Patanjali acknowledged linguistic and conceptual consciousness, but he also acknowledged the nonlinguistic and the nonconceptual. So I think the way that he phrased that is beautiful.

Rick: Okay, good. Here’s another one from Susan in San Diego. She asks, can you speak more about unifying the opposites and how that specifically happens for you, in your direct experience?

Leanne: Unifying the opposites, to me, is right and left, up and down, in and out—any kind of balance, whether that be psychological or physical, mostly psychological and physical, actually.

In my own life, what I’ve used are the trigger points. Okay, my 14-year-old son, my beautiful teacher, brought that up. Most of my trigger points have come through personal relationships, so I watch my reactivity.

It’s radical discernment: Am I being provoked because the other person is trying to overpower me? There are boundaries, but there are no boundaries. Everything is ultimately permeable, right? Just like the air comes into our lungs. We look like we’re bounded, but ultimately, we’re not, because we’re all breathing in and out of this field of oxygen.

Rick: It’s true. Every breath we take contains some molecules that Jesus breathed.

Leanne: Right, exactly. So although we look like we’re bounded, we’re not. I want to say the same is true psychologically. There is a functional organizing principle, no doubt, that allows me to see a wall and not walk into it.

But it’s a very nuanced perception between—let’s just say, continuing to use my son as an example—me and my son as he grows up. Is he trying to overpower me? Or where am I in my own power center, in other words?

I continually use personal relationships as a means to stay in my central channel, dialogue, and engage from a place of what I want to call calm equanimity. Sometimes I have to be fierce, but it comes from a place that’s really grounded and centered, as opposed to reactive and all over the place.

✨ Siddhis and the possibilities of consciousness

Rick: Yeah. Okay, good answer. You said that your mission in life is to introduce pure consciousness into popular culture, and to make clear to people that that’s who they are ultimately—that it’s the fundamental basis of things.

I think we’ve touched upon whether consciousness is just a product of the brain or is a fundamental basis of the universe out of which everything arises. And I think that the whole culture hinges on that question. We’ve talked about that a little bit, too.

Now, the third chapter of the fourth book that we call the Yoga Sutras is all about siddhis. A lot of times, siddhis are dismissed as being some kind of distraction or trap, and we’re told that we should avoid them. But if that’s the case, why did Patanjali devote an entire chapter to them? And if siddhis are real, how is it that they could be performed? If levitation is possible, for instance, how could that happen?

I think that brings us back to this point of whether consciousness is fundamental or a product of the brain. I could elaborate, but I want you to respond first.

Leanne: First, I’ll say that he talks about them quite extensively; it is almost a whole chapter. But at the same time, either in that chapter or at the beginning of chapter four—I do think it’s in that chapter, though—he also says, “Wait a minute, you don’t want to get hung up here,” because these can also become conditions in which you’re wrapped. Pure seeing, pure consciousness, gets co-opted through the siddhis.

So he brings them in, but he also makes sure that he disclaims them in a way. I think it’s really important that he brings them in. Very interestingly, Jung tried to bring them into Western psychology, and we still don’t have them in Western psychology. I think it’s crucial to bring them in because, through the vision of yoga, we’re talking about universality—what Maharajji might call cosmic consciousness, the cosmic mind.

There’s no way to really approach that because Western psychology is so built around individualism and the individual mind, and co-opting consciousness to the ego. It doesn’t have space for psychic phenomena because the cosmic mind isn’t actually acknowledged.

So I think it’s brilliant. It’s a stroke of genius. It’s another element that makes Patanjali’s psychology so far superior, so logically consistent, because he’s cracking the small knot of the individual mind into the universal, into the cosmic mind.

But he’s not leaving us without a ground. He talks about the body, and he talks about these powers that come through clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience. But he also keeps it real in physical form. So he doesn’t leave you spiraling out into the cosmos, into another kind of psychic trip. He takes you there, and he grounds you.

To me, I think it’s important to acknowledge this as a depth psychologist, because Jung was trying to do that. He really was, but he didn’t succeed in doing it.

Rick: He may not have had the tools.

Leanne: Right. He was trying to do it through a synchronicity hypothesis, pretty much. Psychic phenomena engaged Jung from very early on. His mother was quite psychic, and he had a medium cousin, so he was surrounded by it all his life. He was surrounded by religion, too. His dad was a pastor, as were a lot of his uncles.

Psychic phenomena and religion were two of the things that he was steeped in throughout his life. Through his study of parapsychology, he eventually came to his theories of synchronicity, and he just never completed them.

Rick: I think there are a lot of things that can happen to you spontaneously, and you can get hung up in them or not, or you can actually cultivate them intentionally.

For instance, with the siddhis, people do experience such things spontaneously, but Patanjali actually gives a formula for cultivating them intentionally: If you do samyama on this, you’ll get that. If you put dharana, dhyana, and samadhi together on this, you’ll get that.

So it seems like he was addressing them as a serious thing, which people might actually want to cultivate intentionally. But he gave the proviso of not getting hung up on them, because that could easily happen. They could end up being an impediment to your path rather than some form of integration or cultivation of enlightenment of different facets of one’s entire makeup.

Leanne: Right, right. And samyama—the concentration, meditation, and absorption—correct me if I’m wrong, but those three limbs in themselves are absent in Western thought. This idea of having something to concentrate on, meditate on, and absorb into, so you get a vision from the inside instead of a vision from the outside as an object going all around it.

A real vision—prajna, at times, I would use the term prajna—which is a sort of nondual sense of knowledge. It’s a feminine term for wisdom and insight, which I believe is more than what we would indicate as intuition. It’s really that nondual knowing.

Rick: I think it’s kind of related to that point I made earlier about resolute intellect. It’s a state—a state from which one can function, or at which one can reside—from which, when you say something, it becomes true. Or if you want to know something, you know it with clarity and certainty.

Leanne: Right.

Right. The body has resonance with truth. I think that’s an avenue that needs to be explored more in Western psychology. Perhaps I’m saying that by opening the door through the affective neuroscience. I give the world’s leaders, and the people we’re allowing to run large countries with a lot of power, this message: I do believe we really need to understand how the mind works and how the body knows. If this isn’t a time to understand Truth, with a capital T, I don’t know what time on Earth would be better for understanding what that means.

Rick: Yeah, it’s critical. What do you think of the notion that the spiritual epidemic that seems to be spreading around the Earth—hopefully it is—is kind of like the immune system of the planet kicking in? We’re like little white blood cells, getting stronger in order to gobble up and change the functioning of the entire entity that we call Gaia.

Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great way to look at it. Another way would be that it’s like the activation of Buddha mind. It’s an imprint, so it gets activated. We’re all completely interdependent, so it’s global mind. It needs all of us, or at least enough of us. What do you call it—the hundredth monkey principle?

🕊️ Science and spirituality as complementary ways of knowing

Rick: Yep. Another point I want to discuss with you, which we’ve sort of alluded to but could take head-on a little bit more, is the relationship between science and spirituality. A lot of times you’ve said in the course of this interview that the West has been deficient in being able to understand the kinds of things that Patanjali was talking about. Even Carl Jung was kind of deficient and didn’t really get the depth of it the way Patanjali and other Eastern sages did.

I happen to think—and I want you to talk before I go on saying any more—that science and spirituality both have something great to offer one another, and that they need each other.

Leanne: I mean, they need each other today because there’s no getting around science. It’s way too embedded in the culture. There’s a quote I use—I believe it’s in my book. I know I use it in the chapter I wrote in Deepak’s book on brain, mind, and cosmos. It says that, in the end, scientists will have to give up their instrumentation and relax into absolute subjectivity in order to really know pure consciousness. There’s no amount of objectification, representation, or othering that will ultimately bring the knowledge that Patanjali points to.

To be fair, Jung was also pointing to direct experience. He got that point, for sure. Although science is brilliant at what it does, and I don’t want to take anything away from neuroscience or any of the discoveries there, this embodied knowledge we’re speaking of will never come through reading a science report. It must come through direct experience. Does that make sense?

To be fair, Jung was also pointing to direct experience. He got that point, for sure. Although science is brilliant at what it does, and I don’t want to take anything away from neuroscience or any of the discoveries there, this embodied knowledge we’re speaking of will never come through reading a science report. It must come through direct experience. Does that make sense?

Rick: It does. What if, rather than saying that science will have to give up its instrumentation, we could say science will have to expand its concept of legitimate instruments of experiential investigation to include the human nervous system, and use it in a systematic way to explore the kinds of things that Patanjali was talking about?

In the same breath, we could say that Patanjali was a scientist because he proceeded empirically to experience, elaborate, and articulate these realities. He wasn’t hanging on belief.

Leanne: Oh, I mean, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I believe I even say that in my book. I guess what I’m trying to say is that direct experience happens in the person. Whether they have nodes on their head because they’re in a chamber where some neuroscientist is trying to map it, ultimately it falls on the experience of the individual.

So, if what you’re saying is that science will allow, quote unquote, the qualitative data of people’s direct experience, then, yeah, beautiful. In some sense, we have made a slight turn from quantitative to qualitative data. In the field of consciousness studies, that’s where this all gets a bit muddled, because there is no way ultimately to fully objectify consciousness.

Rick: Yeah. B. F. Skinner rejected any sort of subjective experience as being unreliable and nonscientific. But everything is ultimately a subjective experience. Any instrument a scientist wants to use, he’s using his subjectivity to use that instrument.

The kinds of things Patanjali is talking about—and we keep mentioning Patanjali because that’s the topic of this interview, but obviously we can replace his name with many different saints and sages—are subjective experiences. But obviously, they’re real ones, legitimate ones, important ones. So, go ahead.

Leanne: I think what I hear you saying is that science, as it stands now, is deeply embedded in our culture, which has a dualistic framework. It’s based on a subject-object distinction, and it does not acknowledge that perhaps reality ultimately isn’t that—that it really isn’t broken down into subject and object. But science uses that as its tool.

A lot of Western philosophers would look at Patanjali and orthodox Hindu philosophy and say, “Oh, yeah, well, that’s a product of culture, too.” I hear that argument. But when I read the text and when I lived Patanjali’s sutras for 15 years, in my opinion, he’s below culture. He’s seeing behind the veils of the seen. Culture would be in the seen, but Patanjali isn’t pointing toward the seen. He’s pointing toward the seer.

So, he’s not necessarily saying, “Don’t have a culture.” But he is saying that if you have a culture that’s in duality, divorced from this ground of pure consciousness, you will ultimately have a problem. To me, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Rick: Yeah, for sure. And the problem has gotten worse because the divorce from pure consciousness has perhaps gotten more severe.

Leanne: I mean, it’s so severe you can’t even find it in the West. You can’t find it in the European canon.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that points to the greater urgency of reestablishing pure consciousness—or establishing it in the first place—as the foundation of everything. We’ve gotten so far out on a limb, or built such a high castle without a foundation, that the castle is going to crumble unless we somehow establish that foundation.

Leanne: That’s right. And maybe the castle crumbles first, and then we gain ground. I don’t know.

Rick: That, too. Rebuild whatever was good about the castle and forget about the rest.

Leanne: That’s right. When you try to build something on sand, it might all have to come down. Then there’s that acknowledgment of, “Okay, we were so split off from nature.” She goes, and she’s got pure power—pure, pure power.

Rick: Yeah, you’ve alluded to that during the interview, and I’ve mentioned it in other interviews. There are so many structures in our society that you can’t imagine them quietly dismantling themselves and saying, “Okay, we were wrong. We’re going to get rid of this.” There might have to be some greater pulling of the rug out from under them in order for them to collapse and no longer be predominant.

Leanne: Right. There are people very, very enamored with their power and their identification. They’ve become objects to themselves—their business cards, their representation. In other words, they’ve stolen consciousness into an egoic, tight container. They don’t want to give that up.

Rick: Their names on big, tall buildings.

Leanne: And water bottles.

Rick: And stakes. And universities. Anyway, okay. Any stray thoughts in your head right now before I bring in another question?

Leanne: No, I think we’re good as we are.

Collective trauma and cultural conditioning

Rick: So, a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Thomas Hübl, who’s a German teacher, and that interview will be going up later in December on BatGap. He’s really big on healing trauma and collective consciousness. He gets groups together—for instance, Israelis and Germans—because he feels there’s this traumatic residue left over from World War II that needs to be healed in order for the culture to progress.

One question I forgot to ask you, which I’ll ask you now, is: What is the nature of collective consciousness such that trauma can be stored in it? What is the medium? What is the substance such that something like trauma can be stored in it? And what is the nature of that trauma that’s being stored? What are these things? Are they real things, but very subtle, that can’t be observed in a conscious way? Or are they just concepts? I think this is very Jungian, and this is probably your answer to the question.

Leanne: The storage piece—for me, I would say trauma is definitely stored in the nervous system. When there’s cathexis, when people go back and re-experience that traumatic moment, and they’re able to release the energy from the complex where it’s been stored, then energy can flow along better lines, clean lines, if you will. The nervous system is able to come back to its still point, to its central channel. Beyond that, where would it be stored? I couldn’t speculate on anything like that.

Rick: Well, yeah, sure, it’s stored in the nervous system. There’s some speculation that trauma is handed down in the DNA, and there have been discussions and studies of that. But Jung spoke of the collective unconscious, which presumably is a field that’s independent of nervous systems, just the way pure consciousness is independent of nervous systems. Nervous systems are nonetheless kind of tapped into or plugged into it, influencing it, and being influenced by it in turn. Can you elaborate on that at all?

Leanne: Sure. If we could take the cultural complex of the Cartesian split—the “I think, therefore I am,” the mind-body split, the subject-object split—that’s a complex that’s very, very rife in Euro-American culture. It gets passed on, for sure, from generation to generation.

I’ve also read the experiments where they track trauma through the DNA, and it makes complete sense. Unless we can release it on an individual basis, if we acknowledge it—there’s the individual, there’s the family, and then there’s the culture. It’s like concentric circles. For the sake of the dialogue, if we count them as three bodies, you can release it on the individual level and see through it, but you keep coming up because you’re living in it. That’s the ocean you’re swimming in.

This comes back to the point we talked about earlier. People come and sit with me, or get on the table, or do their meditation and their work, but then they’ve got to go back out there and swim in that same cultural complex.

The only way I can see it getting depotentiated in the culture is that people in the ivory tower or in science—people at the higher levels—are going to have to see into it in order to depotentiate it at the level of culture.

Rick: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess I was asking you sort of a metaphysical question. We can only speculate about the answer. It’s just like water, for instance. We know what water is, and we know what salt is—sodium chloride—and we’ve put salt in water. It dissolves in the water, becomes salty, and changes other properties of it, such as the buoyancy of objects floating in it. We understand that.

So what we’re saying is that collective consciousness is some kind of a field that can have stuff dissolved in it—the collective unconscious in the form of trauma. I’m just wondering what the chemistry of that is. What is it about consciousness that enables it to be a medium in which stuff can actually get absorbed?

Leanne: Well, it’s certainly the twisting of thought forms, right? Consciously, it’s Sutra 1.4. So let’s go over the first four. The first sutra is, “Now here we are, an exposition of yoga.” The second sutra is, “Yoga is the stilling of the mind.” The third sutra is, “Then pure consciousness abides in its own true nature.” The fourth sutra is, “At other times, consciousness is taking on the modification of the mind form.”

So the mind can appropriate consciousness. It can take it and, to a degree, steal it. It takes it, wraps it, and twists it around these thought forms that are no longer anchored in pure consciousness. Those thought forms, from the psyche—the psyche of people as they are born into a culture—just become part of their own psychology, so to speak.

Rick: Okay. Would it be fair to say that the mind doesn’t take over or change consciousness, just as a movie doesn’t change the movie screen, but it appears to because mental impressions overshadow consciousness?

Leanne: Yeah, your consciousness is never changing. It’s immutable and absolute. So even though the mind is appropriating it, ultimately it gets slapped back into the field out of which it arose, because it doesn’t have the ultimate power. Does that make sense?

It thinks it does. It appropriates it, twists and turns it, and contorts it. But at some point, the gig is up.

Rick: Yeah. In your book, you say avidya, or ignorance, is not the absence of knowledge, but its obscuration. So pure knowledge, pure consciousness—whatever pure Self is—is never destroyed, absent, or eliminated. It gets obscured, overshadowed, and lost in our entrapment in relative experience.

Leanne: Absolutely. In some ways, we could say that’s part of the beauty. At any moment, if and when we turn our sights to it, it’s just there, underpinning and supporting all of this form. So all of the regeneration, healing, and wholeness is immediately there to come forward once that acknowledgment is made.

Pure knowledge, pure consciousness—whatever pure Self is—is never destroyed, absent, or eliminated. It gets obscured, overshadowed, and lost in our entrapment in relative experience.

Rick: Yep. I kind of like to think of us as having all won the lottery. We’ve got a lot of money in our bank accounts; it’s just a matter of accessing it. But unfortunately, many people are living under bridges because they don’t realize they’ve got that bank account to pay the taxes. You have to pay taxes.

I mean, the point is that we all have this. As someone put it, “There’s no energy shortage; there’s an intelligence shortage.” But there really isn’t that, either, because we have this vast reservoir of untapped potential just lying in wait for us to tap into it, right?

Leanne: It’s just the blockages, right? In the fourth chapter, Patanjali says you remove the weeds. Or the clouds move away from the sun that is self-illuminating, self-knowing, pure intelligence. It’s there, shining.

✨ Bringing consciousness into the mainstream

Rick: Yeah, yeah. There’s a verse in the Yoga Sutras someplace where Patanjali says, heyam duhkham anagatam, which means, “Avert the danger that has not yet come.” You and I have been talking about the dire predicament that the world seems to be in, and I think that might be a good point to end on, because we can all play a role in changing the course of destiny.

I was emailing with a friend who said that she’s gotten a little pessimistic about whether awakened or awakening people are actually having any effect whatsoever on the world, because it doesn’t seem like it when you look at the world. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Leanne: To me, it has to do with this idea of the margins versus what’s in the mainstream. If knowledge and understanding of pure consciousness exist around the margins, and those numbers grow, then there becomes greater and greater infiltration or pressure on the mainstream, and things will change.

But if we can’t infiltrate the mainstream, then, yeah, there wouldn’t be a problem there.

Rick: Yeah. I think it was Margaret Mead who said something like—I can’t even quote it, but I can roughly paraphrase the idea—“Don’t think that some handful of people thinking way outside the box can’t have an effect on changing the culture.” She said that’s the only thing that ever has.

Leanne: Beautiful. Yeah, but it’s got to get in there. It’s got to infiltrate the culture to change it, not stay outside of it, not be some fringe. It’s got to actually get in there and infiltrate and penetrate to make the change.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, I think we should wrap it up. But one more question came in, which is kind of unrelated to what we’re just talking about. I want to ask it because she was kind enough to send it in.

Fiona from Cedar Park, Texas, asks, “How can one bridge the gap between being in the world and out of the world in terms of financial issues, particularly when trying to support loved ones in this unsettling time? I have no doubt that I am that”—meaning Brahman or whatever—“however, the lack of money is taking away my freedom. How can you advise me? Where should I turn?”

Leanne: Right. I think she’s speaking to the conundrum that we spoke about earlier. At least at the moment, the way things are, it’s about having that spiritual practice and embodiment, and then also entering into the workforce, because capital is needed so we can have a home and put food in our bellies.

But with the acknowledgment, perhaps, that the aim isn’t to feed—are you still with me?

Rick: I am. There was just a little glitch in the video. Go ahead.

Leanne: So, yeah, it’s necessary at this time to remain centered and have a job so one can—it’s the way that we exist in this culture. There isn’t an alternative at the moment.

Rick: It says in the Gita, yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam: “Yoga is skill in action.” So it’s not as if spirituality and practicality are somehow opposed to one another. Spirituality, if it’s approached in the right way, can actually enhance practicality and make you more successful in your job or whatever you need to do.

Leanne: Yeah, and it’s about being present, right here, right now. These are all the Legos that we’re working with. We can’t shut them off; this is the way that it is. So it’s being present, if you will, like Krishna on the battlefield. It’s being present to the reality that we have and doing our best to pay our mortgage or pay our rent.

And perhaps, because a lot of the clients I have who are millennials want to be working in jobs that are sustainable and have some sort of eco-sensibility, it’s also about the workforce making choices to look for those companies, when and if possible, that are doing the work to make our environment sustainable.

Rick: Yeah, good point. Somebody could be dragging along at a job they really don’t enjoy, one that doesn’t seem meaningful, but there could be something they could be doing that would really light their fire.

That’s sort of what I’m doing now. I love it. What I was doing for quite a few years was a way of paying the bills, but it had no intrinsic significance. So you can turn the corner at any age, perhaps, and find something that really inspires you.

Leanne: Absolutely. It works toward the beneficial aspects of our world, and then there isn’t so much of a split between what’s inner and outer. You’re living; you’re using your work as a means of also speaking your truth, so to say.

Rick: Yeah. Just to take one simple example, Trump pandered to the coal miners of West Virginia: “We’re going to dig more coal, and you need your coal jobs.” What a horrible job. Why not say, “Hey, let’s bring in manufacturers of wind turbines or solar panels or something, and really revive the economy in a long-term, sustainable way. You won’t get black lung disease, and you’ll get to see the sun.”

There are all kinds of possibilities if we just have the right approach.

Leanne: Absolutely.

Rick: You mentioned your clients. What do you have to offer in terms of your therapy? Do you do that over Skype? How can people plug into what you’re doing if they wish to do so?

Leanne: Yes, I’m a transformational coach, and I work with clients here or on Skype. I work with the mind and body. I also utilize craniosacral therapy with clients who come to me, because it’s my understanding, for sure, that the nervous system is a key component of our spiritual practice. Regulating the nervous system is a key component, so to speak.

Rick: I was just asking how people can plug in. I’ll link to your website, and people can see what you have to offer there. I’ll also create a link to your book, which I found very interesting. People have probably gotten a sense of the flavor of that book from listening to this interview. I’m sure there’s a contact form on your website where they can get in touch if they want to.

Leanne: Yes, they can. Good.

Rick: Thanks so much, Leanne. I really enjoyed this interview, both preparing for it and doing it. It’s been a lively conversation, I think.

Leanne: Yeah, it’s been great. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Rick: Sure. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching.

Next week, I will be interviewing Rupert Sheldrake, who is a British scientist who has written about morphogenetic fields, among other things, and the idea that there are things like what Leanne and I were discussing—consciousness being a field and a medium through which information can be transmitted. He even wrote a book about how dogs know when their owners are coming home. So that’ll be interesting.

The week after that is a woman who is into shamanism, Sandra Ingerman. After that, we’ll be releasing a bunch of interviews from the SAND conference, so you can see all those on the upcoming interviews page on BatGap.com.

Thanks for listening and watching. Thanks, Leanne. I will see you all for the next one.