Leela Muse interview

Leela: I think we should hold each other responsible. I think we should call each other out. I think we should strive to be humble enough to realize that we can cause harm, you know, unconsciously and that nobody is beyond that.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump… If you’re familiar with it, you’ve heard me say this a million times, but for those who are not familiar with it, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. And if you are not familiar with it, I would suggest going to batgap.com where you’ll see all the previous interviews, over 750 of them, organized in various ways. It’s a little bit easier to explore them there than it is just on YouTube itself. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website, batgap.com, and there’s a page that explains methods other than PayPal. My guest today is Leela Muse. In her short bio that she sent me, Leela said that she is a non-duality guide whose YouTube work explores the life-affirming process of spiritual awakening and profoundly unowned, ordinary life. Through contemplative dialogue, she emphasizes the art of noticing, radical honesty, and open curiosity, validating the lived experience of seekers while gently challenging assumptions about what awakening is supposed to look like. And I have gone over some notes derived from all of her over 100 YouTube videos, and looking at the main points of those notes, I think she and I have similar ways of understanding and explaining things. We’ll explore that during this interview. In a YouTube comment to my last interview, someone said, “I want to hear about the person first before you get into all the philosophy.” Because I guess we talked philosophical principles for quite a while before the guy I was interviewing began to tell us about himself. So let’s fix that with Leela. We’ll have her tell about herself first, her relative self. And firstly, I was curious about your name. “Lila” means “play” in Sanskrit, and “Muse” is from Greek mythology. The Muses were nine sisters, daughters of Zeus and someone whose name I can’t pronounce, and each one presided over a different art form, and their role was to inspire artists to breathe something into the creative process that the artists couldn’t quite generate on their own. And the underlying idea is that when a great work emerges, like a symphony or a poem or painting, it isn’t entirely coming from the person, something else is flowing through them. The classic image is Beethoven at the piano with a hazy, luminous figure whispering in his ear. So, why did you choose that name? I presume it’s not your birth name or your married name.

Leela: Yeah, I wanted something pithy and meaningful, and that’s why I chose Leela and Muse, as you just described. And I wanted it for privacy, you know. So yeah, I thought it was beautiful and fun.

Rick: Yeah, I think so too. I like the word Leela. I think the whole universe is a form of play. And I’m often inspired by the idea of the muse. I think that a lot of works of art and creativity, including movies and symphonies and so many other things, scientific discoveries, are inspired by some higher intelligence channeling through the inventor or the musician or the film director or something. And you get the feeling that that higher intelligence would like to propagate an influence throughout society by sending us this wisdom. And it’s interesting because sometimes the same novel idea is cognized by different people in different parts of the world at the same time. Like that idea, it’s time for it to come!

Leela: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that. It’s like in the water or something, in the ocean of consciousness.

Rick: Yeah. Good. So that’s about your name. So you have an interesting background. I I think you started out in a fundamentalist Christian family. Tell us your whole spiritual origin story.

Leela: Oh, my goodness! Yeah, as a child, I was very curious, and I would contemplate things like death and why I’m a human and not a bug, you know. I would look at my hand a lot and just think how bizarre this was and wonder what it is, you know.

Rick: I used to do that on LSD.

Leela: Yeah, me, too. Not long ago. Yeah, I remember staring at the children in kindergarten while we were all supposed to be taking a nap on the mats, and I wondered how they could sleep so peacefully when they knew they were going to die one day. So that’s a vivid memory I have. And I was taught about Jesus and the Bible stories at that age, and it created a sense of awe in me, and I thought to myself that that’s what I want is to be in God’s will and be a good girl, a good, godly girl. I was told about the Golden Rule at that age and I deeply resonated with it. I had a profound sense of this is what it’s all about, you know, the Golden Rule. And I’ve always tried to abide by that. And then around age 10, I became more self-conscious, and it was very severe.

Rick: Self-conscious in what sense?

Leela: Just the sense that I’m separate and other people can see me, and they can judge me, and some kids are cooler than other kids and there’s this autonomy and I should try to be a certain way that’s acceptable and it all just kind of hit me.

Rick: Yeah, that happens to most of us as we start getting into our teen years.

Leela: Yeah, yeah. It was about age 10 when I remember it starting. And it was very severe. I was always constantly on guard, even in class. Like I would try to remain calm and seem cool, and I was pretty good at that, but inside I was in complete turmoil. And it occurred to me that I wished I was never born at that point. And so that’s just how it went throughout school. I coped and got along to get along and made sure everybody accepted me and all the little cliques. And I was like a chameleon, you know. I would put on the face that I thought was acceptable, depending on who was in front of me. And I was really good at it. And there was a shame about that, because I was like, I’m not a real person. I don’t have an identity like everybody else. Everybody else is so confident, you know, and I just felt that I was weak and broken, and I had to hide that from everybody.

Rick: Huh, and you were cognizant of these self-reflective assessments. That’s interesting. Yeah.

Leela: At about age 14 I started dating and things like that, and a boy broke my heart. I had all these Disney ideas of what love should be, at that age. We were both good Christian kids and I had all these fantasies about what life would be like. We would serve God together and things like that. He cheated on me, we were both virgins and he cheated on me, and it did something to me. It broke me psychologically. And I started to have symptoms, like I would talk to myself, I had tics, I would hit myself in the head and talk back to the thoughts. And I was able to suppress it around people, but I would break down alone. I even thought I had Tourette Syndrome. And I coped with this, and I managed to graduate. And it stayed like this, with the symptoms, up until age 31, skipping ahead a little bit, when the seeking began and the awakening began.

Rick: How did it begin? I mean, presumably you were deep into Christianity all this time, up to 31?

Leela: So I sought in Christianity as a teenager, and I was very devout. I would come home, do my homework, read the Bible, and get on my knees and pray every night, and I prayed for wisdom desperately because I thought it would solve the problem of me and make me in God’s will. And –

Rick: Seems like it worked.

Leela: Yeah, it does. But I contemplated the Bible and I started to see contradictions, and it just occurred to me one day when I was reading that I didn’t resonate with this image of God, that God was loving and that God wouldn’t do this. And it scared me because that wasn’t what I was taught, and I was taught that if you doubt you go to hell, you know. So I had to contend with that. I tried even harder, prayed harder, studied harder, and it didn’t resolve anything. My faith was like water in my hands, and I just couldn’t hold it. And eventually I became comfortable in my agnosticism. And it made me even more isolated, you know, on top of everything else, because everybody I knew was Christian. And I lived a very isolating young adulthood, very avoidant of people, and I was kind of like a hermit, you know, it was how I coped. And I had a little boy and got a divorce and got married again, and then that’s when the seeking and awakening began.

Rick: Was your new husband into this kind of seeking stuff himself?

Leela: We’re still married and he is a Christian.

Rick: Okay. Well, Christians can be very liberal. I mean, you know, very open-minded, like Richard Rohr and people like that.

Leela: Yeah, yeah. He’s open-minded enough to love me anyway, so I’m grateful for that.

Rick: Good.

Leela: Yeah. Yeah. We agree to disagree. I told him that in the beginning, I told him I’m not Christian so if you can’t handle that then we just need to go our separate ways, but he was he was okay with that.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, if we consider what the essence of Jesus’s teaching is, you are Christian, you know.

Leela: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And so was Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha, and everybody else who realizes it.

Leela: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: And I don’t need to tell you this, but I don’t think Jesus would disapprove of you in the least, or, you know, what your perspective is now.

Leela: I believe that, too.

Rick: Yeah. Good. And hopefully your husband appreciates that, too, because, you know, you just have a broader perspective. I mean, sometimes when people tell me they’re into Jesus I say, “Oh, great, there are probably trillions of them scattered throughout the universe. I’m glad you found the local one or one of the local ones anyway.”

Leela: Exactly.

Rick: So there must have been a whole transformation or shift that took place from where you’ve left off in your story so far to where you are now. So keep taking us through that.

Leela: Okay. So most of my young life was… the theme was hopelessness and despair. I didn’t believe that I could be better. I didn’t believe I could be healthy. I just assumed that life was misery and that’s gonna be that. I’ll just bide my time. And for some reason when I got married I had this longing to be better, to feel better, to be healthy for my family. And I just got on YouTube and looked up borderline personality disorder, which is what I was diagnosed with, which I was misdiagnosed. It wasn’t that. It was more neurodivergence, but… And they told me there was no cure for it, so I just had that in my mind that this was incurable. But I looked up borderline personality disorder cure, just for giggles, you know. And this man came on there and told his story, and he said that the Law of Attraction helped him heal. And I was like, I’m gonna do that, you know. So I started to watch Law of Attraction videos and give it my best shot, you know. And this was the first time that I started to inquire. I stopped fighting my thoughts and started to just look at them and be like, that’s a good one, that’s a bad one, you know. I need to choose grateful over self-loathing, or whatever. I was very hyper-focused and diligent. It took me a few months and I became really good at being grateful and noticing the belittling thoughts and becoming more sensitive to them instead of it being the baseline, you know. And that’s what started it all. There started to be synchronicity, like feelings of profound meaning, like everything was serendipitous and strange. And I listened to an audiobook called “Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East.”

Rick: Oh yeah, I read that when I was a new meditator back in the 60s. Yeah, far out stuff.

Leela: Yeah, and I was very naive, so I didn’t know if it was fictional or not. I was confused.

Rick: I think it’s mostly fictional, but it was fun.

Leela: Yeah, after the fact, I’m like, of course that’s fictional. But yeah, at the time I was glad I didn’t know, because I was like, “Really?” But I did see that it was based on something that people do believe in, which is this possibility to be liberated. And so I started looking into that and found Eckhart Tolle, and I listened to one of his books and I became very present with trying to understand what he was pointing to. And I had what I call an initial awakening. It was about a day and a half where I was very bizarrely present and it was just like everything was so clear and the thoughts fell away and I could see sparkles in the air and stuff.

Rick: Nice.

Leela: And it wasn’t scary or anything. I just sat on the porch all day and looked at the trees and the sky and I went to sleep and got up the next day and did it again. And then I started to question it, like a thought came, “Who will live my life?” And everything flooded back in, you know, the personhood, the identification, the claiming. And I immediately wanted to find that again, so that’s when the seeking began.

Rick: Sometimes I get the feeling that when people go through an awakening like this, it’s not because they read this book or watched this video or something. It’s more like a chicken in the egg that has outgrown the egg and it’s ready to hatch and it starts pecking and pecks its way out of the shell. So we’re kind of almost destined in this life, I think, to have an awakening if we’re going to have one or if we do have one. And the circumstances will just arrange themselves to facilitate it, but it’s sort of like the circumstances are not the horse, they’re the cart. And the horse is more your destiny, your level of consciousness that you came into this life with that is ready to actualize or manifest.

Leela: Yeah, it does feel that way, like it’s inevitable. Like everything just rearranges around you magically somehow.

Rick: Many spiritual traditions, well, those which believe in reincarnation, say that we basically, we regain whatever level of consciousness we had attained in the previous life, in this life, and then we move on from there. And so, you know, the wisdom of the universe orchestrates the circumstances of our life to enable that to happen, and for us to realize it, and you know, get back in the saddle.

Leela: Yeah.

Rick: Keep on going.

Leela: Yeah, I tend to agree with that. Of course, I don’t know, but I do think there’s lots of circumstantial evidence. It makes sense to me. It would make a lot of things make sense, actually.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so have there been any other significant influences on you aside from, you know, Eckhart Tolle, “Law of One,” “Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East?”I mean, have there been certain contemporary teachers or perhaps ancient teachers that have really resonated with you and have kind of helped to mold your current perspective?

Leela: Yeah, I really I jumped around a lot and partook in lots of modalities. I would say Adyashanti was one of the main ones, as well as Angelo diLullo and Peter Brown, as far as modern speakers.

Rick: Yeah, okay. Good. So, in the notes you sent me, which were kind of a distillation of pages and pages of stuff that I sent you, one of the first points you put down that we can discuss is that, “Non-duality is the simple wholeness of all being, appearing as differentiated phenomena. Duality isn’t a mistake, but it’s how non-duality shows up.” Elaborate on that a little bit and we’ll discuss it.

Leela: Yeah, we can get lots of ideas and interpretations from trying to understand conceptually the message that we hear. You know. We can, because we’re so used to this black and white thinking and this dogmatic way of being, that there’s a right way and a wrong way, we tend to approach the message that way, just naturally. And we subconsciously demonize duality or being a person, you know, and assume, well, if the goal is to be impersonal, then everything personal must be wrong, you know. Or thoughts must be wrong. And I don’t think that’s what the message is pointing to at all. Duality is what non-duality is doing, what it looks like.

Rick: Yeah. I think one of the, playing upon what you just said, I think one of the problems that some people make, like you just said, is black and white thinking. They tend to glom on to a non-dual perspective more conceptually than experientially. And they miss out on the appreciation of the multi-dimensionality of life in which the non-dual and the dual coexist within a larger wholeness, larger context.

Leela: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s very natural. I did it. You know, I think it’s a very common to to go through that phase and to try on that, trying to understand it conceptually. It’s almost like a process of elimination. We kind of have to go through that, to see that, oh! That’s not what it is. That’s not what’s being pointed to.

Rick: Yeah Somebody sent in a question, let’s see who this was. Katie Jones. I don’t know if you know Katie. She said, “Leela, you often point to the nature of thought. Would you say that the sense of separation is more than just a thought, but rather an energetic somatic expression that also influences thoughts? Is it also a kind of contracted energy?”

Leela: Yeah, I would say there’s an energetic holding, like, “I’m this person. I must control life. I have to control, you know, manage this whole thing.” So yeah, they go hand in hand, the idea of, “I am the thinker, the doer, the controller of life.” And of course that’s a heavy thing to believe. And yeah, we can hold that in the body.

Rick: Yeah. One sense I got from the notes you sent me is that, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that it’s not that we don’t have any control whatsoever, but there’s a kind of a feeling that most people have when they’re kind of locked into just their individuality, that they exclusively are in control, or if anything can be controlled, they’re the ones who have to do it. Whereas I think when you kind of relax into a more expansive way of being, it’s kind of like when you’re driving, you don’t have to force the steering wheel, but you just make little minor adjustments, you know, and that kind of keeps you in your lane. But it’s kind of a subtler thing, just a little discriminative discernment this way and that, and then you basically… well, here’s a better example. “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.” The stream is mainly carrying you along, but you row a little bit this way and that just to keep yourself from going off into the brambles.

Leela: I would say that’s definitely how it feels. That’s definitely how it feels. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of value in trying to conclude philosophically whether we have free will or whether we don’t have free will or whether it’s a mixture. I don’t think it’s knowable and that’s okay, you know? Feelings of doership or spontaneity or effortlessness are just feelings. I encourage, in myself and others who resonate, that the feelings of participation and engagement are beautiful, you know, they’re here as an expression of the wholeness and aren’t to be demonized.

Rick: Yeah. Personally I just go by my own experience and my own experience tells me that I am not completely at the mercy of cosmic forces have no choice in the matter whatsoever. You know, it behooves me to exercise a little bit of discernment. And you know, if there’s an impulse to say something and that would be inappropriate, I check that impulse. But at the same time, there’s a great degree of what feels like divine guidance where all kinds of things just flow beautifully in ways that I wouldn’t even have have been able to wish for or anticipate.

Leela: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: And I also think that, you know, feelings of engagement and participation and choice are very healthy, you know, for this human.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: Yeah.

Rick: Good, another question came in from a fellow in Scotland named Kenny Haughan. “Spirituality is enriching, embracing love, hope, healing, optimism. How can psychological healing take place through spiritual practices to reduce existential despair?”

Leela: That’s a good question. The nervous system tends to calm when we have a practice of meditation, or at least it did for me. There was more of a gap and a space to notice that, oh, this is actually safe, there’s no danger here. Sometimes it’s hard to discern that there’s no danger here when we’re ruminating about doom constantly. So we can teach the nervous system that there’s safety and it’ll always react and be there when there’s a situation that isn’t safe, and that’s what it’s for, you know, is to kick into gear for that. But there’s something about deeper insights of realization, like what I call no self-realization, which is one of the insights you can have, that is almost like diving into futility, which sounds like it might be a horrible thing, but it’s actually grace. You know, it’s the grace that I can’t do this. You know, I can’t do this. And life just isn’t what I thought it was. I’m not steering this like I thought I was. And in that futility there can be a relaxation, even more so I would say.

Rick: Could you give us a specific example of what you’re, the kind of thing you’re talking about?

Leela: When there’s a heavy belief in autonomy, it’s like we said, it’s in the body, energetically, a holding, I must figure this out. If not, you know, all these thoughts of doom and rumination can be there. It can become neurotic, out of control. When you’re just sitting there on your bed and you have all your needs met and the temperature is perfect and everything is fine actually. So discerning what is actual from what is imagined and seeing that there is limitation to what thought can do, what imagination can do in this life, can be difficult to face because it takes away some of that sense of control. But there’s something very relieving about it too, like two sides of the coin.

Rick: A couple things came to mind while you were talking. One is Jesus’s situation where he’s in the garden of Gethsemane and it’s like, “This is not good. If it’s possible, let this cup pass from me.” And then finally it was like, “All right, let thy will be done.” And then the other thing is that Alcoholics Pledge about being able to discern between the things you can change and you can’t change and the wisdom to know the difference.

Leela: Oh yes, I love the Serenity Prayer. Going back to rowing the boat, it kind of reminds me of that, you know, your metaphor about rowing the boat. The little bit of control there, take it where you can get it, you know.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, and realize you’re not going to get, you know, 10 miles back upstream if that’s what you want to do. You have to go where the stream is going.

Leela: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so it’s a nuanced balancing, I would say.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve always felt though that, you know, we have, maybe there’s a whole range of things we can’t do, but we always have a little part of the spectrum where we have some wiggle room. And by using our discernment to sort of do this rather than that, we move towards greater freedom or greater lack of it. Like for instance, you mentioned spiritual practices. If a person has an effective spiritual practice and they do it regularly, that’s going to move them in a good direction as opposed to just sitting on the couch and drinking a six pack every night. That’s going to have another effect.

Leela: Exactly, yeah. There seem to be patterns in life, and you can notice the patterns and be like, well, it seems like if that keeps going the way it does, then there will be most likely this outcome, you know. There seems to be cause and effect, there seems to be consequences, you know, relative consequences. So, yeah, I recommend inquiry and noticing, because I believe that that pattern leads to openness and fertile ground for insights.

Rick: What is the nature of your own spiritual practice? Is there something you do on a daily basis? More or less?

Leela: Um, you know, I still inquire a lot.

Rick: Like while you’re washing the dishes or you sit down and get into a thing?

Leela: Just spontaneously throughout the day.  I’m open to maturing as a person always. I’m always questioning thoughts, you know, if they feel like they need to be questioned. I did stop meditating as a practice when the seeking fell, but I do sometimes spontaneously go into that just randomly. And it does kind of feel like everything is a meditation now, you know, on a subtle level, like a state of flow.

Rick: Talk about the seeking falling, because Papaji said, “Give up the search,” and a lot of people say, “Give up the search.” Some people say, “Don’t even begin the search. You’re already there, you’re enlightened, you don’t have to do anything,” yada yada. And personally, I feel like I had years of a very intense seeking phase, and now it doesn’t feel like that, but it’s more like an exploration or an adventure which is, you know, ever unfolding. And I still meditate a couple hours a day because I like it. It works for me. But there’s not this sort of “enlightenment or bust” attitude anymore. It’s more contentment that just keeps deepening.

Leela: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, I feel like if someone has a longing, seek and you shall find, you know, you’re not gonna avoid it. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. It’s a momentum that can arise spontaneously, and trying to suppress it, or shame yourself because this teacher acted as if seeking is useless, then I should just make myself stop. I mean, I feel like seeking in concepts can only go so far and then there can become a frustration and that’s when there should be direct investigating. Sense perceptions, you know, the nature of thought, time and space, and in that way we can investigate life as if we’ve never seen it before, and see through our preconceived notions of what we think this is.

Rick: Yeah, I would say that seeking in concepts, it shouldn’t be something that goes on for years or decades and then finally begin to gain some experience. I think that, you know, like walking, you put one foot down, then you put the other foot down. There should be a kind of a balanced relationship from the start between knowledge and experience.

Leela: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I started a meditation practice after the Eckhart Tolle experience. I got really deep into Samadhi and I had, like, where my body would go to sleep at night and the mind would stay awake. Yeah. Sometimes I couldn’t turn it off. And in that way I was spending time in awareness and seeing what was arising in that. But I did, I sought frantically in concepts in the meantime, you know, on my own time. And at a certain point I felt like I had heard it all, you know, and I knew whatever I was looking for was not going to be in the form of a thought or a concept, or a pithy one-liner, you know, or a rhetoric. So I started to search elsewhere for that, which looked more like a curiousness or like an anticipation. Like, what is this? You know, truly.

Rick: So that’s pretty cool. So you started to meditate just kind of on your own. I presume you didn’t learn a particular practice from somebody, you just…

Leela: Just a general. Just sitting. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and you went right into Samadhi, that’s neat.

Leela: Took a while. I was like you. I meditated for a couple hours a day, at night. I would lay flat on the bed while my husband went to sleep and I would just pretend to go to sleep and meditate. So eventually it got deep into those brainwave states and you go through the visions of the subconscious and everything like that and then there’s just, you know, like at the bottom of the ocean, the deep awareness. And from there, it was fascinating because I could see my thoughts and it was as if they were going on over there, like a TV in the other room that I wasn’t interested in. But they were still going full on, but they were just so distant and I was like, I’m not thinking my thoughts, you know? So yeah.

Rick: Just bubbling up on their own. And this thing about maintaining awareness during sleep is actually an ancient traditional understanding of a stage or something that happens to people. Nothing wrong with it. I mean, I know a couple of people who haven’t slept in decades.

Leela: Oh, my gosh.

Rick: Well, they sleep Yeah, yeah, they snore but pure awareness is never lost.

Leela: Yeah, it was pleasant and I always felt rested the next day, but I kind of enjoy my sleep sleep, you know. I was glad I was able to turn it off eventually.

Rick: Yeah But it is a thing. Some teachers even consider it to be a kind of a litmus test of whether a certain level of consciousness has been attained.

Leela: Oh.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: Interesting.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. So a lot of the stuff that you talk about is that normal human things, like emotions or fears or feelings, all that stuff, don’t get obliterated by spiritual awakening. You don’t have to be afraid of them. They might even become enhanced because there’s less of a suppressive tendency. So let’s talk about that a little bit. I think that people will find that helpful, especially since this spiritual bypassing has been a thing for a long time, and people often feel like, if they’re having these human things, they’re not spiritual enough or something. They need to kind of get beyond them or above them.

Leela: Yeah, yeah. We can have this, innocently, we can have this image of what we think a saint is or a holy person or an awakened person, and it can look very sterile in our mind, conceptually. Somebody who is numb to emotions and untouched by their thoughts. And in that way, we’ve created a wall between us and what we believe awakening is,  which is made of thought, which can be seen through in any moment. But yeah, feelings are natural. You know, fear can come up at any time. Anything can arise. And that did surprise me, actually. After I had no self, I realized how wild and free what appears as this human, you know, emotions and thoughts, how wild they are. And it was funny because I don’t know what I expected for all that stuff to go away or what, but I feel like now it’s different for me because there’s less anticipation of triggers. Before there was doom and anticipation, a lead up, and then there would be a lingering of triggers after the fact, processing that. And now it feels more in the moment.

Rick: Now what I’m wondering is, does spiritual evolution diminish it over time? So you know, because some people are just a cauldron of emotions and they murder people and they rape people and they do horrible things, you know, because they have no self-control and there are, you know, lots of them in prison. And I have interviewed people who’ve spent considerable time in prison and they ended up getting onto spirituality and it transformed them. So they’re just not inclined to behave the way they used to and they’re not governed by these violent, irrational impulses anymore. So, and you know the whole idea about samskaras, have you heard that term?

Leela: Remind me what it is.

Rick: It’s like deep impressions. It’s like, I guess conditioning would be the best Western terminology for it. And there is considered to be layers and layers and layers of conditioning that govern our behavior to a great extent. And one of the teachings in the tradition that uses the term samskara is that spiritual practice and development helps to dissolve them, kind of like mud dissolving in an ocean or something, and so you’re no longer so heavily conditioned, you’re no longer governed by these kinds of impulses. So does that resonate with you? Because we wouldn’t want to give the impression that enlightened people could be murderers or just be having all these violent emotions that, I mean, otherwise what’s the point? Why would you pursue it?

Leela: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I absolutely agree. It is a subtle thing and when I try to describe it, I’m trying to balance between these irrational fantasies that we have and the practical, how it shows up. And it is lighter. I talk about how much lighter it is for me. I can speak for myself. I’ve dealt with these intrusive thoughts my whole life and they can still appear now, much less frequently, much less. I would say it’s like 95% lighter in comparison, if I had to put a number on it, but it’s not a hundred percent and I don’t want to give that impression either. I want to say, be open to what it may possibly be, instead of deciding what it must be before I recognize that this is it. You know, this this right now. If I get overwhelmed, which can happen, you know, intrusive thoughts can come, but they’re usually nothing, like a bird outside the window tweeting. There’s not that heavy meaning there, it just seems to be sounds and images arising, you know, a familiar pattern most of the time, which is a great relief.

Rick: Okay, so would it be fair to say that you have more equanimity and you’re just less overshadowed by these things. They’re kind of lighter, more ephemeral. They don’t kind of dominate you like they might once have.

Leela: Yeah. 100%. Absolutely.

Rick: Okay, good. Maybe another word to throw in here would be “appropriate,” because there could be certainly appropriate use or circumstances for anger or grief or different emotions, but a lot of times people are plagued by an overdose of inappropriate emotions like that and circumstances in which there’s no benefit to having such emotions.

Leela: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: Yeah. I mean, really, it all comes down to practical. Is it practical or not? Is this just toxic rumination? Am I basically torturing myself when there’s no direct problem in the moment? Or is this appropriate in the moment? Is this grief here for a direct reason?

Rick: Alright, so here’s another question from, if I can pronounce this correctly, Audun Lindhjem, I’m sorry about the pronunciation, from Norway. And she asks, or he, “Could you elaborate on the word ‘demonized’? I’ve heard you use it a couple of times during this session.”

Leela: Right. It’s basically the idea that there’s something that is bad about a certain thing. It’s inherently wrong and should not be. I don’t think anything that appears spontaneously and naturally in life is inherently wrong. Of course, we’re free not to prefer it. We’re free to say, “I don’t want that around me,” and we should have boundaries here, in this home, or this around me, or in society. That’s also free. But to believe that there’s an inherent wrongness there is, I think, gone a little too far. If it arose, it’s free to arise. You know, it’s natural.

Rick: Let me press you on this a little bit. You probably didn’t mean this, but to take an extreme example, let’s say a person is inclined to be a pedophile. Is that inherently wrong? Should we do something about that?

Leela: Yes, we should do something about that. Yeah, I’m all for crime and punishment. And I’m glad you brought that up. I don’t want to come across as if I’m not, but it’s almost like in nature, cancer can be a natural thing that appears. And so can mental illness and hurt people hurt people, you know, and there can be these patterns. And we can have compassion for those patterns and also contain them, you know, for the sake of it not spreading. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Well, what they always say in Christianity, as I understand it, is “hate the sin, but not the sinner.” In other words, be compassionate toward the sinner, as Jesus certainly was, which doesn’t condone the person’s behavior necessarily, but people can change.

Leela: Yeah, and I have a theory that if I was born in their shoes I would probably do what they did.

Rick: Good point. Yeah.

Leela: Yeah. I’m just I’m grateful for my life and, yes, I think healthy boundaries are a part of you know having healthy, happy existence as a human.

Rick: Yeah. Do you think that there are societal implications to spiritual development? Do you think that if the kind of thing you have experienced and other spiritual people that were aware of became much more widespread, like 10-20% of the population or something, that it would really have a transformative effect on the whole society?

Leela: Yeah, it would be fun if it became like the new cool thing, you know, and I would love to imagine what that would be like. Maybe. It does seem, because of the internet, it’s caught on a little bit, and there seems to be more just natural awakenings.

Rick: Yeah, for sure. You know, we were talking in the beginning about your name, Muse, and how the name means some higher intelligence is channeling something in through somebody. That’s your muse, you know, that’s giving you, you know, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or something. And, you know, I often think that our technologies, these communications technologies, despite the fact that they’re a mixed blessing, have enabled a tremendous propagation of profound wisdom in in the world, and knowledge. And I kind of see that as the technological dimension of the transformation of collective consciousness to a more enlightened age, at least in my optimistic way of interpreting things.

Leela: Yeah, I tend to be optimistic, too, in that way. Yeah, it’s something that people didn’t have access to even in the 80s, you know.

Rick: Even in the 90s, for the most part.

Leela: Right, yeah. And I’m just honored to be here now.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Me, too. I mentioned the phrase “spiritual bypassing” earlier. Let’s dwell on that a little bit more. What’s your understanding of the phrase?

Leela: Yeah. To put it in a simple way, it means to attempt to go around.

Rick: To use spirituality to numb yourself out or deny something?

Leela: With that common idea that we have of this purified person that I’m going to become, that’s there, you know, we imagine it as at the end of the finish line. And we’re trying to avoid what we see as this messy, what appears as these feelings as, you know fear, existential fear, shame, whatever it may be. And we’re seeing them as wrong, I see as a common pattern, and attempting to negate it and go around it when I feel like the only way that worked for me was through, you know, facing, feeling those feelings. You know, you face them and see, “Oh, I can handle this, I can feel this.” Nothing says it shouldn’t be this way you know that I I shouldn’t feel this way naturally.

Rick: Did you go through a phase yourself of spiritual bypassing and then after a while you kind of matured out of that?

Leela: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, for about five years. And it was really funny because I would hear teachers say, you know, they would talk about spiritual bypassing and I was like, “Oh, those poor ignorant people, I would never do that,” you know, and I was doing it. Yeah, so it can be very subtle and sneaky. As conscious as I believed that I was, I was… like, when triggers would come up I would say, “There’s no one here to feel that.”  It was like gaslighting. I was gaslighting myself and bullying myself, and trying to go around this humanness to get to this pinnacle, this imagined arrival.

Rick: Yeah, you should have tried the old hammer on the thumb technique. That’ll break through the notion that there’s no one here to feel it.

Leela: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I should have. It’ve saved me five years of that delusion. But I did, I was grateful. I didn’t regret any of it. I felt like I had to go through it to see that that’s not what I preferred.

Rick: Yeah, we all go through phases.

Leela: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a guy named Robert Augustus Masters, whom I interviewed over a decade ago, specializes in the notion of spiritual bypassing, has written books about it. So if people are interested, watch that interview. We talk about it the whole time. So we’ve talked a bit about how awakening, well, firstly, the word awakening, do you consider it to be kind of a one-and-done deal or do you feel like there are many many if not endless stages of it?

Leela: Yeah, I feel like it’s an endless deepening.

Rick: Okay.

Leela: Yeah, and I feel like you know we tend to romanticize recognition and seeing through the self and we tend to see that as like the end, ultimate goal. When one of the first things that occurred to me when the seeking fell was, oh this is the beginning, you know, a new beginning. The beginning of an integration and everything coming up to be seen in the light of emptiness and beginning to recognize the utter fullness that emptiness is, that they are not two.

Rick: Yeah, one of Adyashanti’s favorite phrases was, “It’s always good to have the attitude of a beginner.”

Leela: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: And actually “The Law of One,” which you studied early on, as I understand it has all these levels that you can go through and when you get to the highest level as a human being then you kind of start out again on some higher dimension and you start out in kindergarten there and go through a whole nother series of levels you know so it’s like…

Leela: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went through a whole New Age phase and a lot of that stuff fell away but a lot of it didn’t, you know. I appreciate things like mediumship and all the strange adventures we can have in consciousness. And I do feel like there is an appearance of a hierarchy of consciousness, but of course that is all equally this already.

Rick: Yeah, sure, but just as in, let’s say, biology, you know, there are mosquitoes and there are monkeys and there are people and all kinds of things in between and that is all equally this but obviously there are evolutionary differences.

Leela: Right, and you may prefer one over the other, you know, and that’s free to be.

Rick: Yeah, I think I like monkeys more than mosquitoes. [Laughter] Okay, so we talked a bit about awakening, erasing, messy human stuff to whatever extent, and in your talks you have critiqued expectations of becoming charismatic, fearless, and always graceful, but then you say conditioning continues but with less identification. So this is something I wrestle with because I’ve met some, and associated with some, spiritual teachers who seemed really remarkable in many respects, but had some rather egregious human flaws. And so, and they were charismatic and maybe fearless and, you know, kind of amazing, articulate, eloquent. And so it’s just something I continue to ponder, reconciling the discrepancies in the personalities of sometimes apparently very highly developed, advanced beings. Have you pondered that? Do you have any thoughts about it?

Leela: Yeah. I actually signed up for the Association for Spiritual Integrity.

Rick: Yay!

Leela: And I went through all the videos and, yeah, I resonate. I think we should hold each other responsible. I think we should call each other out. I I think we should strive to be humble enough to realize that we can cause harm unconsciously, and that nobody is beyond that.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve seen some of these people get to a stage where they feel they’re beyond causing harm, where they feel they’re… I mean, there was one guy who was obviously going off the walls.  I and some other people were trying to talk some sense into him, and at one point he just said, “I’m perfect and I don’t make mistakes.” And that was pretty much the end of the conversation, you know, what could you say? And others who, you know, do rather unsavory things, maybe like sleeping with all the women in their group and stuff like that, and say things like, “Oh, it’s not me doing it. I’m not the doer. God is doing it.” You know, that kind of stuff.

Leela: Yeah, yeah. There’s a power dynamic. When you’re a seeker, you are probably putting your teachers on a pedestal. And if that person is inclined to take advantage of that, they may do so. So, I think it’s good to raise awareness on the subject. I’ve been meaning to make a video talking about signs of being in a cult, you know, or cult-like behavior. I would never want to get to the point on a relative level where I said to myself that I’m beyond trying not to cause harm or looking at myself and inquiring in that way to continue relative maturing and deepening of compassion. I mean, people in this community are vulnerable. They’re some of the most vulnerable people, you know.

Rick: Well, you seem very humble and real. I don’t think you’re in danger of becoming a megalomaniac or something.

Leela: Thank you. Maybe, maybe.

Rick: It helps me having a kid, you know, and a husband and a family in real life. I think that kind of keeps it real.

Leela: Yes, it does.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: Yes, it does.

Rick: The next person I’m scheduled to interview is a guy named Mark Vicente who is about to come out with a documentary called “Narcissist’s Playbook.” He also made that movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” But, in any case, I’m kind of focusing on that these days, anticipating his interview. And I have a feeling like a lot of narcissists are attracted to the role of being spiritual teachers because it feeds what narcissists need.

Leela: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Rick: People are wshing your feet and handing you flowers and you know doing all kinds of putting you on a pedestal, like you said.

Leela: Yeah, and you can’t do any wrong, you can’t say anything wrong.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: It’s a very harrowing situation if you find yourself under the influence, you know, without the discernment to see what’s going on.

Rick: Yeah, and as I’ve often noted there’s something in the Zen tradition where if you have an awakening you’re supposed to wait 10 years before becoming a teacher, if you’re going to become a teacher. I think a lot of people rush into it prematurely.

Leela: Yeah. Angelo says that, too. And I’m guilty of doing that. You know, it wasn’t long after the seeking fail that I was impulsive and was like, “I have to talk about this.” Um, but yeah, I could have definitely waited.

Rick: Yeah. You’re not calling yourself a guru or, you know, making a big fuss about yourself.

Leela: Yeah, thank you.

Rick: Okay, here’s another interesting point. There’s a lot of these points that start with the word “myth.” So here’s a myth. Awakening is a special, sustained state. And what you counter is that, no, it’s a recognition of what’s always here, across all states, including mundane and devastating ones. Let’s talk about that for a bit.

Leela: Yeah, all states come and go and, you know, what’s being pointed to is all-inclusive and all the states arise within that, arise and fall within that. So this doesn’t have a way that it looks, it looks all ways, already. So I believe that this is just a recognition of that, you know, at a fundamental level.

Rick: I think it’s Ken Wilber who distinguishes between states and stages. States are kind of like, you can have a flashy experience, a nice Samadhi and meditation for an hour, whereas stages are more stable things, that are your baseline, and then on that baseline you might have your ups and downs, but it’s your baseline.

Leela: Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. So, now there’s the idea of another myth, personal enlightenment. The idea this particular character will become enlightened and then own enlightenment, which keeps the separate self at the center as the enlightened one. So, can a person become enlightened?

Leela: No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t say that they can. You know, that’s one of the reasons why I had such an urge to talk about this, because I was like, “Wow, this is not what I thought it was at all. Zero.” It’s a recognition of the nature of reality. And it has nothing to do with me, in a very real way. And in a way that’s very freeing. But that doesn’t negate the health benefits that it has on our psyche and the lightening it has on us. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Would you say that this recognition that I don’t get enlightened, reality is recognized, has it shifted your orientation so that perhaps you identify more as that reality itself than Leela, an individual person, kind of like you identify more as the ocean rather than a wave, even though you’re still a wave. Is that a fair way of… l; Yeah, I would say so. Not really on a conceptual level though. I mean there can be a sort of the conceptual experience of that where you’re just kind of like telling a story that I’m everything.

Rick: I mean your living experience day to day, moment to moment.

Leela: Yeah, without thoughts believed and the filters that divide and dissect reality. This is this bizarre wholeness, you know, seamless. The borders are conceptual. So yeah, I feel this universalness, I can see things in other people that I’m also capable of and basically, yes.

Rick: It’s interesting that as a little child, as you just explained in the beginning, you were quite introspective. In kindergarten, “How can all these kids take a nap when they’re going to die someday? Don’t they realize that?” You know, that kind of thing. And it seems like that introspective, contemplative tendency has stayed with you and matured and it’s kind of a guiding light even now.

Leela: Yeah. Yeah, one of my cousins told me that I think too much, and that’s my problem. But yeah, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I’m grateful for my contemplative nature.

Rick: Yeah, I wouldn’t say you think obsessively, from my observation, it’s like you don’t take things for granted, you ponder the reality of things as you go through life.

Leela: Yeah, it’s fun to me. I’ve always felt introverted in that way, like the inner world was more alive for me. And I feel like I’m able to be more embodied now and more aware of what’s going on around me, so to say, than I used to be.

Rick: Yeah. Nice. Okay, here’s another myth. Real spirituality means stopping the search immediately. You emphasize honoring genuine longing and not shaming seekers. Seeking itself is a natural movement of life. We discussed this briefly earlier, but we can probably say a bit more about it.

Leela: Yeah, I remember feeling shame that I was seeking after listening to certain teachers and feeling like, you know, I need to stop this. And I do see it’s shamed in the community here and there.

Rick: I do too, yeah.

Leela: Maybe even subtly, but… To me it’s ridiculous. If this is already this, and there’s already no one here, and this is it, then, you know, it doesn’t matter. I feel like we have to play out this momentum and play out this energy. Do it the hard way.

Rick: Yeah, and this idea that this is already this, and you’re already enlightened and all that stuff, those are concepts. If it’s not your experience, then the concept, it’s like listening to a description of food when you’re hungry. The description of food or reading a restaurant menu isn’t going to satiate your hunger. You actually have to eat the food. And when you have eaten it, then you won’t be seeking food, but it has to be the experience, just the concept.

Leela: Yeah, I don’t think we truly want to wake up, we just want to be happy.

Rick: Would you consider happiness to be a characteristic of having woken up?

Leela: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so that’s what we want.

Leela: Yeah, yeah. So it’s kind of like we think awakening will give me this contentment and calmness and a very natural thing to want. But when somebody tells you, “Oh, don’t worry about it. This is already it. You know, everything’s irrelevant. Your pain is irrelevant.” It’s like, “Well, but I want to see that,” you know, and that’s valid. Of course you do.

Rick: Yeah, I think those teachings, you were kind of alluding to Neo-Advaita teachings here, are frustrating and not really helpful. They help some people at a certain stage of their development, but I don’t think they’re helpful for most people. And they actually can be, as I said, frustrating. They can make one nihilistic, because one is always dismissing the world as unreal, and people sometimes lose motivation, lose interest in their family or their job or whatnot because they’re constantly undercutting the life they’re living.

Leela: Yeah. Yeah. There was a small window on my path where that message was very relevant and alive and it was experiential and it was a real, real insights and I had to process that. But really that was the only time it was valuable was during that no mountains phase. And it was needed, I’m not gonna say it wasn’t needed during that time, it was, but yeah, you know, this continues, deepening continues. And yeah, it’s not the end-all be-all.

Rick: Yeah, that’s very well put. That’s the way I would put it, small window. And it’s valid if you’re in that point on the spectrum, but elsewhere it’s not. In fact, I have this graphic from Nisargadatta, which I’ve often mentioned, where, towards the end of his life he said, “Forget ‘I Am That.’ It’s so much deeper than that. I’ve I’ve learned so much more.” And “I Am That’ was a great book, but he said, there’s more!

Leela: Yeah, such a joy, there’s always more.

Rick: Like the infomercial, “But wait, there’s more.” (both laughing)

Leela: We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rick: Yeah. And when you mentioned happiness, like what we really want is happiness, that’s what all the traditions say, too. You know, the kingdom of heaven is within you, or in the Vedic tradition they describe ananda or bliss as being one of the fundamental characteristics of ultimate reality. And one teacher that I was with for years used to always say that the natural tendency of the mind is to seek a field of greater happiness, of everyone’s mind, of a dog’s mind. It’s just this natural built-in thing that all beings have, to seek greater happiness, because we are that ocean of happiness of which we’re experiencing a little tiny drop and we want the whole ocean. And that’s in our innate nature that we’re not going to get rid of.

Leela: Yeah, longing is natural. You know, the vines grow up the trees to try to find the sunlight. It’s everywhere.

Rick: And I would say that sometimes it can become too obsessive to the point where you’re not just relaxing and enjoying the moment. You’re forgetting that every day is life and you’re continually pining for some glorious future and not appreciating the moment sufficiently. So that’s a thing.

Leela: That’s when imagination spirals out of its usefulness and becomes toxic and neurotic.

Rick: Yeah, so everything in proportion and each thing at its own appropriate time.

Leela: And I would say the experience of, you know, experiencing that deep suffering and being in that for so long, the contrast of that and this, it’s just, I think that contrast is just like what it’s all about.

Rick: Yeah. And I think it’s actually kind of, must be very frustrating, and maybe it’s even cruel, for someone to say, a spiritual teacher to say to someone who is really suffering and really miserable, let’s say mentally ill or something, “Oh, there’s only this, this is it, what’s wrong with right now, unless you think about it?” There’s something wrong with right now. The person is suffering. They need to come out of that suffering. And you don’t just do it with a lofty concept.

Leela: Yeah. And that’s one reason why I don’t regret any of the suffering that I went through, because I have that memory there. And I can remember when I’m talking to somebody else who’s in pain that there’s a seriousness about it.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s inappropriate to dismiss it, you know, or just tell the person that they should just snap out of it.

Leela: Yeah, there’s something immature and disturbing about that.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, we’ve beaten that one to death. So here’s another one I think is important that relates to some stuff we have been talking about but it’s worth dwelling on. A myth, here’s a myth. Understanding concepts equals realization. Many times on this podcast I’ve quoted a Tibetan proverb that says, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.” And clever debate and theology can become ego trophies, but awakening is direct, non-conceptual discernment between description and actuality.

Leela: Yeah. I know you see it in the community, everybody’s trying to get one over on somebody else and, no, I’m the right one, you know, and no you don’t understand there’s no one here. It’s not about being right; nobody gets to be right. You know, it’s not about that. It’s not in the words, it’s not in the meaning, it’s this, this actuality, this aliveness.

Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of a funny thing that I, not so funny, that I once did. When I was a teenager, at one point I dropped out of high school and hitchhiked from New Jersey to California, and I was hanging out in Los Angeles with a friend, and we were walking down the street, high on marijuana one night, and somebody came bouncing up to us and said, “Would you like to come to a Buddhist lecture?” And we said, “Okay.” And I had been reading some books on Zen Buddhism. So we came to this thing and it was the Nishiren Shoshu School of Buddhism where they have this little Gohonzon, they call it, which is this like little altar, and they chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Yyo to this thing and everything. And we did that for a while. And afterwards, I actually got into an argument with the guy about Zen being superior to this that you’re doing. (laughing) It was ridiculous because I had never even practiced Zen. I had just read some Zen books and I was stoned. But I’m reminded of it because of what you just said, this tendency to want to say, “I am right.”

Leela: Of course. It’s completely natural. Yeah. I mean, I’m guilty of it. That sort of righteous, that self-righteousness we want. We want to be validated and we’re already validated by existing. We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to be the right one.

Rick: Yeah. I think it’s kind of an ego thing that my way is the best way and everybody else’s way is inferior to mine. It’s kind of a sign of spiritual immaturity.

Leela: Yeah, I always say, “If you don’t resonate with what I’m saying, great. Take what resonates, leave what doesn’t.” I’m just speaking what worked for me and what it was like for me. By no means is it the right way or perspective at all.

Rick: Yeah, good. Well, you know, we’re speaking this stuff, but think how many wars have been fought and lives lost and people tortured and so on over this very issue about the human tendency to believe that the thing I’m doing is right and therefore everything else that everybody else is doing is wrong. I mean, so much suffering has been perpetuated by this attitude.

Leela: Oh, it’s deeply ingrained. I still notice it in myself sometimes, you know, just in little subtle ways. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that really cool self-discerning tendency you have. I think that’s a really healthy thing where you kind of like… Who was it? Robert Burns wrote a poem saying, “Oh, would some God the giftie give us, To see ourselves as others see us!” And very often we can’t do that, but if you can do that, it’s a real gift.

Leela: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s one of the most, one of the beautiful things about awakening, too, is you can have a third person perspective of yourself in a way.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Leela: Yeah. Yeah. And when you, when you see something in that light, you can admire it in ways that you couldn’t before because when it’s yours and you own it it’s it’s just so heavy you can’t see past the fog.

Rick: Yeah, you can admire it or you can perhaps check the impulse, you know.

Leela: Right.

Rick: I’ve had a lot of that lately where I see certain patterns in my life that have been around since I was a kid and, now that I’m aware of them, I’m not inclined to express them anymore.

Leela: Right, yeah. Yeah, they can they can lighten and there’s nothing wrong with hope of becoming as long as it’s checked, you know, as long as it’s balanced with emptiness. I wouldn’t throw hope away either.

Rick: Okay, here’s another myth. These are things you called myths in your various talks, and so that’s why I’m referring to them as myths. Enlightenment is self-annihilation. Personality and selfing, and here’s the antithesis of that, personality and selfing remain functional. What relaxes is the claim and ownership, not the appearance of personhood.

Leela: Yeah. I think, you know, I found value in noticing the nature of reality and what it’s made out of and all its different aspects. And what is this thing that we’re calling a self? We can break it down into its core components, and we can sort of discern, claiming from natural function, from natural living. You know, we can discern those two things from each other. Yeah, you’re not going to get rid of the person. It’s already empty, you know.

Rick: Yeah, just as the ocean isn’t going to get rid of waves, but there’s no conflict there.

Leela: Exactly.

Rick: Um… Okay…

Leela: I just feel like we can be very harsh in trying to kill the person, trying to kill the ego and the community.

Rick: Yeah, in Vedanta there’s a couple of concepts that have come to mind in the last few minutes. One is this term called Vyavaharika, which means transactional reality. And so Vedanta readily acknowledges that there is a reality in which it’s a fullness and nothing exists and creation hasn’t manifested and all that. But then there’s the manifest value which is transactional, which is the world in which we as individual people function. And you can sort of appreciate both and everything in between, all simultaneously. You don’t have to deny one just because you appreciate the other.

Leela: I don’t think it’s wise to deny the relative reality. I mean, this is this. Whatever you say or think about it, it’s appearing as this. We can differentiate between the two and we can also see that they’re not two at the same time.

Rick: And another Vedanta term here is Ahamkara, which means the “I-maker,” and it’s just considered to be one of our faculties, just like the mind and the intellect and the senses and our other faculties. The sense of a self which functions in the world is a faculty. It’s not ultimately what we are, but in the transactional realm, you need one.

Leela: Yeah, I distinguish between what I call “selfing,” which is functioning, and identity which is like claiming.

Rick: Right, very good. Yeah, I mean so let’s just dwell on it a bit more. So by claiming I guess you mean like if a person feels like, “Okay, I am this and when this body dies I cease to exist.” You know, just to kind of really lock into a sense of this individuality and its physical body is me as compared to having a… You can finish my thought.

Leela: Yeah, as opposed to, you know, most of the things we do, we don’t have to think about it. We walk, we put the key in the door, you know, we make a sandwich, we’re thinking about something else while we’re making it. If we really look, it’s like, “How did I do that? I didn’t even think about doing that.” So there’s that natural muscle memory and functioning and the quirks that we have in our personality and the natural conditioning that’s always here, which can of course lighten in certain areas. And then that compared to, you know, I can’t believe I did that. I hate myself, you know, and then ruminating, ruminating, with that idea of I am responsible. I am bad.

Rick: So, another myth. No self-insight is the final arrival. We’ve kind of talked about there being no final arrival, but then you talk about deep integration and shadow work, nervous system and relational patterns getting reorganized, then it doesn’t happen overnight. So if you had to put a date on it, when was your initial awakening, roughly?

Leela: Initial?

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: I believe it was the very first Eckhart Tolle one I call it.

Rick: Okay.

Leela: It was, I believe it was, it was around late 2017 to early 2018.

Rick: Okay, so almost 10 years ago, 8 years. And so, do you feel like it’s been a kind of an incremental glide path ever since with no remarkable milestones or do you feel like there has been an awakening here and an awakening there and like that?

Leela: Yeah, there’s been lots of awakenings, I would say, little, little, well they didn’t feel little but glimpses. One for example. I used to be a house cleaner and I was cleaning, I was listening some spiritual stuff and the man I was listening to said, “You can have a realization that you are the only one that exists,” and I was like, huh, and I just contemplated it for just a second and all of a sudden everything became utterly surreal. There wasn’t, I wasn’t doing anything that I was doing, I was just watching myself wash the counter and I knew, it was like a deep ancient memory, that, yes, this is true. This is all there is and I am the only one that exists and it was weird, time kind of slowed down and and it probably only took a few seconds but it seemed like forever. I was kind of like, I hope this passes, you know, because it was kind of freaky. But moments like that. And I felt like it was uphill, but it was kind of two steps forward, three steps back, kind of thing. Ebb and flow of energy. Me-ing and being. Expansion and contraction.

Rick: Interesting. When you have one of these things, and like you say, after the shock of seeing through the self, there’s a period of acclimatization. Life feels raw, surreal, and now, now, now, with less time thinking. That might have been the initial shock of realization. But when you have one of these “aha” moments, and once you’ve acclimatized to it, once you’ve integrated it, do you feel like there’s been some upgrade? And you sort of incorporate that new perspective in a more abiding way?

Leela: Yeah, I always prefer the trajectory that it seems to be going, whether it’s an ebb and flow or… it always seems to be going somewhere, you know, and I always prefer where it seems to be going. So you know, more equanimity, more understanding, acceptance, self-compassion, and compassion for the world.

Rick: Nice. What do you mean by this? “Over months, this becomes very normal. Semi-transparent mountains. Life vivid enough to function but never mistaken for absolute truth.” What do you mean by “semi-transparent mountains?”

Leela: I may have said it was months for me. I didn’t mean like for everybody. So, you know, after no self there was a, like I said, an awkward surreal like, whoa! Everything was empty, everything. Everything was irrelevant, it was meaninglessness and not even in a negative way. It wasn’t like nihilism in that way, it was like pure pure emptiness and I was in a little bit of a shock.

Rick: Did the world seem kind of unreal, like it was just a movie or something and you couldn’t take it that seriously?

Leela: In a way, yeah. But, you know, that lasted for a few days or so and then it began to acclimate and feel normal. And it felt more like flow at that point. I would have moments of like, “Whoa, watch it go,” you know. But that feeling of participation would come back in and doership, which I could see clearly was just a feeling, it wasn’t actual doership. And over months, a year and a half or so, I felt like everything came up to be seen as far as shadow work, as far as old traumas and triggers, that came up to be seen in the light of that emptiness and more clarity and more compassion. I felt like that was one of the first things that happened when I saw the emptiness of it all was love. You know, it was like a heart opening because it’s like a baby, you know, they’re pure, they’re empty, they have no agenda. And I saw myself as that way and everybody else, you know, the whole world. When I had spent all these years trying to love myself, you know, I really just needed a little bit of emptiness in the equation. And then I had this profound insight, I talked about it on the channel because I had already been making content, that this emptiness, this no doership, this no thinker, this meaninglessness, you know, this emptiness, is also being held on to as a conceptual philosophy, to some degree. It was like holding on to the last vestige of control. It was very subtle, but I saw through that, and it freed things up in a way to where it feels more flowy and balanced and honoring of this humanness.

Rick: Did that mean you were kind of attached to the emptiness for a while?

Leela: Yes, but I didn’t realize it. It took me a little while to sort of be like, “Oh, okay, I see what’s going on here.” So it’s very sneaky.

Rick: And as you were going through this, did it have any impact on your relationship with your husband, your son, and you know, just friends. I mean, did you become kind of a weirdo for a while?

Leela: I felt like maybe I seemed like a weirdo but every everybody seemed like I mean, I was already kind of a weirdo… but no, it was nothing dramatic.

Rick: So they didn’t notice, like, “Ohhh, what happened to her?”

Leela: No, I mean, if so, it was not that dramatic. One thing I’ve noticed as far as relationship goes is I have healthier boundaries now. I can say, “No, I don’t want to do that. Maybe next time,” when before I didn’t have that capacity. I had to please people for my sense of value, you know. Now I can sort of honor my own limitations and boundaries in that way.

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting. A lot of these points we’ve kind of touched on but it’s fun to focus in on them a little bit more. In the notes you sent me it says, “the home feeling,” and I know what you mean by the home feeling. I had a teacher who often used to refer to it as the feeling of “mother is at home.” You know how a kid feels when mother is at home as opposed to when mother is not at home. There’s this certain confidence and comfort and security feeling. But you say this home feeling initially appears as glimpses, then stabilizes as a background sense of unconditional okayness across all states. I bet you that sounds really good to people.

Leela: I bet it does. Nice carrot on the stick for you.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: Yeah, sometimes I say I feel like I am my own perfect parent now, you know, in a way. I’m able to hold space for myself when I’m not feeling that great or not having a great day or something’s going on that I don’t want to happen. I may have a little inner fit or something and need to let myself feel that way for a while. And it’s okay. There’s nothing there saying that it shouldn’t be that way. Of course, as long as I’m… There’s something about that that just allows it to express in the moment, and then it’s as if it never happened.

Rick: Yeah, a couple of good points in there. One is the… It’s almost like, I think you said, you’re describing a sense of okayness that abides and underlies everything, even if there’s surface circumstances which people would not described as okay, but there’s a deeper level of your experience, there’s an ongoing okayness. Is that correct?

Leela: Exactly. Yeah. And that’s what I love to talk about on the channel. I’m a nerd as far as when it comes to unpacking, you know, the nuances. I try to anticipate what the seeker will, how they will conceptualize it ahead of time and then address that in the moment. The goal is to just leave them with nowhere to go, except for this open wonder and free fall.

Rick: And then there’s another thing you said there, which they’ve actually done scientific research on with meditators, which is the ability to recover more quickly from a stressful stimulus. So as you know, in life very often something will happen and people will hang on to it for days, weeks, months, years. And whereas… well, I’m reminded of a couple of things. You know, Eckhart Tolle, remember his story about the ducks? The ducks will have a little fight and they’ll shake their feathers and then they’ll be, “Oh, okay,” back, settle down, just swimming around again. And then there’s the old Zen story about two monks had to cross a river, and they got to the river, and this beautiful young girl was standing there and she couldn’t cross, and so the older monk picked her up and carried her across and put her down, and then the monks kept walking, and after an hour or so, the younger monk said, “Okay, are you crazy? You know, we’re monks. You’re not supposed to touch women. You picked up that beautiful woman back there.” And the older monk said, “Oh, are you still carrying her? I put her down at the other side of the river.”

Leela: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I say that a lot. This is more like being a wild animal or a child. Children can throw a fit or get mad at their playmate, but five minutes later, it’s as if it never happened.

Rick: Yeah. So I think this really has a whole neurophysiological component to it where the nervous system, and can be measured and has been measured with tests with galvanic skin response and things like that where a nervous system which easily holds on to impressions continues to cycle through an action-impression-desire cycle that goes on and on, repeats itself, and it can even reinforce the impressions. Whereas if the nervous system can be rendered relatively impression-free, purified of all these deep impressions, then you can have the experience, you can even have it more vividly and deeply than you might otherwise, but it doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression, and boom! You’re over it, you’re moving on.

Leela: Yeah, yeah. I feel blessed to know what both of those are like, you know? It’s not fun to anticipate something that you don’t prefer in that way, in that cyclical way, when it’s not even happening right now. So there’s that timeless element of this, where it’s just like, you are with what’s here now, you know. And it’s usually fine. And if it’s not, you’ll react accordingly.

Rick: Yeah, good. Okay, here’s another point. “Integration is not about perfect behavior, but about a kind of tenderness toward the human experience. We finally get to fully be human once the controlling agenda softens.” I like that.

Leela: Yeah, yeah, that’s the self-compassion that I talk about and, you know, compassion for other. Permission to be human. As if we needed to give that to ourself. I mean, apparently we do.

Rick: Yeah, but the word tenderness appeals to me. I think it’s a good quality to have, tenderness towards life, towards animals, towards insects, towards people, towards everything, not being harsh and brutish, but being gentle. What does Jesus say? “Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.”

Leela: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was in the book of Thomas, wasn’t it?

Rick: I don’t remember that.

Leela: Okay. Book of Thomas is good though. It’s not in the Bible. It’s Nag Hammadi text, I think.

Rick: Oh, is it?

Leela: That was the first video I ever made. I read the book of Thomas.

Rick: Mm-hmm. Is it from the Essene gospels? Is that what the Nag Hammadi text was?

Leela: Yeah, I may have that wrong. It was the lost books that came out later in the, what was it, 70s or something? I don’t know that much about it, but it’s just quotes from Jesus, and it’s very non-dual, so to say.

Rick: Yeah. Hmm. I mean, that’s a whole topic, and we can get into a whole interview about, and I’m not the best qualified person to do so about Christianity and how so much of it has been edited and translated and, you know, what’s that thing they’re doing with the Epstein files, redacted, and all kinds of stuff over the years.

Leela: I would say it’s very heavily politically influenced.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: Yeah, from back in the day.

Rick: Right. And yet, ironically, it’s often regarded as this inviolable, absolute truth, you know, as if God himself wrote it down, which actually they claim he did, more or less.

Leela: Yeah, oh yeah, I’ve heard it. I get told that pretty often, too, sometimes.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: My husband likes to say that.

Rick: Okay, so we’re almost done here with my questions and points. If there’s anything else you want, we can talk about it. But my final point in my notes here is that you often conclude that nothing needs to be eradicated. Even seeking, resistance, confusion, and shadow material are seen as expressions of the same wholeness. And maybe one point I could add to that is, a lot of this stuff might be seen as grist for the mill, you know? In other words, opportunities for some kind of resolution, some kind of deeper insight.

Leela: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I framed the myths like I gave all kinds of disclaimers when I did the myths that I’m not saying that these are wrong. You know, they usually catalyze us, you know. They were definitely… they seem to be required on my path, you know, I had to go through them. I actually forgot what your initial…

Rick: Well, it’s just that all of the things that life throws at us, they could be seen as obstacles or distractions or punishments or whatever, but perhaps they could also be seen as opportunities for growth.

Leela: Absolutely.

Rick: Things happen for a reason. The universe is, God is not a sadist. This, that, and the other thing happen because it gives us an opportunity to learn or grow.

Leela: That’s how I see it and I feel the best in my body when I see it that way. And I always find evidence of it when I look for it. Always.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: So I get excited when something comes up for me now.

Rick: Yeah, I tend to also. It’s like what is the lesson here for me? You know, not “Oh, poor me! Why is this happening? This shouldn’t be happening.” It’s more like, okay, there’s an evolutionary opportunity here.

Leela: Yeah, it’s intriguing, fascinating, what is this trying to tell me? You know.

Rick: Yeah, and that presupposes that nature is an expression of intelligence. It’s not just mechanical or dumb or insentient. There’s a wisdom and intelligence orchestrating everything, and it has our evolutionary development in mind.

Leela: Yeah, and you know, God works in mysterious ways, so to say. We may not know what we need. We may need to go down a dead-end road. That may be what we need in the moment.

Rick: Yeah.

Leela: I’ve called it the one big brain. It feels like an ocean of infinite intelligence.

Rick: Beautiful. Yep. And there’s no gaps in it. No holes. You could you could go millions of light years away, billions of light years away, and it would be just as saturated with intelligence in every little iota there as it is here. There’s just no breaks, no gaps.

Leela: Yeah, yeah, it feels that way, definitely. Seamless. And then, in that way, it does feel intimate, like you’re not alone. I mean, that’s not exactly the right words, because you could also say, “I am alone, but it feels like love.”

Rick: Yeah. And I think that’s what’s meant by the omnipresence of God. A teacher once said, “God may be omnipotent, but he’s also omnipresent, so therefore the one thing he can’t do is remove himself from your heart.”

Leela: Oh, yeah. That’s how I described what I talk about when I told my husband I was gonna make a YouTube channel. He was like, “What’s it gonna be about?” I was like, “Oh God.”

Rick: Housecleaning!

Leela: I gotta explain this, but I told him, you know I’m not religious, but I do believe in God and I believe God is omnipresent, and really that’s the whole thing. That’s what the channel is about. So that’s how I I explained it to him.

Rick: I’m sure you’ve heard the term spiritual but not religious.

Leela: Mm-hmm.

Rick: Yeah, that might be a good term to use with him in explaining where you’re at.

Leela: I think I probably have used that before.

Rick: It’s just more universal, you know? I mean, the whole universe is so vast and and there’s solid evidence that there are planets around most stars, and that many of these planets are in the Goldilocks zone, they could sustain life. And you know, it’s just kind of preposterous to think that we are the only evolved civilization in the universe, and so there must be spiritual traditions galore throughout the whole show, throughout the whole universe.

Leela: Yeah, you know, back when I was 17 and my religion fell away, there was this thick wall of existential fear that I had to move through. It was effortless. I didn’t really have to move through it. There was no way I was not going to move through it, but it felt like I was going to be condemned to hell.

Rick: But you’d had that drilled into your head for so many years.

Leela: So it was a fear of God.

Rick: Right.

Leela: I had to let that go and some people aren’t willing to go near it. And I can understand that. See why.

Rick: Well, eternal hellfire is a scary thing if that’s what they’ve been brainwashed into believing.

Leela: Exactly.

Rick: Another question came in. Let’s see here. This is from Alexander Olschewski in Berlin. “After a clear realization spanning many weeks, that there is no separation at all and that everything is empty, a realization that redeemed the whole story, the shadows gradually returned. Often it is a coexistence of clarity and old energies, yet sometimes it still seems to be an on-off game. It feels as though clarity becomes even clearer each time, while the dark energies grow more intense.” That’s an interesting question. What do you think about that?

Leela: Yeah, I like to say anything can arise as far as old stuff coming up or like post-traumatic stress feelings or feelings of doom. They can naturally arise. But those are states. I mean, all states come and go. They’re free to come and go. They don’t have that heavy meaning that they did before, that this means something about me, you know. So it’s kind of like you don’t latch on to it. I don’t latch on to it like I did before in that way, and it’s just not a problem in that way, you know.

Rick: Yeah. I think one thing that Alexander might find useful is that the spiritual path can be kind of thought of as a house cleaning process and the deeper the experiences you have, the deeper the gunk in your nervous system or psyche can be dissolved. And generally we start with the more superficial stuff and we go deeper and deeper. So that might be why Alexander is experiencing that, even though the light is getting brighter, the dark seems to be getting darker. I don’t think it will always be that way necessarily, but as you go you’re actually able to dissolve or resolve deeper and deeper stuff.

Leela: Yeah, I felt like my journey, that would be processing, seeing through certain beliefs, and it would feel lighter and more expansive, but then whatever was left seemed more obvious than before. So it was like a different layer of subtlety and inquiring into what’s appearing, you know, as felt feelings.

Rick: So as I guess it was R. Crumb, the cartoonist, said, “Keep on truckin’.”

Leela: Yeah, one step in front of the other.

Rick: Yeah. Alrighty, so this has been delightful. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Is there anything in particular you want to leave people with? Any final thoughts or insights or divine revelations?

Leela: I would say you can trust your inner guidance. Wherever you feel led, whatever passion, whatever thing you want to explore as far as practices or modalities or styles of pointing, go into it. See where it’s leading you. Even the dead-end roads are features of the path. And you can trust it. You can trust where you’re leading yourself.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, I’ve talked to people who’ve been into pretty weird cults, and they’ve gotten out of them. And they think, “Well, that was a learning experience, and I wouldn’t want to do that again, but hey, I actually did learn something from having gone through all that.”

Leela: Yeah, and they often help other people.

Rick: Yeah. Good. All right, so I’ll be putting up a page on BatGap about this interview, and with a link to your YouTube channel, and anything else you want me to link to. And aside from your YouTube channel, is there anything else, any other ways people can interact with you? Do you do Zoom meetings or anything like that?

Leela: Yeah, you can go to leelamuse.com and you can sign up for one-on-ones there. I have some days available and check out my social media on there and you can join the email list if you want.

Rick: Good. All right, well thanks so much, Leela. I really enjoyed getting to meet you and having this conversation.

Leela: You too, Rick. It was a joy. Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, you’re welcome. If I ever get down to Mississippi, which is one of the few states I’ve never been in, I’ll let you know.

Leela: All right. Well, you can come to some of the casinos down here.

Rick: Oh, boy! All right, thanks everybody for listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one. I, too, have an email list that you might like to get on to be notified of each new interview as it’s released. And all the usual stuff, you know, liking the thing on YouTube and leaving a positive review on iTunes, all that kind of stuff helps to boost the channel. So I appreciate it. Thanks.