Humanizing Awakening – Maggie Gilewicz – Transcript

Maggie Gilewicz Interview

Summary

• Maggie Gilewicz is a transformational coach, Hellenistic astrologer, and author of Awakening to be Human, based in a decade-long personal journey through awakening.
• She grew up in a household shaped by her father’s alcoholism, and from an early age felt a persistent sense of not quite belonging — always questioning the rules, seeking something beyond the surface.
• Despite a PhD in sociology and years in academia, she had no interest in spirituality, largely because she assumed awakening was reserved for a certain type of person — not someone like her.
• Her path began not through meditation or spiritual practice, but through intellectual inquiry with a transformational coach, which eventually triggered a spontaneous perceptual shift in Arizona.
• What followed was years of cycling between equanimity and prolonged dark nights of the soul, including depression and suicidal thoughts, as buried emotional material surfaced.
• After a major emotional breakdown she calls “the surrender,” deeper integration began — leading to the coaching and writing work she does today.

Key Takeaways

• Awakening happens to ordinary people. One of Maggie’s central messages — and Rick’s motivation for the show — is dismantling the cultural assumption that enlightenment is for gurus, yogis, or people with special spiritual credentials. It’s a human capacity, not a rare gift.
• Insight can function as a spiritual path, even without formal practice. Maggie never meditated, yet years of deep inquiry into the nature of thought produced genuine and lasting shifts — showing that the vehicle matters less than the sincerity and depth of the looking.
• Early awakenings can become hiding places. After her first shift, Maggie spent years dismissing difficult emotions as “just thoughts” or “just illusions” — a common form of spiritual bypassing that delayed integration and prolonged suffering rather than resolving it.
• Dark nights are part of the process, not a sign something went wrong. Shifts act as a solvent for buried material. What surfaces afterward — depression, fear, self-judgment — is often unconscious content that the opening made possible to process, not evidence of failure or regression.
• Humanizing awakening means staying in the mess. Maggie’s framing throughout is that awakening is a growth into fuller humanness, not an escape from it. Integration requires actually feeling and meeting what arises — not transcending it.

Full transcript, edited for readability:

Awakening Happens to Ordinary People

Maggie: I had to hold on to myself because I felt like if I didn’t, I would explode or something would happen. I know it sounds very dramatic, but honestly, it felt this dramatic. This was genuinely a point at which I believed that levitation exists.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with ordinary spiritually awakening people. I was just joking about that with my guest. We’ve done about 750 of them now, so if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, just go to batgap.com and you’ll see them organized in various ways. These conversations are made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. All donations are tax deductible. If you would like to donate, please visit batgap.com for more information. So, my guest today is a delightful person named Maggie Gilewicz. Did I pronounce that correctly, Maggie?

Maggie: – Almost. –

Rick: Gilewicz.

Maggie: – Gilevicz. –

Rick: What? Gilevich, like a V sound.

Maggie: But most people say Gilewitz or Gilewich, which is fine, kind of a “witch” at the end, basically.

Rick: Okay, whichever way you say it is okay. And Maggie’s going to tell us a lot about herself, but, she’s a transformational coach. She’s an astrologer. Is that, is that Western or Jyotish?

Maggie: No, well, it’s Hellenistic, astrological, I use a whole sign system. So, it’s kind of closer to Jyotish, I would say.

Rick: All righty. Jyotish, for those who don’t know, is Vedic astrology. And is that your main way of earning a living? The way Angelo is an anesthesiologist, but he’s also a spiritual guide? Or, your website, if anybody goes to your website, it’s all about astrology. But we’re probably going to hardly talk about astrology today.

Astrology as a Tool for the Awakening Journey

Maggie: Yes, good. I’m happy to talk about astrology, but it’s sort of half and half. I mix both. Most people whom I’m seeing are really not there just for astrology. They’re for both astrology and support in their awakening journey. Yeah.

Rick: Right. Okay. It’s a good tool to have in your toolbox.

Maggie: Yeah, it’s really useful.

Rick: Yeah. And you’re an author. I read your book called “Awakening to be Human,” which I really enjoyed. The title is significant because you’re devoted to humanizing awakening, which can sometimes seem rather dehumanizing.

Maggie: Right.

Rick: Yeah. So, you see yourself not as a guru, obviously, but as a supporter and guide, walking alongside others through the parts of the journey that you have traveled yourself, sharing insights you’ve gained along the way. You have a PhD in sociology and a rather checkerboarded educational background, which we might get into, and a master’s degree in political science, and you are a lover of simplicity, learning, and laughter. And both the laughter part and the other parts will be more and more evident throughout this interview. You have a nice sense of humor and a nice laugh.

Maggie: Thank you. It was great. It was actually great to get to laugh a bit before we started.

Rick: Yeah.

Maggie: It made me less nervous.

Rick: Good. There’s that humanizing part. You admit to being nervous.

Maggie: Yeah, exactly. Totally.

Rick: Yeah. So, your book had a kind of a chronological order to it, tracing your decade-long, sometimes difficult process. But one thing I liked about it, which we’ve already alluded to, is that you frame awakening not as some kind of transcendent escape, but rather as perhaps a growth into greater or fuller humanness. Yes? Is that a fair characterization?

Why She Never Expected Awakening to Find Her

Maggie: Yeah. I mean, before my own awakening, my own view of awakening, which I have no idea from where I inherited that view, was first and foremost that awakening was some kind of transcendent state that one reaches, and that whoever reaches that state is somehow special. In other words, they must have something that the regular person doesn’t have that allows them to reach that transcendental state. And so, of course, I would equate awakening first of all with gurus who dress up a certain way, and talk a certain way. Then with people who lead spiritual lifestyles, generally speaking, travel to India, do yoga, meditate, and are sort of devoted to the whole thing. And this idea that this awakening/enlightenment would be happening to regular people like myself would just never occur to me. That is probably one of the reasons why I wouldn’t even seek it in the first place, because due to my own ideas about it, I immediately felt already excluded from the get-go, as a mere mortal who has nothing to do with this.

I immediately felt already excluded from the get-go, as a mere mortal who has nothing to do with this.

Rick: That was one of my motivations for starting this show, as I’ve said before on this show, because I live in a town where several thousand people have been meditating for decades and people were having spiritual awakenings, really significant abiding awakenings. And I was in this little discussion group with a bunch of people and someone reported that they would tell friends about an awakening they’d had and the friends would put him down. They’d say, “Oh no, you’re just Joe Schmo, you’re a regular person, I’ve known you for years. This couldn’t possibly have happened to you.”

Maggie: Yeah. (laughing)

Rick: And also, “you still have this fault or this hang up” or whatever. And so, I thought, okay, I’m going to start an interview show where I showcase these people. I allow people to see that their peers, people like them, are having spiritual awakenings, and that will instill greater confidence they too could have one.

Maggie: Yeah, and I’m grateful for that, which is one of the reasons why I was drawn to your YouTube channel. And I love the name so much, Buddha at the Gas Pump. By the way, I didn’t tell you that I was playing with AI one day, and I actually prompted it to create a logo of what it would create if I prompted it to do Buddha at the Gas Pump. I had a whole plan to do the logo, send you a t-shirt or something like that, but the plan collapsed for some reason. I don’t know why. But yeah, I mean, I’m so grateful that you started this podcast or channel and to show that this is actually, this whole awakening is happening to regular people. And I think often people may have experiences, really profound experiences without the language or reference, and not even knowing that whatever they experience is called an awakening. But to be honest with you, I think that idea still persists, that this is a transcendent state that happens only to certain type of people. I’ve seen it multiple times.

Rick: Yeah, there is a deep cultural bias or assumption that would take some undoing. There’s nothing wrong with transcendent states, but they need to be fully integrated. One can be playing a rigorous game of tennis, while on some level appreciating a transcendent field of silence, even while they’re jumping around and sweating and slamming the ball.

Maggie: Yeah,

Rick: It’s not incompatible. But if tapping into some transcendent state makes you feel like you just need to sit like a marshmallow all the time, with your eyes closed, or keep insisting that the world is an illusion, and you’re not interested in it, or anything like that, then maybe there is some integration yet to be accomplished.

Maggie: Yeah, which is probably why I know that some people are fed up with this word, but this is precisely why it’s a journey. It’s not a sort of one-off event. And I honestly think that most people go through all these stages, the thinking that they have arrived or they are sort of done or, going through this. I myself went through a whole stage of thinking this is all just an illusion / just a thought and I was left from that place being completely disassociated from my own suffering and emotional pain and all sorts of stuff that I had to deal with later on. So, I think even the annoying bits about this journey or the things that annoy us in people, when we see them act a certain way, they too are part of that process.

Rick: I think you’ll probably agree that what we are talking about here and what all the people who are interested in this stuff are actually talking about is an innate human capacity for development. Something that any and everyone has the hardware to realize, to experience, to develop. It’s not extraordinary. It’s not special. I mean it might be rare but it’s not unnatural or special in any way. Would you agree with all that?

Maggie: Yeah, I would absolutely agree. I can’t actually see it any differently. I just think that everyone has the capacity to remember who we really are. It’s just a case of some people being more or less interested in finding out and of whether their trajectory plays out in such a way that they do start seeking and they do start asking those questions and they do get curious for whatever reason. That’s one thing, but at least the way I see it, even the people who are not interested in this stuff and are not seeking, they’re still like that, so to speak.

Rick: Yeah, and I think if we say they’re not interested, I think we could probably add “yet”. They will be eventually. Maybe not even in this lifetime, but it’s something that I think ultimately everyone is destined to get interested in and to realize.

Maggie: I don’t know about that. I would hope so, because it really, it certainly fundamentally changes the way you perceive life and experience life for the better. It doesn’t mean that life becomes a smooth ride and there are no challenges or anything like that, but it certainly helps.

Rick: Yeah, and if what we’re talking about is your essential nature, if it’s what you ultimately are, then what are you looking for? You know, you’re looking for happiness here and happiness there and this experience and that experience, and those things all give you little bits of it, but all the traditions say that there’s an ocean of it at your foundation, in your deepest nature, and why settle for little drops when you can have the ocean.

Maggie: Yeah, yeah, and I think so many people start searching in different places, in the material world, imagining “okay, this kind of success is going to fulfill me and this kind of car and this kind of house and this kind of relationship and so on.” And that may even be the case for many people, but often they find out that that’s not enough. And usually, the search for something else begins. And for other people, it happens kind of spontaneously, God knows for what reason, and for other people, maybe tragedy strikes or something like that. And that triggers that kind of curiosity. So, I find it just incredibly fascinating how different people are, and how different are people’s trajectories and how it plays out for different people.

Rick: Yeah, I do too. And what you just said, I was talking about this with a friend the other day, the difficulties, the suffering, maybe that serves as a catalyst or stimulus for becoming interested in this. And maybe the fact that these days things seem to be getting so crazy on an international level is a harbinger of a big shift underway in collective consciousness and in society.

Maggie: Yeah, for many, for sure. And especially, with AI. Just with AI alone, there is a real crisis of people not knowing what is real anymore. And that actually really messes with their heads. And so, for many, it’s kind of sad, that sometimes really horrible things have to happen, whether it’s globally or in our personal lives that are sort of a wake-up call and actually even open us up to questioning what is actually true. And it’s unfortunate that it has to happen sometimes this way, but at the same time, I’m really glad that it happens, because that’s when that change happens.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, having read your book, I know that you went through a lot of difficult times, as did I when I was young. And those things served as a goad, you could say, to find out what the heck is going on and why can’t it be better than this? Why does it have to be like this?

Maggie: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don’t know where I shared this or even whether I talked about it. I think I did talk about it in the book. From the beginning, I never felt like I belonged here in some way. There was a sense of, I knew obviously that my parents were my parents and my sister was my sister, but who were they actually? How did I end up here? I remember sort of wondering about that and then always wondering about certain rules, whether in society or in school and always questioning them and therefore, obviously being considered a troublemaker or a quote-unquote difficult person, because I was questioning stuff. And so, from the beginning, I felt a bit like, what is going on here? What is this about? And always, I feel like I’ve always been seeking something beyond or that there had to be something more meaningful than just the surface or something like that. It’s the best way I can put it.

Rick: Yeah, I think a lot of people listening to this will be able to relate to that. I interviewed someone a couple months ago named Emeline Lambert who said that when she was young, she said to her parents, “you know, you’re not really my parents and incidentally, I’m from Mars. I’m not even from this planet, I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Maggie: And what was their reaction to that?

Rick: They just thought she was a crazy little kid, and didn’t take it too seriously. But she always felt like that title of a book by Robert Heinlein, I think it was called “Stranger in a Strange Land”. And, you know, that’s what a lot of spiritual seekers feel like. They feel like, how did I end up on this planet? And what’s it all about?

Maggie: Yeah, but even things like, for myself, I could never quite get along with my peers, the people my same age. I was always drawn to talking to older people. And if I remember when I was maybe six years old, I ended up in hospital having, I don’t know, I think it’s called tonsillitis,

Rick: right, right,

Maggie: …getting them removed. And there was a kid’s word and then there was the adult’s word. And I would spend all my time with the adults. I would just sit at the end of the bed with the elderly people and I would just chat. They probably were exhausted by the time I left because I kept on asking them a million questions and eating snacks that their family brought them. And also, I was really not interested in chatting with my peers. I was always interested in talking to elderly people and I had incredible sensitivity to elderly people’s suffering. To this day, I don’t quite understand why. I mean I’ve always been a sensitive kid, but for some reason elderly suffering or aloneness, especially if they were alone and had no one to look after them, it would really get me, really deeply for some reason.

Rick: Nice. I remember when I was a kid there was a doctor who lived across the street, a retired doctor named Dr. Dowd. He had a son, I guess it was, who had cerebral palsy or something which was a little scary for me, because the guy talked funny and everything. But I used to go to his house all the time and just ask him questions. “Tell me about whales. How come they squirt that water out the top of their…” And all kinds of things would come to mind. We would just have these long conversations.

Maggie: Yeah. Yeah. I think very fondly about that.

Rick: Yeah.

Maggie: But we both grew up with alcohol addiction in the family, so we have that in common. And obviously, all sorts of unpredictability and volatility comes with that. So yeah, definitely not fun, that part.

Rick: Yeah. So, there’s something in my notes on your book about when you were a teenager, Peace with a capital P on the post office steps. What was that that happened on the post office steps?

A First Glimpse of Peace—On a Street Corner

Maggie: So, this had to do with my father. So, my father was an alcoholic and this was one of those days where he came back home drunk, basically, after a long break from drinking. There, I kind of hoped that he was done. But he wasn’t, and I was just completely distraught by that because I was really invested in reading all the books about alcohol addiction and trying to be supportive and all of that. And I just remember just being really, really distraught. And there was just turmoil at home. And, I stepped out of the house and basically was walking down the street and met a friend. The conversation with him was really, really impactful. Because, he told me that I just can’t control this situation and I have to look after myself. And, for someone still very young, there was more said, but those were real words of wisdom that really stayed with me. And as I was coming back home, I was looking back, something basically happened where, all of a sudden, I just saw my entire family as completely innocent. My mother, my father, my sister, and whatever we were all doing, we were not doing it on purpose and it was sort of a result of some kind of learned conditioning. Obviously, I wouldn’t use those words at the time, but I see it that way now. And this was, well, incredibly, incredibly impactful for one, because all of a sudden there was a burden of some kind that lifted. You know, I blamed my father for drinking. I still thought that if he really cared about us, he would have stopped. But he didn’t. And so, it’s hard for me to remember the details, but the reason why it was impactful is because all of a sudden, I saw that inherent innocence of all of us, really. And then, some kind of a burden that came with that just lifted and any kind of sense of victimhood also dropped in that moment. And there was what I can describe as my first glimpse of Peace with capital P, which was a kind of peace that is unconditional and unaffected by anything that goes on either in my head or in my life. So, it’s there, even in the midst of a psychological turmoil, turmoil at home and so on. So that’s what that was about.

All of a sudden, I just saw my entire family as completely innocent. My mother, my father, my sister, and whatever we were all doing, we were not doing it on purpose.

Rick: Yeah, I know in my father’s case, he fought in World War II and he was an artist by profession, a sensitive guy, an intelligent guy. But here he was flying in bombers and shooting down planes and being shot at and all that stuff. And he just got so stressed out by it. And I’m sure that led to his alcoholism. And people do the best they can. It may not seem like that, but does anyone intentionally say, “I’m going to really screw up on purpose here and make my life miserable?” No, you try to do the best you can. And people are burdened with a lot of trauma and a lot of difficulties that it’s easier said than done to just snap out of it.

Maggie: Yeah, no, it’s not easy. And especially where addiction is concerned, it certainly isn’t a case of just, “well, you could just not do that.” If it was this easy, then we would not deal with this problem at all. But yeah, I’m just grateful that early on, I had that glimpse into it for whatever reason, so to speak, because it really spared me from a lot of burdensome thoughts, not just about my family, but about myself. And just overall, it really had a massive impact, that insight.

Rick: That’s great. That’s one interesting thing about you. As I understand it, you haven’t done much actual spiritual practice. I heard you say in your book at one point that you never had meditated. But your main engine seems to be insight. You just have a really bright mind and you read things and you really take them to heart or you listen to things. And somehow, just those insights that you gain from your exploration create significant shifts in your experience.

Maggie: Yeah, I suppose it’s kind of interesting, now that you put it that way. Yes, because, as I said, in many ways now when I look back, I’ve always been seeking something, something deeper, something beyond just the surface. Even though, if you had asked me at the time, I wouldn’t have said that. I wasn’t aware that that was going on, but I was always kind of inquisitive and not quite satisfied with just any answer. Let’s put it this way. And so I spent so many years in academia, doing academic research, the academic thing, that kind of thinking, academic inquiry. So, there was no place in my life for spirituality. And again, for the reason, I don’t know, did we talk about it before we started or after we started? The fact that I’ve inherited those ideas about awakening, that this is reserved for certain kind of people.

Rick: I think it was since we’ve started. Yeah, yeah. People who float two feet off the ground and glow in the dark.

Maggie: Exactly. And I really consider myself sort of, slightly walking with my head in the clouds, but with my feet firmly on the ground. I would describe myself that way. So, I was inquisitive, but also skeptical, cynical, verging on cynical. And I often consider myself very open minded, but also very close minded when I look back, in terms of all sorts of other things. But I really think that one of the reasons why I’ve not been seeking, was precisely because I had this idea that spirituality and awakening is for a certain kind of person, and that person definitely wasn’t me. And so, it’s not for an ordinary someone, who just lives life, human life, has human concerns, things like that.

I really consider myself sort of, slightly walking with my head in the clouds, but with my feet firmly on the ground.

So, that went on for years and years until there came a point where, on the outside, my life seemed to be great. Everything I was doing was great, my lifestyle, whatever, but I was really, really unhappy. And I started, it was just very obvious that I needed some kind of help, but I wouldn’t know what kind of help to even look for. I wouldn’t even consider therapy or anything like that at the time. I just felt like I needed some help. So, I went to my go-to source: books. So, I bought some books, the spiritual books completely put me off, the kind of spiritual books I read, I think it was Osha, but I wouldn’t bet on that. Some book by Osho and something else and the language just put me off and I’m thinking, what the hell does it have to do with regular human life? How does this relate to a regular human life. I couldn’t find the connection. So, then I reached out for self-help, which for the academic that I was, it was just totally below me to read self-help books, because I considered them pseudo psychology for the masses. And I was just so full of myself, my God. But anyway, I ended up with this one book which was just really nagging me. There’s this one book on Amazon constantly being recommended. And so, I bought it and I read it and I’m just kind of making a long story very short. That opened up an inquiry, it was the first time in my life that I started asking myself, what do I actually want? Where am I actually going? Because I realized I never asked myself this question, really, that I was kind of living on autopilot. And that’s how I started working with that Michael that you asked me about. And that led to my first shift. But even then, Rick, I never considered the first shift an awakening. To me, I just refer to it as a fundamental shift in perception. That’s it. I’ve never seen it as a spiritual event, and I’ve never seen it as, “Therefore, now I’m an awakened spiritual person.” Not at all.

Rick: Yeah, as I recall, you had that shift. You were in Phoenix and you were having lunch or something with Michael and all of a sudden, your whole appearance changed. You said your eyes were sparkling. So, try to describe that shift a little bit more. I mean, you were just probably chewing on your salad or something and all of a sudden, this thing happens spontaneously. I think there’s probably an underlying mechanism for why these things happen. They’re not just random occurrences and the intensity of your search up to that point probably created enough pressure or momentum or something, that that little breakthrough could happen. But try to elaborate. I mean, enable us to see it through your eyes. Exactly how did your perspective change or your perception?

Inquiry Without a Spiritual Practice

Maggie: Okay, so I first want to say something that you mentioned, that it absolutely was not random. So even though I didn’t have a spiritual practice of any kind, and I genuinely have never meditated in my life or had a spiritual practice, but one could say that the inquiry that I did with the mentor I was working with, and he also wasn’t a spiritual teacher. He was a coach, a transformative coach. And the only thing he was pointing to all the time was the nature of thought and having me look prior to any thought, to look in the direction prior to any thought, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Maggie: And the other thing he was pointing to was that there is basically this wholeness, that we’re inherently whole, and that when we see into the nature or beyond the thought, we discover this inherent wholeness, right? So really, that’s what he was trying to point me to during our conversations. We talked about other things, but this was a kind of an inquiry. So, okay, we may not call it a strictly spiritual practice, but I would say now in retrospect, it was a kind of inquiry, it was a practice of inquiry into this nature of thought.

Rick: And that is a common word for a certain spiritual path.

Maggie: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Yeah, it’s very valid.

Maggie: Yeah, so again, either way, it was a kind of profound inquiry into the nature of thought, and basically, what would my experience of life be like without any thought? Any thought about myself, any thought about circumstances, what would it be like to actually just see what is without any thought about it, without any label and so on. Right?

What would my experience of life be like without any thought? Any thought about myself, any thought about circumstances, what would it be like to actually just see what is without any thought about it.

Rick: Without interpretation. Yeah. It kind of sounds a little like Byron Katie, where would you be without that thought, she always says.

The Moment Everything Shifted—Over Lunch

Maggie: Exactly. Exactly. And in fact, at that time, I was introduced to Byron Katie as well. Not “in person,” but I found out about her existence, her teachings. And I have to tell you, Rick, I did not enjoy it. I did not enjoy this process, because I could sense that he was pointing to something that was absolutely true in a non-intellectual way and all I had was my intellect to rely on and it wasn’t getting me there. So, I was really annoyed. I was really frustrated, because I kind of knew what he was saying but I wasn’t really getting it, which is what I would put as the difference between basically the intellectual understanding and an insight or a direct insight, something like that. So, I was incredibly frustrated because I was hitting the wall. Basically, my brain was just failing me. And that was really annoying. And so, I could understand it already. Come on, and the more I tried to, the more I pushed, the more confusing the whole thing was getting. So, by the time I ended up in Arizona, I gave up on trying to understand it. I was so exhausted by this inquiry that I gave up for a moment and went to this workshop that was not related to that inquiry with him. And we were chatting over lunch about something completely unrelated, when all of a sudden, basically in a split second, as I said, my perception shifted so fundamentally that I was just seeing life without thought for the first time in my life. And all of a sudden, all my problems that were still there and all this pressure to fix things and work on things and fix that and get rid of that, all that urgency that was there prior, was just gone. Nothing looked like a problem anymore. It wasn’t a denial, by the way. It wasn’t as if I went into some kind of denial place. The circumstances of my life were still there as they were before that insight. But nothing looked problematic. Nothing looked burdensome anymore. And that’s when that experience of Peace with a capital P I glimpsed for the first time as a teenager kind of emerged fully. And it was just…

Rick: I think giving up is a key element here. Yeah, giving up can’t be the first step, but after all that intense striving, then giving up can bear fruit. And I can think of examples, like Adyashanti, for instance, was gung-ho. He had to be the most vehemently intense Zen meditator, and he would just try to out-meditate everybody else, and finally he got to the point where he was thinking he was going to drive himself crazy, and he just had a moment of giving up and then he had his big awakening. Or Eckhart Tolle, he just was thinking, “I can’t live with myself anymore.” And then he had this thought of, “are there two of me? Who is it that can’t live with whom?” And then he went to bed and next thing you know, boom. Or even Thomas Edison. He would work and work and work on a problem, and then he’d take a nap. And then maybe waking up from his nap, he would have the insight. So many examples of that.

Maggie: So many examples. And I think that is just great. It’s not fun when it happens, but I really feel as if it is precisely because the mind has exhaust itself. So, the intellect just kind of gives up, and then the stuff kind of emerges. But yeah, for me, this was massive because I knew that if I could see this, everybody else can. And to me, this was such a great news. So obviously, I went into wanting to let everyone know that they are not their thoughts and they’re just caught up in their stories in their heads. And if only you don’t buy into whatever goes on in your head, you’ll be fine. So, I again, I went into this really annoying mode, which, I can’t even imagine how annoying that must have been for many people, almost like the born-again syndrome. Which also, now when I look at it, it’s very innocent. But as I said, I also understand how annoying that must have been to be at the receiving end of this.

Rick: We’ve all been through phases like that. You know, I cringe sometimes thinking of things I said or did.

Maggie: It’s really, really annoying. But yeah, equally innocent. And really, at that point, the enthusiasm for sharing this came purely not out of, “look at me, look what I found,” at that point. It was more like, look what I found. You need to know this. You need to know this because it gives so much freedom.

Rick: Yeah. You see people going through unnecessary suffering because they don’t know this and, out of compassion, you want to help them. But that can be a fundamentalist trip also.

Maggie: It can totally become a fundamentalist trip, and also be annoying to be at the receiving end of this.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, think of all the fundamentalist Christians in the world who look at everybody and think, “They’re going to hell, and I’m not. I better help them not go to hell.”

Maggie: Yeah, a fundamentalist version of anything is just awful. But for me, it’s a total pain in the ass. But at that point, I remember there was quite a period of time where it was really genuinely just out of compassion. Like, “you need to know this.” Like, “I don’t want you to suffer. Look, I’ll tell you this and things will change.” So, it was, yeah, and I will probably always say that for as long as anyone hears, or is willing to hear me, that if that was the only insight that I ever had, if I hadn’t had any other insight after that, that would have been plenty. Because I really felt as if it saved my life in many ways. And it just completely shifted, not just how I saw other people. By the way, again, the beauty of that insight was that it translated onto everyone else in that I saw the inherent innocence of all people, right? I saw how people are caught up in their stories and beliefs and thoughts, all of them, not just me, right? So that the inherent peace with capital P was available to everyone, that everyone was sort of inherently whole. And that was so beautiful. And I think the other thing I would say, the most liberating thing was that I just didn’t have to believe anything I thought about myself because right up until that point, everything I thought about myself just felt very solid and definite, whereas that completely blew everything. Nothing looked fixed and solid anymore, basically. Everything was up for questioning from that point.

Rick: That’s always a good attitude, I think. You know, in life in general and at every stage of the spiritual path, you know, don’t be so damn sure about anything. Always be open to questioning your assumptions and questioning what teachers say. I mean, you don’t have to be a total skeptic or cynic, because that would take it to the other extreme, just questioning everything, meaning it’s all BS and I’m not going to accept any of it. There’s a kind of a balancing point between credibility and open-mindedness. I think you referred to open-mindedness earlier in this conversation.

Maggie: Yeah, totally. Just curiosity and not necessarily looking for some kind of definite conclusion on any subject. And Rick, years later, I still discovered that I was closed-minded about so many things. I had so many other ideas that I was kind of holding on to rigidly without being aware that I was doing it, but that came later on so it didn’t cure me.

Rick: Well, it’s a progressive development, you know? It doesn’t happen overnight.

Maggie: No, not at all. But just to know, just to feel that I was not inherently broken, that I didn’t really need fixing, that there was really nothing inherently wrong with me. That doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be things to be improved or to be better at, but I’m talking about not being inherently broken. That was massively impactful.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. Now I got the impression from your book that with this shift that happened in Phoenix, everything was pretty groovy for a while, smooth and peaceful and so on, but then things started to bubble up or loosen up and you had to start facing some difficult emotions and confusion and fear and angst and so on. Is that right?

Dark Nights, Depression, and Seven Years of Waves

Maggie: Yeah. So again, it was a very gradual process. You know, you were talking about people awakening without practice or things like that. I really didn’t know that this was called an awakening. To me it was just, as I said, a shift, a fundamental shift in perception that if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone. So, I didn’t see it as a spiritual event or something that happened to spiritual people. And it didn’t put me on any kind of spiritual path. I was just continuing with my life. It’s just that I just experienced life differently, basically. And I would say that for the next two, three years, I was in this equanimity. I think that was probably the best word. So, in fact, the first year after the shift, life was very challenging, very challenging on many fronts. But I was just experiencing it and navigating it very differently, with much more grace, with much more ease. And then basically, some three years into it, because that equanimity lasted for so long, I kind of assumed this is how I’m always going to be. You see, that this is how it is. And I’m not saying that I was always blissful or always happy. No, not like that. But there was that Peace with a capital P. Let’s put it this way, that was always there regardless, and there was very little that could actually throw me in any way. And then, after about three years, there was a gradual process where I started suffering again, and then when I say again, I was even suffering more than I had suffered before that shift, to be honest. And this time it was even more scary. It was kind of scary, because I had no idea why this was going on. I just found myself so completely and utterly depressed, and I’m saying seriously, like not wanting to get out of bed, you know? I was not wanting to get on with life and had suicidal thoughts. By the way, I have to mention that this is another reason why I say that this first shift, if that had been the only thing that happened, it would have been plenty. I have no doubt that because of that insight, that first insight, I actually didn’t follow through. Basically, I just knew that those were just thoughts and there was something, a knowing, that whatever I was going through was eventually going to pass.

Rick: Was there anything in your external circumstances, such as relationship or job or anything else that could have caused all this depression or was it purely a subjective thing?

Maggie: Nope. That’s why it was so completely confusing because there was nothing that I could point to as the reason why I was suffering so much. So, this is why it was just awful, and I didn’t know Angelo, I didn’t know Suzanne Marie, I didn’t know people like that where, if I shared with them my experience or what happened, they’d respond, “Oh, here’s where you are, here’s your next step,” or, “here’s what you should do” or something like that. I had no frame of reference. Again, I was still not a spiritual seeker, still not doing anything in this area. So, I was very, very lost and very, very confused. There were periods of just sheer terror, sheer terror that was just coming out of nowhere. And for no apparent reason, so that went on and off for nearly ten, well, if I count from after the three years of equanimity, maybe seven years, on and off.

Rick: I have a theory about this. Let me see what you think of it.

Maggie: Tell me.

Rick: And that is that a shift can take place, a big shift, and it acts as a kind of solvent for buried stuff that otherwise would just stay buried. But once you have the shift, then it has a dissolving influence and stuff starts to loosen up, which otherwise might not have. And this is why we hear this term “dark night of the soul” or of various difficult phases people go through after having had a beautiful awakening. It just opens the Pandora’s box so all the little demons can get out.

Maggie: Yeah. Big time. I totally agree. Now I know that, now I know that exactly, precisely this is what was happening. It does open a Pandora box. There have been several shifts in my experience, and I would even say that every shift kind of illuminates more and more stuff. So, this is basically a lot of unconscious material that was coming up to the surface and wants to be met, but I didn’t know that. So, what I was doing, I was basically dismissing everything as just a thought or just an illusion. You see what I mean?

Rick: So, for some seven years you were dealing with this stuff and dismissing it as just thoughts?

Maggie: I was dealing with it for seven years on and off. It wasn’t like that. I was out of that quote, unquote Peace with capital P for lack of a better word. I was out of it. Torture, dark night, depression, whatever, back to it again. So, I was in and out, in and out. I never went back to seeing life the same way as before the shift. So, the shift was permanent. There was no way I could see things the same way as before the shift, but now I was suffering and telling myself it was all just a thought and the illusion just wasn’t cutting it.

Rick: Like holding your hand in a flame and saying, “Oh, it’s just a thought.” It’s not going to help.

Maggie: Exactly that. And so, literally, it became my actual coping mechanism. And this is actually very common, when a particular shift becomes a hiding place or a coping mechanism. And it’s a way to basically dismiss or bypass or just stay in denial. And I too, I didn’t know that I was doing that. So, this is why I have no judgment about this because it’s innocent. As if I really didn’t know any better, I was just at the mercy of what was going on without any clue why this was happening. And so, now I know in retrospect that I was basically just suppressing, suppressing and suppressing until basically I couldn’t anymore.

It became my actual coping mechanism. And this is actually very common, when a particular shift becomes a hiding place or a coping mechanism.

Rick: Is this the phase that you refer to as the darkest night or was that something that happened even after that?

Maggie: No, no.

Rick: Oh, the best is yet to come. So, how did you get out of this seven-year phase?

Maggie: So basically, I would say that those were multiple dark nights, on and off.

Rick: In waves, wave after wave.

Maggie: In waves, wave after wave after wave. And now when I look back, I think that something just exhausted itself. And something was in the process of exhausting itself basically over all those years. And then there was a situation which seemed to have basically pushed me over the edge, so to speak. And I experienced just a massive emotional breakdown, which I now call “the surrender.” And that threw me into what I call the darkest night.

Rick: So, it got even darker than your seven years. Yeah, and you say in your book that you started to be flooded with memories and blame and judgment and so on. It just started pouring out. Your traits you didn’t like about yourself, such as manipulativeness or narcissism or lying or…

Maggie: All the nice things. Yeah. Yeah, first of all, it felt as if a cork popped. Stuff tried to come out over those seven years, but it was as if I would just cork it up. And then the cork basically popped and it was an avalanche of things that basically came out. But at the same time, I also look at it as a moment of a surrender. I felt that all my attempts to mitigate my experience, to do something, including dismissing it as just an illusion or just a thought, all just collapsed. And for the first time, I was feeling emotions so fully, that actually, even though it was incredibly painful, it was also incredibly liberating, because I just could not bypass or suppress anymore. It was as if my body just said enough, enough is enough. That’s it! And there was a palpable momentum that picked up that day. It felt as if I was in the process now of something that was running this process that had nothing to do with me already then. And then I went into what I call the darkest night, because all that subconscious, or unconscious material was coming up to the surface, lots of trauma, lots of memories, lots of grievances, that kind of stuff. But also, for the first time I was discovering things about myself that I hadn’t seen before. I considered myself as this noble person, better than, morally superior, etc., than a certain someone specifically and then in comparison to other people. And basically, the best way I can describe it was just, one by one, that every time I pointed a finger at someone to accuse them of something and was feeling noble and righteous as I was doing it, the finger would turn around. It was like sitting in a cinema and there would be memories of me doing something similar to another person maybe, or in different circumstances. Maybe it was not the same thing, maybe not as huge or overt or something like that, but nevertheless.

Rick: There’s a saying, if you point your finger at someone, there are three fingers pointing back at you.

Maggie: Yeah, exactly. Well, if one is willing to see that. It was extraordinary, Rick, because I genuinely didn’t know how many stories I had of myself that just were not true. And I’m talking about the simplest things, like I would never lie. I could never lie, or something. And then I had multiple examples coming to my memory of situations where I lied to someone or told half-truths or white lies or something. We’re talking about everything how I was, I would pride myself on being non-judgmental and then see how I judge people all the time, actually really harshly and so on. This went right down to really narcissistic tendencies, like manipulations of all sorts in relationships. But again, this stuff was not conscious. It was as if the unconscious became conscious. It’s as if someone turned the lights on and then I could just see my whole self. And when I say my whole self, I mean with all the good and “the really bad.” And there was no hiding from it, which is why it really felt like I was just burning in shame for months. And that whole image of this “noble me” was just burning to the ground, piece by piece. By the end of this process, I genuinely could not see the other. I could not point at someone and not see myself immediately as them. So, there was nothing left of me feeling better, more noble than anyone else. That was just gone. And that was really very painful, very painful.

Rick: You know, I wish everyone could go through this before the spiritual awakening, because what often happens is people have some profound spiritual awakening and maybe they even become a famous guru or something, supposedly a very enlightened person, and yet they have huge amounts of narcissism and dishonesty and all kinds of shortcomings, personality shortcomings. And they appear to be blind to that, because they haven’t worked them out. And these things often even become more magnified, perhaps because of their spiritual awakening. So, the way in which, and the order in which you’ve done things seems very healthy to me.

Maggie: Yeah, I’m so grateful. I mean, to be honest with you, it was one of the most soul-destroying experiences. It was a horrible, horrible experience. It was totally, you could say, ego-crushing on all levels. There’s just absolutely nothing left of it. I really describe it as if life brought me down to my knees, as if it was intent upon bringing me down to my knees and it succeeded and I’m so grateful for it, so grateful for it. And you are right, I totally agree with what you’ve just said, and I’m absolutely not excusing anybody, but it was extraordinary to realize how much of what I saw in myself was completely unconscious. I was just not aware of so many of those things. I think the trouble comes when, as a teacher, someone points it out to you and you’re still not willing to see it. You see what I mean? There may even be instances where there will be teachers who will be teaching about shadow work, never having done shadow work themselves, and things like that.

Rick: And also, there are teachers who isolate themselves from critical feedback, who don’t want to hear it, and if somebody offers it, that person gets kicked out or silenced.

Maggie: Yeah, red flag, big time. And so, it’s a massive topic and a really important one. And you’re right. I think that there are many people who don’t get to do this bit. Because honestly, who would want this? Who would want this? Nobody would want this. Part of me doesn’t wish this on anyone, to go through something like this because it’s humiliating. But it’s extremely humbling and it’s a really good thing, ultimately. And yes, you definitely would wish that especially the people who are in spiritual realms, who teach big numbers of people, that they would have done it.

Rick: Yeah. I don’t know about the profession of psychiatry or psychology, but presumably if a person pursues those professions, they have to do a lot of self-scrutiny as part of their training, because they have to go through therapy themselves.

Maggie: Yeah.

Rick: And that might be a good prerequisite for becoming a spiritual teacher. (laughs)

Maggie: It would be a great prerequisite. It would be a great prerequisite, but unfortunately, this is also where there is a trap. The trap is that at some point, and I’ve experienced that trap myself, because in those seven years, if you mentioned to me therapy in those moments when I struggled, if you mentioned to me, “maybe you could see a therapist,” or “maybe you could talk to someone,” or whatever, I would have said, “absolutely forget about it. I am not going to go to therapist because all they do is just, it’s like I’m working on stories, on illusion. Why would I talk about my past? My past doesn’t exist. Why would I talk about my traumas? Traumas don’t exist. It’s just a story,” you see? And again, I wasn’t…

Rick: Were you reading a bunch of books or watching a bunch of YouTube videos that were drilling that notion into your head? Because there are a lot of people who talk that way.

Maggie: No.

Rick: “Don’t worry about Gaza, it’s just a story.”

Maggie: Yeah, no, no, this was interesting. So, imagine, this attitude came out of that first shift, because I saw how so much is just created, it’s in the mind, blah, blah, blah. And especially things like dwelling in the past and dwelling on the story of your childhood, which is an illusion as well. And I kind of laugh about it now. I wasn’t even into radical neo-Advaita, whatever, this just came from that first shift. But I genuinely saw it that way. This was my genuine outlook, at that point. So, I wouldn’t even consider things like therapy, because to me, it was just being lost in the story and ultimately an illusion. And so, I see it all the time now. And sometimes I just talk to someone about hiding in emptiness. You know, there are people who can be totally stuck in this kind of thing, where a profound shift, any profound shift, doesn’t matter if it’s no doer, emptiness, nothingness. I don’t care, it can be literally hijacked by the mind and used as a kind of a hiding place, as a way to bypass, as a way to stay in denial. And very often you might not even know that you’re doing it. And I would say it’s mostly the case that you don’t even know that you’re doing it, because you are looking from a completely different perspective until hopefully someone either points it out to you or something happens that shifts you farther. But it’s definitely one of the big traps where what once is a genuinely profound insight becomes a kind of excuse or a reason not to look at the human aspects of our being, which we all share no matter how awake anyone is. I don’t care. You know?

Rick: Yeah.

Maggie: Yeah.

Rick: Are you aware of, or are you a member of the Association for Spiritual Integrity? Do you know about that?

Maggie: I know about it from Buddha the Gas Pump, but I haven’t investigated it and I’m not a member. Because I thought this is for teachers. I thought it was for teachers.

Rick: Yeah, mainly, but you kind of fit the definition.

Maggie: Oh no, gosh!

Rick: I mean we have actual astrologers in there, who are providing that kind of service. And they are members. But a lot of the things we’re discussing here are things that that organization, which I helped to establish, concerns itself with greatly in order to help to clean up some of these things in the spiritual community that have been very harmful to people.

Maggie: Yeah

Rick: Anyway, that’s just a side note.

Maggie: I’m glad that it exists. I’m glad the organization exists, yeah.

Rick: Check it out. So, how did you work through this phase, this darkest night phase, presuming you have. I think you have.

Maggie: How did I work? I survived, basically. I survived. No, something profound started happening as a result of that. As I said, there was a certain momentum, and it lasted for a few months. Gosh, let me try, I bet I’m going to miss bits and pieces. I’m just giving you the gist of what happened next. Yes, at some point I started looking for videos about awakening, which I didn’t understand. I didn’t even understand why I was doing it because I had no interest in awakening. I had no interest in spirituality. But I somehow felt drawn to listening to people talking about awakening. And now I know that I was basically looking, I wasn’t so much looking for awakening or anything. I was trying to understand why, after such a profound shift, I was suffering so much. I really was looking for someone, who could explain to me why this was happening. And this is probably when I came across a video of someone who actually was a guest on your channel.

Rick: Bonnie Greenwell

Maggie: Not Bonnie Greenwell. It was Shakti…

Rick: Katharina Maji.

Maggie: Yes. It was her. So, I listened to her. So, basically, one of the things I talk about in my book, I would come across certain teachers and I was just looking for humanity. I was aware, I had heard about transcendence. Okay, moving on. Still, explain, why is, I’ve had an insight. I’ve seen what you’re talking about. Why? So, at this point, Rick, I still didn’t know that there were stages of awakening. I still didn’t know that there was awakening of the heart or God or what that even meant, you know, none of it. I actually didn’t know it, I really just only started learning about all this stuff afterwards. And anyway, so she was the first teacher – I will never forget when I found her talk – and she talked about the post awakening journey. And she started bringing up these issues of all sorts, like mental health issues, psychological issues, physical issues. I don’t remember which talk it was, but my jaw was on the floor and my heart was racing. And I was thinking, “Oh my God,” finally a spiritual teacher who talks about this whole other side of this process as no one else did. And at least I’m sure more people talked about it, but I couldn’t find anyone until I found her who mentioned this stuff. And all of a sudden, I first of all, I saw a teacher who also appeared to me to be human, whom I could relate to, which I very much appreciated. And she also spoke in a way that I could relate to, didn’t use too much terminology that I couldn’t understand or something. So, that was incredible, just to hear that. And there was a moment where things have calmed down on their own, like the darkest night lasted and lasted, things started sort of calming down. And then one day, I was on my own at home and was watching something on Netflix and I felt this wave of terror coming over me, like one of those that used to happen years earlier. And I was really surprised and completely taken by it because I felt like, “okay, here we go again.” I had thought that was past me. But at this point, and it is important that, because of the darkest night and because I felt like I was forced to be with the discomfort, emotional discomfort, physical discomfort, all kinds of discomfort, my body built the capacity, basically, to be with discomfort of any kind. And this is actually extremely important. And even before that, I will say, Rick, that to me that darkest night, I can’t imagine this process of awakening without it. And actually, to me, it is as important as any profound shift is important, not less, not more. It’s as important as any other shift.

Rick: So, are you saying everyone has to go through one?

Maggie: I don’t know that everyone has to go through one. I think that everyone goes through their version of it. For some people, it’s going to be very intense. For some people, it will be less intense. We’re all different. So, I really don’t like to generalize because I really just don’t know. And I also don’t know if anyone has to go through it. I’m just saying that in my experience, looking back, I honestly can’t imagine embodied awakening without descending to hell for a while. I really just can’t imagine it, without having gone through that darkest night and facing the not so pleasant bits about myself and facing shame and facing guilt and facing all kinds of fears. I really can’t imagine that because it’s how I discovered a lot of unconscious coping mechanisms, a lot of unconscious patterns. And had I not become aware of that, they would continue to play out, no matter how profound other shifts may have been.

Rick: I see what you mean. And I think what we were saying earlier is that perhaps in some cases, people manage to bypass that without resolving all that stuff and achieve some kind of high state, but there’s all this unresolved stuff that ends up causing their behavior to be very distorted in certain ways. And perhaps it eventually ends up in a big crash and burn event.

Maggie: Yeah, exactly, I don’t even know how the body can sustain this kind of level of denial, because the body genuinely keeps the score. And sooner or later, I feel like you’ll be forced one way or another to deal with stuff that just wants to naturally come up. But again, I really can’t speak for other people. And I really don’t know how that plays out for everyone. But I’m just saying that for me, the transcendental “shifts” were absolutely important, but that part was equally important. As painful as it was to go through it, I really just can’t imagine that process without it.

Rick: Yeah, I agree. It’s a big house cleaning that everyone needs to go through. And I suppose the intensity and duration of it depends upon how messy your house is. But we all have some cleaning up to do.

Maggie: And you know, what I came to see now, a few years since the last shift, is that it is in layers. The way I see it anyway, for as long as I’m in this human body, there is no end point to this. And I would even say that it’s an indication of awakening where you actually no longer look for an end point, in a sense, or imagine that there is such thing.

Rick: I’m like a broken record on that point. And you may have heard my favorite quote from St. Teresa of Avila, which is, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.”

Maggie: Yes, amazing, I love it. Yeah, I love it so much. For me, this body, it’s a whole other story, which maybe you remember from the book, but obviously there are other shifts that happened. But the awakening, the end of separation, the emptiness, the awakening of the heart, and the awakening of the gut were incredibly pivotal. After all those shifts, I only got to discover the layers of stuff in the body, that this body holds that I cannot even access any more consciously. It’s just extraordinary. So, looking for some kind of an end point or point at which I’ll be free from all my inflections or all my human screw-ups or whatever, I can’t relate to that at all.

Rick: Yeah, this is why I don’t like Neo-Advaita. Because, they say things like, “You’re already enlightened,” and all this stuff about progress and layers, and it’s all just a lot of mind stuff. It’s all illusion, and you’re just indulging in it, and you’re keeping yourself endlessly on a hamster wheel of chasing after something, blah, blah, blah. But I really think everything you’re saying is very valid here.

Maggie: And it’s not even that, because a lot of what they’re saying is not even that it’s not true, you see.

Rick: Right.

Maggie: It’s just that…

Rick: That’s one dimension of it, but it’s not the whole enchilada.

Maggie: And also, the way I see it, this is where the mind hijacks a profound shift and turns it into a view.

Rick: Right, right.

Maggie: It turns it into a specific fixed view from which it speaks, from which it views everything, and it’s one-sided, you know? And so right there, to me, that’s already suspicious. So, middle way, middle way, Rick, I think, is really always a good idea.

Rick: And it’s not a helpful teaching for a lot of people who hear people talking this way, and then they try to adopt that attitude, which is an attitude you said you had for a while. And they kind of deny a lot of things and even begin to become nihilistic or lose interest in their family, things like that, because they’re just dismissing and denying so much of the lived human reality.

Maggie: But that is precisely the difference between an actual insight and when mind co-opts an insight or a certain understanding and then uses it. It’s the same thing with anything. Using non-doer, when the non-doer-ship, if it’s not directly experienced, the mind will co-opt the uses to excuse inexcusable behaviors. It’s the same thing. And you can just tell, because no one who’s had a direct experience of non-doer-ship will ever say such a thing. And in fact, you’d say not only that it’s not true, I would say it’s precisely the opposite. Because, the sense of self that would try to hide and avoid and pretend and gloss over things kind of dissolves. And there is no hiding place. Your behaviors, your inflections, everything is out in the open. And to me, if I can say one thing about the way I see the realization, is that accountability and responsibility are inherent with it. They are absolutely inherent with it. So, if anyone uses and co-opts any spiritual concept as a way to excuse inexcusable behaviors or something, then that’s a red flag, as far as I’m concerned.

Rick: Yeah, very well put. And you saved me from having to go on one of my rants about that very point. You did it for me.

Maggie: I did it for you, Rick, oh my God, people will be exhausted.

Rick: Thank you.

Maggie: (laughing)

Rick: I’ve ranted on that too many times. So, I don’t want to skip too far ahead without going through the intermediate steps, but you talk about falling into is-ness, I think is the way you put it.

Maggie: Stumbling, stumbling on the is-ness.

Rick: There are various stages of emptiness, nothingness, is-ness.

Maggie: Yes, yes, yes.

Rick: Are we jumping ahead too far if we start talking about that? You want to cover some other stuff first or go right into it?

Maggie: I can just maybe do it quickly, not to exhaust your audience completely.

Rick: They’ve got a lot of stamina, my audience.

Maggie: Oh, that’s true. I can run through some. So, after that darkest night, what followed was what we can refer to as the dissolution of a sense of separation and what I call falling into an emptiness, which was actually a very scary experience at first, because, as I said, one night there was this wave of terror that came out of nowhere. And this time I was not as terrified of it. Again, the darkest night helped me build the capacity to be with that kind of discomfort. And so instead of avoiding it or running away from it, I lay down on my bed and I leaned into it. And I got curious about the terror and all I knew was that it was a kind of an existential terror. It was a terror of non-existence. That’s the best way I can describe it. And I kind of started conversing with it. Asking, “what is this about? What do I fear?” And I don’t even know how that came about. I think I must have… Oh, no, I know. I actually discovered Gangaji’s website. Gangaji is one of my favorite teachers of all time, by the way. And I discovered her website and there was a little inquiry, free, completely free, sets of questions that anyone can do for themselves. And I think that reading through them helped me do that inquiry for myself, even though it was not the same inquiry, but I kind of knew which direction to go because of that. So, I I just wanted to bring that up in case anyone wants to check it out. And it seemed, “okay, so what do you fear?” And I responded, “okay, that I’m not loved,” that I’m not loved. And I knew that it was not really that. And so, I continue, “what do I fear about that?” “Well, that I’m not special,” that I’m not special. And if I’m not special, then what do I fear about that? And the answer came that I’m nobody, see? And so, the moment that that answer came through, it was as though I was sucked into this black void of sorts, at first it was like a black void. It really felt like death, to be honest with you. It felt like that. But then very soon after, the dark turned into what I call emptiness or empty fullness. Then the darkness was light, the fear was love. There, the whole sense of separation between form and formless disappeared. And with that, I will have to rewind a little bit, but I had a kind of a knot in my belly, in the solar plexus for many, many years. I mentioned that a little bit in the book because it was actually quite a traumatic experience when someone pressed on it many, many years ago.

Rick: Yeah, you were having a massage, a Thai massage or something.

Maggie: Yeah, yeah, that was absolutely traumatizing.

Rick: Yeah, the guy barely touched it and all of a sudden you were freaking out.

Maggie: Yeah, I was freaking out. It was just that it was both physical and emotional pain intertwined at the same time. So, we were both freaked out, because I did not know why I reacted like that, so it was really quite interesting. As I was in this empty fullness or whatever, that knot started dissolving. And by that time, it felt as if the existential angst that was still there, even though I worked through the fears and I worked through so much stuff, there was still this underlying, what I call a knot of separation. Because it felt as if it was a kind of physical knot that contained almost the core of this existential angst, because of the sense of separation. So, when that sense of separation dissolved, that knot dissolved with it. And it really felt as if even my physical body dissolved into that emptiness with it. And even the body was not separate anymore from the formless. So, if you had asked me after that, I got up and I felt, “wow, that was something else.” And I just went and made myself a cup of tea and went on with whatever I was doing, because I still didn’t have a frame of reference. I would have never told you, “Oh, this was emptiness, and a sense of suppression dissolved, and this was an awakening of the heart and gut.” I didn’t know that. In that moment, I didn’t know that this is what it was. It became clear afterwards.

Rick: This is one thing I find fascinating about you is, you can read some little line on a website or something and it precipitates this whole dramatic, profound shift. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me. I kind of crank away with my spiritual practice and all. I get the feeling, and this might seem like philosophical speculation, but I think you’re one of these people who perhaps has done a lot of spiritual practice in past lives. I believe in past lives, and so you come into this life and there’s this kind of realization that you’re destined to achieve and you’re led to things, this thing and that thing, that serve not as necessarily causes of the level of realization that you are destined to achieve, but rather just as little catalysts that make it happen. But it’s got the momentum to happen anyway. But some little line on a website triggers a big shift and moves you more fully into your natural birthright that you’re destined to realize. Does that ring true to you?

Maggie: I definitely heard someone mention that. I don’t remember who that was. And it’s possibly true. You know, I really just can’t know that. But it’s certainly plausible. It sounds plausible.

Rick: A thousand other people could read that line on that website and not get anything, and you read it and the next thing you know you’re in unity consciousness or something.

Maggie: Exactly, yes, exactly. Yeah, but you know, it’s been relentless. I think that as much as everything you’re saying is absolutely true, at the same time it’s been a really tough ride. It’s been a really, really tough ride. And I think that this is part of the awakening process that I believe is still very rarely talked about, because this was actually by no means over. Because right after that, well soon after that, I had the next batch of stuff come up to the surface, traumas and wounds and all sorts of things coming up to the surface and that’s where the energy started kicking in, which you know.

Rick: Yeah, you had all the Kundalini symptoms and things.

Maggie: I had all the Kundalini symptoms, it started with the shaking, kind of randomly, involuntary movements, yeah, this kind of stuff. But again, even then, there was something. Because I’m such an inquisitive person, I normally will Google things and check things and research things to death. There was no urgency to do that, funnily enough. It was almost as if there was a sense of this momentum that I mentioned. There was a momentum, there was something taking place that had almost nothing to do with me. There was a palpable sense of that.

Rick: Well, that’s what I was saying a minute ago. You’ve got this momentum going in your life and, whether you want it or not, it just is dragging you along from one thing to the next.

Maggie: There are some disadvantages to that. For example, this is probably why I never had a clue as to what I actually want to do with my life or where I’m actually going. Honestly, I was just following some kind of crumbs or something, you know. But even with those movements, I didn’t know it was called Kundalini. I kind of trusted that, but I can’t even call it trust, there was a knowing that there was a process and it was happening and it just had to basically play out. There was a moment of concern, I would say, one moment where I thought maybe I was developing Tourette’s or something like that, to be honest.

Rick: Because you were approaching Kundalini stuff.

Maggie: Yeah. And I’m serious about that, because it was a bit much at some point. And then the only thing that I started noticing is, if someone near me spoke truth, like heartfelt truth, the movements would start. Or, for example, if I heard the word consciousness, then my body would react. So, there were certain predictable patterns that I started noticing, like when those movements were kicking in, but otherwise they were kind of random. But then, I started having these real surges of energy, and those were really, really unsettling, at least at the beginning. Where literally when I’m sitting, I felt like I had to like hold onto my sofa because I felt as if, if I didn’t, it would, I don’t know, I would explode or something would happen. I know it sounds very dramatic, but honestly, it felt this dramatic. This was genuinely a point at which I believed that levitation exists. I really believe that maybe if I weighed half of what I weigh, that energy had the capacity to actually lift me off the ground, genuinely. And so that went on for a while. And I noticed very quickly that the more I would lean into it, rather than try to resist it or get freaked out by it, then that energy would settle on its own and much quicker. And then there was, again, I’m kind of rushing through a little bit. So, I’m going through another kind of batch of stuff in terms of my past traumas and things. The energy surges were happening and so on. And then one night, I was in my bedroom. I was listening to Conscious TV. I don’t know if Conscious TV still exists.

Rick: Yeah, Ian and Renata McNay.

Maggie: Yes, Ian and Renata McNay. And sometimes, because I loved Renata’s voice because it was so soothing, I would put one of her conversations with someone on and I would go in and out of sleep. And normally, I would fall asleep and then listen to the rest on the next day. And I was drifting in and out of sleep. I don’t even remember what video that was or who was talking. And at some point, I was lying on my back and this guest says the word consciousness, and my body started to vibrate. The whole body started to vibrate. The whole room started vibrating. I could feel that surge of energy, basically like a build-up. And to the point, this is going to sound so crazy, but my head was started to move from side to side, really rapidly, and it freaked me out for a moment. This was a new movement that hadn’t happened before. And then I just remembered that I have to relax into it, I just have to relax into it. And as soon as I relaxed into it, and as crazy as it sounds, this is literally the best way I can describe it, everything disappeared. And there was a void, which was different from the emptiness, the one before emptiness, which is why I make a distinction between emptiness and nothingness. And there was just this seeing of this bubble floating. There was a bubble floating in a space. I would call it now a primordial void or something like that. And there was a bubble floating in it. And I knew that the bubble was me and my life, that the bubble was my life and the “me” was in it.

Rick:  So.

Maggie: So basically, there was a recognition that this bubble was my life and that the “I” was in it. And then the moment that recognition happened, the bubble burst and then there was just nothing. And I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up on the next day and I was sitting on the bed and my partner comes in and I said, “there’s nobody here.” But I don’t know. And I said, “I’m disoriented, but I don’t know who is disoriented.” So, it doesn’t make any sense. I was aware, I was totally aware that what I was saying didn’t make any sense, you know? And he looked at me and he said that I looked like a deer, caught in lights.

Rick: A deer in the headlights,

Maggie: Yeah, in the headlights. Yeah. And I just felt something was gone. The sense of “I” that was there the day before, that had been in charge. Let’s call it the doer, whatever, had been there and now it wasn’t, so, it literally felt like my body was hollow. It was actually a very visceral experience. I wouldn’t call it a state or anything transcendental because I was sitting there on the bed with my body and everything normally talking. It was just that there was very much a sense of something gone. Something was very gone. And then I would get up and started cleaning. Like I do, I just got on with things, you know? So, I started tidying the apartment and everything. And everything felt like miraculous activity. I was staring at the bottle of window spray and it was looking at me, it’s hard to describe. But literally everything and the whole, it was as if the body was moving and cleaning and doing all the activities in an incredibly focused way. That window spray and that cloth were the only things that existed in the universe in that moment. It was just absolutely unbelievable. And it was so clear that there was no sense of doer needed for things to be done. Like, the digesting happens, breathing happens, it’s the same with everything else. And so that was it. And, you know, I had a few days of disorientation, because of that. But then, it quickly, I don’t know, integrated itself or settled down. I don’t know how to how to say it, so much so that I never talked about it since. I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it because there’s nothing to talk about. Again, if you had asked me at the time, I would never have said anything to you about “no doer.” I would never talk about consciousness. I would never talk about any of those things. I would just describe the bubble, describe the nothing, describe the hollowness, and that would be it. Because I didn’t really have the language. I did hear those terms. I did hear terms like nothingness and emptiness floating around somewhere, listening to videos before. But I never made a connection until long after. So actually, my first conversation with Angelo, I still didn’t connect the dots. Honestly, Rick, I was all over the place. I could only tell bits and pieces about my experience, but I really couldn’t still, I still didn’t fully make any sense out of what happened, and how those various shifts fit with the frame of reference that is used in different traditions and stuff like that. And then I was walking in the woods, which is why I said we have it in common, we like to walk in the woods. And something else happened, which is really, this one is impossible to really describe because it was so, it was such an ordinary moment of what I call the “stumbling on is-ness,” where basically there was just a recognition that there’s just this, that this moment cannot be any different than what it is. It sounds very, maybe lame as I said it. Because, I’ve said those words, “It is what it is” so many times, but they completely meant something very different, usually resignation. But it was a profound something that happened. And as I walked back home, I saw what I call a mechanism of resistance, but some people would call it a self-structure. And I saw the sense of self as this one massive coping mechanism. And that is basically resisting what is. And that it creates so much suffering. So, it wasn’t just the sense of separation that creates suffering, but the resistance to what is. And as soon as that mechanism was seen, and I’m saying “seen” with such detail, right down to the molecular level, it was almost like seeing this sense of self as an x-ray view and all the different ways we unknowingly resist what is. And as soon as this structure was seen, it collapsed. That’s the best way I can describe it. And then this whole idea of awakening and stages collapsed with it. Not as denial, I’m not denying the stages or anything like that because it can easily be misconstrued. It’s just that all of a sudden, even the whole idea of awakening went and the stages and there was just this. There was just, what is left is just being human and doing human things. And it’s kind of like something happened and nothing happened. It was kind of like that, where I genuinely, believe it or not Rick, I actually ran out of words. I told you that once I start it’s like that. Once I’m off. I’m off, it’s hard to shut me up.

Rick: But you’re saying good stuff, I didn’t want to interrupt you, but I do have a couple of questions.

Maggie: Yeah, ask me.

Rick: Yeah, so earlier maybe 20 minutes ago, you were saying that there appears to be no end to the journey. There’s always going to be something unfolding, and yet just now you’re talking about the end of stages. So, before I ask a second question, how about trying to reconcile those two statements?

Maggie: Yeah. So, it’s kind of the way, as I talk about it in the book. It was also the end of paradox because all of a sudden, the seeming opposites or contradictions, they coexist without conflict, right? So, this is why I can say the stages totally exist. I’ve been through stages. This is what they’re called and this is what happened and then this is what happened and at the same time, I see that none of that happened. And there’s no conflict in that. So, there’s no rejecting of anything. There’s no denying anything. None of that. It’s like the best shot in terms of that. So, you see multiple contradictions that coexist without conflict. There’s no need to reject anything, basically. There’s no holding, there’s no pushing, there’s no holding on to anything, there’s no pushing anything away. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, a couple of people sent me t-shirts with the word paradox on them because I like the word so much. And I’ve used it so many times.

Maggie: Yeah, yeah, this is what I mean. I call it a death of paradox because of the things my mind would see all of a sudden. This is also what I saw that day, that the mind loves to see things in black and white terms, it has to be either like this, or it has to be like that, right? Whereas what happened there, it was, well, it’s like this, it’s like that, and neither is true. And then there’s something else, and then there’s another something else, and all of it coexists at the same time. There’s no contradiction, which is why I called it the death of paradox. And I genuinely don’t anymore have an experience of paradox, because I see no conflict between all these seeming contradictions anymore.

Rick: Yeah, I think the key word is conflict because there are still paradoxical realities, just as there are in the universe itself. Photons behave both as particles or as waves, depending upon whether or not somebody’s observing them. But nature doesn’t have a problem with that. And so there can be these paradoxical realities where nothing is happening and everything is happening and you don’t exist, yet you do exist. And on and on. We could name dozens of them.

Maggie: So, exactly. So, I suppose you’re right that maybe the better word is that it’s that the seeming contradictions basically coexist without conflict. To me, that is the best way to talk about it. The other thing I would say, to be honest, this is kind of difficult for me to convey. Because you know that momentum that I talked about that picked up, especially during that emotional breakdown/surrender, that momentum picked up and that day in the woods, there was a palpable sense of that momentum coming to an end. But I would not call it an arrival point or an end point. So, this is why I have trouble. I don’t know how else to talk about it other than that the momentum came to an end. Maybe another way to say it is that the seeking came to an end or looking for any other, there was no looking for anything else. The momentum came to an end. There was just this. So, and that’s it. I don’t see it as, like, I don’t know what else is out there. You know, I can’t talk about it, this is why I am not comfortable talking about it as an end point or an arrival point. I can only speak of the momentum, definitely, palpably coming to an end or the search for my understanding, because really, for me, this was not so much a journey of awakening. It was really a journey of seeking answers as to why I was suffering. And I felt as if that was when that search came to an end. But then, as you know from the books, all sorts of other stuff started happening.

Rick: There’s another paradox that comes up a lot, and I’ve had long conversations with people like Susanna Marie and others about this. And that is, I guess you could call it the paradox of no-self versus self. And you’ve talked a bit about no-self. And my sense, and I don’t claim to have the ultimate understanding of this, maybe I’m at a spiritually immature stage or something, I don’t know, but my sense is that it’s a both-and situation. It’s a paradoxical situation. An analogy I use is, if you have a candle in a pitch-dark room, it’s really bright, it lights up the whole room. But if you put that same candle out in the bright sunlight, you can’t even tell if it’s lit or not because the sun is so bright. So, I think that, and I’ve had discussions about this with some other people who claim to have been awakened for many, many years, who say that you never entirely lose a sense of personal self. It just kind of goes to the back seat. For most people, it’s not the predominant thing, that’s their whole thing about who they are. But it becomes just more like a faculty, which is not your primary sense of who you are, but it’s something that enables you to function as a human being. And if it didn’t, you could hit your thumb with a hammer and you wouldn’t even know it, or someone would call your name and you wouldn’t answer. There’s some kind of localization in addition to the impersonal dimension that you might be primarily grounded in. So that’s my understanding. And again, I don’t insist that it’s the right one. It’s just the way I see it, for what it’s worth.

Maggie: Yeah, yeah. Well, I can confess straight away that this is the bit which I find impossible to convey. And there is literally no amount of explaining that I could do to convey what’s actually in the direct experience, it’s very, very simple. Simple to the point of not being an issue at all. Asking whether there is a sense of self, where is it located? Is it here? Is it there? Is this what that means? It’s just not something that I even think about. So, I really don’t know where to go. I really wouldn’t know where to go with this because, for me, there was definitely a sense of self as something completely separate from the so-called formless. Or even that there was a separation between formless and form that then collapsed. And then, not only the sense of separation, but even the distinction between the two collapsed, which is also impossible to really convey. I honestly wouldn’t know how to work, how to convey this, but the difference is actually massive between the end of separation and the end of an actual distinction between the two. So that would be one thing. Then, when that sense of separation was gone, then there was this experience of no-doer, which to me is kind of related to no-self, where there is simply seeing that this body and mind are an intelligent mechanism that learns how to operate. And just as the breathing happens and all the processes in the body happen without any sense of me participating in it and controlling the process, so does everything else. Right? And so, funnily enough, this was another massive, very visceral, I wouldn’t call it a transcendental state at all. It was a visceral sense of, or loss of a sense of doer-ship. And this is where I think, to me, the no doer-ship is impossible to describe. It has to be experienced. Otherwise, it just makes no sense, no matter what words I could put into it. And this is why I said to you, I’m not very articulate when it comes to the technicalities of explaining. What’s in the direct experience is very, very simple, but the no doer-ship was really palpable. And this is why I shared that experience of how it was extraordinary to see how this body was totally, intelligently moving throughout the day, doing the chores and cleaning and knowing exactly what to do without a sense of self that was in charge of that process. That’s the only way I can describe it. But that didn’t feel at all like some kind of disassociation. It doesn’t mean that my brain was not switched on or anything like that, which is why it’s so difficult to talk about it. So, I would say there was this aspect of the self, no-self, no-doer kind of a thing. And then finally, there was a sense of a whole self-structure collapsing. And again, we’re really talking metaphors here, because to me it was all about, and this is also a metaphor, a certain movement of the mind that came to an end, that was creating the illusion of a sense of separate someone. And that was really interesting because I could see how, I call it a horizontal movement of the mind. And, in that moment in the woods, when I was coming back, I saw that mechanism, how to go back and forth between past and future, as though this was a linear time, was creating the illusion of a linear time. It was also creating this constant movement away from or towards something else that was all constantly keeping the mind away from being right here. And it was a movement that I call “waging the war with what is” by either dwelling on the past or “what-if”-ing about a future but never being quite here. But it was all a movement. It was a mechanism. It was seen as a mechanism, as a movement of the mind. And this movement, this same movement of the mind was creating an illusion of a separate someone in control. And then when that collapsed, it was as though the mind collapsed on itself. So, the horizontal line collapsed and turned vertical. And the mind almost, I describe it as the mind rested in the perpetual now, which is not even a point in time. It’s just that movement stopped. And then there was what I refer to, that there was just this and there really isn’t. The best way I can describe it is, there is no sense of self needed, which, if you notice, I always point out to this, I use the word “sense” all the time, but it’s a sense. In other words, there is no sense of self needed in order to function or even a sense of being a doer needed in order to function perfectly fine. So, everything goes on exactly as it has always been. It’s just that, in my experience, that sense of personal doer-ship or sense of self just isn’t there, but it also isn’t a big deal. It was a big deal for a moment, but it integrates and it’s just not needed in order to function, because the mind has developed, the brain has developed, it learned, it knows what to do. And so, it’s more like everything that remains is just seen more like a happening as opposed to someone doing something. And literally that is my best shot in trying to go there. But this is why I don’t, I can’t speak about it. In my experience, I can’t relate to that positioning of it, that it goes to the background or foreground. There’s none of that in the experience or even a sense of self in the center or some kind of groundless ground or something like that. There’s no sense of any of those things.

Rick: Okay, well, as I say, I don’t claim to have any kind of absolute understanding or experience of anything. Maybe a year from now, I would describe my experience exactly as you’re describing it. But as it is now, it’s more of a paradoxical thing where I totally get that there’s no doer, there’s clearly a sense of absolute silence in the midst of dynamic activity. And I could be playing pickleball, which I haven’t done for a few years, or tripping over something and hitting my face on the pickleball court, which happened one time. And as that happened, it wasn’t happening to me. You know, there was just that unshakable presence, “is-ness.”

Maggie: But to me, everything, the whole full-blown human experience, is exactly as it’s always been.

Rick: Yeah.

Maggie: It’s just what’s not there is that sense of either personal doer-ship or personal agency, but it doesn’t mean no agency, which is also why I’m saying that when it comes to…

Rick: So, if it’s not personal agency, whose agency is it? The body’s agency or nature’s agency?

Maggie: That question doesn’t even arise. That question, “whose is it,” doesn’t even arise. It’s just a non-issue. This is one of the reasons why I don’t even go into talking about this bit, it’s pretty much, even in my day to day, even in my one-on-one work with people, I very rarely go into this particular conversation. Because I can tell you that I remember, prior to the realization, when I listened to people talking about this, I had a real hard time wrapping my head around this. And I’ve learned from my previous inquiries with, starting with my first shift, that there’s just no point of trying to figure it out, because I just wouldn’t. Because, the only thing I say is that it’s a non-issue. It’s really a non-issue and in a direct experience it’s so completely obvious and simple, but I can totally see how the mind, at least my mind, had massive trouble wrapping itself around this whole idea. And I just think that there are certain experiences that are possible to convey. Or I’m just really bad at it. Or I’m simply one of those people who cannot convey this particular bit, which is impossible to describe. It just has to be experienced and then it really is just a non-issue.

Rick: Okay, just for the record, and we’ll never resolve this right now, but in Advaita Vedanta, the structure, the personality includes something called ahamkara, which means “I-maker”. And it’s said that you never lose that, just as you don’t lose the intellect or the mind or the indriyas, the senses. It’s a faculty. It’s just a faculty. It’s not who you are, but it’s a faculty that makes living as a human being possible. Kind of a sense of self without it being the self, because the self would be capitalized.

Maggie: Yeah, just like a functioning.

Rick: Yeah, a function. Good, good. Okay. Maybe that helps to resolve it. Anyway, a question came in. Let me ask that question. So, this is from John Rogers in California.

Maggie: Oh, hi, John.

Rick: You know John?

Maggie: I know John Rogers, yeah.

Rick: Okay, good. Maggie, you have had conversations with a number of people, many of whom are familiar to the Batgap community. Based on those conversations, what would you say are the three most common myths about awakening, aside from the myth that you never get the flu anymore?

Three Common Myths About Awakening

Maggie: Speaking of my flu! This is a great question, actually. I would say, well, the first myth I think we covered. To me, the biggest one is that this awakening/enlightenment only happens to a special kind of a person who has something special. I would even say, so I would say this is a myth. I think it’s absolutely available to everybody who’s basically interested. If someone is not interested in it, that’s okay, that’s okay, too. And I would say there’s a myth that there needs to be a perfect condition for awakening. Because I’ve already, I know from my own journey, but also from just hearing other people that people wake up in so many different circumstances. Sometimes it happens to people who never were even interested in awakening in the first place, or in what we would deem imperfect conditions, being on drugs or sitting in the pub. I know of someone awakening literally in the pub over a pint of Guinness, and stuff like that.

Rick: That sounds like Jac O’Keefe on her first awakening. That’s exactly what happened.

Maggie: Really? That’s incredible.

Rick: It might have even been Guinness.

Maggie: There you go. That would make sense that it would have been Guinness. But no, it was actually someone else. But either way, there is…

Rick: Maybe there’s something special about Guinness.

Maggie: Or maybe there’s something special about Guinness, Rick. Cheers to that.

Rick: Should buy stock in the company.

Maggie: Exactly. Good, good idea. But yeah, I would say, and if that was true, then the people who are totally into spirituality should have all this condition to awaken nailed and be awakened already. And we know that that’s not always the case. So, I would say that’s another myth. I think the biggest myth to me is this idea that awakening stops you from being a regular human. That you become someone special, who is above everyone else and that you are immune basically to human condition. Right? By which I mean conditioning, by which I mean all kinds of patterns of behavior, the things that we actually talked about. Which is why we talked about why it’s so important to do this kind of work, the shadow work, the trauma work, and so on. And that somehow, awakening is a state, basically, that’s detached from day-to-day life, with all its problems, with all its challenges. That it somehow puts one floating on some kind of transcendental cushion above life, unaffected by anything and so on. So, this whole thing about being unaffected, that’s dodgy to me.

To me, awakening is not complete if the humanness and life day-to-day is seen as something separate from this.

Rick: That’s another dimensional thing. It’s like when I fell on the pickleball court, my nose was bleeding, my lip was bleeding, but my pure consciousness wasn’t bleeding. It was unaffected, but the body was injured. That’s just a simple example. It’s one of those paradox things where you’re not affected, but you are affected, depending on which “you” you’re talking about.

Maggie: I would even say that to me, awakening is not complete if the humanness and life day-to-day is seen as something separate from this.

Rick: You’re right.

Maggie: You know? Right, if life is seen in fact as a nuisance or some kind of obstacle to awakening, then I would question that, right?

Rick: It’s a vehicle to awakening, not an obstacle.

Maggie: Yeah, because to me, there’s literally no point in awakening if it doesn’t translate to day-to-day life, exactly as it is, whether you’re a parent or going to work in the office or, I mean, it doesn’t matter. It’s just, I would say this is, to me, the biggest myth and the biggest, disservice, this idea that this somehow makes you a special someone who’s somehow detached from life and so on. And in fact, it can absolutely be the case, because you totally can be stuck in that kind of space, we talked about it as well, and be very much detached but kind of numb at the same time. And it’s more, it’s not even detached, it’s more like disassociated really with a lot of fear of life and a lot of fear of being affected by just day-to-day life and relational dynamics and situations and so on, then I would definitely question that. And finally, I would say the other myth is of a spiritual perfection that is tied to this which again puts awakened people on some kind of a pedestal, whether they’re teachers or not. They’re expected not to be human and not to have the same issues as everyone else, as if that awakening wiped them all out. To me, that’s another myth, which is why, to me, the more human the teacher and the more open and honest about their struggles, human struggles and human challenges, the more likely I am to look up to this person or trust them, to be honest. The more there is this unmoved persona that’s unaffected by whatever, then I get suspicious.

The more human the teacher and the more open and honest about their struggles, human struggles and human challenges, the more likely I am to look up to this person or trust them.

Rick: Yeah. Perhaps a good nutshell summary of that point, and see if you agree, is that a nice proof of the pudding for spiritual development or awakening is that it enhances life. It doesn’t remove you from life in any way. It actually should make life better in many respects, if not all.

Maggie: Yeah, I mean it certainly makes moving through life very, very different, but that it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a life devoid from challenges. I suppose that would be another myth, you know, that there’s still illness, there’s still the flu. There are still some annoying things happening. There are massive problems. And I would even say that in that stage between the first shift and other awakenings, there was a kind of living in denial and what I would call now spiritual detachment. But it meant that I had inability. It was because I was not able to be with emotional discomfort of my own or any kind of disturbances of any kind that would affect me, let alone that of other people or the world. So, I would rather not look. So, I would rather not deal with a lot of things. Whereas for me, the realization, especially the last shift, actually completely changed that. I had to learn to be with my own pain, and that helped me be with the pain of other people and with the pain of the world as well, but without maybe being crushed by it, as probably I would have been in the past.

Rick: It gives you greater resilience and capacity to deal with greater equanimity.

Maggie: Definitely, yeah.

Rick: So, you said the last shift, and in your book, you mention many times the phrase “stumbling on is-ness.” Did we adequately discuss that today?

Maggie: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that’s the best way to call it. Because, I think the reason why I call it “is-ness” is because, all that came through that I could say was amazing, I say, “there is just this.” It was just like, and so there was no war. To be honest, and I think I said it in a book, I actually I thought I was never going to talk about awakening again. After that moment, I actually am not surprised that in the past, people were known to have just gone to some cave for years, or just never talked about any of this. I’m not surprised. But you know now, after over two hours, Rick, that “me” and “not talking” would be rather difficult to achieve. So, I somehow end up talking about it. And even with the book, honestly, I was writing this book without any idea why I was writing it or who it was even for, other than feeling like it had to be written and I just could not not finish it. It just had to be done, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Stumbling on Is-ness: Where Words Run Out

Maggie: But yeah, I think what’s amazing about that bit is that really there are absolutely no words. I can talk about emptiness a bit. I can talk about nothingness a bit. I can describe certain things. But with the “stumbling on is-ness,” there are really no words to describe it in any way, other than, I call it the end of having any kind of a landing place.

Rick: Yeah, I think the Dao Te Ching says something like, “The Dao that can be described is not the Dao,” or something like that.

Maggie: Or something, you know? But you just run out of words, you just run out. There’s just, there’s not anything that can be said about the “is-ness” that can be and there’s no arriving to any conclusion. There’s no arriving to any statement about it at all.

Rick: Well, that’s probably a good point to end on.

Maggie: Well, it was actually possible to run out of words for a bit, Rick, believe it or not. Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so thanks Maggie. It’s been great having this conversation with you and let’s stay in touch. Maybe we can talk on WhatsApp sometime while we’re both walking in the woods.

Maggie: Yeah, definitely. It’s been great and I’m really honored and grateful for the opportunity as I said at the beginning, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an institution, in the best sense of the word. And yeah, thank you so much, Rick.

Rick: Oh, you’re welcome. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.