Mandi Solk Transcript: Self-Inquiry, Liberation, and the Illusion of the Personal Self
Rough draft
Non-speech: [Music]
Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Mandi Solk. Hello Mandi.
Mandi Solk: Hello Rick.
Rick Archer: I interviewed Mandi about two years ago, two years ago February, and for one thing there was a technical problem and her side of the video didn’t come through so I have still shots of Mandi the whole time. This time we’re going to have an animated Mandi, the real thing. A few weeks ago Mandi sent me an email which really caught my attention. It’s a little long but if you don’t mind I’ll read it. She said, “Since doing that interview I had a complete change of position which caused me to reverse a lot of the things I was saying at the time and I really want to have a chance to put that right. Because of many awakenings I had I really believed liberation had happened and it turned out not to be the case. In fact, sometimes, and in my case, awakenings can hinder any chance of liberation because you actually stop looking and think you are liberated when you aren’t and then start talking about it too early.” At this point in reading the email I didn’t know whether to say hallelujah or nyah-nyah, I told you so because I’ve been harping on this point for the last three years in these interviews. But let me continue. The egoic statement, “There’s nothing that you can do,” was what I was saying at the time because it seemed to be my experience. But then I got deeply into self-inquiry and spent hundreds of hours over months and months in inquiry, meditation, between two to three hours a day. My passion for freedom was like a laser beam of white fire until there was a solid breakthrough. I realized that this is the surefire way of getting to the root of the unchangeable. From this place there is no oscillating, nothing to wear off. But by saying that there’s nothing you can do it keeps the listener imprisoned. It suggests that there can be the spiritual haves and have-nots. But how could that ever be a part of love where no one and nothing is excluded and it is everything? I’m holding my hand up and admitting that I was a typical non-duality teacher who was coming out with some egoic and misguided statements that I have had a complete 360 degree turnaround. Gosh, I even used to criticize the use of self-inquiry, which is the only way I began to find real freedom. I’m delighted to say that it has had a great response and I’ve had loads of emails from people who are genuinely relieved to hear that a non-duality “teacher” has changed from saying there’s nothing you can do to, “Yes, there is something you can do.” Best of all, many have started self-inquiring, which is all I wanted to do, just gently suggest that they start giving this a go if they have a true desire for knowing themselves. Anyway, should you be happy to give me another interview, then that would be wonderful, help me spread the word and assist in perhaps opening the bars of the cages of those who are imprisoned into believing there’s nothing they can do, unless grace happens to drop in their laps just by chance. I see so many unhappy, depressed people who are lost after going to some non-duality meetings and I have gotten many emails telling me this. They are made to believe that self-inquiry stirs up the mind and amplifies the personality when all the time it is really the very opposite. So then they have nothing to do but live in a kind of waiting consciousness. So that was great, Mandi. Really nice summary. You could have said it yourself live rather than me reading the email but I thought I’d just get it out there and we can discuss this for the next couple of hours if you like.
Mandi Solk: Well, people have written to me in the past sort of saying, “Oh, but if I don’t have the big car accident or fall off a cliff or the big awakening, does that mean I’m never going to be free?” I always said that, “No, you don’t have to have those things to happen. It can just happen.” But there was nothing else to say after that because you see, these awakenings, I mean the thing about awakening is they wake you up, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t mean that you stay in that state, as we know. But that can be the real confusion, you see, because it can last a while and it can mimic freedom, it can mimic liberation. You know, the one where, just briefly, where I did have this motorbike accident and it looked to everybody else like I was dead but I was sort of going up and up and up and suddenly I could see through the buildings and see through the people and realize that nothing was solid, nothing was real as I had taken it to be. So of course, when I came out of that and I was completely unharmed after this accident, but that stayed a long time with me because you can’t forget something like that. However, the abiding in that, because this is a strange thing, just because you know it, because you’ve seen it, it doesn’t mean that you are immune from the trap of the mind that’s going round and round and round. So that’s why awakening isn’t the same as liberation, it just wakes you up that simply what you thought and took to be so real isn’t real, it has never been real. But that seeing isn’t enough. And then I had quite a few more of these awakenings and I started going to lots of non-duality talks and sessions and it all confirmed everything. So this did seem to be my experience because it happened to me, I thought, “Oh, that’s it now.” But the sense of joy that one is supposed to feel in liberation wasn’t there and also there was quite a lot of egotism. I look back at it now and I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t started looking through self-inquiry. You take yourself to be what you think you are at the time. So the egotism was that I felt that, “Oh, well, I know it all now because I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing else to know.” So you stop there. And I started talking about it, you see, and did interviews and meetings and stuff. And I believed completely what I was saying. But it just came to a sort of deadness in me. Yes, that’s right. And a lot of people talk about this, as you know, who’ve gone to lots of non-duality teachers. There’s something that feels like it’s still missing because the joy isn’t there. But there’s quite a lot of ego there because you stop looking and maybe you go to a non-duality meeting and you sit at the back because you think, “Oh, I don’t need to be at the front because I know it all.” You’re not aware that you think like that, but actually you are thinking like that. And then after a few years, a dullness set in, a depression and the aliveness of freedom, well I wasn’t free. That’s the thing, you see. It took a lot of unraveling to see it. And then I think I just watched one Mooji video in which somebody said, “Oh, have you seen this?” And even at the time they said it to me, there was a rising of ego. There was, “Oh, you know, a guru with a funny name.” I thought, “Oh no!” And I thought, “Well, I’ll watch it.” And I just couldn’t dispute the absolute perfect sense. It resonated all the way through me. And then there was this complete, utter, true humility set in because I realized that I just didn’t know anything and I’d had the arrogance to stop looking. This is the thing that I was writing to you about, that a lot of non-duality teachers, they even misunderstand it. The point of it, as so did I, because I used to knock it. I’m embarrassed to say, well I’m not embarrassed to say because it’s part of what happened, but I was embarrassed when I saw it. Now I’m not. I’m not embarrassed.
Rick Archer: I know, Jimmy. We’re all bozos on this bus.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, we’re all bozos. You’re right. So what? You could be a bozo every moment, can’t you? Recently I was watching a famous non-duality teacher and it was sort of like openly knocking and really almost making a fool of a picture of Ramana Maharshi that happened to be in that room. And I just kind of thought, “Oh dear.” And the reason that he had for knocking the whole self-inquiry thing was to say that, “Well, who’s looking? Who’s doing the looking?” As if in doing the looking, like I said in the letter, it amplifies a sense of personality, but it’s not the personality because there is no personality, so how could that be doing the looking? It’s this spark of divine fire that gets brighter and it only lives to see itself.
Rick Archer: Like I always say, those who knock spiritual practice because they say it amplifies the sense of a practicer should also stop eating because it amplifies the sense of an eater. They really want to be honest about it. An effective spiritual practice, and there are many, but one such as you’ve been engaged in recently, from the outside or just from conceptually one might think, “Oh, it’s just going to reinforce the sense of a doer,” but if it’s really effective it does quite the opposite.
Mandi Solk: I think until you look, you don’t see. First of all, you’ve got to see through all the layers that you’ve put on yourself that you didn’t even know you had, like believing you’re liberated when you’re not liberated. You’ve got to get to a place of fearlessness so that you can really be honest because, really, I’m being honest with you about it. I had thought that I was liberated and that hadn’t been the case, but I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t looked. So first of all, it’s like in talking to you or anybody that sees this, I am I, I’m talking to myself. It’s just seeing it for what it is and seeing through the incredible subtlety and the traps of the ego, that’s what the looking does. Of course, there are lots and lots of different practices and over my apparent lifetime I’ve done lots of practices. I’ve been a Christian Scientist, I’ve been a Buddhist, I’ve been to three different types of Buddhists, even trained to be a Buddhist teacher, like Japanese Buddhism, the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Very nice. I’m not knocking any of it. It was all great. That’s what I was in. I can’t remember the other. There are a few different schools of Buddhism. I was in another school of Buddhism and in that one, actually, the one that I’ve forgotten, I was training to be a teacher.
Rick Archer: It must have been a very effective one. It just kind of wiped out your memory, you know?
Mandi Solk: Exactly! Then I did Vipassana and TM for many years. So I did quite a lot, by no means all, there’s thousands, but I did quite a lot, enough to be able to say, well, I can only say it from this perspective, that I’ve never found anything as cutthroat as direct inquiry because you are literally looking back at source, at the substratum of your being and seeing what it is, or who is the seer and who is the seer of that. It’s going back and back and back and it takes no prisoners. Everything is seen, everything comes to light. There can’t be any further lying to yourself. That’s why to me, well, it’s just great. Since that, it cut through to seeing. I did spend a lot and lot of hours at it. I think that you have to realize, and I know lots of people say it, maybe some people say the opposite, but all I can say is that you’ve got to want it so much. How you know that you want it that much is because the world falls away, it really does, in that you’re not interested in the next moment, really. I was going to say things in life like looking forward to events or anything, you’re just not even bothered because the only moment is this moment. Then when I talk like this I know it comes back to how people talk when they’re non-duality teachers. But the truth is the truth, no matter who says it, but it’s how you get to see that truth that we’re really tackling, I think, here.
Rick Archer: Well, I have several comments on all this. Before we started recording you were asking me, “How do I keep talking to all these people who are basically saying the same thing?” But I don’t quite see them as all saying the same thing. I feel like each one has a different flavor and some are quite radically different than others. But my attitude, which is why I’m comfortable doing this, is that, I don’t know if this is what he meant by it, but Jesus said, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” It’s like everyone in the world is on a spiritual path, as far as I’m concerned, all seven billion of us, and each one is unique. It’s natural for different people to go along different lines, and of course there are going to be groups and similarities and so on. So I find the variety interesting. That’s one thing. Another thing is, with regard to your self-inquiry thing, I wouldn’t present that necessarily as a universal practice because I don’t think everyone is quite ready for it. Traditionally this is the understanding too. Both Shankara and Ramana said that you might need to do various other things before getting to the point at which self-inquiry became effective. So it’s just like school or sports or anything else, you might need to go through certain stages before getting to a certain level of proficiency at which such and such becomes possible for you. Go ahead, you were going to respond to that?
Mandi Solk: I was just going to say, I couldn’t agree more because I did.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah, look at all the things you did. And it’s not like you were just fooling around. All those things had their influence and had their value.
Mandi Solk: I was completely engaged with them all.
Rick Archer: One thing led to the next.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, absolutely. There’s all this talk about whether people should be prepared or not, because for some people, we all know that, we know that for some people, not that many, but for some people the identification with the self has just fallen away in one single thing. And it has been people that have had no spiritual background at all.
Rick Archer: That they are aware of.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, well, that they’re aware of quite.
Rick Archer: They could have a whole lot of spiritual irons in the fire that are finally bearing fruit.
Mandi Solk: You’re absolutely right there. The guy that I know, the guy that I met, who I talked about on the last thing, you know the guy that was a docker? I was saying I’d met this guy that was a docker.
Rick Archer: Right, yeah, I listened to that.
Mandi Solk: Yes, yes. He drunk a lot and everything, and he said that he was on no spiritual path before. But like you were saying, what we term a spiritual path and what is also termed the university of life, you know. I mean, like you say, every atom, everything in life is a spiritual path. It’s just that we keep making this delineation between what is spiritual and what isn’t spiritual. I mean, God doesn’t even have the word spiritual probably. I mean, I don’t even know what it is anymore. But I mean, he had an amazing presence, this guy, and a wonderful way of communicating with people. So he had something that he probably didn’t realize he had. All right, he didn’t go on a spiritual journey, but yes, like you say, God, which is the eternal mystery, yes, that which we are, but it’s so unknown that we don’t know all the trillions of ways that there are. So that’s why we can’t say, you know, this is the best way and it’s the only way. All I was meaning is that for me it was like a laser beam of fire of wanting to rid myself of whatever I perceived the self to be. And inquiry was like a red hot poker, just sort of stirring it all up, burning bit by bit everything that believed it was a Mandi. You know, like something would come up that I thought I’d be surprised at, and lots of things that, I’m trying to give an example. Of course, when you want one there isn’t one.
Rick Archer: Well, let me respond to that and maybe you’ll think of something. When I listened to your Conscious TV interview, I kind of put myself in the shoes of various listeners and I thought, “Well, some people are going to think, ‘Yeah, well obviously this lady doesn’t have to work. She gets to just sort of sit around all day and self-inquire.’ You know, I’m busy. I’ve got three kids. I’ve got a job. Does that mean I’m inferior or something? And also, I don’t feel like I have this burning fire of desire. Sure, I’d like it but I’ve got a lot on my plate and I’m sort of distracted.” I guess my point is that you’ve got to meet people where they are. What is feasible or effective for one person isn’t necessarily going to be for another. We’re not drawing quality comparisons. As I say, we’re all on the path and you really can’t say that somebody who’s all caught up in responsibilities and concerns is less spiritual than somebody who has been dedicating their full attention to self-inquiry or something. You just don’t know. That person could be light years ahead of you for all you know.
Mandi Solk: Oh yes, that’s true.
Rick Archer: And the whole thing about the fiery desire, that too can be stoked. Maybe somebody’s just got a little spark and they don’t have the fiery desire. It’s not going to suddenly become a conflagration. It’s something that can be cultured. You put on a little bit bigger twig and a little bit bigger twig and then some sticks and then some this. Next thing you know you do have a big fire going but one thing does lead to the next. So if a person feels like, “Hey, I’m just a chump. I’m so interested in material things and I’m not ready to be like Mandi who doesn’t care about anything else but this,” don’t worry about it. Just do what you can do. Do what you feel motivated to do and you’re not going to necessarily end up losing all your possessions and being disinterested and renouncing your children or anything. That’s not necessary in order for self-realization to occur.
Mandi Solk: I think those things were never necessary, to drop those things. It’s more like when you feel your toes burning near the fire, it’s more like your opinions, your judgments, your memories and how you perceive your friendships. Those things start to burn up. I completely agree with you again. What I mean is that the fire thing, that’s just been my experience. It’s just been this experience here. Because people Skype me and email me and do meetings and stuff, I see people who are there. The point is they’re there. Now some of them might not have very much attention and sort of find it boring or difficult or whatever. I think the fact that they’re there, even if they walk out, that’s fine. It can be stoked because when I started my search, I wasn’t prepared to spend hours at it at all. It took years but I got to the place where it did become completely all-important. My life changed accordingly. I don’t have children. I love children by the way, but I just never actually wanted to have children. That makes life easier for me as well. People with children have an awful lot to do, but their love and the spirit of who they are and that flame comes from their love. It’s love really. You don’t have to be sitting for hours. I suppose if you get to a place where you’re so sick of the identity of what you are, of what you think you are, it just becomes totally all-encompassing. It does grow for people because it becomes absolutely addictive and putting a twig on a fire and another twig is exactly right. People just find they keep coming back to it. There’s no time constraints on it. There can be awakening to a big chunk of it and then everything’s dormant for years maybe and then another chunk happens. It definitely does grow. One of the things that I suppose all my attention is turned to now is actually teaching some self-inquiry as precisely as you can teach it. There’s a lot of people who talk about self-inquiry and give lectures and stuff, but there’s very few people who are actually saying in concrete ways, “What do you do?” So that’s what I’m interested in. For instance, when I do a meeting now, rather than there be a lot of talk, we’re just going to have a bit of silence and all I want you to do is just in that silence see what comes up. Right now, just see what comes up. Are you bored? Are you thinking of the next thing? How long is this going to go on? Just see what comes up. We do that for a while and then we start looking at it. I just sort of teach them self-inquiry because what happens is with self-inquiry, and there’s so many people talk about it, everybody that talks about it to me is wonderful. I love what they all say, but you can get very confused about which questions to ask yourself. Should I be saying, “I am, I am”? Of course, that’s not it because we don’t want to be saying, “I am.” That’s like a mantra. It’s just a sense. It’s just a sense of that which gets up in the morning, the sense of the heart beating. It’s just pure consciousness, pure existence, and getting a sense of that and letting that grow. Then if a question comes up, if a thought comes up, and one teacher sort of said, “Say to yourself to whom is this thought arising,” that’s great. If that’s what comes up at that moment, that’s the thing to go with for a second or two and let everything come back to silence. Basically, if everything doesn’t come back to silence, it just means that you’ve got on a string of thoughts again. It’s quite simple really because there’s just one easy way to see that—not that progress is being made, but that you’re on the right lines if you come back to silence each time. So I don’t care if it’s a practice or not. It is a practice. Do this and you’ll come back to silence. Silence is the whole thing. It’s everything you could possibly want. People ask questions but if they just gave themselves some silence, the questions would be answered. You are your own teacher. You are the best teacher. All those answers come from you keeping quiet.
Rick Archer: Yeah, which I seldom do. No, actually. And when you say that, when you describe that, maybe we could dwell on it a little bit more to reassure people. The average person, almost everyone, you and I probably as well, when we sit and close our eyes, let’s say, to do a practice such as self-inquiry, there are going to be thoughts. You are going to find yourself wandering off on various ideas and thoughts, both silly and practical and whatever. The mind just has that tendency. And then when you recognize that that has happened, you just come back to the silence, right? Is that what you would say?
Mandi Solk: Yes. The thing to come back to is the “I,” even if at first… We are talking about the sense of “I,” but at first you’ll probably find yourself thinking the word “I.” And there’s nothing wrong. You see, the thing about self-inquiry, in a way you can’t do anything wrong because when you start off, it does take effort. It’s like working a muscle that’s not been worked at all. And this is what I did. And, you know, I’m sure Ramana Maharshi would say, “That’s wrong,” but he would understand. So I was doing that thing where I’d be going, “I,” and “I am.” And then eventually you realize that… You see, when you come back to “I,” even if it’s just the thought “I,” because the “I” has no content, it brings you to a state of quiet because “I” contains nothing. “Me” is different, you know, or a thought is something that pulls you along like a magnet. But when we come back to “I,” even if at first it’s the thought “I,” you come back to a quiet place. And eventually, because whoever’s talking to you about it, whether it’s Mooji or anybody or me, will hopefully gently remind you that we’re talking about the sense of “I.” So that sense is the heart beating, the breathing going on. You’re not beating your own heart. Your heart’s beating by itself, your breathing’s happening by itself, you’re not doing it. You might think you’re doing it, but you’re not doing it, because who are you? Who are you to be doing that? There’s no such thing as a “you.” So we come back to that sense, or Ramana Maharshi would say, “There’s this existence, the sense of existence, and that kind of blossoms into consciousness, which eventually becomes bliss.” So we come back to that sense of “I.” What we don’t want to be doing is this going, “I, I,” and then “I am, I am,” because then we’ve got it going like a mantra.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean if you look at a rose, you don’t have to say, “Red, red.” It’s innocent, it’s red, and it doesn’t have to be the thought “R-E-D”; you just see the red. Coming back to the sense of “I,” sense of self, sense of presence, there doesn’t have to be any verbiage about it. Everyone has that felt sense, just recognize that.
Mandi Solk: That’s it. People often come back to me and say that they’ve been saying, “I am, I am, I am.”
Rick Archer: Just keeping the mind busy. It’s like trying to enjoy the rose, saying, “Rose, rose, rose.” Just relax, enjoy the rose.
Mandi Solk: That’s it, really. That’s the thing that I found about mantras. I have to be careful because I don’t want to look like I’m knocking anything, but I have found in my own experience that meditations that use mantras, you’re not looking, you’re just using a mantra, you see. There might be an expansion of silence, but we’re not just talking here about coming back to silence. Self-inquiry takes off more and more layers of the onion. The onion layers aren’t going to come off by just being nice and comfortably silent, but that’s what starts to happen. First of all, we’ve got to get to know silence. We’ve got to feel comfortable with silence. That’s what self-inquiry starts to do. Then thoughts come, all sorts of thoughts, even good thoughts. We don’t even want those. We don’t want to get drawn by any of these thoughts, just like a train going past. Everybody uses this train thing. My one is, if you imagine little rusty trucks. I don’t know if you have them in the city. They carry coal and they’re like rusty trucks. I always say that a thought is like a poster. You know what a thought is at first. Let’s say, “Oh, they’re treating me just like I was at school.” The poster is, “I’m being treated like I was at school.” If you get in the truck with all the rest of it, there’s loads more thoughts like how everybody treated you and exactly who was treating you like that and the way that you were treated. Suddenly you’re back there in the pit of despair, covered in the coal dust. So when you see the beginning of the thought, as if it was a poster on the side of a bus or something, you just let it go by. Then the next poster comes, like, “Oh, I wonder if I said the right thing to Susie.” So that’s what that poster says. Do we really want to get in that truck with that one? Because then we go into, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that.” But then on the other hand, she shouldn’t have said that to me. If she hadn’t said that to me, then I wouldn’t have said that to her. Suddenly we’re covered in that coal dust. So this is a great way to start when we see these thoughts, as well as the question, to whom do these thoughts arise? Which I’ll come back to. Just another thing is that the minute we see the name of a thought, imagine it like a poster on the side of a bus, then we just drop it like a hot potato and do not get in bed with that thought. Don’t get in the train truck with the thought. Let it go by.
Rick Archer: Treat all thoughts as if they were in Japanese.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, exactly. I like that. That’s great. I don’t know if you’re interested in interviewing me. I should be interviewing you. You come up with some really good ones. I love these. I’m learning loads here. I’m going to write it all down.
Rick Archer: Okay, well here’s a few thoughts based upon what you just said. First of all, you’re talking to a guy who’s been meditating with a mantra for 45 years.
Mandi Solk: I’m not knocking it, honestly.
Rick Archer: Oh, I know, I know. But your conception of it, even though I know you did TM for a number of years, is I think, and you may be right, maybe mantra meditation is preliminary or juvenile or something compared to self-inquiry. I don’t know. But my own experience is that it results in the mind settling to a state of quietude and self-awareness amplifies to the extent that the mind quietens. In other words, it’s like the surface of a pond. If the water’s all choppy, the sun doesn’t reflect very well. But when the water gets really smooth, then the sun reflects perfectly. It’s sort of a natural consequence of the mind becoming silent and yet alert that self-awareness is less and less shrouded by mental activity and eventually is perfectly clear. Through repeated exposure to that or experience of that, just as perhaps you might say repeated exposure with the experience of self-inquiry, it kind of gets stabilized. Perhaps there’s physiological change taking place. In any case, one finds that it’s not lost in the midst of activity anymore. So you could be riding a bus or doing something dynamic and yet that sort of silent self-awareness, which was once only accessible in eyes closed meditative states, is perpetual.
Mandi Solk: I think if it’s perpetual that’s great. But you see, first of all, I can’t compare anything. Like we say, there are so many different ways to seeing what you are and that’s great. Really I don’t have that feeling. That’s another thing that thankfully dropped away with that arrogance really.
Rick Archer: Yeah, whatever works, you know.
Mandi Solk: It is whatever works. The only thing that I would say is that what I noticed about quite a lot of the meditators that I knew, and it was present in me, is that getting to a point where you’re not sort of living in the mind, that was sort of happening during meditation but I didn’t see it a lot in their everyday lives. So I met an awful lot of crabby meditators and I know somebody who’s been doing it for 50 years, he’s not like you at all, but he’s completely uptight and never stops talking. And I think, you know, what’s this been doing for him? So I’m afraid I came away from it because I saw a lot of people that, yeah, they were meditating but I didn’t see them sort of living it. I suppose what I see more from people that have been doing self-inquiry is that because they’re looking and there’s a sort of questioning, there’s something, you know, looking right at what they are and then taking off another layer and taking off another layer. It’s so direct, you see, is that that affects who you are deeply in your normal minute-to-minute, day-to-day life so that it’s not just while you’re meditating. It just seems to have quicker results, you know, and I don’t know if that’s true because, like you say, you can’t say that because everybody’s experience is different of it, you know.
Rick Archer: Well it very well may, you know, and I wouldn’t dispute that. In fact, I mean, I live in a town where there’s 3,000 or more people meditating and many as long as I have been and I see a lot of people like the one you just described, a lot of people who are just really crazy still and really hung up and dishonest or argumentative or fanatical one way or the other and just all sorts of crazy things and I can see myself as having been that way many, many times and during long periods of my life and so on. For me somehow it crept in at a certain point that I began to question assumptions and to not take anything as absolute truth and to just have a much more kind of broad-minded perspective and I’m not exactly sure how that happened but in fact I got booted out of the TM movement because I was thinking that way and I was just much too independent in my thinking. So, you know, I kind of resonate with what you say about kind of the self-examination and the peeling away of layers of the onion. I think a person can get kind of stuck in a rut with any practice and many practices, let’s not say any, and get habituated to something that they think is liberating them whereas in fact they really need to shake things up and break out of a habit that they’re not even aware has gotten ingrained.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, yeah. I think so because, you see, I suppose what I find about this is that it’s always fresh because, you know, when you’re in a rut, what happens is after a while, you know, a solid inquiry is that presence takes over and there’s like a switch over. So instead of there being a dominance of thought and just little specks of presence, presence seems to be the thing, the abiding thing all the time and thoughts are there but they’re more like little fishes just having a little nibble. They’re like vibrations, yes, they’re more like vibrations so you feel the vibration rather than the words because in that seeing, they’re seen so quickly that they kind of obliterate, you know, they disappear, dissolve in that seeing really. So I mean, I think why I love sharing this and doing this now is because I do see really pretty quick results really with people that somehow it does act like a knife, even if somebody only has ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes in the evening. I mean, when I say that they’ve got to have a fire burning, I do think that’s true. You can’t get past that really. But about the fanning of the fire, what I’m saying is that even if they just start with ten minutes in the morning or ten minutes in the evening, if they can get to the place after a few minutes where there’s even a bit of stillness there, that is so addictive, as you know, it’s addictive and you start to want more and more of it and that’s how the fire gets fanned really. I would say that you’ve got to wait. We said before in that last interview, be still and wait on God because if you’re still enough, even if you just give it five or six minutes with real sort of just waiting, really expectancy. We’re not talking about waiting for enlightenment or having a delay. We’re not talking about that. It’s just you give it a few minutes, is all I’m saying, and then something starts to happen.
Rick Archer: Don’t be looking for some big dramatic breakthrough. Just be easy about it.
Mandi Solk: That’s it. And not worrying at all, as you know, with any meditation, whether thoughts come up or not. In fact, great if they do because it becomes � the thoughts that come up, I mean, in self-inquiry, as soon as you notice it, there’s many different ways of dealing with it. You can flick it off like a mosquito or look at it. If it’s something that’s biting at you, like something that’s happened with somebody and it needs looking at, what I always say is just, “Okay, look at the situation for one second. Don’t give yourself more than one second. Just feel the vibration of where it is in your body. Where’s it biting you? In your neck, in your throat, in your heart, in your head? And just get right into it. Not into the words, but just really feel it. So allow yourself to feel it so much that you’re vibrating with it, your whole body’s shaking with it. And then just sit with it. Sit with it. And even if it’s a really ugly sort of thing, just sit with it. Because in a few seconds it just dissolves. Unless you’ve done it, you don’t see it, but it always works. It just does work. You just have to give it a few seconds. And then we come back to that sense of “I am”, just that sense of it, or “I”. And there’s a stillness because once again, the “I” has no content. It knows nothing of that argument you’ve had with so-and-so. It doesn’t store anything. There’s no judgments there. When we get near to the edge, it’s like when you’ve been doing this a while, there can be a burning sense. You can even be getting very hot when you’re doing the contemplation. A fear can come up, and it’s a fear of losing all those things that you think you are, which we said at the beginning. Things like your memories or thoughts or worries. And it will get you at your weakest point. It’s like all these thoughts or minds, and you’re just like, “Oh, my mind!” It really knows where to get you by the jugular. So I’ll give you an example. One of my greatest fears was going, what’s the word, premature senile dementia. Because when I was a young girl, I had an absolutely favorite uncle, Uncle Max. He was quite young, and he was handsome, and he was very funny, and he was always totally lovely to me, an incredibly intelligent guy. We had some great conversations, and I loved him. I used to see him from time to time. One day, my parents had a party, and he was sat there in the corner. He was sat on his own, and he just looked a bit strange. I went to speak to him, and he looked right through me. It suddenly felt very frightening. I must have been about eight or nine. So I went to my mom, and she explained that he had this state called premature senile dementia. He was only like 38. It was shocking, really, to see it. It took a lot of explaining. Then as I got older, this became a real fear for me that this could happen, that you could lose your mind. You know how when you’re scared of something, you watch everything there is to watch on it. So documentaries, any movies that anybody made about somebody who had gone senile, I was there. As if by watching it, I’d think, “I’d better watch it so it won’t happen to me,” the kind of way that we do these things. Anyway, one of the awakening things was that one night I suddenly was aware that I just didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything. What is the test that the doctor would give you if you don’t know something? Oh yes, the first thing they’d say is, “Do you know what country you’re in? Do you know what year it is? Do you know who, well, in our country, the Prime Minister is?” So I was racking my brain. I thought, “Right, the Prime Minister. What’s the name of the Prime Minister?” And for an hour or two I couldn’t remember it. My mind was absolutely blank. I got terrified because I thought I was going senile. Eventually I remembered it and I was so happy that I remembered it. But then later on I was horrified that I was horrified, because I’d realized this was one of my opportunities. I could have jumped in. This is about losing everything, but it doesn’t mean that you lose your ability to facilitate your life. It’s not about that. It’s not about dementia. It’s a different kind of not knowing it. So when you get near the fire, what I mean by the fire is the fire of burning you up, your identity up. Things could happen. So something will get picked on. So that was the thing that got picked on for me. And other people have other things that get picked on. Suddenly it comes up and you don’t realize it until afterwards. “Oh, that’s what it was. It was like Jesus on the mountaintop being tempted, or that’s what it was, and I didn’t see it for what it was.” So then what happens? Later on maybe something else will happen. Another fear will come up. And then you think, “Oh God, that was another time. That’s what it was.” And eventually what happens is your fears sort of dry up and there’s a realization that nothing can really frighten you, actually. So it doesn’t have to be a big “Oh, you’re falling down a black hole,” like some people have experienced. And it’s absolutely terrifying and then you realize it really can be a gradual thing. Have I knocked something?
Rick Archer: You knocked your microphone up to your forehead. Actually keep it down near your neck, that’s better. Good. Yeah, we heard it all, but it just got a little hollow there. There’s a lot to think about there, a lot of good stuff you said. You kind of started out by talking about the fact that presence can get the upper hand over thoughts. For most people, thoughts have the upper hand and their perceptions and their opinions and their attitudes and everything else, that’s how they define themselves. But turning that around, and presence is pretty much in the background, overshadowed, but there can come a time, through the kind of practice you’re talking about, where presence gets the upper hand and that becomes predominant and the thoughts, as you say, are like little fishes. I see it very much that way. There’s like this seesaw or ratio kind of thing where for the most part people are very much overshadowed, gripped, and then presence can begin to shift the balance and eventually become predominant. There are, as you said earlier, awakenings, stages in that process. It’s not necessarily a smooth transition. There can be little jumps and milestones and whatnot. Some of those milestones, as we started out saying in this conversation, can be mistaken for the final destination. Some awakening takes place and you think, “That’s it, I’m done.” But in my opinion, nobody’s done, ever. This is just an opinion, I may be wrong, but in fact I was reading St. Teresa of Avila, I read a quote by her the other day, she said, “The feeling remains that God is on the journey too.” So not only are we not done, but God is not done. The whole universe is a big evolution machine and no matter how far along you are on the whole scale of evolution, whatever that scale may be, you ain’t reached the end of it because there is no end.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, because really, more than knowing what you are, the biggest thing is knowing what you are not. So knowing that you aren’t your thoughts, you aren’t your opinions, you aren’t your judgment, you, your essential you isn’t any of that. And that gets more and more subtle and more and more refined. I wouldn’t trust anybody, I don’t think there’s anybody alive on the earth, anybody been on the earth that will ever say that this ends. What you can say is that there’s definitely an expansion of this presence so that there’s more abiding in it and that whatever is taking place is okay so there’s not panic and reaction around it anymore, it’s just what’s taking place. That idea of looking forward to something, something good like some celebration, that goes. And that’s a lovely thing, it’s an alive thing, not a dead thing, because there’s nothing better than this moment now. So these things happen. But what goes on happening is that you can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next, so you can’t possibly know how that thing’s going to affect you, really. Because there’s not a sense of a you, there’s no sense of a me in the way that it used to be when there was a sense, a very strong sense. Well, you can be pretty sure that most things will just be absorbed in it and you’ll deal with it. What I mean is, for instance, the other week I was actually going to do a meeting and a car cut right across in front of me on one of the busiest roundabouts we’ve got here. Honestly, I was a hair’s breadth away from physical death. The man was very arrogant and frightening in the way that he was driving as he progressed down the road, and frightening everybody on the freeway. Anyway, the moment that it happened, wow, furiously, “You stupid!” That came up for a second. But I think what I mean is, before that would hang on for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, and there would be some light vibration. It’s just dropped like a man with his coat on fire. Even though I have to continue driving down the road with him on the side, it was just dropped. I was explaining this in the meeting, because it was the meeting that I nearly died and didn’t get to, and a lady at the back, so sweet, she said, “I’m a Christian.” What we would say is that if somebody does something like that to us, we would immediately try and switch it to sending him a blessing. I said, “That’s really lovely. That’s not quite what I’m talking about.” In the seeing of what you are, which is not, “Oh, I’m seeing what I am,” obviously, it’s just “I am” in the seeing. There’s such a seeing that when people live in their minds, that’s how it is. You don’t think to yourself, “That’s because he’s living in his mind.” That’s one thing there is a knowing of, that people, if they’re not seeing this, they are living in their mind and they’ve got to be there first. It’s like you are sitting in something much bigger than you. It’s like you are sitting as the driver and you’re in the front seat, and you’re always in first trying to lunge forward. You’ve never ever looked behind you, you’ve never seen that. The car is massive behind you, and you were never the driver, and there’s no place to go anyway, and you’re not going anywhere. There’s a settling into it, and there’s such a compassion that we don’t need to put effort into thinking, “Oh, I’ll send this man a blessing.” He’s just blessed by our lack of reacting to it, by our harmlessness. He is blessed because there’s an open space for him, and his being the way that he is, exactly the way that he is.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and sending him a blessing might also work for that woman.
Mandi Solk: Exactly.
Rick Archer: Because if she’s not functioning in the mode that you’re describing, then that might be really the best thing for her to defuse the anger that she felt when she got cut off.
Mandi Solk: But because she’d come to the meeting, she was asking about that very thing, so she was open to it. And the thing that she agreed with is that I used to go down that route because I used to want to be an angel. I used to watch Harvey with Jimmy Stewart.
Rick Archer: Oh yeah, I love that.
Mandi Solk: I always wanted to be, well he’s not Harvey, Elwood P. Dowd, I think he was called Elwood P. or something or other. The man, James Stewart. I always wanted to be him, so lovely to everybody, just so nice. And then of course every time I wasn’t nice, I would berate myself and it made me have a stronger sense of the self, this wanting to be a nice person. It makes you actually more objectionable to yourself because you can never raise to your own standards, you set them too high. So let’s say you’re that person who believes that you want to be a good person and somebody cuts you up and you’re angry, yes, for a second, and then you think, “Oh no, I must make this into a blessing.” Well later on in the day, maybe you spill some milk at the wrong time or something happens and you’re suddenly angry that you blessed that person because actually now you’re feeling angry towards him and then you have to remember again and you think, “Oh hang on, no, no, let me bless him again, I’ll bless him again.” There’s so much effort in trying to be a good person. I’m not sure we were talking about that.
Rick Archer: But it might still be better than just letting yourself be a schmuck.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, that’s true.
Rick Archer: It could have some sort of counterbalancing influence. But the things you were just describing kind of play into the general theme we’ve been talking about in the last little bit, which is this thing of predominance of presence versus presence being overwhelmed or overshadowed. I think what you’re talking about is a kind of a style of functioning that naturally occurs in a person for whom presence is quite predominant. There’s a natural sort of unattachment or a natural spontaneity. Just to make it more graphic, in the Indian tradition they use this analogy of drawing a line on stone with something, scraping it into a stone and then the line is very etched and it doesn’t go away. Then maybe a line on sand, it’s easier to draw and it goes away fairly quickly. Or a line on water, even easier to draw and it goes away even faster. Or just a line on air, it’s totally effortless to draw and it’s just gone as soon as it’s drawn. You can compare that with various degrees of rigidity with which people function. If they’re very locked into the front seat of that giant car you were talking about, very locked into an individuality, there tends to be that impressionable-ness so that when something happens it creates a deep impression which they might dwell on for months or years or something. “Oh, that SOB cut me off in traffic and every time I see a blue car I think of that guy who was driving a blue car.” Whereas to jump to the other extreme, which was your experience, the thing happens and there’s an initial reaction, there is a line in the air that’s drawn, but as soon as it’s drawn it’s gone.
Mandi Solk: You know, somebody wrote to me just earlier actually about what happens when you get angry with this and angry with that. I actually just sensed from the email that this guy was very angry a lot of the time. I think the point about that is that you stop minding about minding. It’s not just that you get to a state of you don’t mind so much because you really do. Through inquiry, this is the thing I want to keep coming back to, for me, for inquiry being great because it’s for everybody. Everybody can do it if they want to do it and have the same results. Because it just takes a love of truth and honesty and a kind of humility to sort of want to scrape away that ego anyway. I mean, if you’re really loving your ego and egotistic, you wouldn’t want to touch it with a barge pole, would you? So the more that you scrape away at it, the more garbage goes and the lighter things become. So there is much more of a state of not minding stuff. But even if you did mind something, you wouldn’t mind that you minded it. And there’s enormous freedom in that, rather than feeling like a bad person or a guilty person because that happened. You become so able to be self-forgiving because there’s no self to forgive. It’s just seen when thoughts are bought into for a second and that’s what happens when you get angry or annoyed or you have a judgment. But there’s no judgment about it. Whereas when you’re trying to be a good person, you always have a judgment about how well you’ve done. And all the suffering that happens is really because our divine nature, our true nature is benign. So when we start acting out of character, I mean, let’s say people who aren’t on a spiritual path at all and they drink too much, if you like, and they’re angry and violent and what have you, it just gets perpetuated because they think they’re not good enough. So somebody that I heard of went into a jail and talked to some of the guys there about this kind of thing and just kept saying, “You are good enough. You are good enough. Not even good enough, but you are good. You’re totally good.” And some of them couldn’t handle it at all, but one guy, being the most violent in the prison, just came up to this teacher and said, “Am I? Am I really?” And he went, “You are. You are.” And sometimes we need a lot of reminding of that. Well, we need reminding of it the whole time, really. And that’s why Ramana Maharshi said, “You have to be vigilant to your last breath.” This is going back to something you were saying, that it’s never finished, you know. But it gets easier. But on the other hand, it wouldn’t get easier if you had the lack of humility to think that it was finished. You see, a lot of non-duality teachers say things like, “Oh, it’s all over. It’s all over.” Then for me it was all over. Well, you know, that’s a load of …
Rick Archer: I agree. Whenever anybody says that to me, and I hear that too, I think, “Well, you’ll just wait and see, won’t you?” I’ve had people send me emails saying, “I’m totally awake. There couldn’t possibly be anything.” And in fact, in a number of interviews I’ve asked towards the end of the interview, I think, “Well, what do you think is next? Where do you see it going from here? What’s on the horizon? How has your growth been?” And some people say, “What growth? How could there be anything more?” I think what happens with that is there’s a sort of a fixation on the absolute, which is seen to be non-changing, and to the exclusion or to the neglect of the relative, which is ever-changing and ever-improving. There’s no end to the extent to which refinement can take place in the relative sphere. Like our friends Scott Kilby and Jeff Foster, they’ve all come to this position too, whereas at one time they were fundamentalists, non-dualists. Now they’re interested in relationships and all sorts of relative considerations and how to bring non-duality to the sphere of relative human concerns as a means of enhancing them. In fact, Scott and I and a bunch of other people are going to have a discussion in January about psychology and non-duality and what the benefit for psychology may be from non-dual realization.
Mandi Solk: I think it’s just welcoming everything, embracing everything that’s in life. When you fix on the absolute, of course the absolute is non-changing, and that’s what we’re coming back to when we talk about silence. Are you all right?
Rick Archer: Yeah, you’re good.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, when we talk about silence, that’s the source of everything, the source of our action, the source of everything. That’s beautiful and then there’s the seer of that and who’s looking at that. But there’s no deadness in that. It’s fully alive and absolute spontaneity. All the time, it’s amazing, you’re amazed at everything all the time. There was somebody that you had on here recently who said that there’s even another stage when you’re not amazed at everything all the time. Well, actually, I can’t agree with that. The absolute beauty of it is that there’s a sort of a staying awake. Liberation is about staying awake and liberation isn’t something that�you see, when we say we are free now, you are free now. Everybody that is listening to this is free now. You are not a seeker because when we look we find we’re actually not a seeker because your thoughts will never be free by their very nature. Thoughts are thoughts, aren’t they? So how can thoughts be free? They are thoughts and they all link together like glue bonding together. But underneath all that, what you are is free now. So in that freedom�
Rick Archer: Yeah, but the operative phrase is “underneath all that” because for many people all that can be so overwhelming that it’s very hard to sense the freedom. So the trick is to lighten the load that’s overshadowing the inner freedom so that the inner freedom can shine forth.
Mandi Solk: Yes, it is, but sometimes it can be just a seeing that, �Oh my God, I’ve always been free! Of course I’m free!� That which is, is free. But in freedom, everything is free to happen as well. With Jeff Foster, he’s a really good friend of mine because his folks don’t live far from me so when he comes to see them as well, sometimes he’ll pop up. Or when I used to have non-duality North, he’d stay. He stayed a few weeks ago and before he stayed I rather sheepishly wrote to him and said, �You know, I’ve changed everything about the way that I used to see this.� And he wrote back and said, �Do you know I have too?� And we had a great, great discussion about it. But it’s just coming back to that in the freedom it’s seen that everything that happens is completely exactly perfect the way it is meant to be. So it is that old Zen thing that you hear over and over before enlightenment. But we’re not talking about enlightenment. We’re getting rid of the word enlightenment, liberation, even freedom. It’s just that those words, they’re so loaded, aren’t they?
Rick Archer: They are, but they do actually signify something and we have to use words, but we want to make sure that we’re using them carefully so that we’re not saying one thing and people are hearing or assuming another. We want to know what we mean when we use the terms.
Mandi Solk: I think what I’m trying to say is that if people see it as an end thing, there’s no end result.
Rick Archer: Some static, glorious carrot that I’m finally going to catch even though it continues to dangle in front of me, no matter how far I go.
Mandi Solk: Absolutely, and certainly when I used to hear people say, �Oh, it’s all over.� That’s how it used to seem like that. Well, really a dead end. And people sort of saying, �Oh, I don’t know how to talk to my partner anymore because they don’t see things the way that I do.� And every single conversation with anybody is absolutely lush. Do you have that word in the book?
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah. It has two connotations. One is it’s somebody who drinks too much and the other is very verdant and abundant.
Mandi Solk: Lush is gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about Gwendolyn or whatever. It’s the fact that they want to talk to you.
Rick Archer: Let’s play around with another little topic for a bit. You said a little while ago, �There is no such thing as I.� I was reading the book of someone whom I’m going to interview in a few weeks. She was saying, �There are no persons.� I understand what you’re saying, what she’s saying, but I’d like to play devil’s advocate with it just for a little bit and see what you think. I use the word levels a lot and some people say, �Why do you say that?� Because there are no levels. It’s all just one wholeness. That’s true also, but there’s always this paradoxical yes but that you can do whenever you make any kind of statement. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. There are no levels yet there are levels. The physicist would tell you that. Ultimately it’s all just the vacuum quantum field or something, but then there are all these more manifest levels, which again you can take right back down to the unmanifest and say, �Well, they don’t really exist. They’re just virtual. They just appear to exist.� I’m getting a little long-winded here but I’ll try to wrap it up. When a person says, �There is no I,� I can totally agree with that, both intellectually and in my own experience, but at the same time there is an I. It may be ultimately not real but it’s at least functional and necessary in order to live a life. It seems kind of meaningless to me to stay with any absolute finality that there is no I as to say there is no body. If you’re going to deny the existence of the subtler realms of manifestation, why not include the gross as well and just say there is no universe? You have to really play the game of spanning the whole strata of creation even while acknowledging that the more manifest levels ultimately are not real, but in a relative sense they are.
Mandi Solk: Well, you know, we’re having a human experience. There’s no doubt that we’re having a human experience. We have senses and we can taste and smell and we have preferences. But those preferences � let’s just take that one for a minute � are different from judgments because the mind, well, thoughts, always come in and make judgments about this is good, this is bad. They’re like window wipers � good, bad, good, bad � comparing everything. Whereas a preference is just a noticing that you like this flavor better than that person’s flavor or even this person better than that person � not better than, but you prefer to be in that person’s company than that person’s company, not that there’s any judgment in it.
Rick Archer: So let me give you an example to see if I understand what you’re saying. So we just had a lot of rain here for the first time in a long time and that was great. I would rather it had been colder and we’d had a nice snowstorm so I could go out skiing. So that would be my preference, but I wouldn’t say the rain is bad and snow is good, which would be a judgment.
Mandi Solk: Exactly, that’s exactly right. And it’s nice and light to be free of judgments. I mean, my mother, every time it rains she’ll say, “Oh, it’s miserable, it’s miserable weather.”
Rick Archer: Yeah, I know what you mean.
Mandi Solk: And I just say, “It’s raining.” I don’t have anything else to say, it’s raining. So that sense of I is just made so big with judgment, really. This is what goes when we do self-inquiry, that I’m somebody that doesn’t like the rain but I like the wind, or I don’t like the snow but I like the rain. You know what I mean?
Rick Archer: Arguing with what is, yeah, arguing with reality.
Mandi Solk: So that sense of me as a person, the whole point of inquiry is that every time that you think that you are a person, you look at that to try and find where you are. And it’s just that you can never find you, there isn’t a sense of you, there just isn’t. And then, you know, when you are seeing that, it’s like you feel basically so loved and nurtured and looked after by, well, that which you are, or you could call it presence or God, it’s the presence of love. So every time you’re putting your coat on or brushing your teeth or whatever you’re doing, because there’s no sense of a doer…
Rick Archer: Well, who is this that’s feeling loved and cared for and nurtured?
Mandi Solk: Well, exactly, well…
Rick Archer: And by whom? Is there some kind of lover and some kind of lovee here? I mean, who is it that’s getting cared for if there’s no I, no person?
Mandi Solk: Wow, let’s sort of take… brushing your teeth is always a good one because we all do it. When brushing the teeth is happening but there’s no sense of, “Oh, I’m doing that, somebody’s turned me on and my joints are all working and I’m doing it,” when there’s not that sense, there’s just a sense of nurturing and love but not that anybody’s feeling it. It’s just felt. That’s all there is. That’s why every little action, every little thing, no matter how insignificant, that’s what the aliveness is, you see, Rick. That’s what the aliveness is, that everything that’s mundane is no longer mundane. So it’s the ordinary within the extraordinary. Do you know what I mean? That’s what it is.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I know what you mean. But there’s still a sense of localization to me. It’s like when I’m brushing my teeth, I’m not brushing your teeth. I’m brushing these teeth, the Rick Archer teeth, and there’s still a sense of, maybe this will totally go away, but there’s a sense of, I get the universal aspect thing and that’s quite predominant, but there’s still a sense of localization which I find to be practical and necessary. I don’t know, but I don’t think that ever completely goes away. In fact, in Sanskrit there’s this term, “lesha avidya,” which means “faint remains of ignorance.” The understanding is that as long as you’re breathing, there’s going to be a faint remains of ignorance, which gives one some sense of individuation, however slight, which is absolutely essential for functioning as a human being. Well, that’s maybe what they say.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, I just try to put it in, you see, when we’re talking about these things, this is where it gets difficult to sort of put it into words because you’re quite right, I’m listening to what he’s saying, but my own experience I suppose, which is sort of deepening, and I say not done, just deepening, is that that heavy sense of a person, of a doer, it’s thinner and thinner and thinner, you know what I mean?
Rick Archer: Exactly, that’s just what I was saying, faint remains of ignorance, lesha, just the faint remains. But it’s never going to disappear entirely if you intend to keep on living. It may be just a thin crust on a vast ocean, but there’s still going to be some faint remains.
Mandi Solk: Because it’s thin, it’s not sort of noticed as much, that’s why I have to sort of think about it.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s not running the show.
Mandi Solk: No, I mean, if you’ve got physical pain, if you have physical pain. I had some physical pain last night. Now why was that?
Rick Archer: You mentioned last time I spoke with you that you might have to have a hip replacement surgery or something, that must have involved some pain.
Mandi Solk: Oh yeah, that’s painful, that was in April, but this was to do with, anyway, what we call heartburn. Do you call it heartburn?
Rick Archer: Yeah, we do, yeah.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, yeah. And that was really vicious last night. But in the viciousness of it, it takes on a different kind of energy so that it’s completely all-encompassing, almost like a color and a vibration, but not like it’s belonging to a person. It’s there and it was bloody uncomfortable, but it didn’t feel owned. Does that help?
Rick Archer: Yeah. But it was happening, but there was a sense that the experience was not the same as if your dog had been the one with the heartburn. And I wasn’t experiencing it. In other words, in the manifestation of life we call “Mandi,” that’s where heartburn experience was taking place.
Mandi Solk: Yes, the difference is it didn’t feel � it would have before felt like a personal pain, like I owned it, it belonged to me. Now it doesn’t feel like it’s over there, if only it could. But in the light of the seeing of that that’s all that was going on, it just doesn’t bother you quite in the same way.
Rick Archer: Right, because it’s not the totality of your experience as it once might have been. It’s just something that’s happening on the surface of a much deeper orientation, a much deeper reality. There was a story about Shankara, the great teacher a couple of centuries ago who founded Advaita. He had a high fever one time and he was shaking with fever. He was supposed to meet some important person who had come a long way to see him or something, but he couldn’t meet in that condition. So he put the fever on a stool that was in the room and when he met with the person the stool shook. And then when the meeting was over he took it back and he started shaking again and his disciples said, “Why did you just leave it on the stool?” And he said, “Well, because there is some individual karma here still that has to be worked out and I couldn’t shirk it, I had to live through it.”
Mandi Solk: Oh, I wouldn’t have bothered with that, I would have left it on the stool. I’m not bothered about karma. I don’t believe in that. But I like that story. The psychologist Gestalt used to teach that, didn’t he? Put your stomach ache or bad knee or bad back on a chair and talk to it. He did, yeah. I hope you don’t mind because I gave this example in that last interview. I was telling you that I was driving along a very windy highway at night, because this is like that other story of the heartburn. The car, which was a very little car, was being blown from side to side. Now you see, it was noticed that this was terrifying. I’m so sorry, it’s a very non-duality sort of thing. But it wasn’t that me, I personally, was…
Rick Archer: I’m terrified.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, it was as though there was terror all around. If I could describe it, if I could draw it, it would look like I was sat in the middle of a whirlpool, but this whirlpool didn’t touch me, it was just around me. So that fear was solidly there but wasn’t sort of touching me, like standing by a fire but not being the fire, being with the terror but not being terrified, being with the heartburn but not having heartburn. You see, that comes to a point where unfortunately you can’t make any more sense than that really.
Rick Archer: Well, it makes sense to me, even as you said it makes sense. What I would come back to you with is a little bit of a new agey way of speaking, but that we’re multi-dimensional beings and ordinarily people are locked into the superficial dimensions only and those seem like the totality of what they are and what is happening to them. So I am terrified because their whole sense of identity is caught up on the surface level of life. But when you’ve opened up to the full range of all the dimensions that your life spans and you’ve come to predominantly orient yourself or identify with the deeper level, the presence or whatever we want to call it, then just as you described, there’s terror but it’s not my terror, it’s not happening to me because the me that you’re referring to here, so to speak, is firstly not personal and secondly far beyond the realm at which terror or heartburn or anything else could be experienced. It’s untouched by all that.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, I think it’s important this point of your addressing of being here and living a human experience. Because you see, people get very either worried about it or jealous about the idea that somebody’s got something that they haven’t got. You know, and ego comes right into it. So that’s why it’s always a tricky one to talk about truth. It’s a bit of a minefield. All you can really say is what’s going on. You see, my experience of having spent hundreds and hundreds of hours and even now, I love it, you see. I still do it. I probably always do it. It’s like the bodyguard of the being. I think I do about three hours a day. I’m not saying that to show off because I don’t need to do it, nor does anybody need to do it. Nobody needs to do it three hours a day. It’s just my pleasure. And like you said earlier, I haven’t got children and I haven’t got a busy life, you know. So I can, you know.
Rick Archer: Yeah, why not?
Mandi Solk: Exactly.
Rick Archer: As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.
Mandi Solk: Exactly. And so I just like basking in that presence.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I totally relate.
Mandi Solk: If something comes up, you know, it’s questioned. Now I suppose it’s got to the point where it’s just seen through. It doesn’t hardly need a question. Do you see? That’s the way self-inquiry works. It’s not Mandi Solk being special. It’s the way that it works. If you haven’t got three hours a day to spend at it, it doesn’t mean that it can’t work. Of course it can still work. It’s that the underlying thing is questioning what you think of as you. So this really strong sense of I being the doer of my life and being here really does, it does evaporate. It doesn’t feel like there is a person here. Of course, you know, you can see one, I can see one, but the feeling of being inside this, you know, really lessens and lessens and lessens, you see. I know you were talking about stages and there’s all sorts of things, different prophets say things about, well, first of all you start in this stage and then you start … Sometimes I think that’s right and sometimes I think it’s not quite accurate because nobody could really say what the stage is for another person, you know, if they’re at the same … It’s like, are you at stage three? Should you be at stage three? You know what I mean?
Rick Archer: It’s like road maps, you know, and there are different road maps you can buy and they may kind of, you know, resemble one another. The road map or the map of North America that Columbus drew looks very different than the map we see now, but there’s some resemblance and so on, but none of them actually do justice to what’s actually there. If you, you know, actually get in the car and go on the road or better yet, walk and start seeing all the details, you can’t get that from a map. So all these things are just, you know, don’t take them too seriously. They’re just kind of suggestions of possibilities.
Mandi Solk: That’s right, because, you know, you can tell by people’s questions what … There are some similarities. There’s definitely quite a lot of similarities. You can tell by, you know, the kind of questions that people are asking of themselves and asking when they’re right to you. Because, of course, at first, you know, we don’t see all the traps that the mind or that thoughts can play. We don’t see them. They can creep up on you from behind. I often say, “Imagine that you’re rich enough to employ a butler and you employ the butler to bring you the letters and the bills every day. And he comes up with a silver tray and says, ‘Here you are, madam or sir.’ And there you are, there’s the butler, there’s all the things on the tray.” But every so often, because that butler, he doesn’t like you very much, he’s a bit sneaky and he thinks you don’t pay him enough. So every so often, he’ll just creep up at you from behind and suddenly just get the tray and go, “Turn over!” And all the thoughts, all the letters, they all, you know, “Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing? I didn’t employ you to do that.” And he says, “Get stuffed,” or something.
Rick Archer: And it’s time to get a new butler.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, it’s time to get a new butler. And that’s what happens with the mind. If you try and control it, you won’t get very far with trying to control it, because it’ll creep up behind and just drop more rubbish on your head.
Rick Archer: But why did you bring up this idea, based upon what we were talking about?
Mandi Solk: I have no idea. I know where we were. We were on stages and traps of the mind. So the more that we understand about the tricks that the mind can play, the more that we can let it go and are ready for it, the more we… It’s about the more awareness we have. Awareness means being aware, so instead of just looking in front of you, there’s an awareness of what’s to the side of you, what’s above you, what’s below you, what’s behind you. Your state of awareness is what deepens. That which you are aware of, source, that doesn’t change, but the degree of your awareness, that gets wider and bigger and whiter and lighter. Do you know what I mean?
Rick Archer: Sure, yeah.
Mandi Solk: That’s what the growing is, and that’s why you can never say, “Oh, it’s all over.” God forbid you said it’s all over. I’d be very sorry for you, because that’s when people – there’s a deadness, and I’ve stayed with enough of them. They’ve stayed with me, for me to know that.
Rick Archer: Well, you can say that, but it’s not going to last you that long. Eventually you’re going to say, “Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t all over. Keep on trucking.”
Mandi Solk: Like me!
Rick Archer: Yeah, exactly. This whole thing about stages, I think the mistake people make is they try to fit themselves into somebody else’s road map. I remember the first time I took LSD back in the ’60s. We sat around all night reading this book by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Dass, trying to figure out what bardo we were in. We were reading about all these bardos, and we thought, “Maybe we’re in this bardo.” This happens in a more serious way.
Mandi Solk: What did you think?
Rick Archer: It’s based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was some levels of stages you go through. But I see that a lot, where people have a certain road map that they’ve gotten really used to. Maybe it’s their particular teacher’s road map of what the stages of development are going to be. Their experience, as it matures, doesn’t match their conception of that road map. They actually could have gone quite far through that road map, or even gone beyond it, and yet feel that they’re not even starting out on it yet. They haven’t even reached the first stage that they had been anticipating.
Mandi Solk: That’s depressing, because what if you think you’ve either skipped a stage, or you’ve skipped a stage? If there were stages, some people reach them at different times, don’t they?
Rick Archer: Very different, in different orders and so on. If we can draw some grand conclusion from all this, it’s just that, as we were saying earlier, at least you and I seem to agree, maybe not everyone will, that it’s an ongoing journey. I don’t know if there’s any clear consensus about what the landmarks on that journey are going to be, but nonetheless, in a sense we’re all like, you might think, “Geez, it really would have been fun to live back in the 1800s and to have explored the western United States for the first time. Now it’s all developed and there’s highways.” But in this journey that we’re talking about, it’s almost like we’re all explorers exploring it for the first time, because somebody else’s account of it is not going to satisfy anybody. For us, every step of the way is a fresh discovery.
Mandi Solk: I just think that what happens is that I think the maturing of this is, you see, basically, the reason I think you can’t say it’s all over is, what can be kind of all over is certainly that identifying with a personality, thinking that you are your thoughts, all that, that can go. But you see, it’s too simplistic to say that, because that which has built you up to think that you are a you, there’s lots to it and there’s many, many different shades of it, as well as the big things like your memories. You’re not your memories, you’re not your thoughts, you’re not your judgments and everything, and then stuff comes up moment by moment and you see you’re not that, and that starts to be dissolved as there’s an ever-growing presence. However, there’s more reflection of that and, like you were saying about refinement, there’s more subtle things that can come in that you haven’t seen before. There’s other things. This is the freshness of life and this is why you can’t ever say that it’s completely all over, and you wouldn’t want to either, because that’s a lack of aliveness. So I think that’s what we’re saying.
Rick Archer: I think if people could, let’s just speak hypothetically, these people who are saying it’s all over, if they could step into the shoes of acknowledging that there is a vast range of possibility yet to be explored, if they could step into the shoes of someone who had traversed a great deal of that range, they would be utterly flabbergasted at the depth and richness and detail of the experience. They just hadn’t realized that there was such a possibility.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, and there’s somebody, a very famous speaker, and one of these that says it’s all over. Now, I’ve spent time with this person and there is the most absolutely undeniable light there. There’s no question about it and a huge sense with that person of really complete emptiness. But alongside of that, there’s something that doesn’t feel like love. I remember being interested in that, very deeply interested in how this can be going on at the same time. There seems to be this incredible open emptiness, but because somehow there’s still some arrogance mixed in it, so there is something there, although there also isn’t. It’s very hard. You get into territories here that’s just not black and white. There was something that was not of love and something that felt a bit, if you like, small-minded and mean going on at the same time. I just thought, well, that can only come from really closing up a portal, which happens if you think that everything is all over and that’s it. Because if that was really, really the case, what would you be doing still walking this earth? The freedom is what I was after. The freedom is what everybody can have. And the freedom, I would say, is what I feel that I have to a very good degree now, compared to how it was, because I’ve spent a lot of time looking, putting that effort in. However, there’s no way that I could ever say, “That’s it, it’s over. That’s it, me finished, done.” No way. And I’m so glad, because I wouldn’t have been glad a few years ago. I wanted to know it was all over, but now it seems the opposite is true. Nothing is over.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, just what you were saying about that person, whom I think I know who you’re referring to, I think I’ve interviewed this person, and you mentioned love, there seemed to be a lack of love, just take that as a case in point. Inner freedom is established, it’s very fine, but to what extent can love be developed? To what extent can the heart be refined and expanded? Or take another example, to what extent can perception be refined? How subtly, how richly can we appreciate through our senses the creation that’s around us? Whether or not either of those developments takes place, the heart or the perception, the inner freedom can be there. But once the inner freedom is established, I would suggest that the next frontier is this development in the relative, the development of the heart, of perception, of perhaps numerous faculties that are pretty much stunted and undeveloped in the average person that can actually begin to develop significantly on the basis of that freedom, once it dawns.
Mandi Solk: I think there never stops being a deepening of love, it’s the seeing of it because it’s so expansive, even words like “expansive” is just too small. So there’s an ever-deepening wonder of that love, and it keeps on kicking more barriers away, and kicking more barriers away, and every day there’s a bigger expansion of the feeling of it, not by anybody, we don’t want to go into that, it’s just the feeling of it, it’s just that sense of it. And you can never come to the end of that, and I think in the end that’s why, really glad you brought that up, because that’s why it can’t ever be over, because that love, and it keeps taking you by surprise. I mean, even today, I was just sitting, looking at the garden actually, and it wasn’t down to something like, “Oh, there was a lovely birdie in the garden,” but it wasn’t about that, it was just something else, another kind of, as though something else just got opened again and opened again. And I love that going on, that’s lovely. I don’t think there can be an end to that, I’m sure of it. And you can feel it from people who really are feeling it, you know what I mean? There’s not a feeling along with it of something that’s arrogant, or there’s no sense of arrogance with it, or how could there be? It’s the opposite of that. So that’s where I was surprised when I’ve met one or two of these people where, yes, there seems to be this lightness and this openness, but along with it there’s something that’s not quite wholesome as well. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t want to do that comparing, that’s why I don’t mention names.
Rick Archer: No, no, I wouldn’t want to mention names. Ken Wilber talks a lot about this kind of thing, he’s an American philosopher.
Mandi Solk: You mentioned the name! I’m only joking. I said, “You’ve just mentioned the name,” but I’m only joking.
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah, his name. But I’m speaking in a complimentary way about him. He talks about lines of development and he says how there can be, and this idea isn’t unique with him but he expresses it well, one can be very developed along certain lines, say development of consciousness or inner freedom, but really quite immature along other lines of development. True spirituality would probably mean a comprehensive development of all these lines, not just one to the exclusion of the others. One other point I just want to throw in is a lot of times when you talk about spiritual stuff as we’ve been talking, it might almost seem a little hedonistic. It’s all about what my subjective experience is, how much bliss I have, how much freedom I have, how much inner joy and whatnot. But another dimension for growth perhaps that we could consider is of how much value am I to everyone else, to the world, to the environment, and what is the range of possibilities of the development of that.
Mandi Solk: I think that’s answered more simply though, because when there isn’t a sense of a human me in that way, there’s room for everybody else, there’s space for everybody else, there’s space for people to be a complete so-and-so, like that man that was driving the car. And then people can feel that from you really. Mooji says it’s like a fragrance of peace that you give off, it’s a kind of a harmlessness. You can be sat with somebody and you don’t know them and they’re a stranger, and they feel it off you and they feel better for it. They don’t know why. You’re not doing anything, except that you’re not there, so there’s no judgments going on, is there? There’s nothing going on. You’re an open space for that person. That’s the value that there is in it.
Rick Archer: Yeah, we could say that the divine radiates through you to a profound extent and influences that person positively. Oprah Winfrey has this thing where she says every morning her prayer is, “Use me,” as if to God saying, “Just make me as effective an instrument as you can.” And there’s that phrase from that prayer of St. Francis, “Make me an instrument of your peace.” A lot of people who we would regard as saints or highly spiritual people have that perspective that they are just instruments of the divine and they just want to serve the divine or be as influential in a positive way as they possibly can be. They’d like that to be their function on earth.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, that’s right. And that thing, “Use me,” even if you don’t feel that there’s a you there, it’s still something that you want to be used for the best purpose. You want to be an open channel for the best purpose, that everybody feels able to have that sense of openness themselves, that this sense of freedom we’re talking about, the whole point is it’s free, it’s available to everybody. And I hope I’ve made that clear because that “Use me” was what I thought before this interview. I just sort of thought, yeah, I had that thought to be an open channel.
Rick Archer: Well, the less there is a you there, the more you can be used. I mean, the more you’re kind of trying to run the show, the less God can run the show.
Mandi Solk: Exactly, exactly. Get out your own way.
Rick Archer: Exactly. Well, that’s delightful. You’re the kind of person I can just keep doing this with all day and we can’t run out of things to talk about, although we’re kind of going around the same points over and over, but it’s good because we sort of get it from different angles, I think, each time we go around.
Mandi Solk: Oh, it’s been lovely to talk. Thank you so much.
Rick Archer: And you know what? I bet you if we do another one in a few years, you’ll say, “Boy, I thought I had it all figured out three years ago when I talked to you, and now I realize this and there’s so much more.”
Mandi Solk: I think the difference is I don’t feel I’ve got it figured out. I did think that before.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s not fair to say it that way, but I bet you if we do have another talk, and I hope we will, you’ll say, “Boy, it’s gotten a lot even more interesting.”
Mandi Solk: Oh yeah, I hope so. That’s right, that’s exactly what we were talking about, wasn’t it?
Rick Archer: Exactly, yeah.
Mandi Solk: Most things that you say, “Oh yes.”
Rick Archer: And I think that’s something that everyone has to look forward to. Life is this fascinating adventure and it just keeps unfolding for us all.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, well, you know, because I offer Skype sessions, you see, one-to-one Skype sessions, and I think these sessions, oh, I just had a little box that says, “Scott Kiloby’s online,” isn’t that funny? I forget when you’re on Skype that other people sort of pop up too.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, what was I saying? Oh, Skype conversations. You know, it’s a lovely way of meeting this, isn’t it? You know, if you can’t get to see somebody, you can just do this. I mean, it feels very bonding, doesn’t it? It’s a lovely thing.
Rick Archer: It does, yeah. I feel like I’ve got this big family all over the world now.
Mandi Solk: Yeah, I bet you do, Rick. Yeah, fantastic.
Rick Archer: It’s great.
Mandi Solk: It’s a very nice part of it.
Rick Archer: Oh yes, yeah. You’re like one of my British soul sisters.
Mandi Solk: Oh, thank you.
Rick Archer: So I guess we’d better wrap it up. I’ve been speaking with Mandi Solk, who lives in the northern part of the UK. As she mentioned, she does Skype sessions, so if you’d like to get in touch with Mandi, I’ll be linking to her website from batgap.com, and you can contact her through that. You want to say what your website is? I’ll be linking to it, but what is it?
Mandi Solk: It’s mandisolk.com.
Rick Archer: That’s easy. Mandisolk.com. This interview has been one in an ongoing series. I do a new one each week. If you’d like to listen to some of the previous ones, go to batgap.com and you’ll see them all archived there. It’s available both as video and as an audio podcast, so there’s a link with each interview there to the iTunes thing where you can subscribe to the podcast. There’s also a little discussion group that crops up around each interview. I noticed that last week’s interview has 270-something comments now, and it’s just been a week, so they get kind of lively. They usually go off topic, but I can’t police it. I encourage people to try to stay relevant to the interview itself, but who knows? It doesn’t matter. Go there for that. There’s a “Donate” button there. I appreciate people clicking on it. There’s a little sign-up thing there. If you’d like to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, just sign up and you will be. So good. Thanks, Mandi.
Mandi Solk: Thank you. Great.
Rick Archer: I think next week is Cesar Teruel. I’ll be speaking to him in Mexico. I’ll be in Iowa. He’ll be in Mexico. I don’t know much about Cesar yet, but a lot of people requested that I interview him. He seems like an interesting guy. That will be next week. Thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you then.
Non-speech: [music] [music] [music]
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