Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week or today is Mariana Caplan. Welcome Mariana.
Mariana: Thanks Rick.
Rick: I first became aware of you several years ago when I was in a Satsang kind of meeting and a friend of mine said, “You have to read this book, Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment.” And just the title of it, I thought, “Yes, I have to read that book.” So he happened to have a copy and he lent it to me and I read it and loved every page. And since then I have read, I think, three more of your books. Most recently, Eyes Wide Open, Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path. And I just find that, I don’t know, maybe we like to talk to people that don’t challenge us, but I find that your kind of line of thinking and all the experience you have been through and the wisdom you have gleaned from that really resonates with me. So, it is an inspiration to read and it is great to be talking to you.
Mariana: Thank you.
Rick: Let’s give people a little sense of who you are and what your background is and stuff. Go ahead.
Mariana: One thing I would add, I mean I appreciate the comment that sometimes we like to talk to people who don’t challenge us, but sometimes when we talk to people who we are aligned with, then we get a chance to really dive in deep and unpack a level of nuance and subtlety that wouldn’t otherwise be available. So I also, kind of like if you are a yogi and you go to a yoga class, then you can dig in deeper rather than having a discussion whether yoga is useful for the spirit.
Rick: True, I mean if the yogi went to the Fundamentalist Christian Revival meeting, he might never get past first base.
Mariana: So, I appreciate the chance to dive in deeply with other practitioners and I imagine many of your listeners, given that they probably come back again and again, also appreciate your perspective and want to dive in deeper. So, I am ready.
Rick: Good. So, let’s give people a sense of your credentials. I mean there is a little standard blurb in the back of your book about your degrees and so on. You can mention those in passing if you like. And of course, then, given what we are talking about here, a lot of your credentials have nothing to do with what you might learn in a formal academic setting. You have really sort of been there and done that in terms of the whole spiritual scene over several decades now. So, give us a sort of a nutshell version of all that you have been through and how it has qualified you to even write these books.
Mariana: Okay. The last bit, when you say how it has qualified me to write the books, in the case of Halfway Up the Mountain, my teacher, who I was with for 16 years, asked me to write the book. So that was, we can weave that into the story, but that is an interesting credential, right? When we are working in relationship to a teacher, it was actually the teacher’s blessing and request.
Rick: And as I recall, you didn’t really feel up to the task when he asked you.
Mariana: No, I was a very young woman at the time. But to back up, I have all the degrees. So, I have a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology, and then I did a master’s degree in counselling, and I am a licensed psychotherapist. And then I did a PhD in contemporary spirituality. So, I was doing all of that. And as you said, I think my primary qualification for books like this is that I have spent my entire adult life deeply immersed in not only spiritual study, but spiritual practice. I spent many, many years traveling the world, interviewing the greatest teachers that I could have access to. And of course, as time went on, I got access to more and more teachers at a greater level because the books were appreciated. And among those teachers, my teacher’s teacher, my teacher is named Lee Lozowick. He died a year ago, November. And his teacher was a great saint in southern India called Yogi Ram Surat Kumar. He lived in Tiruvannamalai, where a lot of the contemporary satsang scene in India takes place. So I spent many, many, many, many, many, many years experimenting. As a very young woman, I was following shamans in Mexico and Costa Rica and El Salvador. And I got a bit burned and then decided to become a Theravadan Buddhist to just even things out and get some grounding and have some scandal-free, problem-free years of practice while I did more in-depth psychotherapy. Because after getting burned, although I was a young woman, I was a therapist and I had learned enough to understand that when we find ourselves in situations, especially that repeat themselves, but even unhealthy situations, that there’s very often an element of us, as well as, you know, big, bad teacher. So I was a Theravadan Buddhist, or I was practicing Theravadan Buddhism while I was doing more in-depth psychotherapy. And then I met my teacher and his teacher, Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, within about 12 hours of each other. I was wandering around south India. And then spent the next year with his teacher, Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, in very, very close company, in Tiruvannamalai. And then the next five years living at my teacher’s ashram.
Rick: Let me interrupt here and ask, why did you feel like you… Why didn’t you go straight to the horse’s mouth? Why didn’t you make Yogi… I can’t pronounce it.
Mariana: It’s a hard one.
Rick: Why didn’t you make him your teacher instead of his student?
Mariana: It’s a longer story, but I can probably summarize it as I’ve learned to do over the years. I actually met Yogi Ramsuratkumar first, and 12 hours before. And it’s a very interesting question, and each of our stories have these unique trajectories. So I had been searching for years, and I had heard, before I met Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, that there was some white guru who was coming through town to meet his teacher, who was this chain-smoking, kind of mad, saint guy. And he was coming with his disciples to see his teacher. And in my years of seeking until that point, which had been about seven years, which seemed like a lot at the time, but we know now that’s really just, you know, sticking your toe in the kiddie pool, I was impressed, because I had never met a teacher who had brought his students to spend time with his teacher, and to allow himself to be in the function of disciple, with respect to his students. So, I was curious. And I think the truth of it is that we have these profound karmic relationships in life, and somehow it was really my karma to be with my teacher. I had a deep connection to both of them. Both of them, in many ways, favored me in the form of attention and closeness and opportunity. And why I said I’ll make a very long story short, because I was a young woman, I was 25 years old, and I found myself in a cosmic drama way over my head. I fell spiritually in love with my teacher, note, spiritually in love. And…
Rick: And why was this cosmic drama way over your head?
Mariana: Well, because of what ensued from there, because oftentimes in the spiritual path, especially early on, we’re experiencing a lot of spiritual intensity, and we’re unaware of the psychological elements that are involved in it, because they’re unconscious. That’s the nature of the unconscious, right? It’s unconscious. So I decided, my teacher came and left, and I was just madly spiritually in love with him, and I wanted to do anything to become his student. And I hadn’t connected as deeply with the yogi. He, without a certain level of discernment, he wasn’t as accessible. He was this bizarre man, dressed in rags in the summer, with a turban and chain-smoking, and moving his fingers.
Rick: Oh, he chained smoke too; it wasn’t just Lee Laswick that changed smoke.
Mariana: No, Lee didn’t smoke.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Mariana: He was almost Victorian.
Rick: He belonged to the Nisargadatta club. Yeah.
Mariana: And I actually didn’t care about the smoking, but I hadn’t connected as deeply. Yeah. But I met my teacher, and as it happens for some people, and not everybody, right? Sometimes when we fall in love, it’s bells and whistles, and sometimes it’s subtle, and we didn’t even see it coming, and it’s just as deep. But in my case, it wasn’t just bells and whistles; it was fireworks, and cosmic openings, and chakra spinnings, and the whole gamut. But I wasn’t sure that I was ready to sign up, because Lee had said, “When you sign on with me, it’s long-term.” So I went away, and did some traveling, and came back to Tiruvannamalai, and the yogi started attending to me, and calling me up, and talking to me, and blessing me. And I realized that since my teacher loved his teacher more than anything in the world, the weight of my teacher’s heart was to become endeared to his teacher. Unconscious, right? The love games that we play. So in that process, I became very attached to his teacher. And then Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, for a long period of time in that year, had decided that I wasn’t going to be able to leave India for 7 years, and would tell me that regularly, as my visa was expiring, and as I saw that he was so powerful, that if he didn’t want me to leave, the bus to the airport would get flat tires, or there would be an avalanche. And he wasn’t controlling, he wasn’t manipulative; he was just powerful.
Rick: Right. Nature was doing his bidding.
Mariana: That I found myself in this cosmic drama. And the way that it played out is that I needed to decide who I was going to enter into the stream of the lineage with. And I don’t even think in retrospect, a long-time retrospect, there was a right or wrong. I think that there was endless gifts available, entering it through the vehicle of Lee, and other gifts, gifts and limitations, in some way, entering it through the stream of the Yogi. And I followed, as I always have, for better and for worse, I followed my heart.
Rick: Okay. That’s a good nutshell story. Now, along the lines still of qualifications, some people listening to this will ask, “All right, well, is she awakened?” I think that’s a very simplistic question you know, as we’ll explore, but how would you respond to that question?
Mariana: I would respond to that question that it’s not, I don’t find the question that relevant, honestly. Because, somebody was asking me this, I’m a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and this week we were working on the question of the spiritual teacher. And one of my sincere and young students said, “How come when I go to spiritual teachers, they won’t talk about their degree of awakening?” Or, “How come people can’t and don’t let you know where they are?” Because, we don’t know when we’re young on the path. And one of the things that occurred to me is that many people, when they’re younger on the path, even teachers, let’s pick any, you know, imagine five run-of-the-mill teachers who are honest and deep and have kept going, when they first awakened, right, they first had these powerful experiences of oneness and non-separation, and those experiences continued to abide for a period of time, they probably thought that they were more awakened than they did five years later, ten years later, twenty years later, they weren’t interested in the question, not as a ploy, but for a couple of reasons. One, because the developmental processes of life continue to happen. People run into deep relationship issues, depressions, nervous breakdowns. The teachers, right? That’s the access point in the world that I have, for reasons we can describe. I’m carrying all of this confidential information inside of me. They run into having teenagers. They run into illness and death and people who they love, dying, and that the developmental stages and processes of life humble most teachers in surprising ways. And, they also, ideally, run into, but not often, because there’s not so many saints of old, like Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, and Nisargadatta, and Ramana, there aren’t so many around. But, ideally, they run into teachers or sources of knowledge that reveal to them that the awakenings that they experienced and believed were enlightenment. They were enlightenment. They were, in the Yoga Sutras, they talk about multiple levels and levels and levels and levels of enlightenment. And, they’re not small increments, right? They fall into next incremental shifts. And, what people thought were awakened was a really simple level or levels of awakening. So, having said all of that, what makes me qualified to talk about the things that I talk about, the way that I talk about them, because I’m not ever intending to serve in the function of a spiritual teacher. I’ve always wanted to be the friend and the sister, you know, and the spiritual psychologist that’s not afraid to go anywhere with anyone, and is not afraid when, you know, a famous, great spiritual teacher has a psychotic break and wants to talk to me about it. I’m not afraid, and I don’t have a problem with it. So, what qualifies me is that I’ve, I mean, on the one hand, the degrees and the studies aren’t the sole qualification. But, on the other hand, you know, doing 5,000 hours of internship and studying psychopathology for 15 years in the context of oneness, and receiving the stories of thousands and thousands of teachers and students, and receiving them as clients, and working with them over many years, for me is a more relevant qualification for the kind of work I do. And I’ll give you an example here. There was, I worked therapeutically with a person who, with a woman who had, you know, slept with a teacher. And the teacher was married, and the issue came out, and I did a lot of mediation, and working with all the different parties. And when the wife was calling me, and when I say this, this is many situations and many people. When the wife called me, she said, “Have you dealt with a situation like this one?” And I said, “You know, I haven’t dealt with a situation exactly like this one, because they’re all unique. But, given the spectrum of people available, you know, I’m one of the people that will meet you and is holding the complexity of the variables involved.” And in fact, all the people involved in that drama, and that drama is like thousands of other dramas. All those people were actually great spiritual practitioners, quite good teachers, really good people. And at this point in my life on the path, I feel a capacity and an interest to hold the complexity of teachers and practitioners as we move, you know, decades into the path, and all the complexities that we encounter, which include the awakenings, and include the unintegrated aspects of ourselves. So, something like that.
Rick: That’s great. I kind of feel that way too, although I’m not doing it in a professional capacity as you are, and haven’t, you know, kind of sampled quite as many stories as you have. But just doing these interviews, you know, and kind of zooming into the lives of one after another, week after week, that and, you know, I set up a chat group about 10 years ago that has like 300,000 posts in it now, where people are discussing this kind of thing. And I’ve learned, I mean, my own teacher was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and I was with him for many, many years, and you know, and it came out after his death, a woman wrote a book, that in fact he had had sexual relations with a number of women, and kept it rather private. And at first I became very embittered by that, not radically so, not as much as I would have been 20 years before, but it took a bit of adjusting too. But what I ended up getting from it is just a kind of a, rather than a polarization, a kind of an expansion, a growth, an ability to kind of embody the paradox, and appreciate all the wonderful gifts and knowledge and experience. And he saved my life, quite literally, and enriched my life in many, many ways. And on the other hand, kind of an acceptance of, despite the public image of his loneliness as a man, his cultural background and how that clashed with Western values when he came over here. And many people reacted the same way when they heard the story, and in a way I kind of love him more for his humanity. Anyway, I kind of rambled more than I wanted to there, but it is almost the exception to the rule to find any well-known teacher, or even minor teacher, who has not had something like this happen. So, it is hard to find exceptions.
Mariana: And it is not always in the area of sexuality. It is usually in the area of money, sexuality, or power. Or all three, or, you know, Ken Wilber is a friend of mine. I don’t know if you know of Ken’s work, but probably. And we had a deep discussion, the last book that came out was called “The Guru Question”, and we had a deep discussion about this, a public discussion. And one of the pieces that Ken has added to this conversation, a very important piece, is his introduction of developmental lines. So, over two dozen distinct lines of development have been articulated and observed, and some of the main ones are psychosexual, ethical, spiritual, affective, or emotion, cognitive, we could say an awakening line. And if we imagine these multiple lines of development in each person, and teachers, and students, and the reality is that individuals are developing more powerfully in some lines, and less strongly in other lines. So, we get different mixes. And I think one way of articulating what you were sharing about your teacher was the recognition that all of his lines of development were not fully even and fully integrated. And does that disillusion us? or does that humble us and soften us? And maybe before it humbles and softens us, it works us. You know, over the years, when you said you’ve been hearing all these stories, part of what’s happened on the way is that my heart’s been broken hundreds and hundreds of times with these stories. And if I were to have gotten disillusioned with the path, I mean, fortunately, with my teacher, I mean, I had a lot of the problematic relationships before I met my teacher, and not with him. But as we let ourselves get worked by this, and dig deeper, and often what’s getting disillusioned is our ideas, and projections, and expectations about enlightenment, and the path, and ourselves, and teachers. But when we come to the path, we say, “Oh, great teacher! Oh, meditation practice! Dismantle my illusions! Take away my projections! Bring me, disillusion me! Annihilate me! Take me closer to truth!” Right? And we would like, we imagine, because it’s another projection, that this annihilation and disillusionment would take place in the thoughts going away, and meditation, and us just resting in silence because we read something about it somewhere. Or, we read a concept of integration, and we imagine that Sri Aurobindo or Ramana Maharshi not only were fully enlightened, but their parenting, and their relationship skills, and their teaching skills, and their psychological development, somehow, they were all completely integrated and flawless, and maybe they didn’t even smell up the bathroom.
Rick: There are stories like that, you know, Yogananda smelling like roses.
Mariana: Actually, I think some of those stories are true.
Rick: They may be, yeah.
Mariana: But these people were always human, so what’s getting dismantled is our projections. You know, we met up recently at the Science and Non-duality Conference, and I brought my baby there, so, I mostly had my meetings in the hallways, and I talked to many of the presenters there who were teachers, and many who encountered my books. And when people meet me, I’m lucky. You know, what they like to talk to me about is what’s really real. So you’ve got some famous teacher on the circuit, you know, who has 200-300 people following him or her wherever they go, and when they talk to me, they’re like, “Whoa! I don’t even know what I’m doing here. All these people follow me, and I get up there, and I articulate awakening, and people have these experiences, but I’m totally struggling in my relationship, and I’m not sure what to do about my relationship to coffee or marijuana, or if you think it’s okay that I have a glass of wine every night, and what’s the relationship between what I’m doing and the psychological stuff?” And I have these conversations all the time, and I feel more intimate with these people, and my heart opens more, and I don’t respect their teachings less. We’re often talking about how can they present those beautiful teachings and add the skill sets, and the people who have the skill sets to also support these other levels of integration in their students. So, I just stumbled into writing a unique pocket on the spiritual path, and I stumbled into it because Lee Lozowick said, when I was 27 years old, “Will you write a book, Halfway Up the Mountain?” And I said, “You’re crazy! I’m not qualified.” And he said, “Would you rather not write the book?” And I said, “No, I want to write the book.” And then what I did is I interviewed 25 of the greatest people that I could encounter, and I transcribed thousands of pages of interviews with the help of my sangha, and worked on the task of integration. And I thought that I would be doing that, and then I would be writing books on enlightenment later, or whatever it was. And in fact, I found a vehicle into a body of work where the light becomes more evident as the unconscious, and the projections, and the expectations, and then the less true things fall away. But not in the conventional, you know, go to India, hang out in the satsang circuit way, a different way.
Rick: Well I think you’ve been serving a very valuable need because the issues you bring up and discuss in your books are so common, and I think you probably, even unknowingly, save many people from disillusionment by enabling them to ponder this stuff in a mature way. And if you think about the word “disillusionment,” if enlightenment is supposed to be a dispelling of illusion, then we want to get disillusioned as much as possible, but that’s not always going to be quite as we envision it.
Mariana: yeah, we really do want to get disillusioned, and for many of the people who are even listening to this and saying, “Whoa, she’s not awakened, but I’ve been to 500 satsangs and I’m able to abide in that non-dual ‘aha’ no other state,” you know, we check in 5 years from now and 10 years from now, and it actually becomes a value. The value increases over time of the dismantling of illusions because that particular kind of high, it’s not the end of the road, it’s just a piece of the puzzle.
Rick: And sometimes it’s just actually an understanding that one has become very conversant with without really the experiential correlate to it. Let’s talk about lines of development for a second. There’s a lot of things in what you just said that we could unpack, but in terms of lines of development, one of Maharishi’s teachings was always, “Just water the root of the tree and all the leaves are going to flourish. You don’t need to run around watering all the leaves.” So, he would have taught and did teach that all you have to do is dive into pure consciousness and then your behavior, your health, every aspect of your life, your intellectual capacities, everything is just going to simultaneously flourish. So, I used to think there was a tight correlation. I’m older but wiser and can see that that correlation is often, if not always, a lot looser than I had been led to believe. And I think a lot of people, even without having had him as a teacher, kind of come into this assuming that the correlation is very tight.
Mariana: And they’re told that.
Rick: And they’re told that, and a lot of teachers teach that. And so I guess that’s why it can be very disillusioning when they find out it’s not so tight and they need to really come to terms with this whole issue.
Mariana: Yeah, yeah. So, let’s talk for a couple of minutes about the way that that teaching is true and the way that it isn’t true. So, I think that these experiences of awakening end up trickling into many, many, many aspects of our development. They do so in many ways. To begin with, they often create a confidence inside of us. They liberate energy and they create a confidence that’s not a self-esteem kind of confidence, but it’s a spiritual confidence. Like, “Ah! I’m not who I thought I was. I’m not the mind. I’m not the thoughts.” When my mind has these vindictive, angry, jealous, and rageful thoughts, that’s the conditioning. And there are many ways to look at it, but it’s even my parents and my grandparents, and karma, and the nature of duality.
Rick: Yeah, and the person who is saying this isn’t just rationalizing it; there’s something in their experience that tells them this.
Mariana: No, insight, insight.
Rick: It’s like it’s staring them in the face; they can see it operating in their moment-to-moment life.
Mariana: Right, all of us. It’s not the awakened teachers; probably 90% of the people watching this show can relate to that in some way. It awakens a confidence, and that confidence does probably take away some significant limiting belief systems. So, it does water some of those leaves and have them flourish into flowers. And it also gives the strength to then meet some of those conditioned structures and look at them more closely, because if you’re convinced that you’re your thoughts, and a lot of your thoughts are suicidal or rageful and such, you can’t meet them because they’re overwhelming.
Rick: Right, they grip you.
Mariana: Yeah, when you have the spaciousness, you have a way to meet them. So, this is how the spiritual starts to support the psychological, and the psychological starts to support the spiritual. The way that it’s not true is that we have our own lives, and the lives of everybody else, to show that it’s not true. How many awakened spiritual teachers are great husbands and wives and partners, and really enlightened and integrated to the satisfaction of their partner? How many of them are great parents and totally take care of their bodies and somehow live radiant teachings and visions, but are able to integrate their energy and don’t have blind spots and money, power, sex? I mean, nobody. So, what we see is that that awakened consciousness doesn’t necessarily translate into many areas of a life, especially where it doesn’t translate to interpersonal relationships. There’s often very little connection between the two. I mean, a lot of these great awakened teachers are very awkward with students, socially, any kind of relational interaction. And, to me, it’s not a problem. It’s really only a problem if that teaching is repeated, so we’re hanging around, waiting for our awakening to penetrate all the areas of our lives. So, a lot of these relational challenges emerged in relationship. The wounds emerged in relationship. And, in fact, a lot of the healing happens in relationship. If you have significant wounds that most people on the spiritual path have, and we can talk about this, but I’m not really interested in that. That’s just your story, because that story plays out in all the days of your life, and it plays out in your health, and it plays out in your posture, and it plays out in the balance of your life. So, for me, I’m much more resonant with a perspective, a tantric perspective, where duality and non-duality co-emerge and play out as aspects of the one. That makes sense to me. But, as these wounds emerged in relationship, so the healing emerges in relationship. If we had relational wounds that tend to isolate us, or separate us, or make us loners, or sometimes that masks us as independent, right? Hanging out and doing a bunch of inquiry while we’re traveling around the world in retreats is never going to increase our relationship skills. If we’re lucky, on one of those retreats we’ll meet someone else like that. You fall in love, spiritually in love, and then you clash, and you say, “Whoa, we have to do something about this.” You get into therapy, or whatever you start doing, and you start doing the relational work, and then you let this wonderful – I always see it as a nice little figure-eight, where the awakening gives confidence to bear more deeply into the psychological material. As we unravel it, it makes more space, and that space is almost spiritual. It allows more space in our meditation and our awareness, and then we’re willing and able to penetrate more deeply. In that way, a deeper integration starts to emerge throughout life that is trustworthy. It makes us a good friend and a good partner, and it makes us more honest in our business relationships. And we’ll probably get more out of our longevity and health through the integration and learning how to balance our bodies and our passions for the path, but our need for rest, in that way than expecting our non-dual realization to transform our meditation posture.
Rick: Yeah, there’s an old analogy that if you pull any one leg of a table, all the other legs will come along. But in terms of what you’ve just been saying, we could say that there are ways in which the other legs are kind of stuck, and so you have to pull a lot harder on the one leg to get the others to come along. But if you can kind of get rid of the gunk that’s holding up or sticking the other legs, then it will actually be easier to move the table. So, you’re saying you can take a multi-pronged approach in which you simultaneously, maybe you still have your transcendent meditation practice, but you’re also working on relationship issues, or maybe getting into therapy, or doing yoga for your body, or you can sort of work on all the levels simultaneously.
Mariana: And ideally, a teacher, not that a teacher would have to have all those capacities, but ideally, they would include that in their teaching so that their sincere but less seasoned followers would get that as part of the teaching, so, they would be looking out to attend to their integrated development.
Rick: I was thinking about the idea, when I was thinking about doing this interview and I was reading “Eyes Wide Open,” and I kept thinking, “All right, halfway up the mountain, so does she see there to be a summit to the mountain?” And then as I was reading “Eyes Wide Open,” you said that you had come to the conclusion there wasn’t one, so that kind of answered that question. But in thinking about that question, I kind of fished around a little bit and came up with something interesting from the Yoga Vasistha that I just want to throw out and see where it takes us. The Yoga Vasistha defines 16 basic levels of evolution, or kalas as they call them. The first is rocks, minerals and stuff. The second couple are plants, after that animals, 3 and 4. The average human beings, according to this structure, are in kala 5. More spiritually inclined human beings would be kala 6. Saints, kala 7. Really advanced sages and saints, maybe kala 8. And beyond that, the human body cannot sustain it, anything greater, unless maybe one is an avatar or something. And it goes all the way up to 16 supposedly, and supposedly Krishna or something is 16. Now of course, people might not have any faith or respect for the Yoga Vasistha or that whole Indian tradition, but it throws out an interesting thing, which is that when we talk about enlightenment, we are asking sort of “Relative to what?” Relative to the greatest that a human being has ever attained, but what is that relative to? In fact, Maharishi once said, I was in a meeting with him, he said, “You know, we talk about immortality sometimes, but if we really want immortality, do we want to be immortal in these bodies?”
Mariana: Yeah, yeah. It kind of reminds me, it’s a little bit of the opposite, but me and my girlfriend Laura, back in the ashram days, there was always talk about we have to get off the wheel. And we used to talk, you know, in the corner of the ashram, she’s like, “I don’t want to get off the wheel. I like being alive, I don’t want to leave my body.” And I said, “Yeah, me neither. I don’t want to get out of this. I just want to do it well, I want to live it.”
Rick: Yeah, and I mean, the teachers I’ve spoken to, and you’ve probably spoken to the same ones and many more, you might consider, in my opinion, the most mature in their understanding say, “I see no end to this. There seems to be no end to the refinement and the embodiment, the degree to which this can be expressed. So, I’m just along for the ride, we’ll see where it goes.”
Mariana: Yeah, and that’s why, and I kind of knew it at the time, but I was too young to really grasp it. When I met Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, just meeting him and being with him for a year was so valuable to the rest of my spiritual experience, because very young in the past, having met all kinds of different teachers at different levels, and the shamans, and the Buddhists, and the non-dual teachers, right? Suddenly I meet somebody who’s so, so much wider and so much more profoundly enlightened than anything I had imagined.
Rick: What was it about him that enabled you to really be convinced of that? I mean, the outer appearance could have been a little off-putting, with the cigarettes and the rags, and of course, there’s always your subjective ability to evaluate that we have to take into consideration. But what convinced you so solidly that this was the case?
Mariana: What convinced me so solidly that it was the case was my daily experience of being in his presence for a year. It wasn’t really anything anybody said. It was, you know, let’s say I’ve interviewed and met, I don’t know, There was one among them, and I don’t think it was necessarily more so than what I would have found in Ramana, if I had gotten to meet him, or Papa Ramdas, or Aurobindo. But there was one of them that, I mean, the talk of enlightenment, I mean, it was so far gone in the history of the conversation. It never would have come up. He had had his awakening when he was 30. He had gone to Swami Papa Ramdas, and he had gone to Ramana, and he had gone to Aurobindo, but he did his practice. He had this awakening 40-some years before I had met him, and he never stopped going. How do I know this? And of course, my subjective experience was mixed in it, but because I experienced it, you know, to my satisfaction. They said of Swami Papa Ramdas, not our Ram Dass, Richard Albert, but Swami Papa Ramdas of South India, there was a quote about him that said, “Ram Das plays football with the planets.” And I just watched. I watched. I watched Yogi Ramsuratkumar wielding cosmic forces and moving things around, and sending us around the room carrying orchids, like, “What the hell are we doing?” While, you know, cosmic energies are getting used for you to go who knows where, but with the conviction that it was healing. I watched, like, a bleeding heart of love that never stopped pulsing, and I’d wander the streets at night in Tiruvannamalai because I was in my, you know, God-mad, God-high days. Two in the morning, you’d hear him chanting, and five in the morning, and I watched the miraculous healings, and all without any fanfare. You know, the only fanfare was the kind of obnoxious devotees who said, you know, “He’s God because you saw that person get healed from cancer,” but no fanfare, no expression, no talk of enlightenment. It just was a way that life was being expressed. So, whether I’m completely accurate in my perception, or even, you know, in part accurate in it, raised the bar. So, when I go to these conferences, you know, and it’s this teacher talking about non-dual realization and this one, and many of them I actually love and respect because they know that they’re talking about it to serve the people who are listening, but that there’s much more. It’s like I became certain that it’s endless.
Rick: Yeah, it’s like the criteria you just described regarding Yogi Ram Surat Kumar, whose name I’m learning to say here. A lot of the plain vanilla neo-Advaitists might just say, “Oh, that’s just tinsel, you know, that’s just nonsense, it’s all falderal.” I mean, what it really comes down to is there’s only this, and all that is sort of superfluous. But I’m kind of with you in that, you know,
Mariana: he agreed.
Rick: the fundamental non-dual realization is kind of first base, and I sense that beyond that, who can say to what extent that can be manifested or translated into the relative world.
Mariana: And there is, right? Also, there is just this, but what is our perception of just this? A lot of non-dual realization is an insight of “just this”, without even getting the body into it to begin with. And the depth at which “just this” could be experienced while just going to the bathroom and just having a meal, but the depth to which that could be embodied and penetrated. So when I’m hanging out with Lee and we’re going to the movies, his “just this” and my “just this” are of a different quality.
Rick: Caliber, yeah. That was my first spiritual realization. I was 18 years old, I had taken LSD for the first time, I’d been up all night and I walked into a donut shop with my friends, and I was struck by the contrast of what I was seeing in that donut shop and what apparently the lady serving donuts was seeing. I thought, “Holy mackerel, it’s all about actually perceiving the world more fully.” It’s not like the world is a static thing and it is what it is. It’s all dependent upon our capacity to really grok what’s going on.
Mariana: And Rick, why would we want enlightenment to be the end? Why would we want to be enlightened and have reached the top? Because I did a piece in Eyes Wide Open, I articulated these ten spiritually transmitted diseases, and people like that.
Rick: And one of them is “I’ve arrived,” right?
Mariana: That’s the last one, it’s the deadly virus. “I’ve arrived.” And why is it the deadly virus? Because as soon as you identify with “I’ve arrived,” there’s nowhere left to go.
Rick: It’s a very common virus, though, and that puzzles me in a way. I mean, it’s like you see it all over the place. Do you have any comments on why it may be so common?
Mariana: That’s a good question. It’s worth revisiting in this moment. Because for me, when I think about it, it’s really quite simple. If I’ve arrived, then my growth stops. And I love, right? I love God, I love mysticism, I want to keep going until the day I die. And if I had already arrived, okay, so you can hang a signpost and become a spiritual teacher, so what? I mean, it seems so limiting.
Rick: It lets you off the hook, maybe. I mean, you don’t have to bother with all that messy practice and therapy and self-exploration. If you’ve arrived, you can just kind of relax and rest on your laurels.
Mariana: We imagine. I mean, maybe it’s prevalent because we want to be happy, and we want to be free of suffering. And we want to…I don’t know entirely, because I don’t relate to it. But even though it’s prevalent, I think it’s a stage, and it may even be a stage in our Western collective moment of importing non-dual teachings. Because even if it’s fairly prevalent now, as I was saying, you know, I was sitting in the hallways talking to the teachers when they weren’t giving the “aha” to the 300 students at the conference. And they weren’t coming to me and saying, “Hey, Mariana, it’s all just this. There’s no me and no you.” They’re like, “Boy, what do you think of meds? Are there moments in the path when…and what do you think of this?” And my relationship is really on the rocks. So, I think that life will continue to inform all of us. We’ll get older, right? Things happen, and those things that happen humble us. Because the things that happen as we get older is that the patterns that we assumed were in other people, we didn’t think they were patterns. Right? The relationship stuff, they repeat themselves in our lives. And we find ourselves that we’re the ones with the cancer, you know, and getting challenged with our existential fears and devastations. Or, you know, we’re the ones, these non-dual teachers, right? If they have children, and those children become teenagers, and maybe those teenagers are enlightened, but maybe some of those teenagers, you know, end up…there’s wonderful stories, you know. They end up in accidents, or worse, you know. They end up in drugs, and life itself will end up confronting us. One of my spiritual superheroes, who is a dear friend, and has always been one of my… I have my teacher, but I have a few different spiritual, kind of, I call them “uncles and aunts” in the world, and, you know, who always help me out. And I just watch their lives and learn from them and with them. And one of them is Claudio Naranjo. Do you know Claudio?
Rick: Only from your books.
Mariana: Yeah, Claudio is…
Rick: Quoting him and all.
Mariana: Claudio is not in the non-dual circuits, but he’s, for example, in Spain, you know, he’s probably the most renowned spiritual teacher, and he was close with Trungpa, and he was close with, I think, Chatral Rinpoche. So, back in the day, you know, in Esalen, when Fritz Perls and Ram Dass, and all those people were hanging out. Claudio was with Oscar Ichazo for a time, and so, Enneagram lineage, and he got enlightened. He got really, really, really enlightened. And how do we know that? I mean, he stumbled into a guru function, in the sense that he would meet people, you know, he would see their past, present, and future. I’m paraphrasing, but you know, he would know that if this person goes and picks up the guitar, you know, they’re going to end up playing with, you know, Joan Baez, and if this person, you know, does this little technique, that’s going to liberate them, and they’re going to, you know, he was just, he was completely in the stream of life, and was able to support other people in that very effectively. And his, that, this enlightenment stayed for many years, so an organization sprung up around him, and then the enlightenment went away. So, I write about this in “Halfway Up the Mountain”, but I love to track Claudio over the years and decades, because he always has something amazing to teach us about integration. And that, that enlightenment gave way to many, many, many, many, many years of “Dark Night of the Soul”, and at which times he wanted to stop teaching, get out of the public sphere, and he would consult with his teachers, and they would guide him. But, one of the things he told me when I was, you know, writing “Halfway Up the Mountain”, so I was still in my 20’s, he said, he said, “In retrospect, I see that the light of my enlightenment needed to be sacrificed and brought inward, in order to bring light to those structures that were still unconscious, and darkened.” So, the light was going to be brought in and integrated to bear on all the unconscious structures of his life. And that, that’s a multi-decade process.
Rick: And I would suspect, maybe this has already happened, but at some point there will be an enlightenment with a bigger capital “E” on it, that will be realized, and he’ll kind of look back on the first one as sort of a stage leading up to, and as a necessary step in the whole process.
Mariana: Yeah, and I don’t even know if there will be some point that’s part of our discussion.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, there may be many points, but there, you know. In fact, I was thinking a good panel discussion at the S.A.N.D. Conference might be something like, you know, since the theme next year is “Self-Realization”, might be something like, “Self-Realization, destination or milestone?”
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a good idea. And when you were saying, the way that I would phrase it, just for this conversation, because we’re doing a piece of the puzzle, I guess. I’m puzzle piece 108, I was all tickled, as a yoga practitioner.
Rick: Yeah, you’re the 108th interview, yeah.
Mariana: As a self-identified, you know, like somebody who loves the yoga tradition, it’s a nice, it’s a affirming moment, but it’s a piece of the puzzle. And in this piece of the puzzle that we’re talking about, instead of saying that Claudio, and we’re just using him as an example, I don’t actually know what Claudio would say, but instead of an enlightenment with a capital E, I think we’re talking in terms of integration. And I find that more interesting, you know, a profound human integration that doesn’t have a bottom, and it doesn’t have a top, and it doesn’t have sides, right? And the depth doesn’t have an end as you travel, you know, inward into the layers of the body. It’s an integration, and the integration shows up as effectiveness. You know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people throughout Spain, and North America, and South America are touched, and then you started working in education, and the effectiveness of his capacity to touch and to serve, and the love that emerges. Check this out.
Rick: Let me just interject before you tell that story, and that is that if we’re going to use the word “enlightenment” at all, and if we’re going to give it a superlative connotation, then I think it should definitely include integration, and perhaps a number of other things. But, you know, I mean we use words to denote all kinds of things, so if we’re going to use the word, let’s really make it superlative by packing in everything that can potentially be developed, including that integration, you were just referring to. But I interrupted. Please tell the story you’re about to tell.
Mariana: No, I appreciate that point, and in order to do that, we really need to commit to ongoingly meeting our projections onto the terms of enlightenment and awakening, and revisiting our ideas about all of these things as life experience affects us, and not being too proud so that we can let these things fall away and let ourselves confidently stand in a different body of knowledge, even than we stated with conviction 5 or 10 years before, not because we’re hypocrites, but because we’re learning.
Rick: Yeah. You were going to tell a story of some sort?
Mariana: Yeah, I was at a CIS event.
Rick: CIS means what?
Mariana: I’m sorry, the California Institute of Integral Studies. It’s a graduate school in San Francisco where I teach, and it’s in the lineage of Sri Aurobindo. It’s a new friend; I think I can use him by name. His name is Allan Combs. He’s a famous writer, and he was teaching in the program, so we were having a conversation and we started talking about the path, and he said something really quite beautiful to me. I found it very beautiful, and we were talking about fruits of the path and what happens along the way. He’s in the lineage of Swami Rama, and he said that what he had noticed with people who had been with his teacher, I mean his teacher died, but who had practiced for decades, is that a softness started to emerge in them, and it was a softness that would come through the eyes. So, it was like a softening in their face, and the eyes of the practitioners would soften, and the hearts would soften. He said, very humbly, matter-of-factly, that he said, “I don’t know if it’s apparent on the outside, but when I go inside in my meditation, it’s like it’s so soft that self and other dissipates, and my eyes feel softer, and when I look at people, I feel softer in my judgments.” And I loved that, that when he said that, I was experiencing what he was saying, and not because he was trying to be a teacher, but he was really reporting the fruits of decades of devotion and work and meditation, right? Not as enlightenment, you know, with the big “E”, but a softening, a malleability.
Rick: Yeah, which actually shows up in a number of different areas, softness of perception, softness of feelings, softness of attitudes, softness of beliefs. It’s like the whole life becomes more refined and less structured and rigid in so many ways, softness of the body even.
Mariana: Yeah, yeah, and softness of love for self and love for other.
Rick: Beautiful.
Mariana: Yeah, and in the last couple of weeks since that conversation when I’m teaching yoga or meditation or working with clients, I’ve been really diving into that theme, and it’s another aspect we haven’t discussed, but a lot of my training that I’ve pursued post-doctoral, post-guru, not post-guru, because I still consider myself as my teacher, but I pursued somatic psychotherapy, because I wanted to find out what the best of this emergent field, how it was helping people to get into and penetrate the body, and penetrate the hell traumas, so that it can be placed in the context of the non-dual. And as my friend Reggie Ray, the Buddhist teacher, has been working on for many years, we work on an enlightenment of the body, because a lot of this enlightenment is an enlightenment of the mind. It’s partial, and in its limitlessness, it’s very limited.
Rick: And neurophysiologists will tell us that the two are very intimately correlated, and you can’t really affect one without affecting the other. There are so many things that we could talk about. I could do a whole interview on each chapter of each of your books, but I wanted to harken back to something you said a few minutes ago and see what we can do with it in the remaining time. You were talking about Papa Ramdas, and someone said the planets are his soccer balls, or something like that. Einstein used to do what he called “thought experiments,” where he would create these experiments in his mind to work out different problems. And if we do a thought experiment on what’s God’s perspective on all this? First of all, what is God? But if we take God to be this vast, limitless, infinite intelligence, consciousness, whatever, that somehow has within it motivating impulses to give rise to this incredible universe and then to evolve forms within this universe, which can more and more fully realize or express that intelligence that God is, until the point where they come to recognize that they are that intelligence.
Mariana: That’s an awesome definition of God. I totally buy it.
Rick: Oh thanks. But if we try to step ourselves into that perspective and then ask ourselves the question, “What is enlightenment?” and also throw in the whole discussion we’ve been having about continuing growth and evolution and so on, it kind of gives you interesting insights into all this, because you can imagine there being just an infinite variety of reflectors, or of sense organs of that infinite.
Mariana: Can I pause for a moment?
Rick: Yes, please, jump in, yeah, go for it.
Mariana: I love what you said, and a thought experiment is exciting on a show like this. So, I wanted to pause for a moment to let, before people were influenced by what you said or what I said, for them to have their moment, because you gave such a beautiful in-roads into, let’s say, “God is this,” or some variation of that. What comes up in the listeners as they take that perspective and look at enlightenment and give a moment for people to get their own image.
Rick: Are you saying we should be quiet for a minute?
Mariana: Ten seconds, just before we …
Rick:Let’s just do that, let’s pause for a few seconds and ask the listeners to ponder that perspective that I just laid out.
Mariana: And looking at enlightenment and our non-dual realizations from there.
Rick: Good enough. Yeah, because we start from an individual perspective and we say, “Oh boy, I want to get enlightened,” and then eventually we come to realize, and this is something Tony Parsons, this is his whole shtick, is, “There is no you who gets enlightened.” So, what does it really mean then? It really means that cosmic intelligence, at least in this point, at least in this structure, waking up to itself, having evolved a structure that can enable it to recognize itself and to express itself through hands and feet and eyes and so on. And maybe that’s what the whole game is about ultimately, you know? “I am one, may I become many,” and then having become many, all the many continue to evolve to the point where they can recognize their oneness, and then there’s kind of a new level of capability that there wasn’t when there was just flat, amorphous oneness.
Mariana: I’ll buy that. Yeah, there’s so many ways to consider that, but when you suggest that particular thought experiment, I mean, I think about when I was interviewing Joan Halifax many years ago, the Zen teacher who runs Upaya in New Mexico, and she’s a wise woman. She was a wise woman 20 years ago when I interviewed her, and I was talking about premature claims to enlightenment and how devastating that was. And she was like, “Honey, you know, I teach Buddhism on death row to prisoners, and sometimes they think they’re enlightened, and it’s really sweet. You know, it’s kind of like when you were a little girl and you’d go into your mom’s closet and try on her shoes and her clothes. It’s like dress-up.” And so, when you give that big vision, and I do the thought experiment, it’s quite sweet. It’s like, you know, God’s children playing dress-up enlightenment. So, continuing with your lovely thought experiment, I’m usually doing embodied experiments, so it’s nice to enter into somebody else’s experiments. I find them useful. But, I was saying that when I had spoken to Joan Halifax about premature claims to enlightenment and how horrible it was, and how problematic it was, and she laughed and had this much softer, softer perspective, and considering it like child’s play, right? We’re playing enlightenment and we’re sincere and we’re passionate and we have a love of truth and we’re, you know, we’re children. We’re children of the divine, but at the same time, we can take confidence because we’re all that’s available. We’re the people who are here at this moment and we’re the ones who are doing it together. And, right, our knowledge is radiant and good in an aspect of God, and let’s not be too proud to shift our perspective when we discover its limitations. And it’s harder when you’re doing a teaching function and you’re getting famous for talking a certain way, to say, like, whoa, you know, I agree with everything I said before, but it’s a little bit limited because I’ve encountered this and this and this variable. So, you know, my apologies to those of you who, you know, if I’ve hurt anyone, let’s take the next step. If we’re all in this together, let’s keep going. And that’s what we’re doing in this conversation, right? And that’s what your listeners are doing. We don’t have to be the teacher. You know, we should be the teacher if that’s our function, but we don’t have to be the teacher and the most popular teacher. Yes, everyone needs to make a living, and it’s better if 400 people come to your seminar than 10, but let’s together, right, be humble and allow ourselves to be humble as we keep asking truth to do and grow our perspective together. And that’s one of the things I loved about being with Mauricio and Zaya at the conference. It wasn’t like, “Here’s the truth.” It was like, “Let’s play. Let’s get in it. Let’s dig in it.” And, you know, we meet. We have the kind of conversations that I was telling you that I was having, and we humble ourselves and engage in spiritual friendship and, you know, apologize when, you know, you snubbed your friend because of your, you know, your unconsciousness in this area or that area and move on. And there’s really powerful – there’s not a lot of them, but there’s powerful stories in student-teacher relationships where, when the teacher has erred in one of these areas – and it’s a mistake to assume that if we ourselves were in that function, that we might not err as well, even though we might righteously judge the teacher for doing that – but powerful stories when the teacher has then gone to the student, right, and apologized and come to the community and brought that into the teaching. And I find that enlightening. You know, I find that enlightening. I find that beautiful. I won’t turn away from that teache
Rick: I’ll become more curious about them.
Rick: I think I’m going to be interviewing Amrit Desai in a few months.
Mariana: Yeah, I am. One of the chairs in my doctoral dissertation, and my dissertation was on the student-teacher relationship in Western culture, was one of his students that he had one of the affairs with. She told the story. I repeated it in the book. And then, eventually – I think she was even part of the people who sued him – and then he apologized, and they did mediation, and then they did psychotherapy together, and then they continued on, on a whole different level, their student-teacher relationship.
Rick: Yeah.
Mariana: Like, “Ahh!” That’s cool. I don’t know Amrit Desai, but I thank you, Amrit Desai, for giving that example. It would have been nice if all the great yogis who came over in the 60s were integrated and enlightened and as we hoped. You know, some people would take drugs, some people would meditate, everyone would get enlightened, and we’d transform culture and transform the structures of consciousness. But here we are together, you know, on the ship of fools.
Rick: “We’re all bozos on this bus”, as the Firesign Theatre used to say. There’s a quote from Abraham Lincoln, he was once criticized for changing his mind about something, and he said, “I don’t have much respect for a man who can’t change his mind,” you know? Adopt a completely different perspective if experience sort of tells him he should.
Mariana: That’s great, that so applies. Can I, will you give me like a minute to rant about something that bothers me?
Rick: Sure, yeah, go for it.
Mariana: I actually don’t, I’m not aware of Tony Parsons and his work, and I don’t actually know him or his teachings, but the teaching that you described that’s so common about, you know, the whole thing of there’s no me and there’s no you, and that’s the problem.
Rick: And therefore there’s nothing to do.
Mariana: Yeah, nowhere to go.
Rick: No practice, and so on.
Mariana: When has that been useful to an integrated life, you know, as an adult and a partner and a parent and a teacher over a long period of time for a lot of people? Like it might be useful for the teacher whose job it is to give that particular insight.
Rick: Yeah, and for perhaps a small niche for whom that really rings the bell, you know?
Mariana: Perhaps, or at a certain stage.
Rick: Right, right.
Mariana: But we really, you know, we get so, so carried away with this. As you probably know, or maybe you don’t, as you were tracking my writings over the years, there was a piece of writing I did many years ago called Zen Boyfriends. And it got transformed into a musical comedy, and we produced it in the Bay Area, and then I got pregnant, so we’ll probably actually pick it up again once I liberate some more time. But we were really letting ourselves laugh at that and bring it to bear in our lives because it helps get a certain insight. But for me, when it stops practice, it’s a tremendous loss. Like, it is completely true, right? It is completely true at a certain level. That there’s no me, and there’s no you, and there’s nowhere to go, and there’s nothing to do, and there’s no practice, and there’s no Dharma, and there’s no teacher. But God, it makes me almost nauseous when I hear it because it tends to thwart people’s progress in my experience more than it helps them. And it would be something that I would be okay if that teaching was saved for practitioners who had been with a teacher for many years and had already been practicing in a deep matrix of meditation and relational support and body knowledge. And of course, it won’t be, so I add this into the conversation.
Rick: Yeah, thank you. And as they traditionally have said, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn, or as Maharishi used to say, you can’t kill the tiger of the dream state with the gun of the waking state. You need a tool that is appropriate to that level of consciousness or that level of experience, even though ultimately it might seem absurd or meaningless, it has its relevance and value on the level that it’s needed.
Mariana: Yeah, and right after our 20 or 30 years of practice, and we’re working on our meditation still, even though there’s no practice, right then, when we contemplate, you know, there’s no me and there’s no you and there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, the inquiry yields different fruits than when we’re young and trying to get rid of our suffering and don’t want to have to do all the gritty, psychological, relational work. It’s a different practice, and I bring into the conversation as we’re starting to pull it to a close, but I spent lots of time in Tiruvannamalai, not in the scene, but with Yogi Ramsuratkumar and later I would bring graduate students to India and do classes there. So I went to the caves so many different times, the caves where Ramana meditated, and every time I go there, and now it’s in my mind, you go to the caves and there’s always a plaque out there, and I can’t remember the dates, you may have them better, but one of the caves it says, “Here’s where Ramana sat from 1942 to 1955.” I think it was 12 years in one and 16 years in another, give or take, and this was all post-doc, this was post-enlightenment.
Rick: Right, and it was pre-teaching.
Mariana: Yeah, so there was some, you know, 20-some years of integration of that insight that people hang their banners on. There was 20-some years, or 30 years of integration that really started to inform that teaching, and it doesn’t mean that we have to wait 30 years before we can start to be useful to people, but they’re all pointing out instructions about some of the themes we’re talking about, about the endlessness and about integration and about holding that realization humbly in the context of our age and our experience.
Rick:That’s a good point to end on, but I can’t resist asking you before we conclude, when you were trying to come up with the title, the subtitle for Halfway Up the Mountain, were you tempted to somehow weave in the phrase “premature immaculation”?
Mariana: That’s funny.
Rick: You ever heard that one before?
Mariana: No, that’s a good one, that’s a good one.
Rick: Anyway, this has really been a joy. As I say, I could do an interview on every chapter of each of your books, but maybe sometime we’ll do another one and take it further, but I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I look forward to meeting you again in person. I link to your books from my website ever since I set up the website, so people will find links there, but I’ll also link to them specifically from when I put up your interview, as well as to your website. Do you mainly just deal with students in that university and with private counseling people there right in the Bay Area, or do you somehow have any kind of interaction with people from farther away?
Mariana: Yeah, I do a lot of my work psychologically, mostly with spiritual practitioners, and I do as much phone and Skype work as I do in person. So, I’m available and I talk with people all over the world regularly. Sometimes I do psychotherapy, but I also do consultations with people who are at a particular stuck moment or needing support at a certain place on the path. I’m happy to do that. I’m always traveling a bit with my baby in tow, so I’m doing a lot these years. My next book that I’d like to write is integrating psychotherapy and psychological work in yoga, so, I’m often traveling and doing some of that. It’s been really nice. I learned this from writing, because you think you’re writing alone and it can get a bit lonely, but then you start to feel your readers over time. As we’re talking, I can sense the listeners and I want to extend my apologies to the ones that are frustrated by my perspective and find it annoying and less enlightening, but also appreciation for people going on the ride and being willing to open up our hearts and to lessen our pride in order to consider these different aspects of enlightenment.
Rick: Good. I mean, I get the same thing. I’ll put up an interview and some people say, “I loved it,” and other people say, “I hated it.” You can’t please everybody, but you just put it out there and come who comes.
Mariana: And we’re asking, we’re asking each other to give each other the deep benefit of the doubt, so that one thing that’s shared in a conversation like this, so that we can touch each other in a real way.
Rick: Yeah, great. Well let me just make a couple of brief concluding remarks and then we’ll wrap it up. So, I’ve been speaking with Mariana Caplan, who’s written a number, about seven books so far, which I’ve read four of them, really enjoyed them. I’ll link to her books and to her website from www.batgap.com, so if you happen to be listening to this on YouTube or something, if you go to www.batgap.com you’ll see a little bit more information with links to books and her website. There’s also a discussion group there and a little email sign-up so you’ll be notified whenever a new interview is posted, and there’s a podcast you can sign up for if you like to listen to this sort of thing in audio while you’re commuting or whatever. So, thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you next time. Next time will be Eli Jaxon-Bear coming up in just a few days. So, thank you Mariana, thank you everybody who’s listening and goodbye.
Mariana: See ya..