Maury Lee Transcript: Primal Scream Therapy, Nondual Awareness, and the End of Seeking

Maury Lee interview

Summary

Maury Lee describes an intense lifelong search for truth shaped by religious expectations, cultural upheaval, and severe emotional suffering. He explains how experiential therapy helped him face repressed anger and pain, quiet his mind, and see reality with less projection.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can therapy help resolve emotional suffering and inner turmoil?
• How can confronting repressed emotions change the way we experience the world?
• Why might psychological healing be an important complement to spiritual practice?
• How can someone find truth when inherited religious beliefs no longer feel convincing?

Key takeaways

• Repressed pain can distort how we interpret other people and reality.
• Experiencing difficult emotions directly can help release their hold.
• Therapy quieted his mind by reducing the inner conflict he had been avoiding.
• Inherited beliefs should be examined rather than accepted solely to fit in.
• Eastern interpretations helped him understand Jesus beyond conventional Western theology.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakened people. I’ve done hundreds of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to the Past Interviews page on batgap.com.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and would like to support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site.

My guest today is Maury Lee. Maury got in touch with us with a rather different and interesting story than many of my guests. Most of my guests, I would say, are spiritual teachers, and most of them have written books and have a lot of YouTube videos up.

Maury, I don’t think, would consider himself a spiritual teacher, although he is a good writer and has an interesting blog. But his path was quite different from most of the people I interview. He’s never really done much meditation, to speak of, but he went through a lot of therapy, including Primal Scream therapy. I believe the guy’s name was Arthur Janov. Was it, Maury?

So we thought that would be different. Maury is also well spoken and a good writer, so I think it will be an interesting conversation. Welcome, Maury.

Maury: Thanks very much for having me on.

Rick: Welcome. I’m not going to read the bio that you wrote, because I’d rather you just tell us as we go along about your life and how things unfolded for you. The kind of stuff that you were telling me in that video you sent—I think that would be interesting, except in this case I’ll have the opportunity to interject a few questions as you tell it. So where would you like to start?

Maury: Well, let me give a little background, because I think it’s interesting, and I think it does apply to the way I’m set up. Back in the sixteenth century, there was a boy preacher of England, and he’s listed in the Who’s Who. He was the boy preacher of England, and ever since then, the oldest son in my family lineage became a minister, typically a Baptist minister.

So all of the people in my background, on both sides, tend to be very religious, very spiritual types of people. It’s almost as if I was born with a genetic inclination to search for the truth, whatever that is. And it came down the line to me.

My father became a Baptist missionary to what was then the Belgian Congo. At that time, in the late fifties and early sixties, if you wanted to be a missionary to the Belgian Congo, you had to go to Belgium and learn French and stay there for a year before they would let you go over there, because it was a colony.

So when I was eight, I was thrown into a French-speaking school in Belgium. That was very, very difficult for me because I was a really sensitive child, easily upset and disturbed, and I didn’t fit in.

After that, I was taken out to the bush in the Belgian Congo and only got the summer there. Then I was taken to a boarding school in Kinshasa, which was the capital of the country then and is now, and so I was in boarding school and still went to French school.

In 1960, we heard on the ham radio to be at this hill at the top of the village at noon, because the Marines were coming in with choppers to take us out. We got one suitcase per family. We went up on this hill, and the Marines came in with their choppers, guns out and everything else, and we were evacuated from there to Kikwit, which was a city a number of miles away that Belgian paratroopers had just taken over.

It was, I think, called the Simba Rebellion. They were killing anybody who was educated and killing a lot of missionaries. So we got out just in time. The family went back to Appalachia, where my relatives lived, but my dad went back to Africa and stayed out in the bush. He got captured by Congolese soldiers and was almost executed, except that he’d been a teacher and some soldier happened to recognize him and said, “Well, aren’t you Mr. So-and-so?”

He said, “Yeah.”

They said, “Ah, he’s a good guy. Don’t kill him.”

So that’s just a little bit of the basic background. Most of my relatives are all very spiritually inclined. But as a child, I could never, ever, ever buy Western theology and its interpretation of Christ. Even as a little child, the idea that Christ died for my sins was absolutely repulsive to me.

Of course, being among missionaries primarily, it was really difficult for me to express my opinion, because everybody was supposed to believe a certain way. The funny thing was that, being out in the bush a lot, I had the African culture as a counterpoint to Western theology.

I pretty early developed the idea that different cultures have very different ideas of what truth is, what love is, or what the best way to be is. And it just seemed to me that I didn’t believe anybody. I figured I’d have to figure this out for myself, because the missionaries I was around—I didn’t believe what they were saying. The Africans thought something entirely different. They had witch doctors and their magic, and if people believed that it worked, it worked.

Discovering the Limits of Religious Certainty

If the witch doctor told somebody they were going to die, they usually died because their belief was that strong, and I saw it. Then, of course, the Belgians thought differently and saw things differently. They were mostly Catholic, but they didn’t go to church or practice. So very early, I saw that I was going to have to find out for myself.

Rick: It’s pretty neat that you were so independent-minded at such a young age. Most kids aren’t. They just don’t think for themselves.

Maury: Let me jump in on that, because I think that’s a truism. For example, when the kids were all about ten, eleven, or twelve, they all started getting baptized. My dad kept asking me, “When are you going to get baptized?”

I said, “I’m not.”

He said, “Why not?”

I said, “Well, we’re all supposed to be a certain way and believe a certain way. All these kids are doing it just to please you and their parents and to fit in. As long as I’m under your household, me getting baptized won’t mean anything. Now, if I’m away from home for a few years, when I’m twenty-one or something, and I decide to get baptized, then it will have meaning.”

Rick: He said this when you were ten or eleven? That’s amazing. It’s really precocious.

Maury: And so he couldn’t really argue with that, and he went along with it. I’ve never been baptized.

The thing about it was that I only came to this discovery later on. The whole idea that Jesus died for our sins was, like I said, always repulsive to me, because I would never ask someone to die for my sins. I just could not. It didn’t sit right within me.

Jesus and the Jewish Sacrificial Tradition

Later on, when I started reading about Jesus and they talked about how he was the Lamb of God, I thought about the Jewish culture at the time of Jesus. What did they do for their sins? They sacrificed doves and sheep and goats and things. So when he died, they interpreted the death through their tradition: “Oh, he was the Lamb of God, and God sacrificed him for our sins.”

That was just a continuation of that culture. I didn’t really understand Jesus until I studied Advaita Vedanta. All those Eastern sages—it seemed to me, from my interpretation, that Jesus was saying exactly the same thing. It’s just that the West doesn’t get it.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Maury: The West just doesn’t get it. We’re very parochial in the West because most Westerners say, “Oh, those Indian gurus and so forth, they’re all pagans. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re terrible.”

But if you ask the Eastern sages about Jesus, they all say, “Wow, he’s one of us. He got it. He understood.” So who’s got the more open mind?

Once I started reading the Eastern sages, all of a sudden Jesus really made sense to me. I could say, “Okay, this is what I objected to as a child. It was the interpretation that these missionaries had.”

Rick: You were saying that the missionary types didn’t get the Eastern sages, but the Eastern sages had no problem understanding Jesus.

Maury: Exactly. I was very impressed that the Eastern sages seemed to have open minds. Anything that pointed to the truth, or if they could see that a person understood the truth, they just brought him in and said, “Yeah, he’s one of us. He gets it.” But we, in turn, do not give the Eastern sages that same benefit of the doubt.

Rick: Well, it’s kind of a contrast between Christianity and Hinduism. In Christianity, one of the main pillars of the whole thing is, “Ours is the only way,” although I think it’s gotten more liberal. The Pope’s talking more liberally. But in the East, the attitude is, “The Christian missionaries would come in with Jesus, and the Hindus would say, ‘Great, let’s add him to our altar,’ along with all these other figures.”

Maury: Exactly. I think that’s really, really beautiful. Anything that comes to India just seems to be included in the pantheon, and it ends up being very inclusive. I really like that attitude.

Rick: Yeah. I think the reason for that attitude is that in that tradition, it’s understood that God is vast. Even in the Gita, Lord Krishna says that whoever you are, however you approach me, I’ll accept that. So it’s just very broad-minded. There are multiple streams of spirituality, and there’s just a tendency not to be—I’m sure there are fanatics and fundamentalists even there—but as a general rule, not so much.

Maury: Yeah. So I don’t know what you want—

Rick: Okay, so you finally got back to the States in one piece, it sounds like. I guess you got back into school here, right? I don’t know if you finished high school back here or just started college here.

🛤️ The pain of an existential search

Maury: Because of this, I always considered that I had a curse. People think it’s funny because I say it, but from early childhood, I questioned everything. Most adults around me—I didn’t believe them. A lot of them claimed to know the truth, but it was really more of a belief that they were fanatic about. I never felt that adults really understood what the truth was.

I couldn’t find it anywhere, and it was very painful. By the time I got to college and got out of any environment I had known, I went to college in California because that was as far away from any relative or anybody I knew as I could get. I wanted to be free to have my own thoughts and not have anybody tell me what I should think.

It was like being dropped into hell, because I had no basis for believing or knowing anything. I was in a lot of pain and mental anguish. I would look at all these California kids—this was the late sixties, in the middle of the drug culture—and I would see these kids playing Frisbee on the quad, and they didn’t seem to have any concerns or issues.

Here I was in a lot of mental pain, trying to understand what truth was, and other people didn’t seem to have that issue. So, to me, it was like I was cursed. I had this fundamental need to know the truth that I could not escape.

Rick: Good curse to have, in my opinion.

Maury: Yeah, but it was a drive that didn’t feel personal. It wasn’t me being curious; it was like I had to know. It was a very strong drive. It made me study and read everything in psychology that I could read, and everything in spirituality, and ask questions. It was just a profound existential search that I could not escape.

Rick: Would you say you were suffering a lot? You did mention that, because a lot of times, if people are suffering a lot, they have a more ardent desire for escape.

Maury: Yes, extreme suffering. I had already decided that I would never get married and have kids unless I could figure this out, because I couldn’t see any reason why anybody would want to live with as much suffering as I had. I had to find the truth that would stop my seeking or satisfy my seeking, or else life wasn’t worth living.

Rick: Would you say that your suffering had anything to do with your itinerant upbringing, moving from country to country? Or was it not really related to that?

Maury: It contributed to it, but I think mostly it was a spiritual angst that I needed. I had an intuition that there was something I knew but had forgotten. Some part of me knew there was something out there that I needed to find, relearn, or rediscover, and it was of absolute importance. If I didn’t find it, I was a goner.

That intuition was the drive. Some part of me just knew there was something I needed to know or rediscover, and I had to do it.

Rick: That’s great.

Maury: And it felt like a curse.

Rick: Yeah, it wasn’t, in my opinion. It was a blessing, because it bore fruit. It goaded you on.

Maury: You often bring up, with people you interview, whether they got into drugs or anything. Well, I had the perfect opportunity, because I was in Southern California in the late ’60s, and there were drugs all around. I had friends who did a lot of drugs, like LSD, and they would never give it to me. All of those people were like, “You’re already too far out. You’re already very, very, very intense, and we’re not going to be around if you take anything.” So they literally wouldn’t give me any. I don’t know for sure if I would have taken it, but they were like, “No, we’re not going to give you the opportunity.”

Rick: Interesting that your friends were so responsible. Usually, people in that scene would just give anything to anybody. Obviously, you came across to them as intense. Your inner turmoil must have been evident on the outside.

Maury: It was pretty obvious. People would often tell me that I was very, very intense. I’m not real intense now, I don’t think.

Rick: No, you don’t seem to be.

Maury: I’m very laid-back. The me now and the me then are like different creatures.

Rick: Were you always sort of cornering people and dumping your whole questioning on them—“What’s life all about?” and all that stuff?

Maury: I would literally go down the hall in the dorm and say, “Now, you’ve got to understand, I’m not normal.” I think maybe I had a good cover or something, because people would say, “No, you’re not.” But they weren’t feeling the pain that I was feeling. It was just extreme suffering.

Rick: Interesting. So you were in college. I can kind of relate to what you’re saying. I’ve gone through periods like this myself, but it sounds like it was even more extreme and persistent for you. How did you get out of it? I’m sure it wasn’t easy.

Maury: There was a long period when I didn’t even want to go out and walk, because my self-esteem, or whatever it was, was so low that I thought, “Who am I to be walking and killing all these germs with my feet?” Everywhere I went, everywhere I walked, I was very upset that life was set up in such a way that just me walking to class or something would kill all these microbes, or maybe an insect.

Rick: Sounds like you might have been a Jain in your past life.

Maury: It was an extreme concern. How do you not be in pain all the time if you feel like you’re killing all these innocent beings, and it’s not your choice, but you’re doing it? That was just an example of how extremely painful it was.

Rick: Did you put two and two together and become a vegetarian at that point?

Maury: Yeah. Yeah, I never did that.

Rick: Just because of the killing, you know?

Maury: I didn’t.

Rick: So you made it through college, I presume?

Maury: Yeah, that was hard, but I made it through college.

Rick: Were you searching around? In the late ’60s, there was Yogananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and some things one could get into. Were you checking any of those things out?

Maury: No, I really didn’t.

Rick: Did you have a sense that spirituality might be the solution to your suffering, or did you not really grok that?

Maury: I don’t think so. I think at that time I probably equated any kind of spirituality with the same crap that I had been raised with. I was looking in a lot of other places, but I was always very afraid of any authority that claimed to know the truth: “This truth is what you need, and you need to have it. If you don’t, then you’re screwed.” So I just avoided all of that.

Rick: When did you first start actually doing anything, such as some kind of therapy, to try to assuage your pain?

Maury: I read everything I could in psychology and self-help books and all that. I was an extremely intellectual person. I’ve always had a very strong bent toward abstract thinking, and I really enjoy it. The more abstract, the better.

I studied all the different kinds of psychology and literally determined that the only kind of therapy I wanted was Gestalt. I won’t talk too much about this, but I want to make it clear that I studied all these kinds of psychology and said, “I want to do Gestalt.” The reason was that it was experiential. I did not want to go to somebody, be analyzed, have them give me a label, and say, “This is what’s wrong with you.”

Everything I could read by Fritz Perls and the people doing Gestalt therapy said that you just work with what’s going on with you right now. What pain from the past, what repressed pain, is showing up right now, right here? Gestalt therapy basically pushes you into whatever pain you’re avoiding and forces you to experience it.

I found an ex-Presbyterian minister who had been kicked out of the church because he was too radical. He was a very spiritual person, and he practiced Gestalt therapy in a completely radical way. If you went to his group, you could risk everything. If you got into so much stuff that you went schizophrenic and they had to lock you up, he would allow that, because he had a very strong sense that ultimately, facing all the dark and difficult things in people would bring us to health.

The first time I went to his group, after we did our little introduction to make sure that we were present in the group, the first thing he ever said to me was, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with you that killing a hundred people wouldn’t cure.”

Rick: What did he mean by that?

Maury: The reason he said that was that he was pointing out that I was a very, very angry person.

Rick: Oh, I see. Obviously, he wasn’t recommending it, but he was saying that you had so much stuff that you needed to get it out, right? I see what you mean.

Maury: I got it. I thought, “This guy sees me.” The level of anger I had wasn’t something that you wanted to show. Yet, right there, the first time I was in the group, just making a short introduction, he nailed it. I think at that time my voice was really constricted, and I had a lot of twitches. I was really nervous.

Rick: So you weren’t actually expressing anger, but he picked up on your repressed anger.

Maury: Yeah. I started going to his groups. I didn’t want to be analyzed, and I was afraid of my own intellect. I knew my intellect was really, really strong, but I also knew that for years, since college, I had been trying to escape my pain by outthinking it. I really tried to outthink my feelings, and that didn’t work.

His point of view was, “You can’t escape the stuff that you’ve repressed, because it’s always going to be interfering with your life. You’ve got to feel it to let it go.” Since I didn’t want to be analyzed or come to the group and say, “This is what I want to work on,” I started recording my dreams.

I would record my dreams, and when I went to group, he would work with them. The dreams usually expressed all kinds of issues that I had. Working on them brought up all this pain, and I was able to let it go.

Rick: It just sort of dissipated as you worked through it?

Maury: Yeah. It was very intense, but feeling it was the only way I could let it go.

Rick: Were other people in the group getting similar results?

Maury: Yes. I thought it was very, very good.

Rick: It’s interesting. We’ll be talking more about therapy in this interview, but a number of spiritual authorities and teachers these days really advocate it as an almost necessary adjunct to spiritual practice. They can point out examples of people who didn’t engage in any sort of therapy, advanced a lot spiritually, but ended up still with a lot of unresolved stuff.

Maury: Exactly. I think that’s really true. When I wrote to you, my point was that I’ve watched a lot of BatGap interviews and read a lot of what people say about the point of meditation being to quiet the mind.

Meditation is something that I never really did. I tried it many, many times, but I never got anything out of it. The therapy I did really quieted my mind, because as long as you have a lot of repressed material that you’re denying, you project it onto the world and onto other people. You’re not living in reality; you’re not seeing people as they are.

I would go into a room before I went through therapy and think, “This person thinks this because they’re dressed like this, and this person would probably react to me this way because they’re wearing golf shoes and a yellow shirt.” I would walk into a room with some people, and in my head there would be all this stuff going on about all these people. It was just like a circus, and none of it was true. It was just my own crap.

Rick: Some people use the metaphor that all your stuff is like a beach ball you’re trying to hold beneath the surface of the water. It keeps popping up, so you have to keep exerting all this effort, and it creates turbulence in the water because you’re struggling to keep the beach ball under.

But if you can somehow deflate the beach ball, then everything becomes easygoing.

Maury: Very good analogy. I like that. Just to get into the primal scream part, I worked with this guy on and off for about ten years.

Rick: The ex-Presbyterian dude?

Maury: Yeah, he was real. For example, he never would get a license. He didn’t have any kind of therapeutic license. He’d studied Gestalt therapy and was known to be one of the best in the area. But he hated the idea of a medical model. He thought getting a license would mean that some authorities would have control over what he did or what people did in his groups. He was completely radical. He was like, “No, this is personal, this is spiritual, and it has nothing to do with anything medical.” He just thought we were trying to get to a healthy mind. This wasn’t medical; this was spiritual. And so that’s what he was.

Somewhere during that time, I read the book The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov. When I was done with it, I was totally convinced that I was still sitting on a lot of pain. So when I went to the group that night, I was lying on the floor in front of a couch. We were trying to do the introductions, where you just say what happened with you that week so that people would get a feel for where you were.

When he came to me and just said my name, I started wailing. I had no expectation of what would happen, but I started wailing, and my stomach was rolling. It was just a very loud wail, and it went on for about 45 minutes.

Feeling it was the only way I could let it go.

The basis of the majority of the pain was the pain of never having been left alone. What that boiled down to was that, as a child, I never felt like I was free to have my own thoughts and my own being. I was always taught that I had to think a certain way, feel a certain way, and act a certain way. I felt like no one ever left me alone.

Rick: Yeah, even as a child, it seems like you were quite independent. They were wanting you to think a certain way, and you said, “No, I’m not going to think that way.” But I guess…

Maury: So obviously, it was a huge conflict for me. After that, anytime I would see or smell something, or see a scene or something that reminded me of something in my childhood that had pain related to it, I would start feeling this pressure at the back of my head, and it would start getting very intense. I would know that I had to get back to my apartment because some pain and some stuff wanted to come out.

I would go back to my apartment, lie on my bed, and let it come out. I can remember sometimes screaming for an hour or two. I literally lost my voice. When I went back to therapy the next weekend, I couldn’t even talk. The therapist literally said, “You don’t have to go that deep into it. You don’t have to be that intense about it.” And I was like, “It’s coming, and I’ve got to let it out.”

Rick: Intensity was your middle name. People who are old enough may remember that John Lennon and Yoko Ono got into the primal scream, and there was a lot of screaming on some of their albums. But go ahead.

Maury: It worked. It worked for me. I’m not recommending it for anybody else. I’m just trying to say this was my experience. Afterward, people literally told me that I was completely different. They said, “You used to be a real jerk. You were always very critical. You were always arguing with everybody, questioning everybody. You were nervous all the time. Your voice was high and squeaky because of the tension.” After that, I just completely relaxed.

From catharsis to inner quiet

Rick: A couple of thoughts came to mind when I was listening to the video you sent us. One is the question of a sort of cart-and-horse issue. It seemed like you already had a head of steam built up pretty well. Whatever you tried, like this therapy and just reading the book about the primal scream, immediately began to be effective for you.

Another thing, and it’s kind of related to the head-of-steam point and to what you just said about feeling it at the back of your neck and then having to go back to your apartment: I get the feeling you were undergoing some kind of Kundalini awakening. I don’t know if you understood it as such, but there was this energy rising up in your body that was starting to clear through things. Does that resonate with you, what I just said?

Maury: Yeah, except my feeling was that I started having a lot of Kundalini experiences later on, much later after that.

Rick: Yeah, but they might still already have been percolating or starting to build up.

Maury: Maybe. I think I told you that I had a heart chakra opening, which…

Rick: Oh, yeah, but shall we talk about that now, or do you want to do some other things first, before we get to it?

Maury: Go ahead. Where were we?

Rick: Basically, you read The Primal Scream and went to the therapy session. You wailed for 45 minutes. I think I heard you say that afterward, the guy said, “Do you want to talk about what just happened?” and you said no.

Maury: The thing was that what I needed was to feel that repressed stuff. It was so meaningful to feel it and put me back in touch with a norm that was prior to all that pain I was trying to escape and repress. That experience was enough. I didn’t need anybody’s opinion of it. I didn’t need anybody’s comments on it. I didn’t want it, and I didn’t need it.

After that, I didn’t go back to the group and do any of that primal stuff. It was just coming.

Rick: You did it in your apartment. How long did that phase go on, where you were going to your apartment and screaming?

Maury: Two or three years. But the intensity got less and less and less, and eventually it pretty much stopped. It was a process. What was there that needed to come out? I think it was a very natural process. It’s just not something most people would get into.

Rick: Yeah, it happened to you. Take us through those two or three years you were doing this process. Were you just feeling freer and freer as you went along?

Maury: Yeah, and it quieted my mind. When that stuff is let go of, you stop projecting and you stop trying to outthink it or maneuver yourself so you don’t feel it. My mind just got quieter and quieter and quieter.

Rick: Does anyone still practice primal scream therapy?

Maury: Huh. I don’t know.

Rick: I don’t know if this is something—we’ll see what you think—but is this something that could be applied to other people? Could other people somehow do this themselves? Or do you think it’s just something that happened to you? If somebody goes into their room and starts screaming, is it likely to happen for them, or would that be a superficial imitation of what you were actually going through, which was almost involuntary?

Maury: Boy, that’s a hard question to answer. I don’t think just going into your room and screaming would do it.

My thinking about it at the time was that I had all these authority figures around me who were oppressing me and telling me, “No, you have to think like this. You have to feel like this. You can’t have these thoughts. You can’t have these feelings. That’s not right,” and so on. I had all these authority figures conditioning me.

I think that I didn’t have a strong enough will of my own to counteract that. By going to this therapist and giving him that authority, or him being the authority, he would push me into what I couldn’t break through to. By pushing me, these feelings would come out.

I take responsibility for using him, but I put myself in a vulnerable position. He would push, and then these feelings would come out. Like I said, I don’t follow primal therapy. It just worked for me. That’s all I can say: it worked for me. I don’t follow it, and I don’t recommend it. But…

Rick: It was just the channel through which you got some big release. As you progressed through those two or three years of doing this on a regular basis, was it like every day you would go and…

Maury: No, no. It was a…

Rick: Periodically, whenever something came up?

Maury: Yeah. Your mind is very associative. I’d be in a situation, or see or experience something, that was associated with some repressed material. That association would immediately click in and say, “Oh, there’s pain related to this, and I need to experience it.”

Rick: It almost sounds like it became second nature for you to turn around and face any pain that came up. Some people might try to blot it out or run away from it, but you developed a reflex where you would face it whenever it started to come up and just work through it.

Maury: I tried to escape, but there was too much pain there for me to live with. I don’t think I had a lot of choice once I discovered that actually feeling the pain was the way to let it go. Then I was like, “Okay, this works.”

Rick: Would it be fair to say that, after those two or three years, not only did you stop screaming in your bedroom, but the pain had pretty much dissipated and you were more or less pain-free?

Maury: It was very, very much less.

Rick: Did you also feel, at that point, more autonomous and less put upon by what others were thinking or saying?

Maury: Yeah, but that really lessened the suffering. I think when people meditate—in my case, meditation didn’t work, but in a lot of cases, from what I see, when people meditate, stuff comes up that they didn’t know was there. I just think people are set up differently. For some people, meditation will start to bring that stuff up, and they can deal with it in their own way. In my case, something else worked.

Rick: Yeah, and also, when you say meditation didn’t work, there are different ways of meditating. I tried to meditate before I was formally instructed, and it didn’t work for me either. Then I was instructed, and it worked. Sometimes a little bit of guidance or instruction might do the trick.

Maury: I think you’re probably right. Maybe if I’d had some TM or some instruction, it would have worked for me, but…

Rick: But you found something that did, which is great. It’s different, and it’s interesting. Again, now that you’ve gone through all this—and we’re certainly not to the end of your story—you underwent a huge catharsis with this therapy and with the primal scream that happened. Have you contacted or been in touch with other people who had a similar path, or are you kind of unique in that regard?

Maury: No, I’ve always been very personal about it. I needed to find the truth and what worked for me. I never had any sense that I was going to get this and then go out and tell the world what I’d discovered and say, “You need this.” It was always just very personal. I had a problem, and I needed to solve it.

Rick: Yeah, and it worked. But you never really had a teacher or anything either, aside from this therapist. You just kind of did your thing.

Reading as a doorway to experience

Maury: I have to say that, because of my intellect, when I would read, I would literally have experiences from reading. For example, I got into Krishnamurti accidentally. I would go to the bookstore and find a book that was close to what I was believing at the time. But I would always choose a book that was a little further out or a little broader than where I was, and read it. Eventually, I could observe what I was doing.

I’m saying, you keep reading books to break up your mind and expand your mind. Maybe you just need to let everything go. And at that point, I went to a bookstore and saw Krishnamurti. I had never heard of him, but I liked the title of his book because it said, “You Are the World.” That didn’t make any sense to me because I didn’t know anything about non-duality.

So I bought this Krishnamurti book and went home. It was evening, and my wife and kids had gone to bed. I was reading the book, and when I got halfway through, all of a sudden I started feeling this overwhelming forgiveness—just a huge feeling of forgiveness.

You know how sometimes people cry at weddings, or cry when they feel good? I could tell I was going to cry, so I went to the other end of the house and sat on the bathroom floor. All of a sudden, I just cried and cried for a long, long time. But it was this wonderful feeling of relief, because whatever Krishnamurti was saying—I mean, he was talking about letting go of all tradition, embracing the unknown, and all that—it really affected me.

I finished that book, and then for about two or three years I read everything Krishnamurti wrote. I even ordered books from India that weren’t in print in the United States and read those. So I was just a real Krishnamurti fan for a few years.

Rick: It’s kind of cool how—“receptive” isn’t the word I’m looking for—how easily various influences bore fruit for you. Most people wouldn’t read a Krishnamurti book and go through all those experiences and transformations. It seems like whatever you tried, something happened for you.

Maury: I can remember that when I was reading Krishnamurti, my intent in reading was, “I would love to be able to say what he says and think what he thinks. So what is the space that he’s in, where what he’s saying is true for him?” It was like trying to read between the lines and asking, “What’s the space? What is this sense, this feeling, this spacious place that he’s coming from, where he can say these things?”

Like I said, I’m very… When I took Jungian tests early on, I came out as extremely intuitive and extremely thinking. So I would say that in the Indian tradition, I would be called a jnana or jnani, you know, on that path. Of course, I didn’t know anything about that.

But if I read Franklin Merrell-Wolff—which I just reread, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object—I feel the space from which he’s coming. It affects me. In other words, I read, but I have an experience.

Rick: Yeah, it’s cool. You sort of entrain with the author and begin to have his experience.

That’s a really interesting point, because sometimes I sort of poo-poo the people who fill their heads with knowledge. I’ve often said that they mistake that for experience or realization. But perhaps that’s a little unfair, because I think knowledge and experience go together and are somewhat correlated. In any case, both are necessary on the path.

I think I’ve read some blog posts of yours that said just that: You can’t go really far on one leg without the other leg taking a step. It’s interesting how well correlated they seem to be for you. You read a book, and the knowledge elicits an experience. I think that’s really healthy and desirable.

Maury: Yeah, and maybe I’m just lucky to be that way. I’ve had a lot of mystical experiences and experiences of ecstasy that were just too intense for me to even handle.

For example, I think I used to rub my daughter’s back at night so she could go to sleep. I would put a Krishnamurti tape on my cassette recorder to listen to Krishnamurti while I was rubbing my daughter’s back. One time, I just felt so much love for my daughter, while listening to Krishnamurti at the same time, that I just poofed off into this ecstatic place.

The ecstasy was so intense that, when my ego started to come back, it was like, “You can’t stay here, because there’s no you here. If you stay here, you’ll just sit in the corner and stare at the wall for the next thirty years. You won’t take care of your kids or do anything, because this is so good.” So it started to go away.

But as that ecstasy left, people who have had these mystical experiences know that you get this knowing. It’s like a download comes to you, but it’s not verbal. It’s instantaneous.

What came to me was this statement: “You have always been surrounded by absolute beauty, and you always will be, whether you know it or not.” It was very strong. It was saying that everything around you is just absolutely beautiful, and it always has been and always will be. The last thing was, “Even if you don’t know it or see it.”

You have always been surrounded by absolute beauty, and you always will be, whether you know it or not.

So I have an experiential side, but it seems to be really prompted by reading, by just reading.

Rick: Yeah, it stimulates. I guess another way of looking at it is that, since you have such a lively experiential base, since the ground is fertile, seeds that are dropped into it sprout well.

You have this experiential development, which already correlates with a lot of things you might end up reading. So when you do read them, it resonates with something you’re already experiencing and enlivens it or makes it clearer. Whereas somebody who didn’t have that experiential base could read the same book and not get as much out of it.

That’s the feeling I get: You’re kind of cooking inside experientially, and so when you read something, it’s obviously not just flat philosophy. It’s something that resonates with your own experience.

Maury: It doesn’t feel, if I read philosophy, just intellectual to me. Philosophy comes from a human being, and we do it because we have subjective meaning and a subjective space that we’re coming from. So philosophy should, if it’s good, for me, just have some effect.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff, for example—people might say he’s overly intellectual. But I read him, and I get into this really sweet space.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, people might say Shankara is overly intellectual, but he was coming from a level of direct experience and also trying to articulate it in a way that others could understand.

So I guess the point we’re making here is that knowledge and experience go hand in hand, and both are important components of the spiritual path. Some people may lead more with experience, and knowledge will catch up. Others may lead more with knowledge, and experience will catch up. But one way or the other, you want to keep them both lively as you go along.

So I guess the point we’re making here is that knowledge and experience go hand in hand, and both are important components of the spiritual path. Some people may lead more with experience, and knowledge will catch up. Others may lead more with knowledge, and experience will catch up. But one way or the other, you want to keep them both lively as you go along.

So what are some of these other mystical experiences? You mentioned that you had a heart chakra opening. Would that be an interesting one to talk about?

Maury: Maybe ten years ago, I was walking with my wife and our dog. It was summer, and we were just taking a nice walk. As we were walking, I started saying to my wife, “What is this tingling? What is this electrical field that I’m feeling?”

I kept telling her, “My fingers are tingling. I’m feeling energy going down from my shoulders to my hands.” This just kept getting more and more intense.

We turned around and started walking back toward home. I can’t explain this, but I started feeling really tired. I had this thought: “If you take another step, you’re dead.” It kept recurring: “If you take another step, you’re dead.”

Then, all of a sudden, it was as if my whole body was being blown up from inside. It was like somebody had stuck a giant air hose in my chest and was blowing me up from the inside. There was an energetic expansion, and I literally fell to the ground.

The energy was a whole-body energy of expansion, and it was very, very scary. With those kinds of experiences, when you’ve never had them before, you don’t know what they are. It was mind-blowing and very frightening. It was like I was being blown up from the inside, and my body was expanding to include the universe or something.

My wife tried to flag down some cars because I was lying on the grass next to the road, but nobody stopped. So she said, “Should I go get the car and take you to the hospital?”

Me being a guy, going to a hospital or saying that I need to see a doctor is the last thing I would ever do. But I was like, “Yeah, I think maybe I should probably go to the hospital.”

She ran home, got the car, and took me to the hospital. One doctor after another came in and examined me, but they could not figure out what it was. They pretty much all agreed, though: “We don’t really know if it’s a heart attack or not.”

I was sort of giddy and joking around with the doctors. If I died, I could have cared less. They said, “We’ll keep you overnight and test your blood to make sure there’s no heart damage.” So I spent the night in the hospital, and they did their blood tests.

The next day they said, “We have no clue what this was. We don’t know what happened. You’re not sick. You’re not ill. There’s no heart damage or anything.”

So I went home the next day, and I was still sort of dizzy, like my mind had been blown up or something. It was just different. The only thing I could do was thank God for the internet and start looking up my symptoms.

What kept coming up over and over again on different sites was, “Well, the symptoms are like what is called a heart chakra opening.” I wasn’t big into chakras. I hadn’t studied them or anything else. But apparently, from all I can tell, it was a heart chakra opening.

Rick: Yeah. Have you had many things like that, or was that the biggest and most dramatic?

Maury: There was another experience about twenty years ago. I would be sitting at work, and I can remember one day especially thinking, “Oh, my God, why is water running down my legs?” I wondered if I had peed my pants or something, so I was feeling my legs and looking down.

It felt like water—a really pleasant, wonderful feeling of cool water trickling all down inside my legs and around my body. It was just circulating, and it felt very, very good. At times, breathing was ecstatic, as if every breath were ecstatic.

There were periods when I would be into these experiences, and they would last for a few weeks or a month. Everything was extremely beautiful. Things were so pretty and gorgeous to me that, looking at a fish in a fish tank, I would just be in ecstasy. If I rode my bike in the park, everything would be so beautiful that I would cry.

I’m not in that space now, but I had experiences like that. I can’t even remember them all.

Rick: I just wanted to make a comment about ecstatic experiences or extremely blissful experiences, and so on. I think a lot of times what happens is there’s an initial… when an experience initially dawns, there’s a contrast. And it can seem really flashy or overwhelming or dramatic or profound or something like that. And maybe a year later, you’ve actually totally metabolized that experience. You’ve integrated it, stabilized it, and you haven’t lost it, but there’s no contrast anymore. So you’re not even aware of it or anything; you’ve just kind of adjusted to functioning at a different level. But it’s just that initial sort of breakthrough thing that is flashy, like maybe when you jumped into a swimming pool and it feels cold initially, and then after a few moments, you’re not even aware of the water temperature and you’re comfortable.

Maury: You’re absolutely right about that, because I think you really nailed it there. I know that now, things that people react to and think are terrible, I just take much more in stride than I used to, and things just don’t affect me the way they affect other people. And I suspect that you’re right because the calmness that I feel most of the time and the peace that I feel all the time are not something that I see in the people around me. But to me it feels normal. And so I get irritated with people who are always stressed out and reacting to everything, because to me it’s not necessary.

Rick: But they can’t help it.

Maury: But they can’t help it, and I just wish they had the peace that I have.

Contemplation, non-doership, and everyday life

Rick: Yeah. So you had gone through all that therapy business and the primal scream thing, and you were screaming, and then that tapered off. How long ago was that, roughly, would you say, since you had them? Have you sort of done anything intentionally by way of practice since then? Or have you just been kind of on automatic, and the thing has just continued to carry you along and unfold at its own pace?

Maury: Pretty automatic and carried out at its own pace. As far as practice, it doesn’t feel like practice to me, but when I look at myself and say, “What the hell have you been doing?” I would have to say that the only thing I can come up with is contemplation. I will take an idea—not purposely trying to, but just the way I’m set up—and it will just be in the back of my mind. In every situation that I’m in, part of my mind will say, “Okay, this phrase or this attitude or this intent—how does it relate to this situation? How can I embody this here? If I’ve realized something, how does that apply to my daily life?” And I think that contemplation just goes on continuously for me. So I would guess that’s a practice, but it’s not something that I have to try to do. It’s just sort of natural…

Rick: Yeah. It’s sort of like you’re chewing on something, and you just keep chewing on it until it’s all chewed, and then perhaps you take another bite and chew on that. I mean, there are certain ideas that I get kind of fixated on, and I’ll just bring them up often. And people say, “Why are you bringing up the same thing over and over?” And I say, “Well, just because I’m still working on that.” You work through various levels of it, and eventually it kind of gets resolved somehow, and then maybe you take on a new one. I can relate.

Maury: Yes. I think that as we evolve, the stuff that was so important to us and really let us take a step up the ladder—once it’s resolved, and we get it and let it go—you can look back and look at that attitude or phrase or whatever it was you were thinking about, and it doesn’t even seem significant anymore. It’s not that it wasn’t at the time; it’s just that where you are now, it doesn’t even apply and seems like child’s play.

Rick: Like learning to ride a bicycle probably doesn’t seem significant anymore. But it did when you were learning.

Maury: About bicycle riding, here’s something funny that I noticed. I’m a bike rider; I think you are too. I’ll often ride my bike for an hour and a half or so at a time. But when I go out and ride and come back, I don’t have a sense that I rode the bike. I just have a sense that there was bike riding. It doesn’t feel like it was me riding. There was just riding. It didn’t used to be that way. But now it’s just like I don’t have a strong sense of “I do things.” It’s just like things happen. And I see this person, this body, doing this, but…

Rick: Yeah, I bet you get that with most things, right? Not just bike riding.

Maury: Not just with bike riding. I used to feel like, “Oh, I did my bike. I rode for an hour and a half. I did it,” you know. And now it’s just like, no, bike riding just happened.

Rick: Yeah, I get that most of the time myself with most things. It’s sort of the whole authorship-of-action question, covered a lot in the Gita and other scriptures.

Maury: And you don’t have to try. You’ve just lost the authorship. And you get used to it. It doesn’t seem odd to you, but all kinds of motivation and stuff just are gone. You still do things, but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of personal involvement in it. It’s strange.

Rick: And regarding motivation, I don’t know—in my own experience, I find that I’m very motivated. I mean, I have all kinds of ideas and projects and things I want to do, but the doership thing is kind of light. So it’s not like you become apathetic or just sit around twiddling your thumbs. But the sense of me doing this and that kind of dissipates.

Maury: Yeah. And just like doing this interview, you know, it’s like it happened, and we’ll see. But I’ve never been much to promote myself. I admit, I’ve never tried to be saintly. I’ve never really wanted to be somebody or something. This has all just been a very personal pursuit that I seem to have been born with and had to follow.

There’s just riding.

Rick: Well, you know, the subtitle of this show is “Conversations with Ordinary”—in quotes—“Spiritually Awakening People.” Part of the intention of the show is to convey the notion that spiritual awakening is kind of a universal thing. Everyone has it as a birthright, really. And there’s not necessarily anything extraordinary about someone who has had some sort of awakening. You shouldn’t think that they’re special and you’re not, and that it’ll never happen for you. That’s part of our intention in getting these interviews out there: to give examples of people that others might be able to relate to and instill greater confidence in them, too.

Maury: I know in the tradition, especially from the East, they say that you can’t really make a lot of progress without a teacher that you sign on with, who accepts you as a student, and you do that thing. I can’t really say that I’ve ever done that. Any teacher who has videos or books out there, I’ll read and study them, but I’ve never gone to satsangs or adopted a single teacher and said, “Okay, he’s my guru.” At different times, different people meant a lot to me. I can read Krishnamurti now, and I don’t even know what I got out of it.

Rick: But you got something?

Maury: Yeah, at the time, something incredible. And now maybe somebody else rocks my boat.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I think there are exceptions to every generality. People tend to want to make generalities absolute. They say you need a teacher or you don’t need a teacher, or it’s the end of the guru age, or you need a guru. There are all these conflicting statements that people make with a certain degree of adamancy. But I think there’s a lot of individual variation, and one size does not fit all. It’s just really hard to make universal prescriptions. And you’re a good example of that, I mean, with the stuff you’ve gone through in your life.

Maury: Yeah. And I think it’s really good what you’re doing, especially when you have people on like me, who’s not a teacher, just someone who’s been doing this for their own spiritual development or their own peace of mind. I think there are a lot of people that people don’t know about who have made tremendous personal progress and growth, and may even be realized, and nobody knows about them because they’re not talking.

Rick: Yeah, it’s very true. And again, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this show: to bring some of these people out of the woodwork. I think I’ve probably just scratched the surface or seen the tip of the iceberg. There are probably millions of people around the world who have had significant awakenings. In fact, I often hear from people who have had one and were really freaked out by it because they had no idea what it was. They thought there was something wrong with them. Then they start listening to these interviews, and they think, “Oh, this is a good thing. There are other people like me.” I think it’s good. It helps people to know that.

Maury: Yeah, I think BatGap has probably relieved a lot of people’s fears. You mentioned Suzanne Segal before, where consciousness was above her and behind her head, and that freaked her out.

Rick: And she couldn’t find a sense of a personal self.

Maury: Yeah, but if she had had access to what we know, she probably would have found peace and acceptance of that and not felt so out of whack. Luckily for me, I had read and studied so much that when I started having experiences, I was like, “Oh, I’ve read about this. I haven’t lost my mind.”

Rick: Well, the ironic thing about Suzanne Segal, who wrote the book Collision with the Infinite, if people want to check that out, is that she had been a TM teacher and had been on long courses. She’d heard all this stuff, but then she kind of drifted away from it for a few years. So when she had this sudden awakening, she didn’t put two and two together.

It was kind of like her understanding, which she had gained, didn’t correlate with the experience she was having, because a concept is really hard to match with an experience. You can gain an understanding of what a mango tastes like—I use this example often—but it’s totally different from when you actually taste one. The understanding never really came close to the experience.

So she was freaked out, and it took her about ten years to adjust and kind of plug in an understanding, which I guess she eventually got from John Klein, that allowed her to relax into it.

Rick: I just opened my laptop here because I was reading some of your blog posts as I was traveling home from the SAND Conference. There are a whole lot of points that you write about in your blog that I think could be the basis of an interesting conversation. Each one could be.

But there are a few that sort of jumped out at me, and maybe I can scroll through and find a few. Here’s one thing: “Some paths may be more complete.” You said that as the title of one of your posts. You wrote, “People with a little spiritual knowledge think that because they had an experience, they are awake. Most likely not. The experience is a pointer, like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. Typically, a mystical experience or two will arouse curiosity. This is the beginning of the path, not the end.”

That’s a common theme: people sort of jumping to the conclusion that they’re finished. Maybe you could reflect on the whole notion of whether we’re ever finished. There’s also the whole theme of seeking, seeking, seeking, and then the seeking energy relaxes. But does that mean it’s the end of the journey, or is that just the end of a phase?

Maury: I think when someone has a mystical experience, they’re often mind-blowing, really profound, and maybe ecstatic. They may last for a while. The problem with those experiences is that they go away.

I think some people think that because they’ve had a mystical experience or two, they’re realized or enlightened, and they put up a shingle and go out and teach. In many cases, I don’t think they have the whole story.

The only thing I would say stopped my seeking was when I finally realized that I am that, and I know that I am that. That pretty much stopped the seeking. But I totally agree with the point that you’ve been making over the last year or so, from what I gather in your interviews: even once you realize you are that, there’s still a lot of development that can go on after that. And it does.

The only thing I would say stopped my seeking was when I finally realized that I am that, and I know that I am that. That pretty much stopped the seeking. But I totally agree with the point that you’ve been making over the last year or so, from what I gather in your interviews: even once you realize you are that, there’s still a lot of development that can go on after that. And it does.

I think even the Gita or some of the Upanishads mention that once you realize that, you don’t need to make a lot of effort after that, because the knowledge or the realization does the work.

My point about experiences—and we discussed this a little bit earlier—is that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between experience on one side and knowledge on the other. If you have a mystical experience, it’s probably not going to last. A lot of people have a mystical experience, and then it leaves them. They think, “Oh, I was enlightened, and I lost it.”

Well, I think that’s a misinterpretation of the experience, because the experience is a pointer. It’s saying that everything is one, and you can relax because everything is one and everything’s taken care of. But then the experience goes away, and you think you’ve lost it.

I think the experience is trying to point you toward gaining some knowledge or extracting some knowledge from the experience—to realize that you are that. For me, it’s more important to realize that you are that. Then, whatever experience you have or don’t have is somewhat irrelevant, because you have this deep, deep sense of peace. You are that, and everything’s taken care of.

For example, worrying about death: if you realize that, in essence, you are that, and you always have been that and always will be that, then your fear of death is much less. It’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a change. You were that, you are that now, and you’re going to be that afterward. So it’s okay.

So I prefer teachers who—or at least, what I try to do is—not be a teacher, but simply try to be very clear: this was my path, and this is what appears to be truth for me. But I’m not going to hold up a banner and a sign and say everybody should see things the way I see them or do what I do, because I think that causes a lot of damage.

Rick: Sure. There’s a line from the Gita that says something like, “Knowledge is the greatest purifier.” I think you’re kind of an example of that. How would you contrast, just speculatively, your sense of “I am that,” or “You are that,” with the sense you might have gotten forty years ago if you’d read that line, when it was mainly in your head but not in your experience?

Maury: I certainly read that years ago, but it didn’t strike home. It didn’t strike home for many, many years, and I had a lot of mystical experiences, a lot of ecstatic experiences.

For a long, long time, I thought that enlightenment would be an experience that I would have, and the experience would be such that when I had it, I would know that I was enlightened. I think a lot of people have that attitude. Maybe it’s possible for somebody to whom that happens, but I think for the majority of people, and at least in my case, the experience was not it.

What had to happen was that the statement from the Gita and the Upanishads that “you are that” had to be understood in such a way that, as best as I can say it, it drops into your heart, or your being identifies with that statement.

It’s not just a thought that you can think about and say, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” There’s some kind of a shift where you read it and go, “Yeah, that’s absolutely true, and I know it.” That’s where I think the realization happens: when you know it. But on top of that, there’s somehow this other aspect that says, “And you know that you know.”

There’s some kind of a shift where you read it and go, “Yeah, that’s absolutely true, and I know it.”

Rick: Yeah, it’s sort of like what we’ve been talking about with knowledge and experience. This is a kind of knowing that encapsulates both. It’s not just a concept. It’s somehow in your bones, as you say, in your heart. Then there’s no question of doubt or vacillation or anything. It’s just part and parcel of your orientation to life.

Maury: But then your personality is still there. The conditioning that you got is still there. I’ve heard you talk quite a bit about embodiment lately, and people can interpret that differently. But the way I see it is that you realize that, but the person that you are—the jiva—is still there with all its BS and crap, and the things that irritate you, and whatever else.

So I think embodiment is—well, call it a practice, or you just have to contemplate it. It’s like, “Okay, now that I realize I am that, how is that going to affect my behavior? Am I acting in accordance with what I know or not?” I’d say a good portion of the time, or most of the time, I’m not.

Rick: You’re not, or other people aren’t?

Maury: I’m not. You know, I’m not living up to what I know. So I’m not saintly at all in that regard. I’ve realized something, but do I feel like I live up to it, or that I’ve undergone the complete effect and transformation that it could ultimately lead to? Am I there? Well, no.

Rick: That’s a good admission. I think it’s a wise admission, and it’s a distinction that a lot of people don’t make. You’re parsing it out with a lot of clarity here.

From my perspective, there’s a vast amount of territory that can be traversed between that initial realization that you are that and really fully embodying it in all phases of your life. There’s just so much transformation that can take place. There’s room for so much refinement, clarification, and transformation in our whole relative structure—in our whole personality structure, our nervous system, and our senses.

All those things don’t transform overnight. Physiologically, even, those things don’t transform overnight. Neuroplasticity is a common concept these days. The brain just doesn’t become a different brain in twenty-four hours, but it does become a different brain eventually, and they’re able to study that. It takes a while for the physiology to transform, and I’m sure that’s also true of the subtler aspects of our makeup, which are nonetheless real.

Maury: I find myself reacting, especially to my wife, and not behaving without irritation or whatever. I just see it. So I think that realization stops the seeking, but that’s just the beginning of the transformation of what you can get to.

I think the realization and the stopping of seeking are really sweet.

Rick: A significant milestone.

Maury: It’s very, very, very significant. But I would say that’s the beginning. The search is over, but that’s just the beginning of saying, “Okay, I realize this, I know this, and look at the behavior of this thing. Does it match?” Well, no, it doesn’t.

Do I want to be hard on myself or be down on myself about that? No. It’s just the way it is. But at least I have it in mind that I know this. So when I behave in certain ways, I can look at it and say, “Well, it’s not in alignment with what I know.”

Rick: So there’s room for growth there.

Maury: Just being aware of that—call it mindfulness, or simply being aware that you’re not living up to what you know—is hopefully going to change your behavior so that you do become more in alignment with what you’ve realized.

But I think you’ve said before that there’s probably an infinite progression of development that you can have as long as you live.

✨ Awakening, ethics, and embodiment

Rick: That’s an interesting point. Not everyone would necessarily agree with what you just said, but I do. I’ve seen actual posts on the internet from people insisting that there’s no correlation between awakened consciousness and behavior, and that it’s unrealistic to expect there to be one.

I think maybe the correlation is loose, and maybe awakened consciousness in and of itself isn’t sufficient to bring about a thorough transformation of behavior. Perhaps there needs to be more intentional cultivation of ethics, more self-scrutiny, and just being more impeccable, as Carlos Castaneda’s teacher would put it. He said, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability.”

I think maybe the correlation is loose, and maybe awakened consciousness in and of itself isn’t sufficient to bring about a thorough transformation of behavior. Perhaps there needs to be more intentional cultivation of ethics, more self-scrutiny, and just being more impeccable, as Carlos Castaneda’s teacher would put it. He said, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability.”

It puzzles me sometimes that a person can be so awake, so radiating consciousness, and yet kind of oblivious to certain aspects of his or her behavior—possibly even rationalizing that behavior as acceptable or legitimate because they are awake. “You can’t really understand me because I am beyond human assessment.”

I think people get in trouble when they start thinking that way. It lacks humility and self-scrutiny.

Maury: I saw your interview with Ken Wilber, and I’m not sure I agree with everything that he says. But I liked the fact that he was making the point that someone can realize they are That, and their behavior can be quite different.

Rick: He talks about lines of development.

Maury: And that the realization may be at a very high level on that side. But say the person hasn’t ever done any therapy and hasn’t ever taken a good look at their dark side, which we all have. If they haven’t looked at it, or don’t admit it, then their realization can—or at least they can take that—as permission to behave any way they want.

Or they’re in a position of power, being a spiritual teacher, and they don’t consider anyone to be their peer. Therefore, they don’t really take constructive criticism well. And the students sometimes can facilitate that by regarding the teacher as being beyond their ken and not questioning or challenging the teacher because they assume that he knows something they don’t, and therefore they don’t have the authority or right to question. They kind of undermine their own discernment and discrimination.

Isn’t there a famous statement of the Buddha or something that said, “Don’t put any head above your own”?

Rick: I don’t remember that one. But I know another one from the Buddha. He said, “Don’t believe something just because I say it.” You’ve got to go by your own.

Maury: Yeah. And that’s the thing about what realization is. It’s like, who is it that needs to feel, “Oh, I am That”? How that’s realized can obviously be very different for different people, but no one on the outside can say you got it. They might tell you that, but somehow something has to happen in the person themselves. That’s the aha moment. I don’t care what anybody else thinks about whether I’ve realized something or not. That won’t give me peace. It might make me feel good or boost my ego. But who is it that needs that satisfaction, the understanding that stops the seeking? Well, it’s the person who’s seeking.

Rick: Yeah, you’re the one whose doubts have to be dispelled.

Maury: Exactly.

Rick: The understanding has to be solid, and whose experience has to be solid.

There’s another point you made in your blog, which is somewhat related to what we’ve just been saying. I mean, you’ve made a ton of points. We could go on for days talking about the points you’ve brought up in your blog. And I’ll be linking to your blog from BatGap if people would like to read some of this stuff.

But I kind of like this one. You said, “No, everyone is not already enlightened.” And you started out by saying the idea that everyone is already enlightened causes a lot of botched progress on the path. So although everyone and everything is the Self, to say everyone is already enlightened is a misuse of language and a lack of understanding.

If I say everyone is already enlightened, that includes Adolf Hitler, people who are suffering from mental illness, and everything else in the world. So it kind of renders the term meaningless. And, yeah, I bet you could reflect on this for a little bit.

Maury: Oh, yeah. I’m a real stickler for that because I’m a writer, and I’ve spent a lot of years writing, and I’ve done a tremendous amount of reading. The definitions of words become really important. There’s a lot of sloppiness in spiritual language.

Although you can say everyone in this world, including Hitler, is awareness, or is That, it doesn’t mean they’re enlightened. Enlightenment is freedom for the individual and from the individual.

So, yes, we are all That because we’re all one; there’s only one reality. We all are the essence of That. But realization is very personal in that you realize that you are That. And there’s a paradox in that, because once you realize you are That, there’s an identity shift.

The Gestalt means the play between foreground and background. Before realization, the foreground is the personal “I,” the ego: “I’m doing this. I’m living my life. It’s my will. It’s my way or the highway,” and so on. But the shift is that the person is still there, but realizes that they are That.

When people say everyone is enlightened, I think what they really mean is that everybody is that awareness, or whatever you want to call the Absolute. You can’t get away from That. But that doesn’t mean they’re realized.

Rick: No. I mean, by that logic, cockroaches are enlightened. But do cockroaches know that? It’s one thing to know intellectually that That is the ultimate reality. It’s another thing to have that be part and parcel of one’s actual living experience from moment to moment.

Distinguishing Awareness from Consciousness

Maury: People like to equate and interchange consciousness and awareness. I like to make a little bit of a distinction and say awareness is like the blank movie screen on which everything can appear. As soon as the movie starts, then there’s consciousness of what the picture is. But awareness isn’t affected, because it’s the screen.

I like to make that distinction: awareness is the blank field, that which can accept everything and become conscious of anything, but consciousness is the content. It’s whatever object appears. I think it would be helpful if more people would say consciousness is the content, and awareness is the absolute, clear field in which everything appears. But that’s just a personal peccadillo of mine, or whatever.

Rick: However we want to define our terms, I think it’s a worthy motivation to want to standardize terms so that we know we can communicate with each other about these things. And I think there’s a lot of progress to be made in that area.

Otherwise, it’s like a Tower of Babel thing, where we’re talking and people are understanding different points. I don’t think the spiritual territory is as well mapped out as some other territories of human experience, such as chemistry or something. Everyone agrees on the periodic table. All chemists would say, “Yeah, I agree on all that stuff.”

But all spiritual people wouldn’t necessarily agree on all the terms and terminology, or about all the various types of spiritual experiential states of consciousness and all that. So it’s kind of the Wild West, in a way, in terms of our understanding as a culture of what we’re actually talking about.

🕊️ Spirituality as an inner science

Maury: A thought just came to my mind. What are we using when we investigate the Self, when we become spiritually inclined and try to answer the big question, “Who am I?”

I think an important point to make is that I see Advaita Vedanta as a science. When I read it, it’s extremely logical and very precise in examining and interpreting our experience of everyday life in such a way that, if you study it, it’s very difficult not to come to the conclusion they’re pointing to.

I’d just like to say that when a scientist is in the lab, looking through the microscope and trying to prove a hypothesis, taking measurements and all that, the main instrument in the room being used is the human mind.

Rick: True.

Maury: People forget that. They think science is this very precise measuring tool and put it up on a pedestal. They forget that all of this examination, and everything in science that’s looked at and investigated, is investigated by the human mind. That’s the factor that’s most significant.

When someone starts meditating and looking inside and examining who they are, they’re using exactly the same instrument. So if it’s done right and precisely, I think you can call the spiritual search a very scientific thing.

Rick: I’m really keen on that point. If you watched my presentation at the SAND conference from 2015, I really go into that a lot. It’s something I think about a lot.

The point you just made is that whatever instruments they may be using, scientists are fundamentally using the human mind and the human nervous system. That’s the common denominator of all instruments. They have to be using that; otherwise, they can’t use the other instruments.

Maury: I find it interesting that so many realized people tend to read quantum physics and relate to it and find that it’s pretty much in agreement with Advaita Vedanta. I find the same thing. Quantum physics, to me, is saying the same thing that the Gita is saying. It seems the same to me.

Rick: Well, actually, a lot of the founders of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and others, studied some Vedic literature. They read the Upanishads, and they made statements about the primacy of consciousness and so on.

I just want to touch a little bit more on the science thing and the human mind as being fundamental to it. If a scientist is not developing the mind in terms of developing consciousness, and yet that’s the fundamental tool which he must use before using any other tools, then in a way he’s handicapping himself and preventing the full depth of understanding that would be possible if the mind, if consciousness, were fully developed.

It’s interesting how petty and narrow-minded scientists can be, and how unscientific they can be in adamantly rejecting things which are, to their understanding, outside the purview of science. It’s resulted in this clash between science and spirituality, and the rejection of—or the insistence that—the physical universe is the foundation and consciousness eventually emerges from physicality.

I think they’ve got it all backwards. I think the future of science will necessitate switching things around and understanding that consciousness is primary. But that’s not going to happen unless scientists explore that experimentally.

Maury: It’s like the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is the fact that you can’t put science up on a pedestal as a separate thing, because the fundamental instrument is the human mind.

Science is often treated like a religion, like it’s this objective thing out here that we can worship because it’s objective. But all of science is only a result of the human mind. The elephant tends to get ignored. People say, “Science is this objective thing, and it has a much sounder base than spirituality.” That’s just BS, because they’re excluding the human mind from being the one that’s making the hypothesis, determining the measurements, and doing everything else.

I think it’s just as valid to investigate yourself with your mind as it is to investigate the objective world scientifically. They’re both on the same footing.

Rick: Yeah. And I would add that I think the reason science has gotten us into so much trouble, and created the possibility of exterminating ourselves, is that scientists have failed to develop the full potential of the mind.

They’re like kids playing with guns or something, as science lacks the wisdom to properly manage the powerful tools and technologies it has developed. So that’s really the need of the time: to develop that wisdom on a mass scale, so that we don’t wipe ourselves out, and so that all these technological blessings can truly be blessings and not mixed blessings.

Maury: Yeah, our spiritual maturity and understanding that we’re all one need to catch up with technological development. And it’s not there; we’re pretty far behind.

Rick: But hopefully it’s happening, you know, and there does seem to be some kind of spiritual epidemic taking place in the world. Hopefully, it will become solid enough, in the nick of time, to create greater balance in the world. Because we’re all doing our bit as best we can.

Maury: Yeah, and I think there’s, like you said, a lot of people out there who have made a lot of progress and are pretty spiritually evolved, but they don’t talk. In my case, I don’t really talk a lot, but I blog.

A simple life and a public blog

Rick: Yeah, well, your blog is really good, actually. I’ve enjoyed reading as much of it as I’ve been able to read. And again, I would recommend that people check it out. That’s really basically all you have to offer. You’re not making videos on a regular basis or anything; it’s mainly your blog.

Maury: No, no. I’m pretty much of a loner, you know. I really enjoy myself, and I’m retired. I can be totally self-entertained all day long, just fixing my locks, playing with the garage door, or fixing whatever I think needs to be fixed, and just reading and contemplating. I’m totally content doing that—happy with just a very simple, ordinary life.

Rick: Great. In terms of your blog, do you have a way for people to ask you a question? If they would like you to write about a particular thing, can they make that suggestion?

Maury: I don’t think I have that, but they could leave a comment, and you’d see it. If they left a comment and asked, then I would respond. Or if they emailed me, I would.

Rick: Good. Do you want me to put your email on your Batgap page?

Maury: Okay.

Rick: I don’t think you’ll get inundated. I did that with a friend, Steve Briggs, recently, and he only got a few emails from that, so it won’t necessarily be a flood.

Maury: Yeah, I mean, in doing this video, I figured that if somebody resonates with what I have to say and feels like I might be of help in some way, then I would be glad to correspond with them. But that’s the extent of my motivation, because I think there are lots of really good, excellent teachers out there who teach all over the world. They’re very good.

Rick: Yeah. Although, in my opinion, some of the things you write and say show greater wisdom than some of the people who are pretty famous teachers. I think, in some respects, you have—we all have our strengths and weaknesses—but there’s a lot of stuff that I think you state very clearly, more so, in my opinion, than some other teachers who are kind of famous. So that’s good.

Maury: Clarity is something that I really like—clarity in words. That’s why I wrote that blog, “No, Everybody Is Not Enlightened.” It’s simply, well, let’s be clear about this. What are you really talking about? What do we really mean?

When people say everyone’s enlightened, what they really mean is that everybody is That; everybody is awareness. But enlightenment actually happens to an individual. The paradox is that when that happens to them, they no longer really are the individual. So it’s very paradoxical.

It’s almost impossible to write about, but I think you can have more clarity than what we see in a lot of books and statements. There are a lot of teachers who even say everyone is enlightened. I know what they mean, but it can be easily misinterpreted.

Rick: It can be very confusing, yeah.

Maury: And I would just like to say that I’ve had my path. But if somebody really wants to know what nonduality or realization is, it’s all there in the traditional Upanishads and the Gita. It’s all there. So if someone wants to know what to do, I’d say, study that.

Rick: Yeah. And I think this is a general attitude. I would encourage people to do what you’ve been doing, and what I’ve been doing also, which is, if this is important to you, keep your attention on it.

Fine, do other things—ride your bicycle, fix garage doors, do sports, or whatever you want to do—but make this a priority in your life, because that really has an effect.

Maury: Not everybody has your dedication to doing something every day, like meditating, and I think that’s really admirable. In my case, I didn’t, but I did contemplate something every day. So it wasn’t really a conscious practice, but contemplation is very effective.

If you just take something from the Gita, or some phrase that somehow resonates with you, and think, “I would like to experience this or understand this,” just put it in the back of your mind and compare it to your life.

I worked a regular job in an office from eight to five for years. When I would ride the bus to work every day, I would have spiritual texts on my phone. I spent an hour every day on the bus, so for that hour I was reading the Bhagavad Gita or some other text. I would also read it at night.

When I was at my desk at work, I would be contemplating: Am I reacting or performing in a way that’s in line with this spiritual idea? Am I conforming to it? If I conform to it, does it affect my work life? Does it make my work easier?

Rick: Yeah. Does the rubber meet the road? Are you walking your talk?

Maury: I think most people find out that their rubber doesn’t meet the road. But just being aware of that can make you see that you need to do better. Or maybe you could do better? How could I do better? And then apply that.

✨ The senses, consciousness, and free will

Rick: Here’s a question that came in from Dan in London. People are watching live; there have been over 100 people watching most of this. Here’s what Dan wants to know:

“Anything that one experiences through the five senses is imbued with the consciousness from which it arises. I often notice the beautiful lightness of everything that I experience through the senses. As an experiment, I might often look at an object and ask, ‘What’s it made out of in this moment?’ And I notice the lightness behind it. It works with any object. What do you think about this, and what importance do the senses play in realization?”

Maury: The main thing I would say about the senses is that if you look at them and study them, all the senses are just an interpretation. Whatever the thing is in itself, whatever that energetic thing is that’s in this soup that we’re in, our senses are just an interpretation of it. They’re just a reality created by our senses.

Rick: Like filters or something.

Maury: Yeah. And so the thing in itself, whatever that is, is not known to us. I know some people talk about this being all a hologram in the mind of God, and I would tend to agree with that.

Rick: Some say it’s an alien video game.

Maury: So I don’t know if that’s answering his question at all. But I’m very aware that people take reality, or the reality of objects in the world, to be what their senses tell them it is. And I’d say no. That makes our form work in relationship to this energy field, but it’s all just an interpretation. It’s just our reality, and everything is just an interpretation of what’s really there.

Rick: But I might say that Dan, based on his experiences and what you were saying earlier—“You are That, I am That”—is also beginning to experience what the Upanishad goes on to say: “All this is That.”

I think Dan is beginning to experience the That that objects essentially are. They’re not just the superficial appearance; they are consciousness having taken a form. He’s beginning to experience them in terms of that consciousness, or in terms of the Self. That’s the way unity dawns, until eventually everything is seen in terms of the Self.

Maury: Well, I think that everything that I see is aware or conscious. When you think of an atom and it has electrons, how do those electrons know to stay in their particular groove, circling around the center? It’s like they’re aware, because they know how to stay in a place. If something comes close to them that has a negative charge or something, and then something jumps, well, that’s awareness or some level of consciousness.

I can’t find anything in the universe that isn’t aware on some level. So the whole thing is just aware and conscious from top to bottom.

Rick: I agree with you, and I often think that way myself. It’s not as if the electron says, “Oh, something’s coming near here. I guess I’ll jump now.” It’s more that the electron is behaving in perfect accordance with all-pervading intelligence. It’s aligned with that intelligence and operates according to certain laws of nature that are embedded in that intelligence, or that are aspects of that intelligence.

Maury: Right. So whereas we may have a higher level of consciousness, to the point where we feel like we’re making a choice, the electron isn’t making a choice because it doesn’t have that level of subjective feeling. But you can’t say it’s not aware, because it will jump under the right conditions.

Rick: Yeah, it’s not some random little billiard ball that’s just going to do any old thing. It has a certain nature. There’s a saying in the Gita: “Creatures act according to their own nature.” I think that applies to electrons as well. They have certain laws that they abide by, and the whole universe is orderly because everything is acting in accordance with some more fundamental laws—or I guess “laws” is the best word we have here.

Maury: Yeah, that brings up the idea that people feel like they have choices and make decisions. I’ve thought about that for years. A long, long time ago, I had a very distinct feeling that I didn’t have free will. I can remember discussing this at lunch with people from work. Their response to even saying that we might not have free will was, “Oh my God!” One of the guys said, “If I didn’t think I had free will, I’d go home and take a gun and shoot myself.”

So I thought, wow, it shows how much ego is involved in this desire to feel like we have free will. Free will is a hard thing to define and pin down because, where I am now, I would say, “Well, I have free will because I am That, and I created all this. So obviously, ultimately, I’m totally free.”

But as a human being, if I look at the choices that I make, I can say, “Yeah, I made a choice.” But when I really look deeply into choice, I’m not sure that it’s free will.

Rick: So, yeah, you’ve written blog posts about that. And people have written books about that. And they’ve argued endlessly about that for hundreds or thousands of years. And I don’t think you and I are going to resolve it right now.

But I think it’s a matter of what level you’re operating on, or what… There’s a level at which everything is cosmically ordained, and there’s a level at which relative perspectives come into play. And on that level, you have some wiggle room. I mean, you’re not free to just go fly to the top of Mount Everest, but you are free to sort of make choices within a certain spectrum that you operate in.

And then there’s another level at which the whole point is moot because nothing happens, and nothing ever happens. So it sort of matters where you take your stand.

Maury: Yeah, yeah. And that brings up the idea of karma. Because what I’ve noticed in people’s lives is that if people make choices that are in line with dharma, or the universal rules, it seems like their field of choice expands, and they get more and more choice.

But if they don’t govern themselves and make choices that are counter to dharma, it seems like their future choices start to diminish. And the next thing you know, if they can’t govern themselves, they’ll be in jail, where the guards govern them.

Rick: Yeah, very good point. You know, you and I think along similar lines. I’ve often thought about that and said that, and whatnot. But it’s like I said a minute ago: We have wiggle room. Well, the scope of your wiggle room increases if you make the right choices and diminishes if you make the wrong choices.

Maury: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: So, we solved that one. Free will is all sorted out here. I don’t need to write books about it anymore.

Maury: Oh, and then the other thing is that I’ve been thinking in the last week or so about… Oh, God, I’m going to lose my thought here.

🛤️ Closing thoughts on the path

Rick: It will probably come back. That often happens. As soon as you stop thinking about something, it comes back to you. I’ll start making some wrap-up points, but then, as I do so, if that point that you were going to say comes back to you, does it have anything to do with free will, or is it a totally different topic?

We’ll see. Okay, all right. So, you and I have been talking, and we’ve been going for about two hours. I really enjoyed talking to you and could surely do it all day. But these interviews are sort of like a taste, and so people have had a taste of your life and your perspective.

If they want to delve in more, they can go to your blog and read. Do you have a thing on your blog where they get notified when a new thing is posted?

Maury: Yeah, I do. And I should—if somebody puts a comment on there, it should get to me, or if somebody emails me.

Rick: No, I mean, do a thing where readers get notified when you post a new thing.

Maury: I think they can sign up.

Rick: Okay, good. Yeah, I might do that myself, because I like reading what you have to say. And I subscribe to a couple of other blogs where I always feel like I learn something when I read them. So I encourage people to do that if they want.

And, as you said, they can get in touch with you if they feel like chatting. I’ll put your email address on your Batgap page. Anything else you want to say before we wrap it up?

Maury: No. The only thing I would want to say is, I hope that some people find what I’ve had to say helpful in some way. If not, that’s okay, too.

But I would also encourage people to watch Batgap. I really enjoy watching the videos. And I especially like a lot of them that are not spiritual teachers. Sometimes you’ll have a spiritual veterinarian, or just some person.

I like the idea of ordinary people who are awakening and may not toot their own horn, or be making a big splash or doing a lot of videos. Those people, I think, sometimes have a very interesting background and path, and we could all benefit from what they’ve discovered and from thinking about their path, because there are so many.

So that’s all I’d say: Enjoy Batgap. It’s a really good service.

Rick: Oh, well, thanks. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I think this has been a lot of fun. And, you know, we’re kind of on a similar wavelength in many ways, so it’s real easy for me to talk to you and sort of embellish each other’s ideas.

So, keep on truckin’, you know. Keep on writing those blog posts. Keep on watching Batgap.

Maury: Okay, I will definitely.

Rick: All right, well, thanks. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching. As you must know, this is an ongoing series. And if you’d like to be notified of future ones, subscribe to the YouTube channel and/or subscribe to the little email notification thing that you’ll find on Batgap.com.

Check out the other menus there and see what we have to offer. So, we’ll see you for the next one.