Michael Baxter Interview

Michael Baxter Transcript – Advaita, Self-Knowledge, Illusion, and the Solidness of Reality

Summary

Michael Baxter discusses his personal journey exploring non-duality and the nature of the Self. He shares insights from his experiences with illness, near-death, and moments of realization about reality and existence.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can serious illness or physical challenges prevent spiritual awakening?
• What is meant by the 'Self' in non-dual teachings?
• How can one distinguish between what is real and what is illusion?
• Do profound spiritual insights always happen during meditation?

Key takeaways

• Physical illness does not block realization of the Self.
• The world, as commonly perceived, lacks ultimate existence.
• Direct glimpses of reality can occur outside of meditation.
• Self is defined as truth, reality, or being—beyond personal identity.
• Profound shifts in perspective can arise from moments of crisis or vulnerability.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump, the weekly show in which we talk with people who have had a spiritual awakening. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this time is Michael Baxter, whom we will also refer to as Bax or Michael, but not Mike. And Michael is unique among my guests so far for several reasons, one of which is that he doesn’t really claim to have had a spiritual awakening. He says he’s had some glimpses and I think he’s going to be able to talk about them very eloquently, but maybe they’re not stabilized. But that’s okay because the reason I want him to have Mike on, Michael on, is that he, I consider him to be something of an Advaita scholar, if you know what Advaita means, it means non-duality, and there’s a whole school of thought which deals with that topic.

And Michael is very eloquent on that point, writing things, prose, poetry, composing songs, one of which he might sing for us tonight, all sorts of things. So I felt that this might be a very interesting discussion. And it might be a little bit more systematic than some of the interviews we’ve done so far which have been just kind of free-flowing, spontaneous, extemporaneous, because Michael has developed some fairly detailed points and he’s so accustomed to talking about this stuff that he has a fairly clear structure in mind of how he’d like to lay it out. But at the same time it won’t be a lecture, we’ll have plenty of give and take and questions and answers and so on to make it lively for you.

So perhaps what we often do on this show is have people start by just sort of giving a little bit of a biographical sketch of themselves, what their background is, just personal details of their life that they consider relevant, how that pertains to spirituality or consciousness, awakening and so on. So go for it.

Michael: All right. Well, a little bit of background. I was born in Seattle, I was raised on the West Coast, and of course I came to Fairfield with everybody else in the late ’70s and was here for quite a while. I was an administrator at the MIU, MUM now.

Rick: Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

Michael: And I was a student and also a businessman in town here. But for the last, let’s say, 12 years I’ve been living in Coralville, Iowa with my wife who’s a wonderful Arabic lady named Intisar. She’s also a blind lady and she’s wonderful. I always…

Rick: You mentioned that she’s from Baghdad and that she’s into belly dancing. So…

Michael: Right, right. She is a blind belly dancer from Baghdad. Actually her blood is Palestinian and she was raised in Baghdad. She moved here when she was 17, I think, to have her eyes checked out, but there’s not much they can do. It’s a progressive loss of vision. But I always think of myself as having really just three interests in life. She’s the first one and I love her with all my heart. And the second one is this sort of self-discovery stuff. And the third one is music. I love to sing. Well, I should say I love to sing along. So if there’s time at the end today, maybe sing one song.

Rick: Sure. I’ve got plenty of time. So I understand that you’ve had some health issues. And that that actually has some relevance or significance with regard to your spiritual development. I mean, you’ve been a meditator for decades, right? You learned to meditate when you were probably a teenager or 20s or something like that. And then at a certain stage you got leukemia? Right?

Michael: That’s right. I got myelogenous leukemia, which means it’s in the bone marrow. And that was in ’94 that that was diagnosed. And at that point they gave me three to five years to live and there was no real cure. But I took chemo shots every day for 10 years. And so I lasted quite well with those. And then they came up, they discovered a wonder drug, just almost a poster child for wonder drugs. It’s four little pills that I take every day now. And technically chemo, but the side effects are not bad. Basically I’m just tired. I get cranky in the evening. So if I bite your head off, Rick…

Rick: I’ll ask very non-probing…

Michael: Yeah, be very careful! So yeah, it’s an interesting thing. I wouldn’t say that getting sick made me think about mortality so much as I would think that I was actually starting to wake up. And as we know from Maharishi’s teachings, the TM teaching, the mind likes to be able to match a reason to an experience. And so given that I was sort of awakening and still am awakening, it was just kind of a nice match that I should have some kind of serious illness. Yet I don’t think one really caused the other.

🩺 Health, Illness, and Spiritual Development

Rick: Yeah… One thing Maharishi always said, which some people found discouraging, was that in order to really be enlightened or whatever term we want to use, the nervous system has to be functioning perfectly or free of stress. And yet there are so many examples which belie that. I mean, so many people who have been alcoholics and then have had this profound awakening, or drug addicts, or…

Michael: I’m going to try that next, alcoholism.

Rick: Or have had some serious disease and have been awakened in spite of it. And both ancient and modern, there are examples of that. So did you feel that your disease, your illness, and the drugs you had to take were in any way an impediment to inner development?

Michael: And I’m sort of saving that part of what I want to say for a little bit later. But in general, I don’t think there’s any connection whatsoever between fact and fiction, between that which is real and that which is maya or illusion. And if anything, the illusion would have to be downstream from the truth. And so there’s no way that it could flow back upstream and affect… No condition of the fiction could ever restrict or affect the fact. That would be my take on that.

No condition of the fiction could ever restrict or affect the fact.

Rick: Yeah. Well, as a matter of fact, actually, like many spiritual authorities and books, you can take any one thing Maharishi said and find something pretty much the opposite that he also said. And I remember him saying that you could actually transcend or take any of the five senses and arrive at the being or the self or whatever, and presumably through having that experience repeatedly, have that become a stable and permanent reality, even though you might be very handicapped in certain respects, and obviously you’re not.

Michael: I think that’s right.

Rick: So how would you like to lay this out? I know you have a whole structure here. I don’t want to interfere with it by jumping ahead or anything.

Michael: Well, please interrupt me enough to keep this from being pedantic. Out of necessity, I have created a system, the graphic and text, words, ideas and pictures, which I did over the years to help me understand what’s been happening to me.

Rick: Good. And I’m glad you phrased it that way, because I do want to put this in terms of your personal experience and not just sort of an abstract cosmology that you’ve developed, but how does this relate to you? How did you come up with this stuff?

Michael: That’s right. I’m not claiming that this is truth. I don’t think there is such a thing as relative. It works. So I’ll show you what I have here. I’m going to show this diagram here. I call this the cycle of self-knowledge. You’ll probably right away see that there’s this big sort of egg-shaped cycle, and underneath that there’s a very dark triangle. In this schematic, the dark triangle is the Self, and the egg-shaped cycle is the relative world. The idea being that we move through different milestone experiences in the relative world, sometimes passing quite close to the Self, and sometimes not so close. And I found in my case that just trying to populate this map with some of my experiences has helped me to put them in a common context, you could say.

Rick: May I interject a question here? I think some teachers would say, “How can you not be close to the Self? What can take you away, to any distance, from that which is everywhere?”

Michael: Well, this is actually … you’re bringing out really one of my personal favorite points.

Rick: Are we getting ahead of ourselves?

Michael: Let me make this point, Rick, but I won’t spend a lot of time on it. I think that really different regions of this schematic require a slightly different dialect, or slightly different language. So obviously at the top, where for now let’s say that we’re far away from the Self, the reality is that people are different. I’m not you, and I’m not the Self. But as you’re moving towards the Self, that is called into question. Is there really a difference between us? As you’re passing the Self, there’s really no experience of the world.

Rick: Let’s define the term “Self” a little bit. Because most people, if you say, “Oh, what is your Self?” “Well, I’m 5’8″, and I weigh 140 pounds, and my skin color is such and such, and I go to school.” So let’s define what we mean by “Self.”

Michael: Okay. I’m going to cop out on that one. Here’s the way I would define “Self.” Ever since ancient times… let me set this graphic down…

Rick: Sure, they can show us again now.

Michael: Ever since ancient times, people have said, “Know thyself.” And we’ve all accepted that this is a valid statement, it’s a valid goal. And so rather than try to nail it down, I would suggest that we just accept that whatever the Self is, that knowing it is a valid quest.

Rick: Yeah. But I think we need to make clear that when we refer to knowing it, we’re alluding to something which is not commonly known, otherwise what’s all the fuss about it? And if we’re just going to define “Self” in terms of our likes and our dislikes and our job and our family and our possessions and our preferences and our physical appearance, then what’s to know? We all know that.

Michael: Let me give three synonyms for “Self” that I’ll propose. Truth, reality, and being. Self is defined, let’s say, as that which is true. Self is defined as that which is real. And being is, from the perspective of a living person, if he is in touch with his being, then he is in touch with his Self. So for now, maybe that’s good enough.

Rick: Yeah, so let’s at this point establish that the term “Self” and the way we’re using it refers not to the common definition, but to something that is often overlooked and that would be perhaps a more fundamental, essential level of reality that is very worthy of being discovered.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, good.

Michael: So here’s kind of my story then, and it’s also the story of what I call the three laws of self-knowledge, which you’ll see are something that I stumbled upon, but they’re also, for example, something that Shankara from, what’s that, 8th century India, upon which the TM tradition is based, the teachings of Shankara, that Shankara also verbalized quite beautifully. So as I said, I guess it was about ’94 I got leukemia, and by…

Rick: By that time you’d already been meditating for 20 years or something.

Michael: Something like that.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And then in ’98 I had run out of options. We weren’t sure if the drug was working, but the cancer was progressing. And they had proposed, I don’t know if you know what a bone marrow transplant is.

Rick: Sure.

Michael: It’s extremely invasive.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And…

Rick: No picnic.

Michael: They had said, my doctors had told me that now’s the time, I should do that. And I thought about it long and hard and decided that I wouldn’t do it, no matter what. I’d rather spend my time just getting ready to die. And so that was all fine, as long as it was theoretical, as long as it was still at some distance. I was actually a card-carrying member of two or three right-to-die societies, like Hemlock Society. And I actually had the bag that you put over your head, and I had the checklist, take this drug and then do the bag. So I was actually going through my checklist and really trying to prepare myself to take my life before I couldn’t take my life.

And things got so bad, I was on two chemos at that time. I was also on some kind of a psychological medicine that wasn’t working. And I had just unbelievable depression and anxiety symptoms. And the short story is that I became acutely suicidal. And I think I had about one hour left on this earth. I had full intention to just take care of things.

The short story is that I became acutely suicidal. And I think I had about one hour left on this earth. I had full intention to just take care of things.

Rick: And you probably had a fairly certain belief that the death of your body wasn’t going to be the death of you, or did you?

Michael: Not really.

Rick: You didn’t know…

Michael: No. I mean, I wasn’t at peace. I wasn’t calm. I was just completely freaked out. But I was in such physical, emotional, psychological distress that I didn’t feel… The symptoms alone were just killing me. And so my best friend called out of nowhere and said, “I’m getting this kind of strange feeling. What’s up?” And I said, “I don’t think I have an hour left.” And he said, “Promise me you’ll call your doctor and check yourself in.” So I did that and spent a month in the psychiatric unit, University Hospital in Iowa City. And I was what they would call an affective flatliner, meaning I had zero capacity to register emotion. I was just in a walking coma, so to speak, for about a month. So it hit me really hard.

Rick: And this is both because of the stress of the disease and also the side effects of the drugs, I suppose.

Michael: Yeah, all of the above. The drugs, the fear.

Rick: Right. Just everything you’ve been through.

Michael: Yeah. It was just… It really came to a head.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And, okay, so I had a breakdown. I had a major depressive episode in ’98. But my wife pulled me through that.

Rick: I didn’t know you were married. You were married at that point.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: When did you get married?

Michael: Well, that’s the thing, Rick. We always go by the day we met because that’s the day our lives changed. So we met in ’93.

Rick: Oh, good.

Michael: Yeah. So she definitely pulled me through. She’s a very strong, wonderful person. Now, flash forward to a couple years, two or three years later, I was having some kind of a surgery. Now I happen to have an allergy to general anesthetics. If you give me the wrong anesthetic, I won’t wake up. So my body tends to interpret anesthetic agents differently than most people. So what happened to me in this surgery was that I seemed to be alert and talking all the way through the surgery.

Rick: Even though you were supposed to be unconscious or what?

Michael: Well, yeah, they gave me enough to knock me out, but it didn’t knock me all the way out. I was talking. They felt that I was just comfortable. But I wasn’t experiencing anything. And then in the recovery room–

Rick: You mean you didn’t know you were talking?

Michael: That’s right. –which, if you think about it, that right there tells you that the person can function just fine without– I mean, I was making sense, apparently. You can do just fine without memory or actual experience. But then in the recovery room, I sort of woke up, just in the typical meaning of the word.

Rick: Coming out of your anesthesia.

Michael: Yes, I just woke up. And the most amazing sequence happened, which was that I suddenly felt like, oh, I’m back. And I could see that there’s me, there’s the world, and I’m talking. I’m in the middle of a point. And then there was this sadness, like, oh, now I have to make sense. Now I have to be responsible and not look like a fool. So I better figure out what I’m saying. And now the burden is on me to not look foolish, since I’m back. But for some reason, right before jumping back in and taking the reins and being responsible, I said, where was I before? And metaphorically, so to speak, I whipped my head around somehow and looked back. And I won’t tell you that I saw anything at that time. I didn’t. But I did realize that the world, including me, had come out of nothing. And that was just as obvious as could be.

I did realize that the world, including me, had come out of nothing. And that was just as obvious as could be.

…So I later came to think of that as the second law of Self-knowledge, which is simply that the world isn’t. The world is not real. The world lacks existence. The world doesn’t exist.

Rick: It’s interesting. You’re one of three people I can think of that came out of a near-death surgery type experience and had a spiritual awakening upon coming out that more or less changed their whole perspective once and for all. So I didn’t mean to interrupt your thought, but it’s not uncommon, it happens. So the first law again, self-experience directly. Second law…

Michael: Well, those are…

Rick: Oh, those are different. I’m sorry.

Michael: Yeah. Now, Shankara, 1,200 years ago, his second law, and I will come back to his first law, but his second law is that the world is not real. And what I experienced is the world lacks existence. You might see it. It might be for functional purposes real, and yet it lacks that crucial attribute of existence. It simply doesn’t exist.

Rick: At least not in any ultimate sense.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: I mean, yeah. It appears real enough.

Michael: Yes.

Rick: If I punch you in the nose, you feel it, but on some level, nothing’s happening.

Michael: It lacks the true commodity.

Rick: Right.

Michael: It may have reality, and yet it lacks existence. And just as obvious as it could be, all the things that I noticed over the years came in the midst of some kind of action. None of them happened in quiet meditation. It seemed, at least in my case, to be some value of contrast. To see the white spot on the blackboard, or the black spot on the whiteboard.

✨ Glimpsing Existence: The Second Awakening

…So that’s the first part of my experience. Now, go ahead, Rick, if you want.

Rick: Well, I was just going to say, as you’re coming out of your surgery, out of your anesthesia, and you had this realization that the world lacks existence, was it just sort of like the type of experience we might have when we’re waking up from sleep, and we remember a dream, and we maybe have an insight, but then when we get back into the nitty-gritty of our day, we forget all that. It’s just a memory. So, I mean, did the concreteness and reality of the world somehow impinge upon you again and make you forget that subtle insight you had had?

Michael: Yes. Yeah. But that’s a really good example about sleep, because I think this cycle, this diagram, one thing that’s been useful to me is that it seems to be exactly the same pattern, which works at different scales. Works at this sort of grand scale of seeking. It works at the scale of the daily cycle, where we talk about sleeping and dreaming. And later, I’m going to suggest that it works at the scale of one individual thought. So this is halfway. This is halfway to a glimpse of Self, because what I had done is I had glimpsed that the world isn’t, but I hadn’t glimpsed that which is. So now the next thing, you can check with my wife on this one. I was absolutely obsessed by that for whatever it was, three, four, five years.

Rick: That experience you had had.

Michael: Yeah. Because it was crystal clear. And then, on Mother’s Day of 2005, the other shoe dropped, and I saw that which is real. It was a busy day, and we were in our house, and I was in the kitchen washing dishes and looking out the window. And I quite suddenly became aware that I was not looking at the yard and the sky. Rather, I was actually looking at solid existence, that that’s what can be seen. You can only see what’s really there, and something that’s not there, you can’t see it. So, I mean, I could still perceive the yard and the sky, but it was absolutely clear that they collectively, as a single unit, lacked existence. And more importantly, that there was existence per se. There was this abstract commodity of existence, the most abstract thing, which was present in its most infinitely condensed form, extremely dense.

There was existence per se. There was this abstract commodity of existence, the most abstract thing, which was present in its most infinitely condensed form, extremely dense.

Solidness as the Measure of Reality

…And what Shankara said is his first law of Self-knowledge. He didn’t call it law of Self-knowledge, but I’m calling it that. Is that Brahman is real. The way I put it when I wrote in my journal that day is that the Self is. So until then, all I had is that world isn’t. And now I had Self is. And these two things were very different. And to me, they’re still very different. So Self is, truly is. And the world isn’t. That’s clear as can be, right?

Rick: Yeah, no, it makes sense to me. And these experiences were about five years apart from one another or something.

Michael: Something like that.

Rick: And would you say that, and that was about five years ago that you had experience number two. So are these just pleasant memories or did somehow having had these two experiences shift your perspective on things? Definitely shifted.

Michael: Shifted things a lot. You know, it’s kind of like a guy who wakes up from a dream and actually sees his bedroom around him and then goes back to sleep. And now he’s trying to convince his dream buddies that they’re not real. The dream landscape isn’t real. He’s seen the real, you know. His buddies are saying, either you’re wrong, which you probably are, or you’re right. And if that’s true, why would you waste your time trying to convince us? You know, so it’s kind of a lose-lose situation. But yes, it restructured me. And I began my obsession with solidness as the measure of reality. This is something very, very powerful and very specific, that what the self is, is that it’s solidness. It’s density. It’s dense existence per se. And this is, by the way, also Ramana Maharshi’s favorite way of describing the Self, is that it’s a dense mass of Self-knowledge or of existence.

And I have been basically a Ramana student or scholar for the last 10 or 15 years. I’ve identified my 10 favorite books by him and about him, which I read over and over and over. So Ramana has been just a wonderful person to study for me. And this is his favorite way of describing the Self, is in terms of its solidness. And so I have been, I would have to say, fairly fanatical about this angle that truth, reality, being, existence, Self, is exactly equal to solidness. And so now an interesting question is, if solidness is the measure of reality, what does it mean to be solid? We can start with physical objects, and they appear to be solid, but the scientists say they’re not. So there’s this quest for solidness. And one thing that I noticed over the last five years is that the memory of anything in the world is different from that thing itself.

The memory of this pen is different from this pen. But the memory of the Self is identical to the Self itself, only in the case of the Self.

Depression, Honesty, and the Void

Rick: There’s about three thoughts in my head that I want to pursue here with you. First of all, we won’t lose the track of this conversation, but you don’t seem depressed anymore. I mean, you were on the verge of suicide.

Michael: Well, I’m on Zoloft for one thing.

Rick: Oh, okay. But you were on the verge of suicide. Is that what did it? I mean, you were on the verge of suicide 10 years ago and you were deeply depressed and now you’re not. Is that Zoloft or is there some kind of more spiritual reason for this?

Michael: I’m not going to credit spirituality with any improvement in my personality. And my nature still is to be depressed. For one thing, I scare myself by looking so hard into these things. I just look so hard with such intensity that I scare myself. And my wife saves me.

Rick: I think Eckhart Tolle would say, “Who is this self you’re scaring?”

Michael: Well, sure. And I would respect that language.

Rick: Like when he said, “I can’t live with myself.” And then he had the thought, “Wait a minute. If I can’t live with myself, there must be two of me. So who is this self I cannot live with?” And then he woke up the next morning enlightened.

Michael: Yeah. I appreciate that. But for me, it seems to be instead of one big cycle, like a career of seeking, there seems to be this shorter cycle. And there are places… Well, I’m going to hold this graphic up again. There is a small circle towards the bottom on the seeking side, the left side.

Rick: A little green circle.

Michael: Before passing the Self and getting a glimpse of the Self, which is the experience of the void. This is the experience when seeking has been done and has come to its fruition, which is that seeking is now seen to be invalid. We have seeked our way out of seeking. And so there is the void experience. What happens to me is that I pass that point many times a day.

Rick: So you go through little mini-cycles.

Michael: Yeah. I get depressed about a thousand times a day, but then I get out of it. Or my wife pulls me out of it, or the world pulls me out of it.

Rick: Different people proceed in different ways, and you might just be processing little chunks of this as you go along.

Michael: Maybe I’m a rapid cycling bipolar. I don’t know. But it’s probably happening on multiple scales. But that’s what I notice. Depression comes and goes. Definitely it’s part of the …

Rick: You know, one thing I think that’s definitely in your favor is that you’re very honest. You don’t seem to be trying to convince yourself of anything other than what you’re actually experiencing. And I think that’s a real asset for somebody who’s seeking truth. People can psych themselves into all sorts of states.

Michael: Well, yeah. This is one of the great things about having a glimpse of the Self, is that huge shiploads of affectation and mood-making are now not needed. It just doesn’t matter. And I’m not even saying I’m above mood-making. I’ll do it like anyone else. But there’s just no connection between actually seeing something real and then my relative personality, which is just like it always was. It has not been benefited in any way.

Solidness vs. New Age Concepts

Rick: I couldn’t say that. I mean, I’m still a schmuck in many ways.

Michael: I think more so, maybe… (both laughing)

Rick: Maybe it’s just simple maturation, which would be taking place anyway as we age. But boy, when I look back at the way I was before I learned to meditate, before I got on this whole spiritual path, and just how radically I changed within the first couple of years after embarking on that, and then maybe the changes haven’t been so contrasting ever since, but still at any time I can see a steady evolution. I can think back to five years ago and I cringe to think of what I might have said or done then, and I don’t seem to be so inclined to say or do that now. There seems to be some kind of impact of all this. And I should hope so. I mean, that’s a whole other discussion and it’s something that I’ve pondered a lot myself is that how tight is the correlation between spiritual development and such things as ethics?

Michael: I mean, if what you find out about the illusion is that it doesn’t exist, then that kind of cuts the legs off. I mean, I’m speaking for me at least now, Rick, is that for me that cuts the legs off – in other words, something which doesn’t exist can’t really be said to benefit from something which does exist.

Debating the Nature of Reality and the World

Rick: Yeah, but you know, I remember Carlos Castaneda had this little exercise that he was given by Don Juan to try to see his hands in his dream.

Michael: Right, I tried that for years.

Rick: I did it actually, after I’d read those books. But you know, the implication – well, I don’t know what the implication was, but it’s an analogy for actually being able to change the dream.

Michael: Oh, don’t get me started. I hate The Secret about changing the dream, because that will keep you interested in the dream.

Rick: Yeah, but on the other hand, the attitude that you have no control over the dream can lead to cop-out situations in which you excuse all kinds of inappropriate behavior as being totally beyond my control. I mean, I don’t have any decisions to make here, you know, it’s just all on automatic and there’s no doer and no decision-maker, and therefore, pardon me while I pick your pocket, you know.

Michael: Well, let’s save that debate for maybe there’ll be a part two sometime.

Rick: Oh sure, any time.

Michael: I want to get back to solidness.

Rick: Do you want to talk more about solidness?

Michael: Yes, so solidness, you know, it just was so obvious to me, it’s all I can say, that solidness is the same as existence, it’s the same as Self, it’s the same as reality, that truth’s final solidness is that. And this is why I would say that the New Age approach, now forgive me if I lump some things together and generalize, but the New Age approach, including lots of things, tends to go, in my opinion, only halfway to the original message of Shankara. Don’t let me lose that, Rick, but I should tell you, I was actually released from MIU faculty because of this.

Rick: Thinking too much outside the box?

Michael: Because of this, but.

Rick: I was released in a similar way.

Michael: But what it was, is that I was researching what Shankara said and trying to compare and see how much of what Shankara had said was evident in the curriculum on campus. And obviously, what Shankara said had a lot to do with this sort of ultimate truth, Self, whatever. And yet, what we find a lot these days has to do with consciousness. And consciousness is usually conceived of as something, I’m generalizing, but light, energetic, positive, blissful, very thin and viscous and fluid, lively, it’s life, it’s mind. And these are all the things that I saw don’t exist. But compare that to deep, dark density, which is infinitely solid, which is not lively, which never moves, which never takes shape, which never does anything, which has no liveliness to it. So what I’m getting at is that, in my opinion, the so-called New Age message takes us only halfway back to what Shankara was telling us.

On Brahman, Reality, and the World

…I’m hoping my brother will watch at least part of this interview.

Rick: I’ll have him on if he claims to.

Michael: Well, he’s in California. But my brother…

Rick: We’ll get Skype working one of these days.

Michael: My brother Tony, he asked me, he said, “You know, Mike, you got into your meditation and so on, and now you’re out of it. So what I see is that you stepped into something and then you stepped back out.” I said, “No, Tony, I stepped into something, and then I decided that that didn’t go far enough. So I continued in the same direction and I took one more step.” And that’s what I’m trying to say here is that there is one more step, which we usually don’t get to in a lot of the things that we read and hear and talk about these days. It’s that step which is not that you can change the dream or the fluidity of consciousness or you can improve… I don’t want to improve the dream. I want to wake up. So there’s part two, so to speak.

Paradox and Living in the World

Rick: My personal orientation is… Maybe I’m more elementary with this, but I definitely want to wake up, to whatever extent I can wake up, fully if possible. But at the same time, I’d rather have a good dream than a bad dream. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I prefer that much less to not having hit my thumb with a hammer.

Michael: But if you hit your thumb with a hammer, let’s talk about a dream where you experience that kind of pain. You’re likely to wake up, whereas if instead of hitting your thumb with a hammer, in your dream you have ambrosia and bliss, you’re not as likely to wake up.

Rick: That’s a good point. You have a point there. I really feel like the universe is structured for our maximum evolution and that doesn’t mean all butterflies and…

Michael: Well, now it’s my turn. What universe? If you can say who’s the one… Well, don’t you feel there’s some kind of intelligence going on here?

No.

Rick: Really?

Michael: No. Neither on the side of the self nor on the side of the non-self. Who needs it?

On Laws of Nature and Consistency

Rick: All right, we have a few points to unpack here. I don’t want to lose the… We’ll come back to this one. I don’t want to lose the solidness thing.

Michael: Okay, well… But I definitely want to come back to the solidness thing. In terms of solidness, I like that term and I like your use of it and the fact that you use it. And I’ve had some really solid experiences my Self at times. And it makes the most sense to me by considering that that which is real, being, or whatever you wish to call it, isn’t particulate. It doesn’t exist in greater concentration here than here. It’s not made up of pieces. It’s universally omnipresent, all-pervading, whatever you want to call it. And so there’s this kind of solid mass that is…

This formlessness.

Rick: Yeah, it doesn’t have more dense areas. What appears to be dense is actually, on that level, no more dense than what appears to be spacious.

Michael: Yes, and all of the above – spaciousness, apparent density – totally doesn’t exist. There’s this little poem that I wrote that I like a lot. See if I can remember. It says something like, “Standing on my own shoulders, I see the vast terrain I have created. Boundless, endless, fathomless is the sheer extent to which I exist and this world does not.” So right now I’m getting goosebumps, because this is my sort of bliss, either by picking up not only that Self exists, but to what depth upon depth it does exist. And not only that the world doesn’t exist, but to what far extreme it doesn’t exist. And therefore between the two, how absolutely unconnected they are.

Boundless, endless, fathomless is the sheer extent to which I exist and this world does not.

Paradox and Practical Living

Rick: You know, in my experience, paradox is very important. And what I mean by that is that I can be, let’s say at a concert, really enjoying it and with no thought, on the level of the concert, that it doesn’t exist. Why would I go if it didn’t exist? I paid my money, I went to the concert, I’m enjoying it. But at the same time, as I’m watching that concert, it’s very clear to me that nothing is happening. It doesn’t exist, as you say. That it’s just, we could use the term “silence,” but there’s a level both within me and within everything, which there’s no demarcation between those two things, that nothing is happening. But I tend to give, kind of, you know, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” to give credence to the level of a concert as well as to the level that nothing is happening. And you know, I mean, you say you love your wife, I’m sure you do.

It’s not predominant in your experience, nor would you ever want it to be, that she doesn’t exist.

Michael: She doesn’t exist.

Rick: No, but you love her.

Michael: Exactly. I mean, why should that mess things up? Just the mere fact that she doesn’t exist, you know. I mean, it’s a technicality. She definitely does not exist. But so what?

Reconciling the World and Brahman

Rick: Yeah. Well, a very handy phrase that Maharishi used to use is that knowledge is different in different states of consciousness. Or sometimes he said, “Reality is different in different states of consciousness.” And he would give talks in which he said just what you’re saying, that nothing exists, that nothing ever happened, and so on and so forth. And then the next breath, he’d be talking about all kinds of levels.

Michael: And as you said, honesty. You know, I prefer to assume that everyone is honestly describing their experience as they move through different points of the cycle. And all you can really do is describe. Even if you’re prescribing, really all you’re doing is describing what seems true to you at that point. So speaking for myself, I seem to move through the different points on the cycle. Each one demands its own language. Here it’s obvious that you and I are not one and the same. Here it’s obvious that we are. Here it’s obvious that we don’t exist. So each region of the cycle demands its own dialect. And yet, as I move through them experientially, all I’m doing is trying to honestly describe, you know, what is obvious to me at that point.

…So where I’m at now after five years of, you know, obsession with solidness is that I am, I feel that I’m beginning to, let’s say, get over this glimpse of self. Now I’m not denying, there can be no denying, you know, my mind can’t judge that. Part of what that did is that it showed that there’s no mind. But I’m starting to fill in the gap. And Shankara put it beautifully. His third law, so let’s review. You know, he said the first law was that Brahman is real. The second law is that the world is not real. Now Shankara’s third law, what I think of as the third part of his Mahabhagya, is that Brahman is the world. So this is so amazing. And what came to me out of necessity over the years, what I had to come up with to make sense was that I, for me at least, I inserted a little optional phrase before that, which now I’ll tell you the whole thing.

That because the world isn’t, Self and world are identical. Only having rejected the existence of the world, only having seen that it’s not real enough to have earned its own category, it’s not in competition with the Self. Only because it’s been completely denied, now I see that there’s nothing but Self. I see it at least logically. And working backwards from that point, I see there’s this gradual filling in of the gap. Finally what you proposed earlier, that if all there is is reality, why should we continue to call parts of our world, or our world per se, unreal? So I think that is the third piece and that’s what I’m working on now.

On Intelligence, Creation, and Divine Play

Rick: Well, I wanted to get back to the theme of intelligence and kind of segue it into this conversation because you made comments about there being no laws governing the universe and things like that. And you have more scientific background than I do, but whenever I look at a Nova program or one of these nature shows or something where it’s showing the vastness of the universe or the complexity of the cell, how a cell functions or how a fetus grows, so many things, anything you look at, it’s like your jaw drops with awe at the vast intelligence that is functioning in every minute particle of creation. And you can say that creation never happened and nothing exists and all, but fine, maybe there is no ultimate reality to all this, but insofar as it appears to exist as a play, as a display, it’s extraordinarily, infinitely, incomprehensibly creative and intricate and marvelous.

I mean, man, for all of his intelligence, couldn’t create a housefly. We could create some pretty cool machines that do some pretty cool stuff, but if we had to create a housefly that was as small, that could do and see everything a housefly does and function as it does and reproduce itself and all that stuff, we’d never do it. And if you analyze the housefly, look at the way its eye is structured, for instance, or its digestive tract or anything else, there is this amazing creativity to it. And that to me hints at God, it hints at there being some divine intelligence who is maybe entertaining himself, maybe the whole thing is just a play which has no ultimate reality, but there is something going on that deserves tremendous respect and scrutiny and deserves understanding if we are really seeking ultimate truth, I think.

Michael: All right. The last thing I had prepared to talk about was what I call the life cycle of a thought and the three keys to know thyself. We talked about the three laws of self-knowledge. So these are the three keys to know thyself. And so now I’m going to hold up this second graphic, and let’s put it on the clipboard. What you’ll see is that this is the same original graphic, but now it is specifically in terms of a very small scale. The cycle has taken on the size of one single thought. And so it shows, which for me is something very useful, the life cycle of a thought, how a thought gets started, comes out of nowhere, it flourishes and projects itself as the world around us. And then there’s this impulse to seek its origin, and we seek, and at some point seeking disappears too, the thought disappears. And then there is no experience, but there is a transit very close to the Self.

Now after passing the Self it’s possible to retroactively have what we call an experience of the Self. So there’s a difference between actually the Self and an experience of the Self.

Rick: So you’re suggesting that every thought goes through this cycle?

Michael: Yes.

Rick: Or does some thoughts just sort of dissipate?

Michael: I would propose that all thoughts go through this cycle.

Rick: In every person?

Michael: Yes, in general. And it’s not so hard to picture because we can simplify it. We can say that just as at the heart of every red blood cell there’s a fast vibrating atom of iron in hemoglobin, every molecule of hemoglobin.

Rick: Illusory.

Michael: Illusory. Just as we can say that every molecule of red blood has this atom of iron vibrating at its core, just like that, every thought we have has the feeling of I-ness vibrating at its core. So we’ve just talked about thoughts in a generic way, imagination thoughts, creative thoughts, psychotic thoughts, genius thoughts. All of these thoughts, they may be different in the content and their applicability and their so-called relative ranking, but they all function in the same way. They’re all extrapolations of this feeling that I’m here. So now we’re just talking about the I thought, that the I thought sprouts out of nowhere, matures, extrapolates into the world experience, and then waxes again, or would it be wanes again. And finally there’s a despairing moment and then it’s gone and then comes a glimpse of Self.

Rick: Maharishi used to say that there’s a gap between thoughts and that the Self can be glimpsed in that gap.

Michael: Absolutely.

Rick: And that if a more evolved nervous system or whatever didn’t have as many thoughts going on all the time, so the gaps were more evident and maybe wider, so to speak.

Michael: Well the second key is that the Self can be glimpsed. Well this is saying a lot because it’s one thing to talk about a solid Self, but so what? And here comes this idea that it can be glimpsed. Now think about it, if you glimpse something eternal, it doesn’t matter how short the glimpse is. It’s like saying if you introduce a pinprick into the side of a balloon, it doesn’t matter how big that pinprick is, you’re going to bring down that balloon, that illusory shape that’s keeping the inside from the outside. So the second key is that the Self can be glimpsed as often as we have a thought. And this is something encouraging for me because it’s not like, “Oh, I have to wait years.” It could happen any time. And the third key to know thyself is that the Self is glimpsed at the very beginning of each thought.

Rick: Let me tell you something about my experience that this reminds me of, and see if it resonates with you as well, maybe you have the same experience. And I’ve said this before on this show, but what I experience is that the more contrasting the situation I’m in, the more obvious the Self is to me. And one of my favorites is running through an airport, because airports are so chaotic, especially these days, air travel is just nuts. And trying to catch a connecting flight, and you’re tired, you’re racing for your connecting flight, you may or may not make it, you’re running along, you’re out of breath, your lungs are burning, and I’m describing an experience that I had last year. And yet, in the midst of all that, the predominant experience is silence. The predominant experience is that there’s this perfect stillness that all this craziness cannot perturb.

And it’s not only inside in some way, it’s in the environment as well. There’s chaos in the environment, but at the very same time, there’s perfect silence in the environment. And that’s my experience. And the more contrasting, and airports like that are about the craziest places, the most contrasting experience I’ve ever run into in the course of my life. But it’s there also when I get up in the morning and the house is quiet and I’m just walking around doing my morning things. It’s just not so obvious. But if I look, if I care to just check, sure, there it is. To me, my understanding, that’s the Self. And the ultimate state of enlightenment, whatever that may be, may be a lot more clear, and that silence, or whatever you want to call it, may be a lot more predominant, but it’s not going to be some totally new element that comes in.

Whatever we’re going to experience when things are as clear as they can be, we’re already experiencing it, maybe just not as clearly. But it’s there, it’s identifiable within our experience right now and at every moment.

Michael: It’s got to be. I mean, if you and I go to the movies, we see Avatar, before the movie starts we’re looking at the screen.

Rick: Right.

Michael: While the movie’s playing, we’re looking at the screen. When the movie’s over, we’re looking at the screen.

Rick: Exactly.

Michael: It’s got to be a part.

Rick: And we get into the movie and we may forget about the screen, because we don’t care about the screen, we’re interested in the movie, that’s what we’re there for. But if we chose to, in the middle of the movie, we could look and sure enough, I see the screen there.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: You know?

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: And so, I think that’s a useful little hint, or little trick, because it eliminates the notion that Self-realization is some kind of far-off, alien thing that I haven’t even begun to experience or realize. It’s not far off, it’s right here, right now, very familiar, very intimate, and we’re already experiencing it to a great degree of clarity. Clarity can increase. I used the example last week that maybe you’re walking down a road and you see a tree, and you know it’s a tree. You don’t know what kind of tree or anything else, maybe it’s a little foggy out, but you know it’s a tree and not a horse, is a phrase that Maharishi once used. Now some kind of “arbologist” or something might come along and see the tree and say, “Oh, that’s a such-and-such,” and he’d know the Latin name and he could lecture for hours all about the tree. You’re both seeing the same tree though.

One guy has maybe greater authority, greater clarity about it, but you’re both seeing the same tree. And I think that there’s something in that for us here, with regard to this whole idea of knowing the Self and knowing enlightenment, it’s like, okay, you had some glimpses five years ago, ten years ago, but whatever you had in those glimpses, you’re living it. You’re living it now. It just may not be as predominant in your awareness as it was when you first had the glimpse, but I don’t think you could lose it.

Final Thoughts and Closing

Michael: Well, it’s so great to talk about because it’s equally fun to agree and to disagree. We could take the point of view that there’s no such thing as enlightenment because that means that there’s some person who is enlightened.

Rick: It shouldn’t mean that if we really understand the term.

Michael: No.

Rick: It’s not something you get.

Michael: Or even that, I mean, was Ramana Maharshi enlightened? Was he an enlightened man? Is there such a thing as an enlightened man?

Rick: Well, you run into semantic problems, you know, because of the nature of what enlightenment is. It’s not something that a man gets. It’s the reality, you know.

Michael: So the protagonist of the story is the Self. It’s not the man.

Rick: And so, you know, words … if you think about it, if we’d sat here for this hour or two discussing the color red and trying to describe it perhaps to your wife, let’s pretend that she had never been able to see. Now she probably has a memory of what red is like, but if she had never been able to see, we could talk until we were blue in the face or red in the face, and we would never be able to convey the concept, even though it’s such a simple one, and a person who can see knows what red is. So we’re talking about an experiential thing here, and if we’re going to talk about it, we need to use words, otherwise we could just sit here. It would be very boring, everybody would turn off the TV.

Michael: You should do an hour like that sometime.

Rick: Yeah, right. See how many hits that gets on YouTube. So we have to use words, and no word can encapsulate any experience, whether it’s the taste of a lemon or the color of an apple or anything else, but we do our best. And so, a word like “enlightenment” is just a pointer, and it has connotations, and maybe it’s better not to use the word because there’s so much baggage around it these days. So we try to use words like “awakening” or “Self-realization” or whatever. But I think if we define our words with a little bit of care and attention, then we can at least still talk.

Michael: Right. Well, you know, it’s great.

Rick: And you know another point, I mean I’m doing too much talking here, but another, I think, a real critical issue is the whole issue of doubt. And on the one hand, you don’t want to be kind of all cocksure and talk yourself into something that you’re not having, and it’s good that experiences can sort of withstand the test of skepticism and scrutiny and questioning. But on the other hand, the mind is a very habitual machine, and it can get into habit patterns of doubting and questioning, and it can actually, I think, undermine our ability to have this experience that we’re talking about, to grasp it. The mind can just keep jumping in and say, “Nah, this couldn’t be it, this couldn’t be it, I’m waiting for something better.”

Michael: Could be. Well, you know, there’s one nice side effect, was it just talking about it is kind of enlivening, you know, it feels good.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. I always come away from this evening high as a kite.

Michael: Then you can’t sleep. Then I go to another thing after this, where we talk about it for another hour and a half.

How do you sleep?

Rick: I sleep okay. I’m a good sleeper, you know. I get up early. Our cat is like an alarm clock.

Michael: Oh, okay. She won’t let me sleep past seven.

Plus, I know you’re quite a yogi. You do a lot of …

Rick: I do that every morning, yeah, asanas and all, and meditate and stuff. Have you ever had the experience of witnessing sleep that’s sometimes talked about in spiritual circles as being a symptom of awakening, sporadically here and there?

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: Have you ever had the experience that someone or something wakes you up, maybe your wife wakes you up because you’re snoring, and when she does, you say, “But I was already awake.”

Michael: It has to be.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: I mean, it doesn’t make sense. If you say the alarm clock woke you up, how could it wake you up if you weren’t there first?

Rick: Right.

Michael: You know, you had to be there for it to wake you up.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: I mean, even in this outline here, we had to work at it backwards, but of course the fact has to come first.

Rick: Right.

Michael: And that’s the way it is in the spiritual literature, too. Like for example, in the Ramayana, Rama says, “I want to hear the truth.” He’s talking to his teacher, Vasishtha. I insist on the truth, and he means it. And Vasishtha says, “I will tell you the truth, but first I have to tell you the half-truth.” You know, you have to.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: I mean, and this here started with the second law, which is the half-truth.

Rick: There’s an analogy Maharishi used to use where a man is standing in the middle of a big mud puddle and he wants to get out. And he says, “How do I get out of this mud puddle?” And you call from the edge of the mud puddle, “Take a step.” He said, “But you’re asking me to put my foot in the mud again.” I said, “Yeah, but you just take a step, okay? Now take another one, and keep doing that, and at a certain point you’re going to be out of the mud puddle.” So there are a lot of teachers who sort of de-emphasize or de-value the idea of a sequential, incremental path – steps of teaching, stages of consciousness, degrees of awakening, and so on. But I think, and maybe for them and for some people that’s not necessary or relevant, but I think for a great many people it is. And that’s why there’s one more way in which I use the sense of being inclusive.

It’s like your brother, he’s a fundamentalist Christian, you say, “Great, this is perfect, just right for him.” And until it isn’t, you know, if there’s a stage at which it’s no longer right for him, fine, maybe he’ll have a little trauma and he’ll get on to something else, and that’ll be just right for him.

Michael: Just kidding, Tony.

Rick: Yeah, Jesus all the way.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: What… Is there anything we haven’t covered?

Michael: Oh, gosh.

Rick: I mean, I’m sure.

Michael: Is there anything we have covered?

Rick: Right.

Michael: No, I think it’s a good, it’s enough.

Rick: Good.

Michael: Well, undoubtedly you’re going to have some more major awakenings. I mean, I can see it coming. You’re going to be doing something or other, cutting the grass, and there’s going to be … so we’ll have to have a sequel to this at some point.

Yeah, if only to take different points of view.

Rick: Yeah. Next time around I’ll say that the world doesn’t exist and you can argue that it does.

Michael: Right. I mean, you just can’t figure it out in words. I know how I feel about my wife, and the fact that she doesn’t exist doesn’t change that.

Rick: Right.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: Do you ever tell her she doesn’t exist?

Michael: Oh, yeah.

Rick: Especially if she’s on your case about something.

Michael: No, no, she accepts it.

Rick: Hey, you don’t exist.

Michael: She accepts it. I have a whole sort of poetic language that I use where she represents the world and I represent the silence.

Rick: Right.

Michael: Well, one small poem in that flavor would be that every day at this time, or every time at this point on the cycle of self-knowledge, I ask you, “Would you rather be everything or actually exist?” And as always, you chose the former and I chose the latter.

Rick: She chose to be everything and you chose to actually exist.

Michael: Yeah. So, you know, she’s everything, yet she doesn’t exist. And I’m nothing, yet I exist. And there’s just a beauty, for me, there’s a beauty in that kind of language.

Rick: So together you make a complete…

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: “Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean.”

Michael: Hang on. Don’t say that.

Rick: Okay. You know that poem?

Michael: Yeah. I do. Yeah.

Rick: Well, that’s beautiful. Maybe that’s a good note to end on. So this has been Buddha at the Gas Pump. My guest this week has been Michael Baxter. My name is Rick Archer. Stay tuned for the titles at the end of this show, where you’ll see links to a blog, podcasts, all kinds of… a discussion group, all kinds of interesting things. And I want to recommend another show that’s similar to this, that I’ve been listening to for the last few days. It’s called The Urban Guru Café. You can find that on iTunes and you can also find it on the web, The Urban Guru Café. It’s produced in Australia and it’s interviews like this, interspersed with music actually. They keep going back and forth between people talking and all kinds of cool cuts of music, but you might enjoy it. So until next week, thank you for watching and have a good week.