Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and this is interview number 71 in the series. My guest this week is Michael Hall, Dr. Michael Hall, PhD, who is a psychologist living in Binghamton, New York. And in just a second I’ll have Michael introduce himself in terms of a brief biographical sketch, and then we’ll get into much greater detail. But I just wanted to mention, in case those listening don’t make it to the end of the interview, that I just added a new page to the website yesterday, batgap.com, which is a list of all the upcoming interviews, so that you can see who’s coming, you can submit questions to guests that I’ll be interviewing, and maybe you’ll think of new people that you’d like me to interview. So, welcome Michael, thank you.
Michael: Yeah, it’s good to be here. Thanks for talking with me.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve been listening to you, as I do with most of my guests, all week long, maybe five hours worth or so I’ve listened to. And I must say I feel a lot of affinity with the things you say. It’s like, not that my perspective on things is any sort of arbiter of truth, but for some reason a lot of the things you say just resonate with my experience and my understanding of things. So, this won’t be an argumentative interview in any way.
Michael: Oh good. That’s okay too.
Rick: So, why don’t we start by just having you give us a brief sketch of who you are, what you do, just a paragraph or two, and then we’ll flesh it out.
Michael: Yeah, well I’m a clinical psychologist, so I’m not a spiritual teacher full-time, although I do try to convey this understanding that emerges in me. It’s been a long, slow process. I guess maybe it is for everybody, but you want a little background in biography, I guess. So, I went to college in the 60’s and I happened to read The Three Pillars of Zen when it first came out in ’67. By then, I’d already been searching in some way, although there wasn’t a lot to do in the 60’s because very few books were out, there was no YouTube, there was nothing. So, I wound up reading things like the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Evelyn Rose’s book on mysticism, just original sources is about all I could find. Then, The Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Philip Kaplow came out, and that was like, wow, this is happening right now. Actual Western people are practicing Zen Buddhism and coming to Kinsho, or awakening. In fact, it’s happening in Rochester, New York. So, that gave me a lot of inspiration and hope. Then, I went ahead and went to graduate school in clinical psychology at Indiana University, got a PhD and wound up in Rochester doing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. I think partly because I was aware of the Rochester Zen Center. That was ’73 to ’75 I was there, but I was actually too shy and anxious to go to the Zen Center. So, I walked around it every day.
Rick: Interesting.
Michael: I lived about four or five blocks from it, and I would go on these long walks every day and walk right by the Rochester Zen Center. This went on for most of two years.
Rick: Huh.
Michael: I finally went to a one-day introductory talk there that they gave, Roshi Kaplow gave, and came away with a headache and not much else. They make you sit in this very rigid posture and they hit you on the back with an oak stick. [Laughter] It all seemed very difficult. I was very tense and very anxious. I was a new father. Anyway, I didn’t really start to practice Zen Buddhism until I moved to Binghamton, New York, when I went to work at the University Counseling Center. There was my first real job, which I managed to avoid getting until I was in my late 20s. I met a man there who was a psychology professor named Craig Twinneyman, who was a very serious, hardcore Zen practitioner at Rochester. He had created a very dedicated group of meditators there in Binghamton, and I started joining him. I’d go from 6 to 8 in the morning, and I could walk to his house from my house in the snow, which is usually snowing in Rochester and Binghamton. I actually did this, and I don’t know why I did it. I just did it. When I look back, I don’t know why. Whatever you tell yourself is usually a story. So, mostly, you don’t know why you do things. I started sitting with this group on a regular basis, and I noticed very quickly that all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms I had at that point just started to disappear. Actually, for me, the most interesting thing was that every time I would sit, and we would sit for two hours in 35-minute rounds of sitting with 5 or 10 minutes of walking meditation in between, I would sit and suddenly I’d be aware of being very angry. I hadn’t been aware of that before I started sitting, but as soon as I’d go into the Zazen posture and start breathing and trying to just pay attention to the breathing, I would be aware of being very angry. This would last for about an hour. In other words, it would last all the way through the first round of sitting, through the walking meditation, and then sometime in the second round of sitting, it would just sort of go away. So, that was interesting. I also noticed that when I first started sitting, I had this lump in my throat, which I didn’t know what it was. I mean, now we just say it was a symptom of tension. It quickly disappeared. So, these kinds of things caught my eye and made me want to keep doing this.
Rick: What were you doing during the actual sitting? What was the nature of the practice?
Michael: I had been to this one-day workshop at the Rochester Zen Center and they taught counting your breaths.
Rick: Okay, so that’s what you were doing.
Michael: Breathe out two, breathe in three, breathe out four, go to ten and start over. That’s what I was doing, just a basic counting practice. Over maybe six months, I noticed that gradually the anger thing would only last a few minutes and then it wasn’t there at all. I’d start to sit and I wasn’t angry. I had been told at that time also that I was boroline hypertensive. My blood pressure was like 140 over 90 and I was thin and pretty fat.
Rick: And young.
Michael: And very young, 28 maybe. So, one day I was walking through the mall in Binghamton and they had these automated blood pressure cuffs where you put, I think, 75 cents in it and it takes your blood pressure. It was like 110 over 70 in the middle of the day and I thought, well, that’s interesting.
Rick: Did you have a tendency toward anger outside of meditation?
Michael: No, I don’t think anyone would think of me as an angry person. I was always suppressed resentment and anger, even suppressed my own awareness of it.
Rick: And it didn’t blow up every now and then?
Michael: No, no, no.
Rick: Interesting.
Michael: I was totally inhibited in that regard. But like I said, I was someone who liked to please people, wanted to get along, didn’t like conflict, and probably wouldn’t have known how irritated, resentful, and angry I was. But I couldn’t help but face it when I’m sitting there being still and can’t move and distract myself.
Rick: Right.
Michael: So, that’s why I kept doing it, really. Stuff like that happened, these physiological things. And, this went on for four or five years. And interestingly, there’s about 17 or 18 people in this group, they all got up and moved to Rochester, except for me and Craig. And we just continued to sit there in Binghamton. And I went back and did another one day thing at Rochester. But then, my marriage ended and I was living in this little apartment by myself, feeling miserable. I had met Roshi Kapila at that point, but I hadn’t become a student of his. And I was reading the Three Pillars of Zen, the Heart Sutra, and these lines, forms only, emptiness, emptiness only form. And something just like that, out of nowhere. I just went and laid down in my bed, and laid in the dark, and went into this really profound, I don’t know, non-dual experience of a complete disappearance of the sense of me. Or any self-consciousness, or anyone at all. And yet, there was this pure awareness that was just delightful. And this went on for some unknown period of time. And then, I fell asleep and woke up the next morning and was back to being me again. And didn’t like that, of course, but I knew something big had happened. So, I called the Rochester Zen Center and said, “Can I talk to somebody about something?” And they put Bowdoin on the line. Bowdoin is now the abbot, the Roshi at Rochester. And he was very nice and said, “I think you need to come and talk to Roshi Kapila about this.” So, I did. And essentially at that point, I began serious Zen training, going to first two-day, then four-day, then seven-day meditation retreats. And that was very instrumental. And then, I had other, different kinds of awakening experiences in these retreats. And then, you know, eventually Roshi, you know, sort of approved. And in Zen, they have all these ways of testing the depth of your understanding. So, I approved this understanding as kinsho, or what you might call an initial awakening. But, then I went on and did all these koans, hundreds of koans, you know, these Zen puzzles. But, I felt like after a couple of years of drama and excitement and, you know, all these experiences, everything went dry. And I was still passing koans, but I had no clue what they really meant. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Rick:How do you pass a koan? I mean, let’s say somebody says, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Michael: You have to, it’s not intellectual. It’s not conceptual. It’s often not verbal. It has to occur, like you have to, in effect, be it. You have to be the solution or the answer. R
Rick:And then, you just know when you have got it?
Michael: Half the time, you don’t know. But, you know it in retrospect, but the roshi will see it immediately and say, “Okay, that’s good. Go to the next one.”
Rick: Interesting.
Michael: Yeah, so it’s a very dynamic, dramatic, intense, and brief kind of thing. You know, and then a real Zen teacher can often tell the minute you walk in the room in a private meeting if you’ve got it or not.
Rick: And, they must be very perceptive.
Michael: Very perceptive. And, you’re in a state, you know, in a retreat setting where all the senses are highly attuned. You’re in total silence and it’s very intense and focused. So, I mean, the whole thing with the training there when I went there was to provoke awakening and create an optimal sort of setting for that. And, it was rigorous and physically and emotionally grueling, but it did seem to succeed at doing that for a lot of people. But, then I went through, like I said, this dry spell. My second wife got pregnant and had a miscarriage and I had to cancel a seven day retreat because I just didn’t want to leave her. I never went back after that. So, I was in the late, I was 88 maybe. And, then I went through like 15 years of normal life, you could say, being a psychologist. We did have another baby in 1990, who’s now 21. So, I raised my kids and worked.
Rick: Were you still meditating during that time?
Michael: No.
Rick: Just living life.
Michael: Just living life. I would say I gave up on the idea of what you might call continuous awakening. I’d had these experiences, so I believe completely in the, you might say, the truth of the teaching of Zen Buddhism. But, I thought I just wasn’t going to have a chance to get further in this lifetime because I had to live a normal life as a householder. I wasn’t going to abandon that. I think that’s the implication there, to really go as deep as you need to go, you have to be a monastic.
Rick: Yeah, at least in some traditions.
Michael: Yeah. So, I’d read about people like Wang Po, or Wei Ning, or Dogen, or many of these Zen masters in ancient China and Japan, who talked about much deeper levels of awakening than anything I could relate to, but I just didn’t think that was in the cards for me. So, there was some kind of struggle with all of that, but I would say I gave up on it. And then, in 2002, for no reason whatsoever that I can identify, I’m sitting in my office and I had a book open in front of me by a guy named David Hawkins. I think I might have been reading it, I don’t know, and it just all of a sudden, like that, everything fell away. And then, that’s never gone away.
Rick: Amazing. I mean, it’s interesting. You kind of like put it behind you, you hadn’t been meditating or anything else, and all of a sudden, bingo.
Michael: Right.
Michael: I mean, maybe five years before that, I’d started a meditation group, but that was like once a week for an hour. It’s erratic, yeah. It was once a week for an hour, and I led that for five years, but it was just, I don’t know what it was, it didn’t, it’s just like I just liked to do it. So, that was, but no, I wasn’t practicing, I wasn’t doing anything. I was reading a book, and that’s it. And I hadn’t read that much about it either.
Rick: So, when you say everything fell away, let’s delve into that experience a little bit. What exactly happened or didn’t happen?
Michael: You know, it’s not, that one wasn’t an experience. I mean, the other ones were experiences, and they were, you know, I could tell you about them in detail, and they were dramatic and interesting. And this one, I would say nothing happened. I mean, there was no experience. There was just a ceasing of something. It just stopped, and. What just stopped? Whatever this is, whatever I thought this was.
Rick: Whatever, I’m going to be pernickety here, whatever you thought what was.
Michael: Yes, I put it in languages, the sense of me, the sense of I, the sense of an identity that is continuous. That just stopped, it just ended. So, as of that moment, you have had no sense of me, I, identity? Well, I wouldn’t say in that absolute sense, but I’d say it nearly that clearly. And I’ve, you know, I’ve given a lot of thought and done a lot of work with trying to identify the moments that there is some seeming identity with the old programming and belief systems. And when that comes up, now it just jumps out at me, and I usually, I, you know, can sort of see it and catch it. So that’s become then my practice, is just these, I think they’re called vasanas in the Hindu tradition. E; Yeah, vasanas.
Michael: Vasanas, these deeply ingrained, automatic patterns still arise, you know, because there’s still the conditioning, there’s still the ego, there’s still. As long as there’s a body and there’s life, there’s this conditioning that continues. And I think a lot of it is universal, I mean, it’s completely impersonal, it’s not about me personally, it’s just human beings are constantly being conditioned. And so, but yeah, there’s no underlying, there’s no sense of an I at all. It’s never been, never come back and thank God. And I don’t, it’s like you have this sense of, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t earn, and then so then, you know, I immediately started talking about grace, because, you know, I was raised in a Christian tradition, I turned my back on it when I was 16 and never looked back. But then, you know, when I went through this thing in 2002, I suddenly was very comfortable with the words of Christ, and went back and started reading the New Testament, and the meaning of some of these passages would just leap off the page at me. It was lovely, beautiful stuff, but it seemed like grace, you know, just for no reason whatsoever, undeserved, you know, boom, you know.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, in listening to your talks over the last week, you know, I heard you say that you give legitimacy to the idea of making efforts, doing practices and so on, but crossing of the final threshold doesn’t come about through any sort of effort.
Michael: Right.
Rick: You know, maybe it’s the momentum that the cart has gained, and it just coasts over the goal or something.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, maybe that’s it. I think there’s something to be said for a progressive, effortful, disciplined work at deconstructing the eye, deconstructing the sense of who you are. I think that’s valuable, it certainly increases the level of comfort and enjoyment in life, it makes you far easier to get along with, and you don’t have as much of a negative reaction to other people. But, this final step cannot be taken by anything that could possibly be called you. I mean, the way I say it is the ego can’t surrender itself.
Rick: Right.
Michael: So.
Rick: It’s like picking yourself up by your own bootstraps or something.
Michael: Right, it’s worth making the effort to pay attention and to lose interest in yourself. But, and I do think maybe that, it’s like clearing out this underbrush and this thicket, and I think over time there is a progressive, maybe silence or presence that emerges. But, awakening itself happens of its own in some way that to me appears mysterious, and I don’t know why, but I did a lot of stuff that I thought probably helped. I think it was Suzuki Roshi who said, “Awakening may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident prone.”
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that’s a good way of saying it. Certainly in this Zen tradition, there is a tremendous emphasis on work, hard work, and responsibility, and commitment, and discipline. I mean, these are words that people don’t like to hear. They like to just think, well, it just happens. When I first started teaching, I kind of emphasized the grace end of it, and then I realized people misunderstood that to me. They don’t have to do anything. They can just sit there and it hits them like lightning or something.
Rick: Right, but then it doesn’t. Well, I mean, there are a lot of teachers and speakers out there who are saying just that.
Michael: I know.
Rick: In fact, they are sort of emphasizing, “Don’t seek.” Seeking is an obstacle; give it up. To me, that’s like a guy standing on a mountaintop describing his surroundings, saying, “Don’t climb.”
Michael: Right, right, right. That’s exactly it.
Rick: The view is beautiful; don’t bother climbing.
Michael: Right, right, exactly. I mean, the way I look at it is you have to seek like a mad dog. In Zen, they say it’s like you have to practice like your hair is on fire, until it gives itself up. I mean, you know, but to me, another way of saying it is like as long as the ego is sort of succeeding in its goals, you don’t give up at the level you have to give up to die in this way. But, if the ego is banging its head against a wall as hard as it can over and over again and doesn’t get anywhere really, then at some point, it might just fall over and drop dead and be done with it. That’s called awakening, you know? A total surrender, and people then think, “Well, I’m going to surrender.” Well, you can’t surrender. You can’t surrender at this level deliberately, unconsciously, and willfully. It has to be involuntary. There are lots of ways, maybe, of getting there. It doesn’t have to be what you call a spiritual practice. I would say people like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, their practice was being profoundly depressed for years and years and years, until they just couldn’t stand it anymore and then gave up involuntarily and something snapped. Certainly, there are people.
Rick: who can’t make a practice out of that.
Michael: Well, I’m not recommending it, but I see people who do it all the time, or addictions of the similar people, like David Hawkins and others who have been out-of-control addicts. It’s not a recommended practice, but I took the route of a recognized spiritual discipline that seemed to work for me immediately in some ways, so I just kept at it. I don’t take any credit for that; it just seemed to happen that way. I’m glad it did.
Rick: Well, I think maybe as a psychologist, you would certainly understand, or anyone would understand, that conditioning is a real thing, and the vast majority of humanity are deeply conditioned and deeply ingrained and entrenched in habitual ways of seeing and thinking and behaving and so on. All of that, layers and layers and layers of that, and I’m sure there’s a physiological component too, it’s not just psychological, it really has the tendency to occlude any sort of clarity of awareness. It just gets covered over in layers of mud, and you have to remove those layers. And that’s what spiritual practice will do, and it might seem absurd in a way. It’s like a man standing in the middle of a mud puddle and he says, “How do I get out of here?” And the man outside the mud puddle says, “Well, take a step.” And he says, “Well, you’re asking me to put my foot in the mud again.” And he says, “Yeah, okay, but you do that enough times and you get to the edge of the mud puddle and then you’re out.”
Michael: Right, right. To me, I call it the practice before and after awakening, and it’s the same practice. It’s paying attention to these habitual, chronic, automatic beliefs and assumptions about reality that take over and then lead to crazy thinking and behaving. And it’s certainly, to me, a myth that awakening completely clears the deck of all this stuff. It doesn’t. For me personally, a lot of it just disappeared in smoke with this last awakening, but some things didn’t. They’re deeply conditioned and automatic and they come up over and over and you have to work at seeing them and understanding them and not buying into them and releasing them. That practice can be taught to people and I teach it to people all day in my office. With or without awakening, I’m beginning to de-emphasize this awakening thing altogether. It’s wonderful, it’s important, but the goal here, I think, is to become an actual, mature, adult human being who makes a contribution to the world and isn’t a jerk. And you can do that without awakening.
Rick: Yeah, and there are some people who supposedly were awakened who didn’t quite do that, you know, who behave like jerks.
Michael: Absolutely. There’s lots of that. The more you know the spiritual marketplace, the more you’re aware of it. I don’t want to seem critical or judgmental, it’s just a fact. You can see it in yourself, you don’t have to look at other people. You can see, you know, I can still be irritating and selfish and blah, blah, blah. I think with awakening, you have a chance to catch it.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Because without some level of awakening or deep practice, it’s so quick and automatic, it just grabs you by the throat. You don’t even know it.
Rick: You don’t even know you’re grabbed.
Michael: Right.
Rick: Right.
Michael: Exactly.
Rick: Now, you know, people might find it a little puzzling, because a few minutes ago you were saying, well, any sense of a personal identity evaporated, and yet now, just in the last sentence, you said, I can be selfish and irritating and all that stuff. So, you know, the question naturally comes, well, who is selfish if all sense of a personal identity has vanished?
Michael: At the moment of being selfish, there is a perception, you could say, of an I. Underneath that, there is no I, but you have to remember that. You have to remember the underneath part.
Rick: I see. Do you have to remember it through some volition, through some act of attention?
Michael: I think so. Usually, in my experience, the normal way life is lived, this isn’t happening, this addictive, compulsive behavior. Then, when it starts up, it’s such a dramatic shift that it’s noticed immediately. There’s almost no real effort involved in not pursuing it. But, sometimes, this conditioning is powerful. It can sort of grab you and you can almost get lost in it briefly. I would say that with a deep awakening, where there’s this continuous underlying awareness, you don’t get lost for long. You have the chance to catch it quickly. But, there’s a deliberate effort involved in noticing and not buying into it. I don’t know that I would say there’s an I that’s doing it, but the programming and conditioning would look like there’s an I. Some of this stuff is physiological. It doesn’t have a cognitive component to it at all. It’s like the body is just reacting. We’re all deeply programmed. You don’t wake up enough to completely diffuse the programming. You have to keep working at diffusing it.
Rick: There’s a saying in the Indian literature, talking about conditioning, that a deeply conditioned person is like stone. You can make a mark in the stone and the mark stays there. And then less conditioned, maybe you’re like sand. You make a mark and it goes away pretty quickly. Less conditioned is like water. Less conditioned is like air. Extending that analogy, it’s interesting to note that you can make deeper marks in softer substances, which would mean you could have a richer experience if you’re less conditioned, and a fuller experience, and yet it’s not indelible. It just dissolves quickly.
Michael: It comes and goes very quickly. There’s an interesting idea that I mean, realizations and revelations continue continuously for me. I think they do for anybody. I heard Jill Taylor talk. She had this wonderful video, “My Stroke of Insight”. At some point, she said that feelings normally will come and go in about 90 seconds if you let them. I took this idea and I teach it all the time. If you don’t construct a story about it in your head, in other words, blaming someone else for why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, or if you don’t feel entitled to feel this way and you don’t keep rehashing something that keeps it going, and you don’t resist the feeling, you don’t suppress it, deny it, ignore it. It comes up, you feel it, and it’s gone. I don’t know that I can say it’s always 90 seconds, 60 seconds, but it doesn’t have to be hours, it doesn’t have to be days and years. It can be really very brief. But yeah, the more unconditioned this is, this body-mind, there’s no buffers. Everything is just immediately felt and experienced. The goal is to not buy into the story we tell ourselves or the belief we shouldn’t feel something.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: So as a psychologist, I spend a lot of my time trying to teach these ideas to people. And they can get it, and it’s an educational process. With or without awakening, people become much more free and contented, happy, spontaneous, real.
Rick: I’ve heard you quote Byron Katie a number of times in your talks, and that’s what she’s all about, is enabling people to not take their thoughts so seriously and to turn around whatever conviction they cling to and just let go of it.
Michael: Right. I believe that this is a practice that can be taught. It’s just observing your mind. You can do it anywhere, anytime. Certainly, silent sitting meditation or some other formal practice is beneficial, I think. You can do this anywhere, anytime. This is my practice, I guess I would say, if I have a practice now. It’s just awareness.
Rick: I sometimes think of this whole thing as being like, you can move a table by pulling any of its legs. And like that, there are a number of things you can do which will bring everything else along in your life. You can learn to change the way you think, like Byron Katie teaches people, and that changes all kinds of other things. Or you can sit and meditate, which is an entirely different process, and yet that changes all kinds of other things. None of these things is mutually exclusive, and you can do several of them. It’s like pulling a couple of legs at once on the table.
Michael: Right. There is some kind of affinity that people are just drawn to certain things, and so I encourage people to do what they are drawn to do. For me, sitting meditation was a very powerful draw.
Rick: It has been for me too. I have been doing it for 40 something years, and it has always felt right to me, and it has always worked.
Michael: Yeah. Why not do it? But other people, I have met people who have very close relationships with people who are, I would say, deeply awake, who have never meditated.
Rick: Yeah, exactly. And don’t have any interest in it, and wouldn’t do it if you put a gun to their head.
Rick: Or people like yourself who did it for years, then stopped doing it, and then had an awakening.
Michael: Right.
Rick: We really can’t get a pat formula. There are so many different ways that it shows up.
Michael: That’s right. There are no formulas, but it is important to do something.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Somehow you have to, you know, in the Buddhist tradition, it’s important to hear the Dharma. It’s important to hear the truth or an accurate teaching from somebody who can be that truth, and then something sinks in somehow, and then learning to listen to yourself, learning to listen to your inner sense of what you need to do, and then to tell the difference between the conditioned, programmed, ego-based beliefs, and some other more direct knowing that says, “Go do this.”
Rick: There is a verse in the Gita which goes, “Because one can perform it, one’s own Dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the Dharma of another. Better is death than one’s own Dharma. The Dharma of another brings danger.”
Michael: That’s right.
Rick: It’s a good one on this point, because you can hear somebody talking about their practice or what works for them, and you can think, “Okay, I’m going to try to do that.” And then you can end up being totally frustrated because it’s not appropriate for you, and it’s not going to work for you. Maybe it will work for you 10 years down the line, but right now, something else is actually going to be much more effective.
Michael: Absolutely. That’s absolutely the truth. That’s why it’s like, just because, first off, you don’t really know what worked even for you. It seems like certain things work, but you don’t know for sure. But it’s really hard to tell other people what they should be doing. I can suggest things that work for me and that I’ve seen work for other people, and you can try it out and see if it helps you. But it’s really empirical, and it’s learning to trust some inner knowing in you that says, “You need to do this or do that.”
Rick: Yeah, it’s very true. I mean, I taught TM for 25 years, and for much of that time, my attitude was, “Well, this is the best thing, and this is more effective than everything else, and everybody should really be doing this, and if they’re not doing this, they’re kind of like wasting their time or whatever.”
Michael: Right.
Rick: And I have a completely opposite attitude now. I just sort of feel like, who am I to say what’s right for people? If they want to chant Hare Krishna or be a fundamentalist Christian or whatever they want to do, that’s perfect for them at that time, and if it isn’t, they’ll get interested in something else.
Michael: That’s such an easier way to be in the world, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: To not feel like you’re supposed to know what everybody else needs. What a relief.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And then, you know, any sense of judgment goes away, too. Yeah, until this last thing in 2002 happened to me. I thought you had to be a Zen Buddhist, and you had to do Zazen, sitting meditation, go to retreats, and probably be a monastic, because that seemed to be what worked for me. Oh, no, that’s true.
Rick: I was talking about – go ahead.
Michael: I’d say, unless it is for you. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. If it’s for you, then that’s what you’ve got to do, but that’s not going to be true for hardly anybody.
Rick: Remember “Sly and the Family Stone,” different strokes for different folks.
Michael: Yeah, right, right, right.
Rick: I was thinking about your 2002 thing, and would it be fair to say – would this be an accurate way of describing what happened? Which was that, before that juncture point, your predominant identity was Michael Hall, individual, with occasional glimpses of universality.
Michael: Right, right.
Rick: And then what happened was, when the shift happened, your predominant identity was universality, with occasional upcroppings of Michael Hall.
Michael: Yeah, that’s a good description. Yeah, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s absolutely right. And the universality never really goes away. I mean, it might be less prominent at different times, but it’s always there.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And there’s something very deeply biological about it. I don’t know what, but everything just feels different. Being in this body, being everything is just different in some fundamental way. I mean, when this happened, I was – you know, you just blurred all these things out that most people don’t want to hear, but one of the things I blurred out was that my DNA is different. It’s like –
Rick: It might be.
Michael: I think it has to be. Something is really deeply biological about it.
Rick: Well, you know, mind and body are interrelated, and I bet you if you had been really thoroughly studied in every way before that awakening, and now you’re really thoroughly studied now, they’d see all kinds of differences in your brain waves, in your blood chemistry, and all kinds of things.
Michael: I really think so. In fact, one of my own observations here, mine, was that period between what I would say was the first real awakening in ’82 and this continuous thing in 2002, that whole period I now look at as – I think it’s what John of the Cross meant by the dark night. Another way of saying it is it’s a period from the first experiential awareness of the kingdom of heaven and the continuous dwelling in it. What happens is you have this sudden awareness of the presence of God in all things, and then of course, that leaves and you go back to being you, and you try to do what you thought worked to get you there to begin with, and it never works because it wasn’t you that did it. Then, you go through this long, tedious, difficult process of trying to get back to the Garden of Eden and nothing works. I think that’s what he meant by the dark night, and I also think that whole process is a biological transformation.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Michael: It has to go its own way in its own time and can’t really probably be hurried very much. You don’t know that’s what’s going on at the time. I sure didn’t know. I thought nothing was happening. I was just stuck and that was the end of it, but I’d now say there was this deep transformation that was going on that whole time, kind of of its own, just working its way through this biological body-mind, etheric, psychic, physical, emotional body. Once it was done, it was done.
Rick: I think there’s really something to that, and not only on levels that modern neurophysiologists could measure, but also in all the traditional esoteric stuff, chakras and shishumna and all that stuff. I’m sure there’s all kinds of nadis being cleared and all that kind of business.
Michael: Right, right.
Rick: It’s just another way of explaining it.
Michael: Yeah, I think, I went back and read the Kundalini literature and Kundalini awakenings. I think there’s a lot to all this. This is deeply, all I can say is this is deeply biological. This is not just a shift in perspective, although it’s certainly that. You can’t go back if you tried. I mean, something is just, I don’t know, a hole has been created or burned out or disappeared or something.
Rick: Body is the temple of the soul.
Michael: Yeah.
Rick: And I think this dark night thing is interesting. I was thinking about that perhaps during the week as I was listening to you. It’s different for different people, you know. Like we were saying with practices, one shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that one’s own dark night has to be the same as St. John of the Cross or something.
Michael: Right, right.
Rick: Everybody is going to go through different stuff, but what’s happening is there’s this inner transformation. And depending on what kind of garbage you have in your house, it’s going to look different for different people. Some people might get really crazy, some people might get depressed, some people might, all kinds of things. Some people might become megalomaniacal.
Michael: Yes.
Rick: You know.
Michael: It’s interesting. I see more and more kinds of psychological problems, especially these kind of radical falling apart of people’s lives that I’m seeing. I’m getting emails from all over the world about people who are on this path and have had some kind of glimpse. It seems like their life is completely falling apart. They can’t go to work, and they don’t want to go to work, and their relationships are. I see all of that as part of this dark night now. It’s just some kind of radical reorienting of this whole being that is tough. I guess I would say for me, I had minor versions of that, but I didn’t seem to have to become homeless. I guess that’s good, but I’ve seen people who did become homeless. It’s just part of the process. There’s some willingness to ride this out wherever it takes you.
Rick: Yeah. And not everybody has the liberty to sit on a park bench like Eckhart Tolle. Some people have kids to feed and stuff like that.
Michael: Well, that was me.
Rick: I think there are things you can do though to ameliorate it. There are purificatory things, there’s yoga, there’s dietary things. There’s all sorts of things you can do. As you’re saying, it’s a physiological transformation taking place. There’s stuff you can do to facilitate and smooth that out, Ayurveda, all kinds of things.
Michael: Yeah, I think I help people do that in my office all the time. But for people who are outside of any tradition and don’t have any kind of teacher and are really on their own, it can look really messy.
Rick: Yeah. Well, you talked about Susanne Siegel. I mean, you and I both have read her book. She had had a tradition, but she kind of walked away from it and then had this sudden awakening and didn’t know what the heck had happened to her and lived in fear for ten years.
Michael: Right. That’s a wonderful book and a great story and kind of an appalling indictment of a lot of psychotherapy also.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Psychotherapists, I read that book and kept cringing the whole time, but at the same time, I couldn’t put it down. Thankfully, this guy was editor of Yoga Journal, I guess.
Rick: Steven Bodian.
Michael: Yeah, Steven Bodian.
Rick: He centered on Jean Klein.
Michael: Yeah, yeah. He said, “Look, you’ve had an awakening. Go talk to this guy.”
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: I immediately had this sense of what Jean Klein probably said to her, which was essentially, “Your thinking mind, your ego continues after the most radical awakening. You just don’t need to take it seriously or pay any attention to it.”
Rick: Yeah. She was also continuously looking back, trying to find that sense of personal identity that she felt she had lost.
Michael: Right.
Rick: He said, “Stop looking back.”
Michael: Right.
Rick: “Stop looking for it.”
Michael: “Stop doing that. You can’t go back. That’s gone.”
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: If you try to go back, you’re going to feel like there’s something wrong with you because that’s gone.
Rick: The book we’re referring to, by the way, for people who are listening to this is called Collision with the Infinite by Suzanne Siegel. I have a link to it on backgap.com if you want to check it out. Good one. There’s also been a few interviews I’ve done with people who had really dramatic kundalini awakenings. One is a woman named Sarojini, which you’ll find on Backgap, and another is Siddhananda. They both adopted Indian names after they got with their guru, but boy, the stuff they went through. The first one, Sarojini, she was just like this housewife in Arizona, and she didn’t know anything about spirituality. She hadn’t ever thought about it, and woke up one morning with this sort of strange energy going on. It just started to go like a volcano, and she thought she was going crazy. She started doing research, and she thought she had kundalini disease when she first looked up the term. She went through all kinds of rigmaroles until she sorted out what was going on with her and found a teacher.
Michael: Yeah, that’s one thing your website and similar ones do. It makes it possible for people who are out there on their own to really get a much more accurate and broad-based understanding of this whole thing. That’s a real service that helps a lot of people.
Rick: Yeah, and thank God for the technology that makes it possible. Obviously, there was a time not long ago when, as you said, it was back in the 60s. What do you do if you’re interested in this stuff? Well, there are a few books, but it’s hard to find anybody who knows what they’re talking about. Now, it’s kind of spreading all over the place.
Michael: Oh, it’s amazing. Just since the last five, six, seven years, there’s an explosion. That’s great. I think the only downside to it, if there is one, is that I see people who have a really in-depth intellectual understanding of it and can confuse that with the real knowing that’s experiential and direct. But, you know, that’s okay.
Rick: Well, that’s an interesting topic, actually. And I heard you, just this morning, I was listening to you talking about some guy who pretty much memorized everything there was to know about Buddhism. And you mentioned another woman who actually had memorized everything that Adyashanti had ever said and felt like she could teach.
Michael: Right, right, right. I met her at the end of an Adyashanti retreat I went to. It’s like, “Oh, wait, time out. This … channeling Adyashanti is not the same as being him.”
Rick: It’s a funny thing because I’m going to interview him in August and I’ve listened to over five days worth of his audios. I have it all on my iTunes. And yet, if you ask me to summarize what he says, I’d be at a loss for words. But actually, while I’m listening to him, it’s like every single sentence is an “aha.” It’s like it clicks.
Michael: He’s great.
Rick: But let’s continue on this point for a minute, because this whole thing of people … I think it’s easy to get an intellectual or intuitive feel for this, because we’re like fish in the ocean, you know? We’re surrounded by this water. And so if somebody starts reading these books or listening to these talks, they have this kind of “aha” thing of, “Yeah, I get it, non-duality, it makes sense to me.” But I think there is a common syndrome these days of mistaking that initial intuitive sense for the actual state of realization. If a lot of these people were to somehow magically step into Ramana Maharshi’s body and see through his eyes, they’d suddenly realize, “Whoa, this is much different than that initial smell of it that I had.”
Michael: Absolutely. The real thing is so radically different and more, I don’t know, destabilizing, you might say. It’s just, yeah. You can read this stuff so much. I have people I work with and teach who do. They can quote Nisargadatta page and number and refer to all these things I’ve never read. When I was going through this process, I didn’t read that much. In the Zen tradition, you’re not really encouraged to read. There wasn’t that much available anyway, except for original sources. I didn’t understand Wei Ning, really, or the Fifth Patriarch or something. There wasn’t much available and you weren’t encouraged to read. You’re encouraged to experience directly for yourself. Now, there’s so much available that you can almost delude yourself into thinking you don’t have to have the personal experience. You can intellectually grasp this stuff. You can, but that’s like reading a menu and thinking you’ve had lunch. It’s not the same.
Rick: Yeah, it’s very good. It’s really good to draw this distinction between experience and understanding. They’re not the same thing. I think there ultimately comes a point at which they merge, but prior to that point, and that could mean many years, they are two different things. I think both are important. They supplement one another.
Michael: I think for me, it was the intellectual understanding and the ability to describe it and put it into words came after the experience. The reading mostly came after. I started reading all these books because I was curious about how people expressed it. Until 2002, I didn’t read hardly anything. I just didn’t. Now, I’m fascinated by how different people express this. The intellectual understanding is very useful afterwards. It’s less useful beforehand. It’s good to have accurate teaching. That’s very helpful, but ultimately, you have to have this inner transformation.
Rick: I think one of its main values beforehand is just an inspiration or a carrot to follow.
Michael: That’s right.
Rick: This sounds good. I should go for it.
Michael: I’d say that’s what it was for me, a sense of this is possible for human beings, and it may even be possible for me. It’s worth taking seriously and pursuing it. It’s good. That’s worth doing.
Rick: Yeah. It was actually a Zen book that got me going. Back in my hippie drug days, I used to read Zen books. One night, I was sitting on my bed, and all my friends had gone home. I was sitting there on LSD, thinking, “Here I am again in this weirdo state.” I picked up Zen Flesh and Zen Bones and was reading this little book. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, “You know, these guys are really serious, and I’m just screwing around here. If I keep screwing around like this, I’m going to live a miserable life.” I thought, “That’s it. I’m going to stop drugs, learn meditation.” It was an inspiration.
Michael: That’s great. Some of those nuggets stick in your mind. Things I heard in Zen training, I went through like, “Show me your original face before your parents were born.” Some of the Koans are just things I heard the teachers say or things I read in books. I had no clue what they were. I would now say even things I heard in church growing up, in the New Testament. Things that Jesus said. I had no idea what it was, but I think at some level, it sticks in there and rubs away and irritates and provokes. You’re not conscious of it, so there’s something to be said for hearing this stuff. Even if you don’t have a clue what it’s about, it seems like it goes deep inside for at least some people and just works on you.
Rick: Yeah, kind of like a little bit of sand makes a girl.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Interesting. So, it’s been almost 10 years since 2002. How would you say your life has changed, if any, in the last 9 years? How is it different today than it was just after that awakening? Maybe it’s one of those yes/no answers, where yes, it’s different this way, but no, it’s the same in that way.
Michael: On the surface, it doesn’t look that different. I’m still a psychologist, I still own an office building, I’m a parent, and I still have relationships. I still work in the same building and live in the same location that I did when this happened. Nothing changed on the surface in a way. I did start eventually trying to convey this stuff as a teacher or something, because I kept getting people wanting me to do that. So, eventually that happened. I would say it’s more an inner process of continuous revelation. Just new realizations and new ways of seeing things just keep coming up.
Rick: Have there been any sort of mega-realizations, or is it more like little nuggets, little gems that reveal themselves throughout the day, day to day?
Michael: I would say both. Just recently, there’s a sense of, and some of it is very hard to put into words, but one idea that just recently occurred is that everything is programming. Everything that we normally think and see, and I knew this, but you know it at different levels, you know it in different ways. It’s all programming. None of it needs to be taken the least bit seriously. I’ve been even saying this, but you see it in a deeper way sometimes. It just pops into your head and it’s so very clear.
Rick: Can you give us an example?
Michael: Well, I would say there’s a guy, Bart Marshall, who’s a good friend in North Carolina. Bart had an initial glimpse when he got blown up in Vietnam by a mortar shell. Then, he was aware that there were dead bodies around. He was aware that these bodies were just rubber dummies. There’s no animating force in them. Then, that gradually, over many years, he had a much deeper awakening after seeing Harding, I guess. The headless guy.
Rick: Douglas Harding.
Michael: Douglas Harding. We’re all just rubber dummies. That’s really all that’s here is a programmed robot. It’s just another way of saying that this is not to be taken that seriously. Whatever comes out of this mouth is mostly just programmed nonsense. It’s just the way it is. There’s this other sense of a way of being in the world that is totally unconditioned.
Rick: Unconditioned?
Michael: Unconditioned, yes. This spontaneous, direct, free speaking and acting. In Zen, it’s called wu-wei, meaning acting without an actor or speaking without a speaker. You get different ways of seeing it. This underlying realization, I don’t know if it changes or deepens, but the ability to articulate it and manifest it in the world and live it out in this body and be more continuously present. That, I think, is a progressive thing.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: I think that 20 years down the line, I expect it will be much deeper than it is right now. This realization, this original face or seeing is what it is, but the ability to embody it and manifest it and articulate it and live it out is progressive. It’s a progressive deepening and you could say it’s a progressive disappearing of anything to do with me. I’ve heard Adyashanti say this too, but there are new realizations that occur all the time. You realize, especially because I’m teaching this all day every day in my office, I hear things come out of the mouth that I realized I couldn’t have said not that long ago.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: That’s cool. It’s interesting. It’s fun. It’s hard to articulate. It’s hard to give you specific examples. Some of it is stuff that you see more deeply. All I can tell you is it’s a progressive thing that goes on forever, I guess, unless you really get sidetracked and lose all sense of what’s real.
Rick: Yeah, or have some brain damage or something.
Michael: Yeah. But my overt life looks pretty similar. I don’t know that I, you know, I shaved my head at one point because I didn’t have any hair anyway. It’s just like nothing to do with spirituality. I guess another realization is I quit wanting to call it spiritual. It has nothing to do with spirituality, really. This is just seeing things as they are. Why call it spiritual?
Rick: Well, I think that’s what the word is supposed to connote, but it just has so much baggage.
Michael: I know. I had people who always had trouble with that. I don’t have any problem with it. I came out of a spiritual tradition. I’m very comfortable with it.
Rick: Yeah. If you’re going to use words, you want to use them to communicate. If you’re going to use a word that’s going to confuse people because it has so many connotations that you don’t intend, then you might as well find better words.
Michael: Yeah, right. It’s just gradual and progressive. It’s a progressive disappearing to everything you ever thought was you.
Rick: So, the very essence of it, the core of the realization, you don’t feel that that can be clarified or stabilized or anything. It just is what it is, or could it be?
Michael: No, I would say both. It is what it is, but there’s no doubt that it gets stabilized, clarified, deepened, embodied. The deepening is the embodiment and the manifestation of it. I’m not a big fan of pure non-duality. I call it the cave of non-duality, where people have a non-dual realization and sit there. I don’t mean to sound overly negative about it, but that’s important. You have to bring this awareness into the world and live it out in daily life and express it behaviorally and verbally in ways that people can understand and appreciate. That’s part of it.
Rick: Yeah, I totally agree. This is a perennial theme in these interviews because I keep hitting on that point, where people just glom on to the absolute view and then just tend to dismiss all the relative considerations.
Michael: Right. Of course, in Zen, being a Mahayana Buddhist tradition, there’s part of the training program. This is maybe a slight concern, that people have these non-dual realizations and think they’ve got it. If you’re in a tradition or have a teacher of some kind, you realize that’s great, but what’s next? It’s embodiment. It’s bringing the non-dual into the dual. Eventually, they both disappear and then there’s just this. These are stages of enlightenment or awakening. People say there are no stages. I don’t understand that. Of course, there are stages. There are degrees of depth. Mainly, what that means is the ability to embody and manifest it.
Rick: I think, again, they’re speaking from the absolute view. They say there are no stages. On some level, that’s true.
Michael: Yeah, that’s true at one level.
Rick: But if that’s …
Michael: I understand.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: But still, it’s like in the ten ox-herding pictures.
Rick: I was just going to mention those, actually.
Michael: It’s only in the last X number of years that I’ve had a sense of this tenth picture. Walking through the marketplace, bare-chested, mud-caked, this guy just here. But, he’s in the marketplace. He’s not in a cave. He’s not dwelling in bliss. He’s alive and well in the presence of other beings and making some kind of mark and impact and just acting freely and disturbed. And it has to be brought into the world. That’s it.
Rick: You’ve been talking about how the embodiment and the evolution of it is seen in terms of ability to express it, which is to a certain extent an intellectual verbal kind of thing. How about other dimensions, such as emotional or perceptual? How have those been growing, if at all, in your life?
Michael: I would say that the main area of growth there is in relationships. Primary romantic relationships, like with a woman, where old patterns that I didn’t think would still be there or still come up do sometimes come up. You know, feeling – taking something personally, getting hurt, feeling not valued. It’s hard to say it with a straight face, but it feels very real at the time.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: So, there’s something very valuable. Relationships can be a real practice if you take it seriously and are willing to not get totally lost in your own reactions and not blame your reactions on someone else. Just see it as your own conditioning. Some of it is very deep and hard to get at unless you’re very intimately connected with another human being. The people who, you might say, trigger this stuff in me, I value because I wouldn’t see it otherwise. It wouldn’t come up.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: So, if you had a very, say, pleasant, comfortable relationship or job, or, you know, there’s a lot of nice things about that, but on the other hand, you may not become aware of some very rough edges in you that are still there and wouldn’t get activated without somebody challenging you or pushing you.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: So…
Rick: Did you ever read Carlos Castaneda’s books?
Michael: Sure. Remember the Petty Tyrant?
Michael: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. I just don’t get the idea that any of us ever get beyond this stuff completely. I don’t think that’s realistic. I think the goal is to embrace this and welcome these challenges that come along. It can be physical health, although I’ve been healthy. It can be chronic pain. For me, it seems like it’s been relationships. It’s also running and owning a business, you know? Rm Mmhm.
Michael: A lot of psychotherapists don’t like to be business people, but it’s always been interesting to me and I do that. I own a big building and, you know, it’s been a real interesting challenge to learn to deal with people outside of a therapeutic context who challenge me and push me and provoke me. And notice how undisturbed, mostly, I am and how much more skillful and automatic and easy it is to just deal with things that I know I could not possibly have done in the past. I see this also in terms of, honestly, electronic gadgets and software. I wouldn’t have even tried to do things like this ten years ago. Now, I enjoy the challenge of just being present and actually reading the directions. Doing what it says to do, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Not feeling like I should know how to do it because I’m just so bright or something, without reading the directions. Just surrendering to what is real, moment to moment. Cooking, I never tried to cook before. Things that I just avoided in life. I didn’t realize it, maybe, but I now see that I just avoid it. You know, repairs, home repairs.
Rick: Mmhm.
Michael: Stuff I just go and do. I read the directions, I follow them, and I do it. I would never have done that stuff ten years ago.
Rick: Cool. I’m glad I asked you that question because I don’t hear people say this kind of thing too often. I think it’s very useful for people to hear.
Michael: Mmhm.
Rick: Because sometimes you actually have the impression of spiritual people, so to speak, or awakened people, that they are going to become more otherworldly, less involved in some way. They are going to have to simplify their life and can’t deal with a lot of stuff. And what you’re saying is just the opposite, which I think is kind of a breath of fresh air.
Michael: Just the opposite for me. And I know people going through that kind of stage that you described, but you want to keep going through that and pass that. I mean, this is the embodiment. This is the manifestation, you know?
Rick: Yeah. As you say, it is a stage and I shouldn’t belittle it because it might be a very important stage for a certain person to just really chill for a while and not have a lot coming at them.
Michael: Right.
Rick: I think there is a value to monastic life.
Michael: Right, right. But eventually you want to keep going, so to speak, further. Just keep at it. And what then happens is, I think a vastly more comfortable and skillful and enjoyable interaction with everything.
Rick: Mmhm.
Michael: Everything that happens and you don’t need to avoid anything. It’s like everything is just this.
Rick: Yeah, there is another verse in the Gita which is “Yogastha Kuru Karmani”, which means “Established in being” or “Yoga, perform action”. And obviously in the context of that, Arjuna is being asked to go out and fight a battle, which is a pretty challenging situation, but he is being told first to get established in the Absolute or in the Self.
Michael: Mmhm. Yes, and then bring this understanding into the world.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Manifest it in this body and this mind, helping people who are suffering, having compassion, you know, doing what you can do.
Rick: Mmhm. What’s your sense of God? What’s your feeling for God or who God is or what God is or your orientation to God?
Michael: Well, God is a word I would never have used until 2002 and then I get where I was totally comfortable with God. God is, I mean, as I understand it, it’s not an entity. It’s nothing outside of you or me or this. It’s, you could say it’s the same thing as “Mind” with a capital M or “No Mind” or it’s all that is and all that isn’t. Any definition, description, quality is not it. So, normally you hear people talk about God and what they’re talking about is their projections, their programming, their conditioned beliefs and, you know, the idea that God has opinions or feelings or…
Rick: God hates homosexuals.
Michael: Right, or would vote for somebody. It’s beyond belief. It’s just hysterically funny. God has not registered anything.
Rick: That’s funny.
Michael: Anything you say about it isn’t it.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. I sort of think of God as just, I mean, whatever you look at from the Hubble telescope photos down to microscopic things, there’s like this fascinating intelligence that seems to be governing everything, expressed in everything, you know. It’s like so amazing the way everything works. I mean, look at the eye of a fly and how that works. That didn’t just happen through a bunch of billiard balls running into each other randomly.
Michael: Yeah, I’m very comfortable with that kind of thinking. It’s almost like there’s something that cannot be described that is animating everything.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And you are that.
Rick: Exactly, which is what makes it a relevant point and not just an interesting philosophical thing.
Michael: Right, right.
Rick: If you are that, how deeply can you know that you are that or experience that you are that, hopefully, you know. And we see some of these really great saints who seem to be, they say, God realized, you know, who have merged with God so fully and so consciously. That’s an interesting kind of point on the horizon that we might…
Michael: I just like to see them have a job.
Rick: Yeah, well some of them have… some of them bear pretty… yeah, some of them don’t, like Anandamayi or whatever, who practically had to be fed, you know. But some of them bear fairly heavy burdens of responsibility.
Michael: Right, right. So I just like the integration of this awareness into ordinary life. Daily life is the way, you know.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Ordinary… being ordinary is our true nature, you know, and nothing special, nothing different or outside, just this as it is, being yourself, you know.
Rick: Yeah, true. And I mean, obviously, what you are implying is that some of the people I just alluded to have been kind of glorified and deified.
Michael: I don’t know, but maybe. But it’s like, yeah, for all of us, like ordinary people, living your real life with presence and gratitude and just here, just now, feeding the kids, you know, cleaning up the dishes, you know, running errands. But there’s a way of doing all these things that reveals, you might say, the presence of God in all of it.
Rick: Yep.
Michael: And that’s an inner perceptual shift that allows for that to happen. This is it. This is heaven on earth right here, right now, just like it is. And seeing this and living it and manifesting it and embodying it and then interacting with everything, you know, is the way, I think.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Daily life.
Rick: Have you noticed a big improvement in your effectiveness with your clients?
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Rick: I guess you call them clients.
Michael: Yeah, clients, yeah.
Rick: Since your shift.
Michael: Huge.
Rick: Actually, has your practice become a lot more popular? Because word of mouth, hey, this Michael guy really has an effect.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, I was all, but, you know, I look back on that and I say, I’ve seen people, I have both friends and clients I’ve seen long before and long after this shift. And some of them point out there’s a lot more continuity than I would see. To me, it seemed very discontinuous before and after.
Rick: You mean, you seem like the same guy, basically.
Michael: Yeah, I was saying similar things. But, you know, I had these awakening things and going back to the early 80s. So, I think that the shift in a behavioral sense was much more gradual.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: I mean, internally, like a radical before and after in 2002. But I think it was integrating and processing and manifesting slowly during that whole period of time. But, yeah, I’d say I sense I’m vastly more effective as a therapist. But I always felt like I was pretty effective and I had, you know, I never had an opening in private practice. And, you know, basically still haven’t taken hardly any new people unless they’re deeply immersed in this spiritual path. Then, I will see them. I’d say the therapy I do, although I still see people I never talk about spiritual anything or awakening or anything. But the way I can see their problems and help them with it is deeply affected by this awakening thing I’ve gone through. And the ability to teach aspects of it that are liberating to people. Like, to not take things personally, for example.
Rick: Yeah. It’s like you’re functioning from a subtler level, sort of.
Michael: It seems like you just see what’s in front of you.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: You’re not, like you talked about earlier today, you’re not occluded. It’s just what is in front of you is just revealed. It’s obvious. It just jumps out at you. So, that makes you.
Rick: No longer through a glass darkly.
Michael: Right. Right. And so, you know, I don’t have ideas about how to treat people. I just interact with them and what needs to happen pretty much happens of its own. But, yeah, it’s vastly more enjoyable, less difficult.
Rick: Do you find it more enjoyable to deal with the people who, you know, really have a spiritual, there’s that word again, but that kind of inclination?
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: As compared to the people who are just kind of totally messed up and not really interested in this kind of thing?
Michael: You know, it’s very funny. I mean, Binghamton, where I live, is an old manufacturing town that’s been on hard economic times. And there’s a lot of people here who have never heard of Buddhism or meditation or anything else. And I’ve seen a lot of them. And, in other words, they don’t have any preconceptions. Their glass is totally empty. I pour something in and they get it. They’re transformed. And it’s almost like they’ll pass.
Rick: Just talking to you. You don’t send them home with prescriptions to try this or do that.
Michael: Well, I just tell them. I just tell them the truth. And because they don’t have — they don’t come in with all these ideas, you know, about what Nisargadatta said and so forth, then they’re just — they can be transformed sometimes like that. It’s like amazing. And then some of the most difficult, recalcitrant, stubborn, and in a way hopeless people I’ve ever dealt with are the ones who are convinced they know everything about spirituality.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And I feel like I just have to beat them senseless to get them to stop doing that. And, you know, sometimes they’re willing, sometimes they’re not. So, it’s unpredictable. Yeah, so people who have heard me talk and like what they heard me say, those are good people I like to work with.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: But, you know, the people who have been steeped in some version of spirituality, and I get those too for 30 years, and just have a whole bunch of beliefs and convictions and ideas based on what they read and intellectually understood, I’d rather take a bricklayer.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Farmer and start from scratch.
Rick: Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that most of Christ’s disciples were like fishermen and things.
Michael: That’s right. That’s right. He didn’t get the intelligentsia.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: You know, he got the outcasts, the people who had nothing, and were both probably somewhat desperate and totally open.
Rick: Mm-hmm.
Michael: It’s very interesting. People who get it are sometimes not the ones you would think.
Rick: Yeah. Do you ever deal professionally with people over the phone or Skype or just in your office?
Michael: Both. Yeah, I do Skype. I’ve had people around the world who I Skype with, and I’ve always done some phone work, and I see people in my office. I’ve done a lot of teaching in Binghamton and around Ithaca and other areas in New York and around the country, but now I’m trying to downsize. I’m trying to reduce the size of my practice and eventually liberate some time and energy because I’ve nearly finished a book I want to publish. There’s a lot of teaching stuff I want to do, a lot of writing I want to do.
Rick: I was actually going to ask you that, whether if you could do so, you would actually just not have a practice and just devote yourself fully to writing and doing satsangs and stuff like that.
Michael: Yes and no. I haven’t done that, so therefore I wouldn’t do it. I think you do it when it’s right. The teaching in my office has been invaluable to me in learning how to convey it. It’s just been a wonderful learning experience in terms of what works, what doesn’t work, how to convey it, and how to get it across to people. I feel like my ability to convey it has been infinitely deepened by just staying in my office and trying to communicate with ordinary people about this awareness. I also feel like that’s coming to an end. That’s been a very valuable process, but I feel like at this point I need to do more like what Scott Kelby is doing or other people.
Rick: He’s a lawyer. He spends most of his day practicing law.
Michael: I didn’t even know that, but there’s nothing wrong with living your real life exactly as it is. For me, it’s been easy to bring this awareness into my work because I do psychotherapy. I want to convey to other therapists and ordinary people the realizations that come out of this. I call it applied awareness. When you see duality from the aspect of non-duality, what does that look like in daily life? How do you live your life in a way that’s more skillful and less stressful and is more enjoyable for everyone? That can be taught. I do this all the time. I spend more time trying to convey this to a broader audience because I think it’s just very useful. If I were an artist, it would be manifesting in my art. If I were a motorcycle racer, it would come out there. I’m a psychologist, so it comes out that way.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a blessing. I think it’s really cool that you have a profession that segues so nicely with your passion.
Michael: It’s very natural. I’ve gone to retreats with Adya Shanti and I look at Eckhart Tolle’s DVDs. The questions people ask these guys are always deeply personal, emotional, and psychological questions. How do I deal with depression? How do I deal with chronic pain? Do I have rage reactions or addictions? It’s always what comes up. This is the real hunger in the world, so this can be addressed.
Rick: Maybe the whole world is going through a dark night of the soul right now.
Michael: That’s a good way of saying it. I think that’s a very useful perspective.
Rick: There does seem to be a quickening of awakening and all. I think correspondingly, there’s a lot of stuff happening.
Michael: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff.
Rick: There’s a lot of stuff happening. World War II and World War I were no picnic, but there does seem to be some intensification or acceleration going on these days.
Michael: I had a hard time. I didn’t know for sure if I bought that for a long time. I had people tell me that and I heard people say it that I trusted. Now I see. I do believe that. I think that’s absolutely real. I get emails all the time from people all over the world who have clearly had some kind of awakening experience and don’t know what is next or what to do. I don’t know that this was always happening. I doubt it. I don’t think so.
Rick: I think it’s accelerating, as far as I can tell. Neither of us is in a position to say statistically or scientifically, but it sure seems that way.
Michael: I think so. I’m beginning to think so. The Earth changes are very interesting.
Rick: Which is all cause for optimism, as far as where the planet is headed. Maybe all these predictions of a new age and so on will pan out.
Michael: I think people have to grasp that there’s a deconstruction process that has to go on. It can look messy on the outside and feel messy inside. Suzanne Siegel being one example of it. There are many. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, although it can certainly be confusing. It can be very helpful to be part of a tradition or a community or to have someone you can talk to or read who can help you navigate that and not just freak out.
Rick: There’s a term in physics called phase transition, where a thing goes from one state to another state. On the junction point of the transition, there’s a lot of turbulence that takes place and then it smooths out again.
Michael: That’s a great phrase. I avoided physics my whole life. It’s one of those things I always avoided. I might be able to do now. That’s a great term. There’s a book I read in graduate school called The Structure of Scientific Revolution.
Rick: Thomas Kuhn.
Michael: Wonderful book. He talked about paradigm shifts and normal science and extraordinary science. I think in a way you could say this is a paradigm shift or a completely different way of seeing things.
Rick: Big one.
Michael: A big one, yeah.
Rick: I suppose another way of looking at it is if we think of, like you said earlier with the guy in Vietnam, the people died and we’re all just rubber dummies. If we think of ourselves as sort of being cells in a larger body, the body of humanity, collective consciousness, then all these cells are kind of waking up and that would perhaps suggest that the whole body is waking up, as so many of its cells do.
Michael: Right, and the body is everything.
Rick: Yeah, and there are also examples in science where a real small percentage of a system governs or influences the whole system in a very pivotal sort of way. Like about 1% of the cells in the heart are called the pacemaker cells and they regulate the beating of the whole heart. So even a small, I think it was Margaret Mead or somebody said that big changes always happen with a very small group of committed people. And the fact that more and more people seem to be undergoing this awakening could really have a pivotal effect on the whole.
Michael: I do think that. I had this awareness that just popped into my head after this happened to me that every human being who somehow goes through this awakening makes it a little bit easier for everyone else.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: That’s the Buddha himself said, supposedly when I awakened, all beings awakened with me. And of course when Jesus, Jesus says, you know, I forgive the sins of the world. These are similar awarenesses that somehow, I mean now we’re so interconnected. We’re the same. We’re one. We’re one thing and one beating, pulsing, you know.
Rick: Organism.
Michael: Organism and.
Rick: We’re like a big jellyfish.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah, when any one person gets a little bit more of an ability to see what’s real, it does in some way make it a little bit easier for everyone else. And if that’s happening all over the place, that’s a big deal.
Rick: Yeah. I mean there’s also that hundredth monkey story. You’ve probably heard that one, right?
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Rick: Where a certain number of monkeys start washing their coconuts on some other island.
Michael: Right.
Rick: And as soon as it reaches a certain critical mass, then all the monkeys on completely unconnected islands.
Michael: Right, right, right.
Rick: Learn the same trick, you know.
Michael: Yeah, there’s some energetic something, resonance that goes on that’s very.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah, very powerful.
Rick: Yeah. Cool. Well, we could probably keep going on like this all day, but is there anything that, you know, has been sort of in the back of your mind or that you customarily like to say to people that we haven’t touched upon?
Michael: Yeah, when you ask that question, what occurs is I feel like saying to people, have faith in your ability to realize this truth directly for yourself. It’s inherent, we all are this and just, you know, it’s worth it. And that’s it. Keep pushing. Listening to talks like this and reading the books, some of the books you mentioned on your website. I bought two of the books you have on your website that I hadn’t read.
Rick: Mm-hmm.
Michael: Like the one by Donna Gorel especially, Perfect Madness.
Rick: Oh, right. Interesting, huh?
Michael: A very interesting book and I mean just continuing to expose yourself to this kind of stuff loosens things up. So, yeah, that’s what I would say.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a saying, you know, that to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life.
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Rick: That’s actually one thing I liked about what I was hearing, you know, when I was listening to your talks during the week, you were saying how, you know, you can kind of, you know, fan the flames.
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Rick: What was the other thing? Bellows they call them.
Michael: Yeah.
Rick: You can fan the flame, you can brighten the fire or you can be throwing water on it, you know, and dampen it. But it definitely makes a difference if you put your attention in this area.
Michael: Absolutely, yeah. Good, yes. Have faith that you can manifest and live this and realize this in this body, in this lifetime and do what you can that makes sense to you to do that.
Rick: Yeah, it doesn’t matter your age or anything. I mean, when Adyashanti was here a month ago, a guy got up to the microphone and he practically had tears in his eyes because he had heard Osho say something about how you really have to get this at a young age or you’re not going to get it all because you become too set in your ways later on.
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Rick: And Adyashanti’s answer was, “Well, I totally disagree with that, you know, I’ve seen so many examples to the contrary.”
Michael: Absolutely.
Rick: So it doesn’t matter, you know.
Michael: I mean, I’ve heard American teachers now say, “If you don’t get it by your mid-30s, you’re not going to get it.” Not true. I mean, this happened to me when I was 56 or something. Age has nothing to do with it.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Anyone, at any moment, it’s just a ceasing and it can happen to anyone. If you’re alive and your nervous system is relatively intact, and maybe if it isn’t, it can and does happen.
Rick: Yeah. Good. Well, good. So that’s an optimistic note to end on, I suppose. So, thanks Michael, this has been great.
Michael: Thank you. It’s been fun. I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you very much.
Rick: Yeah, me too. So let me just wrap up by telling people that you’ve been listening to an interview with Michael Hall on Buddha at the gas pump. You may not have discovered batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the gas pump, that’s B-A-T-G-A-P. But if not, go there and you’ll see all the interviews I’ve done archived, as well as ones that I have continued to do. And you can sign up for an email notification. Every time I put up a new one, you’ll get an email. There’s a discussion group there where people get into big debates over all these things. You can get into that if you want to. And there’s also a podcast. Some people don’t like to sit in front of their computers, but they listen while they commute and things like that. So you can click on a link and get a podcast and put it on your iPod. So that’s it. Next week, next interview is with a very fascinating gentleman named Radhanath Swami, who has written a book called “The Journey Home,” which I read back in January and I loved it so much I’ve been telling people about it ever since. It almost eclipses the autobiography of a yogi in terms of being a fascinating story of a person’s spiritual adventure. So that will be the next interview and we will see you then. Thanks for listening. [