Michael Rodriguez Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how literature, meditation, and self-inquiry can reveal deeper levels of truth and human potential. It also examines the limits of academic education and the importance of integrating intellect, feeling, wonder, and direct experience.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can literature support spiritual growth and self-knowledge?
• What is the relationship between awareness, consciousness, and the nature of reality?
• Why can academic and intellectual knowledge feel insufficient for genuine understanding?
• How can meditation and self-inquiry help reveal who we truly are?

Key takeaways

• The source of fulfillment is within, not in external achievements or possessions.
• Awareness is boundless, ever-present, and prior to our thoughts and concepts.
• Great literature remains alive because its meaning deepens as the reader changes.
• Spiritual understanding requires moving beyond intellectual knowledge into direct experience.
• Education is incomplete when it develops the intellect without the heart and sense of wonder.
• Self-inquiry helps loosen identification with thoughts, emotions, and the body.
• Beauty and creativity can reveal the transcendent source behind ordinary experience.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 365 of them now, and if this is new to you, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and check out the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see them organized in various ways. Also, this whole production is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of batgap.com, and we appreciate those who have been supporting it.

Part of that support has gotten me out to California for the Science and Nonduality Conference, which starts tonight. But first, today I’m going to interview my good friend Michael Rodriguez. I say “good friend” even though we just met in person last night, because for quite a few months we’ve been corresponding by email and including a couple of friends in the correspondence, such as David Buckland and Susana Marie. We really felt an affinity from the start and had very lively conversations, which, in preparation for this interview, Michael had the kindness to consolidate into a series of notes. A little bit later in the conversation, we’ll go through those notes and make sure we’ve covered them all, because there’s really some juicy stuff in there. I think you’re going to find this a very interesting conversation.

Michael is a very bright guy with a very dedicated background, both in his traditional education and in his spiritual education. So, that’s what we’re going to start talking about first of all: your background and how you ended up where you are today.

Michael: First of all, thank you for having me on the show.

Rick: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.

Michael: Thank you. Well, if we were talking about the story of Michael, I would say that it begins really when I was a kid, around six or seven years old. Then I had a spontaneous question arise, which was, “When you get to the edge of the universe, what is on the other side?” Somehow, that made an indelible impression on the psyche and really initiated a lifelong quest to discover what’s true. Somehow, that was endemic to the way my mind works, that sort of questioning, and it led me eventually onto a conscious spiritual quest. The next big moment, I would say, is in high school, when, as a senior, I had a teacher in my English class.

Rick: So, wait a minute. At six or seven, you had a conscious spiritual quest?

Michael: At six or seven, I’d say that was the first glimmer of the conscious spiritual quest. Prior to that, there were no wonderings or reflections; there was no sense of being on a path. But somehow that was…

Rick: But once you had that little glimmer, you just couldn’t forget it.

Michael: I couldn’t forget it. It somehow was a necessary precursor to getting the ball rolling. And ironically, or perhaps not ironically, it’s quite fitting that the work I do now really directly addresses that question, but not from a traditional materialist standpoint.

Rick: What question does it address?

✨ Consciousness and the resting point of awareness

Michael: The question of what is real, what is the reality of the universe, and whether there is something that’s quote-unquote “on the other side.” So, the way that I work now is to start from the experiential realization of boundless awareness or consciousness itself. I use those two words synonymously, although sometimes I make a distinction between them for pedagogical purposes, which we can talk about too. But essentially, the realization ultimately was that there is no boundedness to whatever this is. And so, somehow, the mind had posed a question when I was a child that was insoluble to the mind, but that was, in a sense, solvable experientially much later, after decades of searching, seeking, wondering, and self-inquiry.

Rick: Okay, so you had this great English teacher in high school, as did I. For some reason, English teachers were always the best, even though I didn’t go on to become an English major in college or anything. But, in my experience, they had the most intelligence, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness.

Michael: There’s a heartful quality to a really good English teacher, because they understand the soul. In my experience, literature is really a spiritual exercise: reading literature, reflecting on it, becoming one with it, memorizing it in order to really get the essence of a poem or a passage. It’s a spiritual discipline in itself. In fact, we find this even in spiritual traditions. In Christianity, they have Lectio Divina, divine reading, which is taking a passage from Scripture—from the Bible, in that case—and meditating on it. In my experience, that was always part of the process. It was a kind of Lectio Divina with classic literature. I was doing it also with spiritual literature, but somehow that was built into the way that I approached it.

Rick: With literature, it seems like there would be as much variation in the spiritual depth of it as there is among people in general. Some people are just rather crude and superficial, and others are very deep and insightful. Look at the books available today. I suppose maybe what qualifies something as really classic literature is that there is some depth to it. You had your pulp fiction novels back in the 1600s, but they didn’t stand the test of time. Is that true?

Michael: That is part of it. They ask certain perennial questions that have no definitive answer, because they’re really plumbing the depths of the psyche and of the soul, and there’s no end to that. So, if you read the great literary figures, you can never finish reading a great piece of literature, just as you can never finish reading, say, the Bhagavad Gita.

Rick: Sure, because there are levels and levels.

Michael: Absolutely. No matter how much you think you know about it, as you continue to develop in a relative sense and go back to these texts, you see deeper and deeper levels that you missed for the first 20 or 30 years sometimes.

Rick: Until perhaps you surpass the depth of the author, do you think?

Michael: Well, the depth of the author makes no difference in the sense that the text itself is kind of an autonomous being.

Rick: Doesn’t it reflect his state of consciousness, though? You read Shakespeare—doesn’t it go as deep as Shakespeare was?

Michael: Which is infinite.

Rick: He in particular, or everyone?

Michael: Everyone, of course. But the creativity that someone like that brings to a text has no limits. So, you could read Hamlet forever and never exhaust its potential meaning, just like you could read the Bible for the rest of your life and never quite pin down Jesus to be this rather than that. Because a literary text is alive. It’s not a dead, inert thing. The experience of reading a text is a living experience, and you’re always changing, so the text changes with you. Because it’s a meeting.

Rick: Some people feel that great composers like Beethoven and Mozart were divinely inspired, that they were just conduits for something much deeper that wanted to be expressed in the world. Do you feel like that may be true of writers also?

Michael: I think it’s true of all artists. That creative impulse comes from the unknown. Beethoven marveled at it himself. Mozart did too; he didn’t know where these tunes came from. He would wake up and a whole symphony would be in his mind.

Rick: In a flash, yeah, and then he just had to take the time to write it down.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And that’s a mystery. No one can claim to understand that. In a sense, it’s a mystery as grand and as ineffable as the creation of anything. It all comes from the same source, and I think that artists are aware of that. And so, even though you could create anything and it would still be coming from the source, in a sense, artists are consciously conduits for that which is transcendent. And when it comes through, when it breaks through from the realm of the uncreated to the created, it’s permeated and saturated with its origin. And somehow that communicates to us. And we all know this. There is nothing terribly grandiose about what I’m saying. I think everybody knows this when they encounter beauty. It’s universal, a universal human experience.

When it comes through, when it breaks through from the realm of the uncreated to the created, it’s permeated and saturated with its origin.

Rick: Nice. So, you ended up going on to get four degrees, three master’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and a PhD. What’s the fourth? The master’s degree?

Michael: Yeah, that’s right.

Rick: So, your master’s degrees were in literature and…

Michael: Yeah, no, one of them is in Irish literature and one of them is in comparative religion.

Rick: Okay.

Michael: And then the PhD is in literature as well. And that was a thrill for many years. As I graduated high school and found myself in college, enjoying very much the study of literature, I felt very alive and as though I were following my dharma. It just felt very normal and natural that I would be studying this and that I would hopefully go on one day to teach it. I wanted to teach as well as my high school teacher had taught. And I had seen Dead Poets Society, which had an enormous impact on me. It really transformed the way that I saw the world, and it instigated, brought out of me, this desire to be of service in that way: to express my passion in a way that would help wake students up to their own divine potential. I couldn’t always speak of it in spiritual terms, but that was always the subtext.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: Each of us has infinite potential, and if we can somehow tap into that through great literature, that would be something really divine. As Robert Frost said, literature helps us discover what we didn’t know we knew.

Rick: That’s good.

Michael: It always stuck with me. There are levels that we do know, but we’re not conscious of them. And so, ultimately, literature makes us conscious of consciousness itself, which for me is the great realization: that it’s consciousness that is conscious. And when we actually look for it, we can’t find it, despite the fact that it is “I Am.” It is undeniably present and conscious.

Rick: I think it’s worth mentioning that, in my opinion, we each possess what we might call the home of all knowledge, deep within our awareness: a vast repository of energy, intelligence, creativity, wisdom—all of that. And most people just tap into a tiny fraction of it and try to live their lives on that basis, which is as if we’re all walking around as multimillionaires and begging at street corners because we’ve forgotten we have that bank account.

Michael: Yeah, it’s the difference between being satisfied with relative knowledge, which is the norm, and assuming that it is true knowledge.

Rick: And getting some little fragment of it, because that is all you can get in a lifetime.

Michael: And most people live at that level. The level that you’re describing so beautifully right now is the repository from which relative knowledge flows. And ultimately, the only thing that can satisfy the yearning for absolute knowledge, which is there and which we mistake for relative knowledge, is the recognition, the direct realization, of the repository—the source from which all relative knowledge flows. And that instills in us the peace that passeth all understanding. I think everyone is in search of that, and it’s described differently in different traditions. It’s verbalized differently, but the source is simple and single, and it’s universal.

Rick: Yeah, the Upanishads have this one—I forget which Upanishad—but they say something like, “It’s not for the sake of the wife that the wife is dear, but for the sake of the self the wife is dear. It’s not for the sake of wealth that wealth is dear, but for the sake of the self that wealth is dear.”

And it goes on and ticks off a number of things that people might strive after in life, and makes the point that whatever satisfaction we derive from external things is just a sort of paltry reflection of the ocean of fulfillment that resides within.

Michael: Yes, and it’s here.

Rick: Which is not to say we shouldn’t enjoy the external things, but without also tapping into that ocean of fulfillment that resides within, we’re really shortchanging ourselves.

Michael: Yeah, and in a sense, when we’re talking about it like this, it seems so theoretical and far-off, but it is here. It’s always here. This presence that does not come or go, this ocean of knowing and of being, which are synonymous.

So, this sense of being has an intrinsic knowing quality, although when we go deeply into what that means, even that description that I just gave is paltry, because it’s prior even to that concept. It is even prior to any concept or idea or experience. It’s prior to everything, but it’s here—not prior in time, but just prior to the first movement out by mind.

It’s here. And the irony of this spiritual quest is that the whole thing takes place here. It’s all a mental movement that has no substance or reality to it, and it’s just a simple noticing, although it doesn’t seem so simple when we are struggling to try to understand who we are.

Rick: So, Michael, we talked a bit about your fascination with, or your love of, literature and your academic pursuit of that, and we talked a bit about when you were seven, you had this spiritual experience that really got you thinking about the deeper questions. But obviously, skipping forward, you’re a dedicated spiritual teacher now, and that is your primary focus. So, how did your interest in spirituality emerge in the midst of your academic life and eventually eclipse it?

Michael: That’s a great question, and “emerge” is a good word, because it really did emerge out of the academic work. When I was in college, I had two professors, in particular, who subsequently became dear friends of mine and who introduced me to the wisdom of the East.

One of my professors had been a student of Toni Packer’s, who was initially Philip Kapleau’s Dharma heir and then broke from him when she encountered Krishnamurti’s work and really started her own bare-bones meditation center in upstate New York. So, I had met Philip Kapleau when I was in college and had gone to some retreats of his when he was down in Hollywood, Florida, during his retirement.

I just fell in love with Zen immediately, and I felt a deep, kindred, karmic connection, as though it had been in my blood for lifetimes. So, as soon as I met him, there was a deep resonance. I had read The Three Pillars of Zen by Kapleau and had that under my arm when I went to meet him the first time. It was a very powerful experience.

That led to the beginning of really a 20-year commitment to zazen—to sitting meditation—and working with Toni Packer for a number of years and retreats. That was all going on simultaneously with the academic work.

So, whatever I was doing in my classes was dovetailing with the experiential aspect in retreats and sesshins and other work, particularly with Toni Packer for a long period of time, who was my main teacher early on. I learned so much from her.

Rick: As a college professor teaching literature, were you subtle about your fascination with Zen and spiritual teachings, or did you just bring it right in there and refer to it explicitly?

Michael: That’s a great question. A little of both. In academia, one has to be careful about what you say, which was one of the reasons I ended up not feeling comfortable in it. But there were courses that I would teach in theology, for instance, or religion and literature, where I could explore these topics more overtly.

But it was often in the context of talking about literature and spirituality more in an implicit sense. It always came through somehow, and that’s what’s interesting. No matter what I taught, the spirit of the inquiry that I was personally engaged in would somehow manifest itself, and it often manifested itself in my passion as a teacher.

One of the most common reports I would get from students was how passionate I was. There’s something about passion that’s infectious, and I experienced it with my own English teacher. You probably did too in high school with yours, but there was something that communicates in that, and that speaks to students.

Rick: Did many of your students actually get interested in spirituality? Did you light a fire under a lot of them?

Michael: I did. I’ve had students come back to me and say that the class with me inspired them to go to divinity school or study to become a religion major in college. I did get that.

I also had students come back to me and say that every week they came to class, they felt like it was their therapy session. I actually got that a lot. It was a common theme, although I would never talk about that, but that was the flavor of a lot of the classes.

There was a sense of sharing, of talking about life, and applying the literature to real-life situations. So, I would always talk anecdotally about whatever I was learning in my own life and how I was applying some of the lessons that were coming out of the literature.

I do feel that literature helps us live a better life and helps us to know who we are, essentially like any great spiritual text. They help us understand who we are and, in an ultimate sense, who we are absolutely, which is beyond the name and the form.

You can get that sort of message in some of the deeper literature by Shakespeare, or even someone like Samuel Beckett, who might not initially seem like a spiritual writer, but in my view is deeply spiritual, because he was concerned first and foremost with human suffering and the relief from suffering. Glimmers of truth come through Beckett’s writing here and there.

I was always eager to communicate that to the students, those glimmers of truth that were coming through even the darkest of literature.

Rick: So, you’ve alluded to the fact that you eventually became disillusioned with the academic life. My guess is that that kind of snuck up on you like a thief in the night, incrementally. It didn’t hit you. You didn’t wake up one morning and think, “I can’t do this,” but it must have begun to gnaw at you more and more.

Michael: It did. Over a long period of time, it started to become less and less fulfilling, because my heart really was moving more and more, as my own personal journey was developing, in the relative sense. It was becoming more and more consuming, and it was difficult for me to talk about anything other than that.

Rick: Were there many of your peers who appreciated what you were doing, or were you kind of a fish out of water?

Michael: A fish out of water. There were maybe one or two who were on a similar kind of path, and they were very dear, close friends, but only a couple. For the most part, it was a very heady environment, and I was finding, as I was going deeper into my own truth, that I was dropping more and more from the head to the heart and to the felt sense of being.

It’s very difficult to teach in an academic environment unless you’re in your head.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: That’s what it is.

Rick: That’s what it is, right.

Michael: For the most part.

Rick: Just singing, “Kumbaya.”

Michael: Right. There’s not much of a container for truth beyond the mind. It really is meant to fill students with relative knowledge and then get them to spit that back in one way or another, either on tests or in their writing.

It’s a very structured, formulaic kind of system that started to feel less and less true and authentic to me, because I wanted my students to be free. I found myself holding them to academic standards that didn’t feel good to me, judging them on their writing and being forced to give them grades that didn’t necessarily reflect what they were getting out of the class, because they didn’t necessarily conform to the rubrics that we had set forth.

It did not feel good. It was not in alignment, I would say, with who I was and what I wanted for my students, which was for them to find out who they were, who they truly were.

That self-inquiry was always a part of everything I did, and I always wanted them to deconstruct everything they thought they knew. I was always trying to help them come out of their conceptions and their ideations and their beliefs about who they were, and trying to lead them more into an inquiry about the nature of themselves—the self, in the truest sense.

Everything I did, whether it was Emerson or Thoreau or T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens or Shakespeare or Robert Frost, was always geared toward self-knowledge.

So, it was a very natural movement for me to leave academia, eventually, after a decade of teaching full-time at the university level, and to share in a different way. I feel now as if I’m really drawing on the deep reservoir of potential of myself to be of service, to be helpful to people who are there for that, specifically.

People come because they’re suffering, and they want to know who they really are, beyond identification with thoughts and emotions and the body.

Rick: It’s interesting, your point about academia being very heady and intellectual. Most people say, “Oh, that’s what it’s supposed to be,” but it’s interesting to contrast that with the traditional gurukula in India, where there’s intellectual knowledge being presented, there’s devotion and love and respect for the teacher among the students, and from the teacher to the students.

There is that mutual love and heart-level thing that’s very explicitly cultivated. There is service in terms of some kind of work that contributes to the community and so on. So, it’s more multifaceted. It’s as if it takes into account all of one’s faculties as a developing human being, rather than just the intellect.

It seems as if our whole society is a little top-heavy and lacking in those other qualities because of the nature of an educational system. And in fact, they are always cutting the stuff—the arts and things—that are considered frivolous and impractical for earning a living.

Michael: That’s right. And that is because we live in a very materialist culture that is based on the accumulation of stuff and technology and progress in the technological sense.

And unfortunately, we haven’t made as much progress, perhaps, in terms of our moral and spiritual development as we have technologically, which is a dangerous place.

Rick: I think we’re paying a price for it.

I mean, just take any example: the environmental crisis. It’s a direct reflection of regarding the world as a mechanistic resource that we can extract stuff from for our own benefit. And there is no sort of appreciation for the world as a living being or for love of animals and nature and all that from the heart level. So, we’re seeing the symptoms in the world of the sort of education that has been predominant.

Awe, wonder, and the intelligence of life

Michael: Yes. One of the things I always tried to evoke in my students was awe and wonder, which I think is very rare nowadays. They are so bombarded by so much stimulation on so many levels that we are deadened to the living, vibrant reality of this moment. We are sort of stuck in our heads or we’re stuck in front of a computer screen, and we forget that this moment is alive with conscious intelligence.

As the awakening started to unfold here, that became more and more pronounced, so that it ended up just swallowing up everything. That sense of conscious intelligence—that the body itself, which we think of as this thing, this lump of flesh, is actually living. It’s conscious, it’s intelligent, it’s sensitive, it’s fundamentally undefended and free.

And everything is made of that. That was one of the great awakenings here: that it’s not just the body that’s conscious and intelligent, but everything that is experienced is made of that same conscious, intelligent principle, which is synonymous with our true self.

Rick: Yeah. It’s ironic because even though science might be held culpable for the sort of dead, mechanistic view of the world that is so predominant, on the other hand, science has enabled us to understand matter in such intricate, deep, subtle ways that, if we appreciate what it’s actually showing us, it evokes the sense of awe and wonder that you mentioned a little while ago.

If you look at a single cell, you look at a grain of sand, you look at a little bug on the sidewalk, and look closely enough, you realize, “What an amazing, miraculous thing, so full of intelligence.” So, in a way, science might be able to redeem itself by helping us come to appreciate, by being a tool—not the only tool, but a tool in our toolbox—which could help us really appreciate the wonder of life more than ever.

Michael: Hopefully. I think a good scientist has that as a foundation.

Rick: Some of the great ones articulate it.

Michael: Absolutely. Einstein talked a lot about the necessity of imagination, creativity, and wonder.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And he had spiritual experiences. He had divine experiences of the infinite intelligence that is what we call the universe. And so, if we can somehow kindle in ourselves that innate sense of wonder that we all have as children, and that somehow gets calcified primarily by our education system and our cultural conditioning—

Rick: And just the constant onslaught of life.

Michael: Yeah, the constant onslaught of life as we know it in this modern Western culture, although it’s not just Western now. It’s really a worldwide phenomenon.

Rick: Yeah. I was riding home last night from the dinner we had at the restaurant, and one of my hosts was saying that she was surprised there aren’t more incidents of violence in the streets and so on. She said, “Because life is just so intense for most people.” I’m kind of oblivious to that, living in Fairfield, Iowa, my idyllic little existence, but she said, “Most people are just dealing with so much, and there’s so much pressure, that it’s a wonder that people can withstand it.”

Michael: It is.

Rick: So somehow or other, if that’s the way it tends to be out there, it begs the question: Is spirituality a luxury for those who have somehow arranged their lives to have all kinds of leisure time and stuff?

Michael: No.

Rick: Or can people who are really in the thick of it get some relief and benefit from these kinds of things we’re talking about?

Michael: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I think the latter. It’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity. As I see it, waking up is a necessity—waking up from the dream of living in separation, fear, desire, and anxiety. All of that is not practical, actually. What we think is practical is not practical. It’s actually highly impractical. I mean, how well can you function when you’re wracked with thoughts, anxiety, and fear?

Rick: Exhausted. I mean, talking about people, Arianna Huffington’s on a campaign these days just to get people to sleep a normal number of hours, because she feels as if our whole society is sleep-deprived, in addition to being bombarded with sensory stimuli.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: Not really a conducive situation for deep experience.

Michael: It’s not. And what we find, interestingly, when we slow down practically—I know that there are mothers out there who have children who are screaming and they have to put food on the table, and they may be working two jobs—but there are moments in every day for all of us, even if it’s three to five minutes, where, if we can just drop down into the felt sense of being, over and over again for small periods, that has a tremendously healing effect on the body-mind.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And over time, that really accumulates, even if it’s just time in the bathroom alone, or time walking to your car, or time from the car to the job. There are moments every day which everybody does have. It takes a little bit of earnestness, as Nisargadatta would say, and commitment, but what’s the alternative? Pain and suffering.

Rick: Yeah. And how many hours a day does the average American watch television?

Michael: Yes.

Rick: Or play video games, or go around looking for Pokémon Go characters, or something, if they’re that age.

Michael: We do. We fritter away a lot.

Rick: So there is time. It’s just a matter of knowing what to do with that time, and having the ability to stop the rat race and tune in.

Michael: Just tune in. Very simply, it is down-to-earth, and I’m not trying to talk about anything grandiose or abstract here. It is really a very functional, down-to-earth—you could call it a technique, but it’s just resting. Resting, and dropping down, and I call it softening instead of surrendering. We could say surrender, but that has such loaded connotations. So, just softening the density of the body and the mind is extremely therapeutic, as well as making the body and the mind more transparent over time to the true nature of the self, which is weightless and spaceless and timeless—the consciousness itself, we could say.

It makes the body-mind more permeable to true nature. Everything is true nature all the time. It’s difficult to notice when the body-mind is just a series of contractions, tightness, and restriction, which is not the natural state. That has become the normal state, but it’s not natural to be defended and constricted and fearful, unless you’re in the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.

But we live that way all the time in situations that are not actually in any way harmful or threatening, but it’s all psychologically driven. So the work that I do now is very much about helping people disidentify. And there’s nothing unique in this work necessarily. Hopefully, I present the work in a unique way, but it’s really very universal. Many teachers out there are doing wonderful work like this by just helping people to wake up from identification with name and form.

Rick: Now, you yourself practiced Zen for 20 years. How many hours a day, typically, did you do that?

Michael: I was a hardcore Zen student.

Rick: Like hours a day?

Michael: Many hours a day.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: I would just sit.

Rick: Right, and do retreats and the whole works. So sometimes I see a bit of a disconnect between people like yourself and myself, for that matter, who’ve practiced hours a day for decades, and who then attain some degree of benefit from that, profoundly perhaps, but then turn around and say, “There’s nothing to do,” or “Just a few minutes here and there.” And I wonder, “Are people really going to attain satisfactory results unless they learn some kind of effective practice and dedicate a reasonable amount of time to it?”

Michael: Well, as you know from our discussions back and forth, I tend not to be dogmatic one way or the other, and I feel free to flow between all the different levels and layers of consciousness. So I don’t get stuck anywhere, so that I can be really available to be helpful to people wherever they think they are.

For some people, it’s appropriate to have a really structured sitting practice. For other people, doing it in the midst of daily living, in terms of karma yoga, is perfectly appropriate and helpful. And for some people, it’s a combination of the two. Some people don’t need to do anything except live their life and listen to teachings and read spiritual texts, and something is happening alchemically in that process.

Rick: Yeah, that attitude is behind the creation of Buddha at the Gas Pump. The idea is to present a whole array of different teachers and let people gravitate to what’s appropriate for them. And very often I’ll put up an interview and I will get an email from one person saying, “That sucked. That was your worst one ever,” and someone else will say, “That was your best one ever. I really love that.” So, it’s obvious that people just have different affinities, and you know that one size does not fit all.

But perhaps we can make a general statement, and you can make a general statement about what one should do at the very least if one is interested in all this and just wanting to make some kind of progress.

Michael: That’s such a great question. I think if that spark is there to find out what’s true, to find out who you really are, I would suggest putting as much time and energy into that as you possibly can.

And again, going back to Nisargadatta, my root teacher, he would call that earnestness—just being earnest, sincere, honest with oneself. If you want to know yourself, if you want to wake up from suffering, then it is just common sense that that is what you would put your attention on.

But so many of us are complacent in our suffering, and we want to wake up, but are just so comfortable in our lives that we’re not really willing to give up our little luxuries.

Rick: Yeah, and we probably don’t need to. We can begin to just introduce a second element of something that is akin to what we are talking about here—some practice, some teaching, some focus, some reading—just being more earnest about spirituality, and just see what ends up dropping off in your life.

You might find you’re not going to lose interest in your children, and you’re not going to lose interest in any sort of healthy pursuit.

Michael: We don’t know what’s going to happen.

Rick: No, we don’t, but there is this sort of stigma against spirituality that you’re going to become a monk, or you’re going to become aloof and detached and disinterested in your children.

I was listening to some Adyashanti recordings the other day, and a woman was saying just that. She said, “I love my children more than anything in the world. I’m afraid that if I pursue this too far, I’m not going to love them anymore. I’m going to lose interest in them.” So those concerns are up.

Michael: They do come up, and they are mind concerns. They’re concerns that the mind throws up to stall the issue. They’re not true, and they’re just these little—

Rick: Doubts?

Michael: —doubts that come up.

Rick: Which can be dispelled.

Michael: They can be. This is the point I was trying to make: knowing oneself is not impractical. It actually enlivens whatever your role is in this life. If it is to be a mother, you can only be a better mother if you know who you are. You are not going to be a worse mother if you are not identified with thoughts that make you feel miserable. How could that be? It actually will bring back life, vitality, truth, goodness, and whatever we are doing.

If we are called to be a mother, a cab driver, or a teacher, it could happen in any field. It’s the spirit with which we’re coming. It’s not what we are doing that is really central to the matter. The heart of the matter is really just to get clear for ourselves about what is true. Then whatever flows from that will be true.

I am just encouraging people to be honest with themselves. In my own case, there was a point where I really had to give up everything. It was that intense for me, but it does not have to take that shape for everybody. Now things have come back. It was just a period of purification. Now there is a movement back into this role.

Rick: When you had to give up everything, was it a leap in the dark, or into an abyss? Or was it more like, “All right, I’m leaving the garden, but I’m entering the house”?

Michael: It was an abyss. I could not see what was coming. There was no security. There was no guarantee it was going to work out in a good sense, in the relative sense. I had left a job that paid well and had benefits. I don’t recommend that. People have to just follow their own truth. That was my truth.

For me, it was necessary to face the fears that came up with those doomsday scenarios: being homeless, having no income, and having no insurance, which is a big one that is conditioned into us. The fear of getting sick and not having a doctor to go to—what do you do then? Those are legitimate concerns at some level, and so I am not dismissing that.

Rick: Sure. And the more responsibilities you have, the more legitimate they are. If you have five kids, you’re just not going to walk out on them.

Michael: No, and I would never encourage that. But at the same time, those fears do have to be faced—the fear of survival. At some level, you have to really face whatever’s standing in the way of you being your authentic self. They often revolve around money, security, and health. Those are the big ones. Those are natural human concerns. I bow to them. I bow to those concerns and respect them.

At the same time, if they’re causing a sense of constriction in the being and a stifled sense of separation and fear, then I think that’s something that one needs to look into. Just get at the root of it: Where does that come from? Am I really defined by that fear?

But again, this is just my own path. I never make prescriptive judgments across the board about anything, because we are all unique and we’re all coming from such varied places. I’m always just giving provisional suggestions that people can wonder about and try out if it’s true for them. It’s just an invitation.

Rick: Yeah, I think a good wrap-up point for this topic is that what we are talking about with spirituality is really gaining access to the repository of all intelligence, creativity, and happiness. And so, even though having that enlivened in our life might end up in a reshuffling of our priorities and our activities and so on, it’s generally going to go for the best if we are really contacting and tuning to that in a genuine way.

It is really going to be an enhanced life. I think most people who have really gone a long distance with this would assure you enthusiastically that they have no regrets whatsoever, even though their life might be very different now than it used to be, as if it has really paid off. It’s kind of a Jack and the Beanstalk thing, where you are really going to end up with the riches if you take the risk.

Michael: Yeah, and the riches aren’t necessarily material.

Rick: No, I didn’t mean to imply that. They may be. You might be more capable of earning a good living or something if you have a clearer mind and a more coherent thought process, but not necessarily.

Michael: No, and that is not the point. The point is to be true.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: But I have found in my own life that every time there was a softening whenever a fear arose, and then following that back to where it flowed, following it back down to the source, and not identifying with that fear, and then moving forward regardless of it, blessings would flow.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And that’s…

Rick: Seek ye first the Kingdom of God or Heaven, and all else shall be added unto thee. Yes, yes.

Michael: But it is its own reward.

Rick: Yes, it is.

Michael: It is its own reward. That is the end in itself, just being true. And I have noticed that there have been some amazing openings in a number of different areas in my life. One is making this work possible, and people contacting me for support and being a friend through this process. So, things start to flow more synchronistically.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: But it’s never done for that purpose. It’s done for its own sake.

Rick: I always like to take it out to society too, because I always feel like the individual is the unit of society. And although people like yourself might be rather rare these days, there is no reason why, as things progress, people with this sort of orientation couldn’t become quite the norm.

And if that were the case, I think we would see a vast reduction in the problems that beset society, because our economic problems, our environmental problems, and all that are just the reflection of all our individual activities.

Michael: Yeah. And if each of us, anyone listening to this, can find what is true and authentic, can find and discover this pure consciousness which is here and waiting for itself to be discovered by itself, it is just consciousness recognizing itself as such. If that can happen individually, then each of us will flow from that true space in whatever way is appropriate, and that will have repercussions in the world.

Rick: Yeah.

👁️ Questions about being enlightened

Michael: That will have sent forth ripples that go far beyond what the eye can see. Anytime we are coming from truth, whatever flows from that is true. And so, for one person, it might be taking this work into their business. It might be flowing from truth in their business, and being an enlightened entrepreneur or awakened entrepreneur.

For somebody else, it might be being an awakened mother, an awakened bus driver, schoolteacher, doctor, or lawyer. Each of us has our own unique path, but if it is coming from this non-dual understanding of non-separation, then whatever it is, it will be appropriate and true.

Rick: Yeah, it’s good.

Michael: And helpful for the community, for society, and for the family. It all is interconnected.

Rick: Yeah, and just to reiterate, but then we’ll shift to a new topic, a lot of times this point is not brought out in spiritual circles: that this actually does have societal implications. But it does. If instead of it being a novelty, a boutique thing that small groups of people are into, it becomes more and more the norm, I think we’re going to see vast impacts on the quality of society. It might just be the thing that saves us from any number of things which could do us in.

Michael: I think the societal implications are, in a sense, byproducts of the understanding.

Rick: Definitely.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: I mean, you have to put the horse before the cart. I’m not saying that we should work on a social level, although that needs to be done too, but I’m just saying that we are tapping into the fuel source of human thriving and human creativity. And if you want a forest to be green, all the individual trees have to be green. So you water the root of each tree and they start getting green. Next thing you know, you have a green forest.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. And this can be tested out in everyone’s life, to follow the thread back to the sense of conscious presence, or boundless awareness, as I call it. So simple. It’s here. It is always here. Everything else is changing, and conscious presence is here. It is the reality of this moment. It’s shining with boundless conscious awareness.

If there is an identification with thoughts, just drop down with the attention into the felt sense of being. Thoughts don’t have to disappear. They don’t have to not be there. They’re perfectly welcome to be there. But you can feel it in this moment, this presence that is scintillating with life. It is synonymous with life. And we’re not separate. There’s no separation from that.

There is no “I” being alive. There is just this life living itself. There is no you and me in this space. If we’re communicating from our heads, there is a you and a me. But it’s another way of being if we are really coming from this more fundamental space of openness. It communicates at a heart level. And I can feel it in this moment. I don’t know if that’s your experience right now.

And I can sense that there are these waves on the surface of the ocean, which we call thoughts. But we are not separate as this presence. I can’t find it. I know there is undeniably the presence of awareness. Because even if I were to doubt the presence of awareness, that doubt would arise by virtue of the presence of awareness. Otherwise I would not be aware of it.

There is just this life living itself.

So, it’s the one fact of experience. And it’s the one that we overlook. And so, this wonder and this awe that I was talking about earlier, in a sense, I’m asking whoever is interested to be astonished by the presence of awareness, to wonder about consciousness. If you really think about it, it is mind-blowing that there is consciousness. It should really stop us dead in our tracks.

But consciousness falls asleep to itself as this vibrant, alive intelligence and dreams separation and otherness, deadness. And we go through our days like automatons. But the way that—if you just think about it this way, I put this in my book, in one of the chapters, in fact the first chapter—I was trying to point to this.

The way that a video camera sees, if you were to imagine you were a video camera, just for a minute, and to look around and to see the world from the perspective of a video camera, that would be very different from the way consciousness sees, wouldn’t it? In one of them there’s a kind of dead, inert panning without any knowing quality. But that is not the way you know. You know as a conscious being.

And so there’s an aliveness to knowing, and there’s an aliveness to seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling that we overlook. And it’s available: this aliveness, this joy of being, this joy just to be. And it’s built into consciousness, just the sense to be, which is the most basic level of existence. It is just the sense of being.

And this is not abstract. It’s a fact that there is being. It’s a hard fact. In fact, it’s the only thing we know for sure: that I am. And then to go deeply into the sense of what that I-am-ness is—well, it’s present and aware.

Michael: And this is where the heart dwells. This is the region of the heart. Ramana Maharshi talked about the heart on the right side of the chest. The left side of the chest is more of the human heart, which experiences emotion and feeling and even intuition and opens and closes literally. The right side of the chest is more of this space. Ramana used the right side of the chest as a metaphor for this space of awareness, within which the human heart arises and subsides. Arises and subsides, contracts and expands.

🩺 Dimensions and healing work

So, the point is that this wide-open presence of awareness is undeniably present and aware. The human heart functions by virtue of this divine heart that we all are. And this is an enlivening, joyful realization. It sends healing energy through the body and the mind. It’s actually the healing factor of the body. And any time that attention is placed on this, it grows in warmth and sensitivity.

And if we’re coming from this, we really can relate to other people in a way that is unifying. Instead of coming from “I’m me and you’re you,” we are coming from what we share. This is shared. It’s not mine, it’s not yours. And so why would I want to be anything other than helpful and kind, if we’re not separate fundamentally?

Rick: It’s an important point. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” has a deeper meaning, because others are you.

Michael: Well, I think if we’re talking about the story of Jesus, which is what you were just alluding to, there was a deep realization there of this nondual awareness. We can see evidence of that throughout the Gospels and the sayings of Jesus, and also in the Gnostic Gospels in particular, but also in the Gospel of John.

It’s a very powerful awakened being who was awake to the fact that there was no separation between the human and the divine, and between the self and the other. In Martin Buber’s language, it would be the I and the thou, as opposed to I-it. Usually, we engage with things and people as if they are objects, but if we’re coming from this presence, then everything is that presence in disguise. It is appearing as what we would call a wall, but it’s all saturated with being.

Rick: There is a chapter in your personal story that we haven’t touched on yet, but that you’ve alluded to in some of our conversations, and that was how you had to undergo a lot of purification. And I think probably most people on the spiritual path are going to have to go through a chapter like that, so it might be worth our discussing it for a few minutes.

Michael: Yeah, that was an important period after I left academia. It was just a really intense wondering about true nature and self-inquiry. And just as a natural byproduct of that, things started to fall away.

There were lots of toxins the body-mind didn’t want. Lots of toxins. It didn’t want alcohol or meat, even television and movies. Everything became very sensitive. The body-mind became like a nerve ending during this period, and I couldn’t listen to regular pop music because all I could hear in the lyrics was codependency, and it just sounded so far removed from what I was discovering.

Although at some point, whenever I hear popular music and it’s a love song, I started—and still do—listen to it like a devotional song. So, I would replace it with God or self or consciousness.

Rick: George Harrison tried to do that when he was really getting into God and the Beatles had broken up. He would go to concerts and sing, “In my life I loved God more,” and then the audience would boo him because it wasn’t the original song.

Michael: Yeah, it’s beautiful. Yeah, so there was just this period of not wanting any toxins—visual, auditory, in any sense. And that rendered the body much softer and more sensitive, which it always was, but this really was just coming back to that natural state, and really marinating in that felt sense of being for hours and hours at a time, which was a joy. It was not onerous. I mean, it was really pleasant.

It is blissful just to be, and not have to be in gear or doing or being productive in the world. It was just to sit and watch the clouds and to be. It was just utterly delightful. And I was in a situation where I could do that for long periods of time.

I understand that there are some people who might not have that particular luxury, but again, there are still three to five minutes a day when you can just take the mind out of gear and just be and drop down into what it means in a felt sense to be here.

Rick: Yeah, the underlying point here—Jesus said something about not pouring new wine into old wineskins—is that the body is an instrument through which awakening or enlightenment is lived. And there are some people who seem to dismiss the significance of having it be a fit instrument, but I do think it takes a certain amount of physiological clarity.

The Indian tradition talks about vasanas, and if you are full of vasanas, deep impressions, then it’s not a very conducive condition for living pure awareness, pure consciousness. So, all kinds of purificatory measures are prescribed. And Patanjali has his yamas and his niyamas and so on for helping the transformation of the physiology.

Michael: Yeah, and for each of us that will be different. So, for one person it might just be detoxing from drugs and alcohol.

Rick: Or that might be level one of purification.

Michael: We are all different. For me it was a whole combination of things, so I don’t feel inclined to be prescriptive about that. And I’m not suggesting that we have to have our malas and be doing prayers and austerities and that stuff. I would just say, let it be natural.

Rick: I’ve seen people take it to extremes.

Michael: Yes, I’m not suggesting that.

Rick: Like, “Oh, I can’t do anything because it will be impure.”

Michael: Yeah, and that’s not what I’m saying. Here’s what I would say: Let the intelligence of the system dictate.

Rick: Tune in to that.

Michael: Yes, what it is that’s right for you. And if each of us does that in our own unique way—and I felt that restedness in you just now, when you did that deep sigh, which was beautiful, just the restedness—if we can each do that more and more, it has a tremendously healing effect, not only on the body-mind, but also on the group mind and on the group consciousness, tremendously.

I mean, a being who’s in a restaurant, who’s at rest, you can feel that, whether you know it or not.

Rick: And if you go to some satsang, and there are hundreds of people in that sort of state…

Michael: And that was a huge thing for me, going through sitting with these beautiful beings. I went through a several-year period where I did that, particularly here and through Open Circle. Just incredible teachers came through. They come through on a constant basis, and being able to sit with human beings who are at rest is such a gift.

And so, satsang is such a beautiful invitation to each of us. And if one feels called to do that, really to follow that intuition, I would say just follow your own intuition, and be true to it as much as possible. Because consciousness is supremely intelligent. All we have to do is listen to it. And it knows, and each of our body-minds knows what it needs to heal.

And if we just give that our loving, caring attention, and then just have the earnestness to be true to it, how could that go wrong? How could you be a less effective human being in the world if you actually followed your intuition? The body is inherently a biofeedback system. That’s what it is. It was designed to be that way.

Rick: It gives you feedback.

Michael: It gives you immediate feedback, and if it doesn’t, if it’s out of tune by one fraction of an inch, you will know it through some uncomfortable sensation.

Rick: Yeah, it’s true. You go out and get drunk, and the next morning you feel like crap. There’s a message there. And you know it.

Michael: Suffering is the equivalent of physical pain. Physical pain is meant to give us a clue that something needs to be corrected.

Rick: Yeah, my hand is on the stove. Oops.

Michael: Yeah, but we don’t do that with suffering.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: Nobody would keep their hand on the stove, right?

Rick: Right.

Michael: Because the system is smart enough to know not to do that. But with suffering, why do we keep doing what we know is harmful?

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: And we don’t heed the same warnings.

Suffering as an invitation

Rick: Sometimes in spiritual circles, people are a little bit, I would say, unkind when the subject of suffering comes up. They’ve locked into the law of karma as a concept. And if somebody gets cancer or something, they feel like, “Well, it must be their karma.”

But that also brings up the question of all the terrible suffering in the world. Often, it is due to circumstances apparently beyond one’s control. Look at what is happening in Aleppo these days. How is that kind of suffering a feedback mechanism for us to make any kind of change? It looks as if sometimes we just have to really grin and bear it, go through it.

Michael: Yeah, well, suffering of any kind is an invitation, and I know that it’s difficult to say.

Rick: Concentration camps, the really horrific stuff.

Michael: Of course. And there are people who come through that, like Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, which is an extraordinary book.

Rick: Or Elie Wiesel.

Michael: Exactly. Suffering is always an invitation, even in the most extreme circumstances, to wake up. I’ve certainly had my own difficulties in life, and it hasn’t been smooth sailing.

I think the key is to recognize that the circumstances of one’s life are the way they are for many, many reasons. A lot of this stuff happens before we are even aware of what’s going on. Much of the conditioning in the body-mind happens before we’re five years old, and that becomes the dominant program of our life. The way that we view the world, the way that we experience, the way that we interact and relate—all of that is very much conditioned before we’re aware that conditioning is going on.

Societally, that’s true, too. There are infinite causes and conditions for everything that arises. So, the question is not so much the bare event as the attitude with which it’s met. If we can look at our suffering as an invitation to inquire into what is true, regardless of the circumstances, it’s tremendously powerful and liberating.

It could be in terms of health or money or the loss of a loved one, but it’s always potentially instructive if we have that attitude rather than a victim attitude or a poor-me attitude, which is not helpful at all to anyone under any circumstance. It is never helpful.

So, even if we find ourselves in really challenging situations, such as a medical diagnosis of some kind, that’s an invitation to really look into whatever is arising in terms of a response to that and to inquire into what’s true in this moment, regardless of the circumstance. If it is bringing up deep fear, then that is an invitation to really look into it, to go into that fear and to really experience it.

Normally, we do everything not to experience whatever arises in response to circumstances, and that creates a very powerful sense of separation from the experience. If we can learn to soften that reactivity to experience, and then inquire into it and trace it back to its source, there’s no longer a “me against” experience. There’s no “me” trying to work out experience and make it hunky-dory.

There may be times when action is needed, but if it’s coming from this truer space of boundless awareness, as I call it—or true nature, consciousness, presence, whatever—then the response will not come from, going back to Buber’s terminology, the “I-it” relationship. It will come from the “I-Thou” sense of nonseparation from the event.

So, it’s not that I’m having this experience and I really don’t like this experience, or I’m having this experience and I really like this experience, which are both two ends of the same continuum. It’s about really inquiring into both of them, feeling whatever is arising in the body-mind as feedback, and really heeding that intuitive advice that’s coming from the system.

This consciousness is supremely intelligent, and the body is consciousness. It’s not that there is a body that is conscious. The body is made of consciousness. It’s the life that is weaving together the cells of your body. It’s weaving together the tissues. It’s beating your heart. It’s breathing you. It’s blinking your eyes and digesting your food and growing new cells after old ones are dying and replenishing itself constantly.

It’s nothing but intelligence, actually. There’s no unconsciousness in the body. The body is full of life. It’s just aliveness expressing and dancing.

The more that we can tune into that and not feel like I am alive, not feel that I have a body, but recognize that I am that—that’s what I am—the better. “I” refers to that conscious intelligence.

That’s what started to wake up here during this process: that nonseparation from cosmic consciousness, which sounds rather grandiose and abstract, but it’s right here in this lived experience, in this moment. It’s not abstract at all.

That’s why I’m suggesting that we drop down with the attention into the felt sense of being consciousness. Not being conscious, but being consciousness. Because there’s no one who’s conscious. There’s simply consciousness that’s alive as the reality and the totality of everything that’s arising.

So, that’s one way to invite suffering closer, rather than trying to push it away or anesthetize it, which is the norm in our culture: to drink it away or drug it away, sex it away, or in some way deny it. Another possibility is to wallow in it, which happens a lot with depression. There are many reasons and causes for that, too, some physiological and biochemical reasons as well. But at the end of the day, the attitude with which we meet whatever arises determines the quality of our experience.

Rick: Yeah, this point is particularly germane in light of the opioid epidemic that’s ravaging many parts of the country. Large numbers of people are trying to numb out, trying to stifle whatever it is they’re feeling.

It seems very shortsighted, because obviously an opioid only lasts for a relatively short amount of time, and then you’re going to feel even worse. But I guess people just don’t feel like there’s a light on the other side of the tunnel. If they could somehow be guided to feel through whatever it was they were trying to stifle, I think they would find that it actually does clear up, and they feel way better than opioids could make them feel temporarily. They feel better all the time than any drug could make them feel momentarily.

Michael: Well, we’re all seeking abiding contentment. Everyone just wants to be at peace and happy in one way or another. Most of us do it unwisely because we don’t know any better. We’ve never been taught what peace really is.

So, we seek momentary peace or pleasure. We seek passing pleasure as a way to feel a momentary sense of relief from the pain that we’re feeling. But we all know—everyone knows innately—that it doesn’t last and it doesn’t work.

Sometimes we have to learn that lesson over and over again until we, as they say, hit rock bottom and can’t do that anymore. The body won’t let you do it. It has given you enough signals that it’s time to wake up from that.

So, we might find ourselves in some recovery program, or we might find ourselves in satsang. I think getting fed up with suffering is actually important. It was important for me that there was a sense that I just can’t suffer anymore.

Rick: Well, let me ask you about that, because the account of your life you’ve given us so far didn’t sound too horrific. You had this great education, you had a teaching job that many would envy, you seemed like a pretty happy guy, and you had all this spiritual—the spiritual thing was dawning ever since you were a child. But then you said you definitely went through a sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll phase, so I’m not sure quite where that fits in the chronology of things.

Michael: Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

Rick: All right.

Michael: Definitely wouldn’t go that far.

Rick: But there was an indulgence in things that you later needed to purify.

Michael: Just the normal, garden-variety indulgence.

Rick: Normal stuff.

Michael: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. So, we talked about this whole purificatory phase that you went through. Maybe you want to talk more about it. At a certain point, was there finally a sort of breakthrough moment in which you would say you woke up? Some people say that they can mark it on a calendar; other people say it snuck up on them.

Michael: It was both.

Rick: Okay.

Michael: It was both, which is why I don’t talk about it in dogmatic terms, and I don’t say it has to be one way or the other. As you know from our conversations, one of my mantras is “both and neither.” Right?

I can’t say it was one of the more—it was a progressive unfolding. When I think about it and construct a story and a narrative, it seemed progressive. Of course, change and progress are mental. They have to be remembered, constructed, and put together in order to have the story of me over time.

Of course, all we ever experience is the eternal presence of awareness, which neither comes nor goes. But if I’m constructing a narrative of my life in time, which requires memory and imagination, there was this sense of the slow cook for 22 years, of conscious slow cooking. Of course, it happened prior to that, too.

Rick: But that was intentional for 22 years.

Michael: Yes, but there were also stations—the Sufis used the word “stations”—like plateaus of understanding and insight where you can’t go back. There were shifts in understanding where understanding and experience would all coalesce and then click into place. Once that clicks, it’s definitive. It’s stable.

There were moments toward the end of that purification process when there were two or three clicks where there was a shift. It was a 180-degree shift, actually, from feeling, thinking, and being a separate self who was conscious to realizing that I am consciousness and that that’s what “I” refers to.

There was a moment of realization that I am the unbroken, eternal continuity of pure awareness.

There was a moment of realization that I am the unbroken, eternal continuity of pure awareness. Since then, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions have no sway. They’re still there, but the understanding has clicked: they’re just passing through, or made out of awareness, or passing through awareness. But “I” refers to awareness, which neither comes nor goes.

So, it’s a literal 180-degree shift in understanding, because prior to that you feel like you are someone who’s making progress and who comes in and out of it. That sense has gone—the sense of being someone who is getting it and losing it, getting it and losing it, which is a common phase that happens.

But there’s no sense of losing myself now. I mean, it’s an absolutely absurd idea to think that I could lose myself. It would be like thinking—I don’t know. It just seems nonsensical to me at this point. There’s no losing the self. The self, without conscious being, nothing could be. So, it’s the foundation and reality of whatever is.

There was a stabilization during this process, where that became just normal and natural again, with no big deal, to be honest with you.

✨ Awakening, evolution, and post-awakening life

Rick: Speaking of Adya again, I was listening to a recording just yesterday in which he was saying that initially, spiritual experiences and breakthroughs can seem amazing, but we acclimate, and we eventually end up in a stable state that doesn’t seem like any big deal at all. If we were to snap into it suddenly, it would seem like a big deal, but we acclimate.

Michael: We acclimate. Eckhart Tolle had his park-bench years, when there was a period of settling into that shift.

Rick: Ramana had his cave years.

Michael: Twenty years, yeah, quite a long time. That period of time will be different for each one of us, but I do like to stress and emphasize that returning to the natural state—which you never actually left—really is natural. It’s a natural stage of evolution, if you will.

The ultimate realization is that the evolutionary path culminates in the realization that consciousness does not evolve. But that is a paradox, and so there is and isn’t this evolutionary path.

Rick: It’s maybe a paradox, but if we’re really clear on what we’re talking about, then consciousness doesn’t evolve, but its expressions evolve, and the vehicles through which it is lived evolve.

It’s like saying electricity is the same, but you have different wattages of light bulbs and different instruments and machines, all of which channel that electricity very differently. They might evolve over time with technological progress, in the case of that metaphor.

Michael: One of the tricks with evolution is that it sets up some goal. If we can agree to have evolution without a goal—post-awakening sadhana, for instance—I would make a differentiation between pre-awakening sadhana and post-awakening. Pre-awakening, you’re really on a journey somewhere, and you have an idea in your mind of what that will be. But post-awakening, this is complete. In my experience, in this moment, this is utter completion.

Rick: And yet if I were to talk to you 20 years from now, you might say, “Whoa, it’s just a lot richer than it was 20 years ago.” You’re not anticipating that or longing for that and all, because you are quite content now. I think, actually, there is a thing where contentment becomes quite predominant and the whole seeking energy drops off because you just feel so content. But, in my opinion, that is not to say that continued evolution of some sort doesn’t happen. I think it does.

Michael: Yeah, it’s a tricky one.

Rick: Even in your own experience, I don’t know when this awakening happened for you, but if you look back to when that was, do you feel like there’s been a maturation, a deepening, a refinement of something in some relative sense? We’re not implying that consciousness is changing anymore.

Michael: Or presence is not changing. By definition, presence is presence. How could you have more or less presence, or a presence that is different than this one? It’s ridiculous, right? And you’re laughing because you can see that.

Rick: I’m laughing because one time my wife and I went camping in Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and it’s a rather foreboding place. You have to really be prepared to get out into the boonies and explore the canyon without dying. And so, we were limited to our campsite and easy walks around that vicinity.

She went to the camp host and the park ranger guy. Here we are in this vast national park, and she said, “Is there any more than this?” And he kind of laughed and looked at her like, “What more could there be? This is an amazing place.”

Michael: Well, that’s one of the things that is realized: There can’t be any more perfection than there is in this moment. That siren is absolutely what it is. It doesn’t have to be changed or improved upon or gotten rid of. It is what it is. Everything is shining with the absolute radiance of pure awareness. And you will never get more or less of that.

That’s part of the realization: It is absolute, regardless of what’s showing up, regardless of the circumstances. All circumstances are shining by the same presence of awareness, and it doesn’t have any gradations in itself.

Now, at the same time, the body-mind does continue to refine, as you say, and to become more sensitive and perhaps transparent to truth. But it is not goal-oriented. And that’s the key. It’s not as if the body is going to become some perfect, bionic body. What is it that I would be striving to be like? What ideal would I set up that would be perfect for me to attain? That’s all mind projection that’s part of pre-awakening sadhana.

So, if we could agree on a kind of post-awakening sadhana, I describe it as a timeless process of unfoldment: post-awakening sadhana, a timeless process. It’s a paradox, meaning there is an awareness of the perfection of every moment as it is. This moment is timeless. This presence is timeless.

And there’s this relative unfoldment in time towards more and more transparency of the body-mind, you could say, but not of awareness. And it’s not particularly going anywhere. It’s just joyful. It’s joyful to be. It’s joyful to express creatively, to be in relationship. But it doesn’t have to be going somewhere.

Just like you don’t listen to a symphony by Beethoven in order to get to the final note. You’re not listening to it thinking, “I can’t wait till the end of this, because that’s going to…” The whole thing is a joy. At every moment that you’re listening to it, it’s complete. The joy is in the total absorption, to be the beauty of that. That’s what life is.

Rick: I think that’s very natural. I think that if a person is bound and suffering and not liberated, not awake, there’s a desperation to achieve relief from that. And there’s a very strong individual desire to wake up, or at least there can be.

But when waking up has taken place and there’s a tremendous relief and contentment, then one can just rest in that. And I don’t think that evolution stops at any point. It’s just that God has sort of taken over in the driver’s seat, and you can relax and enjoy the ride. But the santosh, or contentment, becomes predominant enough that the whole seeking energy drops off. And there’s…

Michael: Well, there’s more energy for other things.

Rick: Yeah.

Michael: You know, like being of service, being in true relationship with friends and family and loved ones, whoever that might be.

Rick: My cup runneth over.

Michael: Yeah, yes, that’s so beautiful. I mean, when awakening was happening, there was such a feeling of plenitude, what they would call the plenum, this overabundance, overflowing abundance. I still see it everywhere. I can’t see any boundary to this abundance. I can’t see any edge or border to it. All I see is just fullness and emptiness at the same time, because it couldn’t appear but for the emptiness in which it appears, by which it is known.

This empty knowing, which it is. I mean, again, this is not abstract. If we try to look for awareness, we can never find it. There’s an empty knowing or an empty aware-ing, as Tony Packer, my first teacher, used to call it—aware-ing, to make it into a verb.

Rick: I think Paul Hedderman says something like this, too. He has some funny words.

Michael: Yeah, there’s that sense of aliveness to it, rather than awareness as this dead object, this thing. It’s life. It’s life itself, and there’s no beginning or end to life. It’s just absolutely clear to me that there is no beginning or end to what this is.

And so, the body takes on more universal proportions, because we do have an individual body in a relative sense, but that individual body is woven with its infinite environment. There is no beginning or end to the environment. It’s part of an infinite network of being.

Going back to my childhood question, what is on the other side of the universe when you get to it? And, of course, the realization that dawned is that there’s no end to this. There’s no beginning to this. But experientially, that revealed itself, so that the body became nonseparate from this beginningless and endless whatever we call this, whatever this is.

The body is both individual and universal, and that’s when I think the real flow of being starts to really run through uninterruptedly and without any sort of kinks in it. There is a sense of freefall or free flow of just being this without finding any limitation to it, any border or any place where beingness can get, or your consciousness can get, snagged. There is no sense of getting stuck. What would that even mean?

Everything is change and flow and flux. Nothing gets stuck. Everything is fresh. It’s just memory that gives the illusion that there’s a sense of stuckness. But this is just totally new. This has never happened before, this feeling, this sensation.

And there is a sense of joy about that, about just being awake to awakeness, which is all it is. It’s just being awake to the fact that there is awakeness. It’s being conscious of the fact that there is consciousness, which Nisargadatta would call the highest meditation: to be aware of being aware, to be conscious of being conscious.

And not a person being aware, but just awareness is aware of being aware. And that is so freeing. There’s no “me” who’s against experience anymore. There’s just a flow of experience with no center, and that’s the key: no center.

📚 Nisargadatta and other guiding teachers

Rick: You told us about your time with Tony Packer and Philip Kaplow, but then I know you also have a picture of Nisargadatta here. You never met him in person, but you consider him your root teacher. Of all the pictures you could have brought, you brought this one.

Michael: Because this is the one that’s in I Am That. I was actually going to bring my copy of I Am That, because it’s the copy I’ve had for 22 years. It’s just a mess, but I can’t get rid of it. And this is the picture that was in that. I’ve just lived with that picture for 22 years. That’s why I chose that one out of all the others.

So, yeah, I discovered—or he discovered me—when I think I was 18. And I think it was Tony Packer who introduced me to him. There was just an immediate resonance, and he completely seized my being. The power, the incredible power and insight that came through was just unparalleled.

And I’ve had a lot of great teachers, including Ramana, but there’s no one for me who compares to the crystal clarity of Nisargadatta, to his transmission through I Am That, which is remarkable.

If you think about the fact that this book was translated from his original language by Morris Friedman, the power is still full force. You feel like you’re sitting there in his little studio in Bombay, that he could be smoking beedis right in front of you. It is that powerful.

It has an incredible transmission, and it always will, for anybody who encounters that text. It’s a living, breathing text, and it has the power to shift consciousness and to trigger realizations in a way that I have never seen in anything else.

But we’re all different. For some people, that might come in talks with Ramana Maharshi, or it might come in any number of ways. But for me, it was definitive. It formed the foundation for everything else that came.

I just lived him throughout the whole process, and when it seemed dark and pointless and altogether futile, I would always turn to him, and there would always be a sense that this is possible. I knew it was true. I knew it was true immediately, and the whole way through, although it took a long time to come to that realization for myself.

And then later, I met Rupert Spira and became deeply, deeply touched by his pointings, particularly the path of inclusion and his extraordinary descriptions of the nature of consciousness, how there are no objects in experience, and how consciousness is the reality of what we call objectivity.

He was profoundly influential for me. I had a number of key awakenings through my engagement with his work, and in many ways, I still draw from him, even though I’ve developed a different way of talking and expressing this. There are some really important understandings that came through him.

But he was prepared by Nisargadatta. And then the other one was Mooji, who was such an overwhelmingly powerful force, just as Rupert was. They were both sort of working synergistically in very different ways because they’re such different expressions.

They are rather opposite in a lot of ways, but Mooji really helped to clarify the nature of pure awareness and to open up the heart to the wellspring of love, unconditional love, affection, creativity, spontaneity, and intuition.

All these things came from Rupert. They were both contributing, like the yin and the yang, towards some full understanding that was founded on my engagement with Nisargadatta, which was the foundation for that. So, it was just a tremendous amount of gratitude to all three of them, really.

Rick: So, you’ve written a book, and some people who will be watching this in a few years can buy that book now if they want to, but those who watch it right after I put it up might have to wait a year.

Michael: Yeah, it’s going to take a little while.

Rick: It’s still in the works. But I think you’re going to set up—or by the time this airs, you may have set up—on your website a way of signing up to be notified when the book is published. I would recommend that. What is the book about?

Michael: The book is tentatively titled The Uncreated Light of Awareness. It’s been accepted by Non-Duality Press, which has recently been acquired by New Harbinger. So, it will take about a year to come out, and it’s a book that examines the nature of awareness from the perspective of experience.

It contains a lot of experiential contemplations and meditations that lead the reader into the direct realization of boundless awareness, and to have that become established as the natural state. And then there is a deconstruction of the psychological self, and a re-establishment back in the seat of awareness.

And then there’s a chapter on integration, where this is taken into our normal everyday lives, so that it’s lived in the midst of fire and pressure, so that it becomes real. Our lives become saturated with it, this understanding at every level, and there is nothing that is left out. There’s no sense that truth is not applicable to some aspect of life.

That really everything becomes saturated in the understanding, and that we are able to live and relate as love, which is, at the end of the day, what it’s all about.

Rick: Great. So, you have alluded to working with people and with groups and stuff like that, and you live in the Bay Area, but people will be listening to this from all over the world. So, do you do Skype sessions with people?

Michael: I do. I do regular Skype sessions with people, which work remarkably well. Actually, one of the most beautiful things to come out of the work I’ve been doing with people on Skype is the realization, when I’m working with someone on this presence that we’ve been talking about, that people who are in Australia and India and in just all corners of the world, we tune in together, there is no distance, literally.

It’s the same presence.

It’s the same presence. It’s like falling into a wormhole, and it just connects these two seemingly disparate people in space and time into this non-dual presence, which is so warm and juicy and loving. It’s been just a beautiful experience.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of that and also doing online satsangs, and we’re putting together some satsangs in person and also doing retreats. I’m giving a retreat in Greece in July, a seven-day retreat there, and some satsangs in London and more to come. So, people can check all that out on the events page on my website.

Rick: Which is?

Michael: boundlessawareness.org.

Rick: So, thanks, Michael. This has been great. I really enjoyed talking to you. We should do it more often.

Michael: I would love that.

Rick: And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. As most of you probably know, this is an ongoing series, and if you would like to be notified of future ones, there’s a mailing list you can sign up for at batgap.com.

If you’d like to check out past ones, go into the past interviews menu and you’ll see hundreds of them organized and categorized in various ways. And check out the other menus too, because there are a lot of interesting little things, and we keep adding stuff as time goes along.

I started a quote section where, whenever somebody sends me a quote or I come across a great little quote that I find inspiring, I’m adding it in a categorized kind of a way. We have a glossary of non-dual terms that someone sent me that I put up there.

There’s a geographical index where you can type in a city such as London and you’ll see what’s coming up in London among all the people I’ve interviewed. Once Michael puts in his information, you’ll see the details about Michael’s visit to London, and a bunch of other stuff.

So, just check out the menus, and we continue, we hope to continue making this a more and more valuable resource for spiritual seekers and people in general everywhere. See you next time.

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