Summary
Michael Speight describes a lifelong path of meditation, mystical experiences, and service within the Transcendental Meditation movement. He reflects on the value of sustained practice, the unusual perceptions that can arise, and how awakening may be recognized and understood.
Questions This Interview Explores
- Can meditation begun early in life lead to profound spiritual realization?
- What kinds of experiences may arise through intensive meditation practice?
- How can someone distinguish genuine awakening from a temporary mystical experience?
- Does spiritual awakening always happen suddenly, or can it unfold gradually?
Key takeaways
- Consistent practice can remain meaningful even when dramatic results do not appear.
- Meditation, yoga, and breathwork supported a lifelong commitment to inner realization.
- Mystical perceptions may arise during intensive practice, but they are not the same as awakening.
- Awakening can arrive suddenly or develop so gradually that no clear turning point is noticed.
- It can be helpful to test profound spiritual experiences with trusted, experienced practitioners.
- A genuine realization is marked by an enduring shift rather than a passing peak 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. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch other ones, please go to batgap.com and go under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the others archived.
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My guest today is Michael Speight. Michael is an interesting guy. His background is somewhat similar to mine. He was in the TM movement for many years, and he has lived, in many respects, what I would say is a much saner life than mine. He had his first profound mystical experience when he was eleven, when I was still a totally confused little guy who hadn’t even gotten to Boy Scouts yet. He bypassed many of the destructive aspects of the sixties that I indulged in, and it paid off for him. He had a profound awakening, and he’s had all kinds of beautiful mystical experiences throughout his life.
So I don’t know why I launched into that little comparative narrative there, but welcome, Michael.
Michael: Thank you.
Rick: Whatever pops into my head, you know. Okay, so Michael lives in Ogden, Utah, which is right near Salt Lake, and there’s an interesting reason why he lives there. We’ll see whether we get into that or not. But he’s lived a fascinating life for the last many, many decades, and I think we want to start, Michael, with the experience you had in the library when you were eleven, because that really kind of launched your spiritual quest.
Discovering Philosophy and Religion in the Library
Michael: Okay. My school took a trip to the library, and we had the opportunity to go exploring a bit. Most of the kids went off to the children’s section, and I didn’t. I took off to the other side of the library and ended up in the philosophy and religion section.
I was just walking slowly down that aisle, and I was drawn to a book. I mean, I literally just looked over, and my hand went out almost on automatic pilot. I pulled this book off the shelf.
Rick: I’ve had people who’ve done things like that, and the books actually fall off the shelf. They don’t have to reach for them. Some book falls off, they look at it, and it’s Ramana Maharshi or something.
Michael: Oh my gosh, wow. Well, I wasn’t quite like that. But yeah, I opened it up and looked through it, and there was a black-and-white photograph of the Potala Palace. My whole…
Rick: Which is?
Michael: That’s in Lhasa, Tibet, the living quarters for the Dalai Lama.
Rick: Before he got banished or whatever.
Michael: Right. So I looked at it, and I just recognized that it was huge—just this huge emotional welling up. It just looked like home.
It just felt like my house, totally familiar to me.
Rick: Did you later have any past-life experiences, vivid ones about that, or was it just more this familiarity when you were eleven?
Michael: Yeah. Later, my wife and I had a shared experience. Oh my gosh, I was… and we had it at the same moment. We were sitting there talking, and we both went, “Did you just get that?”
I was riding on my horse. I was all decked out, and I was going into this town somewhere in the Himalayas to collect my bride, who was my current wife. She saw me coming and took off—beat feet—and we didn’t get married. But she could describe the horse, and I could describe the horse. We both saw the same thing, and I think that’s why we got married in this life: to deal with that.
Rick: Yeah, you had a karmic debt to pay there.
Michael: Yeah, a serious one, but it was a lot of fun.
And so that book changed my life. It was one of Alexandra David-Néel’s works. She’s that woman who spent, what was it, eighteen years in Tibet. I read the book, and it talked about mystical things to me as a child: people levitating and melting snow around them, and people walking super-fast in the Himalayas, guided by stars and things like that.
So I was smitten with that. I was just like, “Wow, man, I want to know how to do that.” From reading the book, where she talked about meditation, I somehow cognized a meditation that later turned out to be a traditional Tibetan visualization meditation. I practiced that pretty much every day until I had a profound experience of pure consciousness—what in the TM movement they would call the transcendent. It was very profound.
After that, it was just, “This is what I want for my life. That’s the goal. That’s what I want to have.” Of course, I had to make a living and do all those things that everybody else has to do, but I didn’t lose sight of that.
After that, it was just, “This is what I want for my life. That’s the goal. That’s what I want to have.” Of course, I had to make a living and do all those things that everybody else has to do, but I didn’t lose sight of that.
Rick: Nice. I just got a little bit distracted. I want to say to those listening—I usually mention this at some point—that if you’re listening to the live recording and want to post a question during this interview, go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. You’ll see a form at the bottom of that page through which you can post questions. That is true of all the interviews I do on Skype.
Okay, so when you had that experience of the transcendent, can you describe it a little bit more? I mean, how did you know—or maybe you didn’t know at the time—that it was an experience of the transcendent, and you later put words to it?
Michael: Yeah, I didn’t know. At that time, I put those words to it after I had met Maharishi and learned what we learned. It was just that—I would say what I related to it at the time was “the peace that passeth all understanding.” That was because we grew up going to church and all that sort of stuff, and that was it for me.
I worked very hard after that trying to recreate the experience, and I think what got in the way was that my father passed away when I was fourteen—rather untimely. You know, as a young boy or young man, you’re struggling with puberty, and so it was a little bit difficult, although I kept practicing. Then I tried other things. I tried Zen for a number of years, but didn’t get anywhere with that.
Rick: It’s kind of impressive that at that young age, throughout your entire adolescence, you practiced meditation regularly. What, an hour, two hours a day? I mean, how much?
Michael: I probably did an hour or more each time. The other thing I should say is that my father was into gymnastics, and my brother and I were both gymnasts from knee-high. We even had some equipment in our backyard. Through that, I started a Hatha yoga practice. I started doing Hatha yoga before I was eleven, and I did that regularly, so that may have had something to do with it.
Somewhere along the line—I don’t remember exactly where—when I was young, I learned about pranayama, so I’ve been doing some breathing exercises.
Rick: That’s really cool.
Michael: So it all just felt right. I will say, I did not share any of that with my mother after my dad passed away because I just didn’t feel… I was concerned.
Rick: Sure.
Michael: You know, I didn’t want my mother to worry about anything. She had enough to worry about with my dad being gone.
Rick: Yeah. But it’s impressive, because most kids that age are just bouncing off the walls. There’s no way you can get them to sit still, and here you were meditating at least an hour a day. To me, it’s sort of my way of thinking that it indicates some kind of carryover from past lives.
The only thing I ever had like that was that I figured out how to put my legs in the lotus posture.
Michael: Oh, cool.
Rick: You know, just when I was sitting around in the neighborhood playing around: “Oh, you can put this leg up here, and then that leg can go up there.” I actually won a prize at a birthday party for doing that. I didn’t get any inkling of the Enlightenment thing until I was about—I don’t know. It all just felt very normal for me. It just felt natural.
But the fact that you meditated so diligently, even when it wasn’t really easy and you weren’t really getting any great results from it, that’s amazing to me.
Michael: I don’t know. Those books—by the time I graduated, by the time I finished tenth grade, I had read every single book in that library’s philosophy and religion section.
Rick: Wow, that’s impressive.
Michael: So I was running out of things. Through all of that—you can see the bookshelf behind me—that’s what’s left of my several-thousand-book collection. I’ve got it down to that now.
I kept studying, reading, and trying to learn, and that was always very inspiring. Then, when I was about seventeen, my best friend from Boy Scouts’ father owned a bunch of horses. He would take people on hunting and fishing camps in the summer, and he’d get us boys to work, which was, wow, you know. We’d go up in the Sierras.
We used to go up from this base at Lone Pine in the Sierras. There was a cabin there, and we always stopped to water the horses before going over the 8,000-foot pass. We’d always knock on the door of the cabin. Mostly nobody was there, but this one time a man answered the door.
There was something about him. I didn’t know what it was, but there was something about him that was different. Many years later, I found out that that was Franklin Merrill-Wolfe.
Rick: Oh, I’ll be darned. How cool.
Michael: Yeah, and I was seventeen, so there you go.
Rick: Tell people who he is, just briefly, just in case they…
Michael: Franklin Merrill-Wolfe was an extraordinarily brilliant man—a PhD, mathematician, and philosopher. He got into Shankara in a big way back in the twenties and thirties and had a complete realization. He wrote a number of very fine books and had a small following.
He found Los Angeles—he was living in Los Angeles—and found it too difficult, so he and his wife moved to that cabin up there.
Rick: Hey, that’s cool. And then, also, since you’re talking about Boy Scouts in the mountains, there was this interesting story you told about how you were camping. You just had tents, and there was this really violent storm coming up the valley. Why don’t you tell that one, just for kicks?
Michael: Oh, wow. Yeah, we’d been out on a Scout trip. We hiked about sixty or seventy miles of the John Muir Trail every summer, and we’d done that. It was the last day, or the last night, before we hiked out.
We were in this canyon, so to speak—a big, broad canyon with mountains on both sides. At the end, where we’d come off the pass down into it, there was a lake. A storm cranked up that was just mind-boggling: lightning, thunder, dark clouds. It was really something, and it was coming down the valley right toward us.
Everybody was getting a little worried, so the Scouts started putting… We had tube tents, you know—worthless things.
Rick: That’s like a pup tent or something?
Michael: It’s a plastic tube, and you run a line through it between two trees and sort of make a pup tent out of it with a couple of clothespins. You’re going to get wet, but not as bad. So people were putting those up, and I didn’t. I went over by myself, knelt down, and prayed. I literally prayed in a very Christian fashion from my childhood, which was a Catholic, high-Episcopal Catholicism.
I just prayed and asked, “Could we be spared this storm? It’s got to really wipe us out. It could kill people. You’ll get lightning going everywhere.” There wasn’t much around there, just right there, slightly above tree line. The storm came down and got right up to the edge of our camp, where you could stick your arm out and get water on it, get wet, pull it back, and it’d be dry. Then this wind came out of the north and blew that storm right around our camp, literally, just clunk—very precise.
Rick: Yeah, like twenty feet, and then it came back to where it had been, except on the other side of us, and went on down the valley. We were all dry. The other kids were like, “What are you doing? Why don’t you put up your tube tent?” I said, “No, we’re not going to get wet. I just knew it.” It was powerful.
Michael: I’ve always felt much closer to God up in the mountains.
Rick: Sure, yeah, me too. I love mountains, whether hiking or skiing or whatever you do in them. I’ve always loved them, which is why I live in Iowa, right? I grew up in Connecticut.
Michael: There’s some irony there.
Rick: Yeah, so there are some other interesting stories like that in your life, but they happen later on, so let’s come back to those. Perhaps moving chronologically, which is sometimes an orderly way to go, tell us a bit about how you ended up getting into TM.
❤️ Meeting Maharishi
Michael: I had a friend whose parents shared the hospital room with my parents, and he was born the day before I was. So we just grew up together like family. He had gone off to Humboldt State College—it wasn’t a university, but I guess it was a state college—in Northern California.
Rick: In Eureka.
Michael: Yeah, actually north of Eureka.
Rick: Arcata.
Michael: Arcata, that’s it, yeah. I had gotten a job packing mules for the U.S. Forest Service in the backcountry, which was $2.75 an hour for sitting on your horse and riding around God’s country. It was fabulous.
First Encounter with Maharishi
But he said, “Why don’t you come up and help me pay the rent?” That was his modus operandi; he was always kind of like that. Then he said, “Oh, there’s this guy named Maharishi up here.” That didn’t ring a bell with me. I didn’t know who that was.
I resigned my job. It was coming toward the end of my 90-day appointment anyway, so I just left and went up to Humboldt. It turned out Maharishi was there doing the 1970 teacher training course. I met all these people whom I thought were really cool hanging out there, and I really liked the way they felt. I can remember a bunch of us getting together and singing “Hey Jude.” How Sixties is that?
But I went up to the place where Maharishi would come to give his lectures and waited for him to arrive. I did that, I think, three times. I wasn’t impressed, but I kept going back. There was something that just pulled me there.
Then, I think it was about the fourth time, there was a very well-dressed man standing there, with a blue blazer and all that sort of stuff, and I got into an in-depth conversation with him. I’m one of those people who talks to anybody; I love talking to people. We had this really amazing conversation.
Maharishi arrived, and then the doors opened. The whole crowd of people was out there, and I just got sucked along with them and pulled right in. I was given a seat in the front row, about two seats down from the gentleman who turned out to be the keynote speaker, a professor from Stanford. It was an amazing, amazing lecture.
Just listening to Maharishi speak, being that close to him, and sensing how he felt to me, I thought, “This is my teacher. This is the guy who’s going to open this up for me.”
So I went to ask if I could learn from him. He had a room that he would go to on campus—not where he was actually staying, but for between things—and I went up and waited in line. I took a little flower with me and stood there like this.
As he was walking toward me, I had this thought that I shouldn’t take his time. I thought that I should dedicate my life to freeing his time so that he could bring his teaching to the world. In that moment, I took a classic Zen-type bodhisattva vow not to give up until all sentient beings reached enlightenment.
Then I sat there and thought, “Oh, God, what did I just do?” But that seemed to really pay off because, getting ahead a bit, later on, after I’d become a teacher, I was invited to join Maharishi’s staff—well, a course staff. That worked out to joining Maharishi’s international staff, and that worked out to being Maharishi’s personal assistant.
Rick: Yeah, that’s nice. What years were you on the international staff?
Michael: ’73, and then we came back and found MIU, went through all of that, and then I went back. I was back and forth quite a bit.
Rick: Well, let’s not take too much time on that, but there must have been some overlap. I was over there from about the fall of ’73 through the spring of ’76.
Michael: Oh, yeah, yeah. Probably we crossed paths. It’s not as though there was any lack of people around Maharishi. I was at Seelisberg and Hertenstein, Weggis, you know, those places—the usual suspects.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, so when you finally learned—I guess it wasn’t from Maharishi; it was from somebody else—was your initial experience what you’d hoped it would be?
Michael: Oh, yes. First meditation, and I was like, “Wow, God, yes.” It was one of those moments. It was very, very powerful. Then I promptly forgot my mantra and had to get it recovered.
The other thing that happened was that I instantly started doing an hour’s worth of meditation each time.
Rick: You just sink into it?
Michael: Yeah. I closed my eyes, and when I thought time was up, I’d open them, and it would be an hour later.
Rick: Yeah, even though it’s supposed to be 20 minutes, you lose track, right?
Michael: Yeah, I did.
✨ Awakening and integration
Rick: Yeah. Cool. Well, I don’t want this to be—I mean, TM had a profound effect on me. I tend not to be a proselytizer for it anymore, or in these interviews, certainly. At the same time, sometimes it gets brushed off as trivial, or just a stress-reduction technique, or something good for beginners. I think that does it a disservice because it’s been very profound for many people, and many people have awakened as a result of its practice.
Michael: Absolutely. I think TM is one of the fast-path methods, which simply means that you have a shot at it in one lifetime, and it certainly was very, very profound. I owe Maharishi a debt that is unrepayable, from one point of view. He’s the greatest teacher I’ve ever known. I learned more around him than even anybody else. An amazing, extraordinary man.
Rick: Yeah. You mentioned that within six months of beginning, your grade-point average went from a 1.28 to a 4.0. That’s nice. We’ll keep moving along here, but were there any particularly noteworthy experiences during that whole phase when you were Maharishi’s personal attendant or anything?
Michael: Well, yeah. On my teacher training course, there was a lot of celestial perception, or refined perception of things—seeing through walls, watching people’s souls, cognizing their thoughts, healing people. There was a lot going on.
Rick: Yeah. You were probably meditating 10 to 12 hours a day or something?
Michael: Eighteen. Maharishi was in silence, and then he came out, I think, the next day or so—maybe that evening; I don’t remember exactly—and he said, “Okay, how long have you been meditating for?” We’d all been doing twelve-plus hours. He got around to a meeting and was like, “Oh, well, it’d be good to cool it off a little bit.”
Rick: Yeah. You mentioned in some notes I read that you had instructed about 17,000 people to meditate. How in the world did you do that many people?
Michael: Yeah, I have to point out that that’s actually instruction in meditation and advanced techniques, and I’ve led a couple of TM Siddhis courses.
Rick: Oh, if you count all those people, okay.
Michael: Yeah, you’ve got to put it all in there. Maharishi made me a TM Siddhis administrator and an advanced-techniques teacher, which really upset some people in the movement who weren’t on the call, so to speak. That had some interesting ramifications. That’s another reason why I don’t have much to do with the TM movement anymore. Actually, I don’t have anything to do with the TM movement anymore.
Rick: There’s all this politics in organizations, you know.
Michael: There are.
Rick: Okay, so at some point, you say you awakened, or became self-realized or something. People post these videos on YouTube. Just the other day, someone brought one to my attention that was going on about how this guy had become enlightened. I didn’t watch the whole thing; I just spot-checked a few bits of it. He went on for a couple of hours looking at his hand and looking at the wall and talking about how he had become enlightened.
It reminds me, when I see things like that, that the whole concept of awakening and enlightenment and so on is a little fuzzy in the popular understanding. There’s no clear-cut, agreed-upon definition of what we mean by these terms. So what do you mean by them? When you say that you became realized or awake, what happened?
Michael: How would you know that?
Rick: How would you know, and what do you mean by it, as compared to what all the other people who say it mean by it? I don’t know if you got them all in the same room and had them compare notes. There might be some overlap and agreement, and some disagreement.
Michael: Yeah, it might well be. I was speaking on the phone to a man whom I know to be enlightened. I’m not going to mention his name because I don’t have permission to do that. He was asking me some hard-hitting questions, and all of a sudden I just went, “Whoa, boom!” It was dramatic.
I felt my whole crown chakra burst open. I felt like the top of my head was on fire. I felt Shakti going up out of the top of my head. I’ve never had anything that dramatic before. He just kind of laughed and said, “Well, there you are.” I said, “Okay.”
I wasn’t necessarily going to take his word for it because I’ve had other profound experiences—nothing like that—but it never went away. It’s still there. I checked it with two of Maharishi’s Vedic couples and went over everything with them. I talked to Jerry—you know who I mean, Jerry?
Rick: Jerry Jarvis.
Michael: Yeah, and we talked quite a bit. I also talked to another enlightened person I know, and I went over all my experiences and what was going on.
The other thing I would say is that, because Maharishi trained us so well and gave us such clear definitions of these things, it was self-evident to me. My experience was exactly as he described. I didn’t really have any doubts about it from the beginning, but I did want to verify it with other people.
Rick: He didn’t exactly use the terms “Whoa, boom.”
Michael: No.
Rick: And he didn’t talk too much about flames coming out of your head.
Michael: No, and that’s unusual. Let me say, I have friends, a couple in Fairfield, California, who just sort of woke up. In fact, one of them was awake for about four years and she thought she was, but finally she talked to somebody else and they went, “Oh yeah, you’re there,” and she went, “Oh yeah, okay, that makes sense.” It was just natural and smooth. A big, flashy boom is probably more rare.
Rick: Yeah, some people distinguish between people who have these sudden, dramatic awakenings and “oozers,” you know, who kind of ooze into it. They couldn’t quite mark on a calendar when the shift happened, but in retrospect they realize, “Whoa, you know, I mean, it’s all different now.”
Michael: Well, the thing that I would add to that is that about a week before this happened, something inside me quit. It just gave up. Now, I didn’t stop meditating or anything, but just something in me surrendered—that’s the word. I think that’s what changed. Something in me surrendered, and with that surrendering, then in that moment, it went through.
Rick: I think that’s key because a lot of people say you don’t do it or make it happen. It’s not something you get or you do.
Why Transcendence Cannot Be Forced
That’s correct, yeah. I agree with that completely. Maharishi always told us you can’t force transcendence. That’s my experience of it. We set up the conditions for it. No matter what teaching you’re following, no matter what meditation you’re following, you’re relaxing, you’re letting go—whatever it is. Whether it’s advice to intellectuals, something in there shifts and changes until that surrender takes place. The word usually used is grace.
Michael: That’s correct, yeah. I agree with that completely. Maharishi always told us you can’t force transcendence. That’s my experience of it. We set up the conditions for it. No matter what teaching you’re following, no matter what meditation you’re following, you’re relaxing, you’re letting go—whatever it is. Whether it’s advice to intellectuals, something in there shifts and changes until that surrender takes place. The word usually used is grace.
We set up the conditions for it, but we can’t force transcendence.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes they’ve used the analogy of, let’s say, a pan of water that’s a little choppy, and you want the waves to settle down and the water to become perfectly still. You just have to let that happen. You don’t do it by pushing on the waves to try to get them to stop, because then you just create more waves if you do that.
Michael: Yeah, good analogy.
Rick: So, okay, you’re a guy who had a rather marked and abrupt shift. What was life like, let’s say, the week after that shift that was different from the week before that shift? What changed? You say it continues to this day, so what’s different about you now than before the shift, in terms of your subjective experience?
Michael: The week after, I went to bed.
Rick: Really? Because you were wiped out by it?
Michael: I was wiped out. I was totally hosed. I hit the sack. I didn’t get out of bed except to eat. My wife would check on me: “You’re okay?” “Yep, dear, I’m fine. Better than I’ve ever been.” I was totally awake—vivid, amazing, extraordinary. It was a shift in perception that I couldn’t really put my finger on. I can point at it with words, but I can’t describe it. Everything was amazing, and the top of my head felt open and alive, just on fire. That went on for actually about a month.
After that, there was this sort of roller-coaster ride where some days I felt totally amazing and other days I felt like rock bottom again. That fluctuated like that, and my understanding is that it’s not all that uncommon.
Rick: No, it’s not. Usually, there’s an integration phase going on. There’s been this big blowout, and the nervous system has to catch up or adapt to it.
Michael: Yeah, I think so. But I’m going to leap ahead a little bit and say that you never exhaust it.
Rick: What do you mean?
Michael: Well, you’ve gone into a pure consciousness that is on a first-name basis with infinity, so there you are, you know, and infinity is infinite and you can’t exhaust it. So you’re always going to grow, you’re always going to have the opportunity to expand, and you’re always going to have the opportunity for more knowledge in one sense, although your awareness is huge.
Just in talking to you right now, I’ve been cognizing you. Your physiology and self are getting structured in me. That happens a lot with people. They come and see me, and we just sit and talk. Then I’ll look at them and say, “Oh my goodness, what happened to your ribs?” And they say, “Oh, I cracked three of them.” You start to see on a more refined level.
The other piece of it is that you and I come from the TM tradition, where Maharishi used English words to describe traditional states of consciousness. He also said it’s really only one big, giant state of consciousness. We use these descriptors to talk to you about this maturation, this maturing, this growth as you proceed through it.
My experience of that was that just two and a half months later, I was in what we call Brahman. That’s another one. I went back and remembered Maharishi told us, “Okay, go read the Brahma Sutras.” So I have them. I pull them off the shelf, and it was like, “Oh, this makes sense. I’ve been reading these for 40 years.” And they said, “Okay, okay.” Each Upanishad was like that.
But the greatest part of that is a feeling of coming home, a feeling of complete naturalness, a freedom—total freedom—a freedom of equality with all things, a joy, a blissful state. Not like what we might think of as winning the lottery, which would be joyful, but it’s not the same thing. It’s more subtle and more powerful than that. So it was a pretty quick turnaround.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And I’m still getting used to it. I’m honest, you know; it’s still every day is like, “Oh, wow.”
Rick: Yeah, it’s like another day in Disneyland.
Michael: Yeah.
Rick: So when did this happen, this shift, this awakening?
Michael: Not that long ago.
Rick: Oh, just a few years or something?
Michael: No, actually, the full shift took place last summer.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Michael: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I’m a newbie.
Infinity, unity, and the world
Rick: Okay, good, interesting. You know, I wanted to question you on some of the stuff you’re just saying about infinity and all. In mathematics, you can have infinity and then you can have bigger infinities. You could take infinity and add ten to it and that’s bigger, or you can take infinity and square it or cube it or take it to the tenth power. They play with this kind of concept.
But in terms of consciousness and our experience of consciousness—your experience—do you feel and find that there’s a sort of dimension that isn’t going to change or get bigger or vaster or anything else? It’s already infinite, so what more could be added to it? And yet the embodiment of that, the living of that, the expression of that, the channeling of that through a human life has no end of growth. Does that fit your experience, or would you say it differently?
Michael: I think that’s a very good way of saying it. What I would say is this: Before enlightenment, we tend to think of infinity—and a lot of mathematicians do that—as something linear. It started over here and goes off infinitely in that direction.
The kind of infinity of pure consciousness isn’t like that. Aurobindo used to say, “Satyam Ritam Brihat”—the truth, the right, the vast. So it’s that vastness which your awareness begins to encompass. I think some people who have been there longer have maybe a greater sense of that than I might at this point in time.
To me, there’s a sense of it being limitless, and that’s pretty amazing, while at the same time there’s a sense of continued growth and understanding. You’ve got to remember, in the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna sits down with Arjuna to have their discussion, he starts with the subject of knowledge and then he talks about experience.
Rick: Samkhya, then yoga.
Michael: Yeah, and I think that you can still learn things. I met a woman who was the first person Maharishi connected with when he went to Hawaii back in ’59, before he even came to San Francisco. She told me that she was very—“Oh, the poor little man, he didn’t know anything about Christianity.” And I had to tell him. I still remember her saying that. Okay, little did she know, but yeah, he probably didn’t know much about Christianity. So he learned. He learned. He still learned.
Rick: Well, sure. You know how to fly helicopters, I’m told. You said you have a helicopter license, but you don’t know how to fly 747s, and you don’t know how to do brain surgery, and you don’t know how to play the drums, maybe. Obviously, there are all kinds of relative things we can learn, and no one would expect an enlightened person to be able to do all those things or know all those things. Those are specialized channels of knowledge and ability, right?
But what we’re kind of alluding to here is: What is it that is intrinsic to awakening that would be a common denominator for all people?
Michael: Well, I hope—yeah, gosh, that’s good. I’m glad you asked that, because I’ve listened to a few other marvelous interviews, and I think that this is a common question that comes up with people. You’re asking two things. You’re saying, “What’s your experience?” and you’re saying, “What’s the common denominator that everybody might experience?”
I’m going to guess that my experience might be slightly different from somebody else’s, but have the commonality of that vastness, that awareness, and that unity. The unity piece is, for me, very important. If I look at an object and focus my attention on it, I cannot differentiate between myself and the object that I’m looking at.
Rick: And yet you know where to stick the fork when you eat dinner.
Michael: Yeah, and yet you do, which is probably that lesha-avidya thing. We’ve got to still survive and be able to eat and all of that.
Rick: Yeah, lesha-avidya, meaning faint remains of ignorance.
Michael: Right.
Duality as Divine Manifestation
Rick: And yet is it ignorance? Is appreciation of any sort of duality ignorance, or is it that the divine—that we’re appreciating the richness and variety of God and of God’s creation? Do we want to brush it off as being illusion, or do we want to see it as the divine in form?
Michael: I want to do both. I want to see the divine in form, and I want to appreciate that, because that’s part of the reason for creation, we’re told. The Vedic literature talks about that, and all great saints have talked about the joy of God’s creation, experiencing that and living that, and living that in its absolute fullness.
But you’ve got to remember Maharishi’s talk about living 200%.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: So we’re living 100% of the absolute value, or that vastness, that pure consciousness, but we’re also living 100% of the relative value. I don’t see those as incompatible. Frankly, I get frustrated with these teachers who say, “Oh no, none of that. That’s all nonsense. It’s all illusion. It’s all maya. It doesn’t exist,” because this does exist.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a term in Sanskrit, “mithya,” which means dependent reality. They use the example of a pot, which looks like a pot and acts like a pot. You can put things in it, and yet it’s really only clay. So is there really a pot, or is there only clay? Well, both.
Maybe the clay thing is more fundamental than the pot thing, but that still doesn’t mean there is no pot, right?
Michael: Well, I think people who perhaps—I’m guessing, but perhaps the reason why some people like to emphasize complete nonduality is because it can shake the unenlightened mind, the unrealized mind, a little bit out of its stupor and maybe make it freeze up a little bit, where then it has to expand and look at things a little bit differently.
Rick: Maybe, but I think it also tends to confuse a lot of people because they’re trying to hold down jobs and raise families and take life a little bit seriously, and they’re being fed this thing over and over again that you don’t exist, and there is no universe, and it’s all an illusion, and nothing matters, and you have no free will, and it’s all preordained, and yada yada. I don’t know if those teachings are really applicable or appropriate or useful for everybody.
Michael: Yeah, well, I agree with you. I don’t think they’re useful for everybody. I think that you have to define your terms. I spent a lot of years in the computer industry, and one of the first things you do is define your terms before you get into a discussion, to make sure you’re all on the same page. I think that there’s a huge disparity between cultural contexts and understanding. My background is in religious studies.
So if you grew up in Japan and you grew up around Zen Buddhism and you’re familiar with those terms, and then you take that to America, Alan Watts is a good example of a guy who completely blew it, in my opinion. I think he tried, but he just didn’t really get Zen, and so he didn’t translate it into our culture in the way that perhaps would have been as useful as it might have been.
So we see a lot of that misunderstanding taking place, and I think that I did that. I think we all did that with Maharishi’s teachings and other people’s teachings. We read it, we see it at the level where we were, and then later we go, “Oh, I didn’t see that before.”
🕊️ Tradition, culture, and cognitive dissonance
Rick: Yeah, that brings up an interesting question. A few minutes ago, you talked about how you had this awakening and then, within a couple of months, you sort of got to Brahman, as you use the word Brahman. I was thinking about how, if there’s a religious tradition or a culture in which you’re told over and over again from your formative years that the whole concept of God is irrelevant and ultimately everything is emptiness and things like that, I wonder if that’s the kind of experience you grow into, and whether there are outliers or mavericks in such cultures who begin to experience God and wonder, “Well, they never told me about this.”
Or whereas if you’re in another culture which emphasizes the development of God consciousness and higher states than self-realization, whether you naturally grow into those. What do you think about that?
Michael: Well, I’ve heard it said that you’re born into your religion and your culture because that’s what you need to experience. So I would have to agree with both those statements. We are products of our conditioning, and we’re also victims of our concepts. Cognitive dissonance should be studied in school by everyone. Everybody should have that right on the tip of their tongue: the understanding that we tend to reshape things to fit our idea of the way things should be, which is based on our conditioning and our concepts.
Rick: That’s actually some notes here from your book. You talked about cognitive dissonance theory, and you said, “One, humans are sensitive to inconsistencies between actions and beliefs. Two, recognition of this inconsistency will cause dissonance and will motivate an individual to resolve the dissonance. Three, dissonance will be resolved in one of three basic ways: changing beliefs, changing actions, or changing perception of action.”
Michael: Correct, yeah. I just want to make sure I didn’t write that. I plagiarized that one because I couldn’t say it any better, so why not use what was written? Yeah, that’s it exactly.
So this is why we have a lot of the problems we have in the world: why some people like somebody’s politics and somebody else doesn’t, or somebody’s religion. They get very vehement about their version of it, and they’re not being gentle, they’re not being kind, they’re not opening up and living life at a more fundamental truth level.
Rick: Yeah, I guess one way I would frame it is, rather than beliefs and actions, understanding and experience. Maybe that’s another way of saying the same thing. Religious fundamentalists, for instance, are holding tightly to a certain belief or beliefs. Do they really experience that, or are they just holding tightly to something that they haven’t experientially verified?
If they were to experientially verify it, would they lighten up and realize that other expressions in other cultures are actually saying the same thing, just because they sound different because they’re from other cultures?
Michael: I’m on the Salt Lake City Interfaith Council, and it’s quite fascinating to be in a room of people who are all talking to each other—Muslims, Jews, Christians, all versions are talking to each other—and they’re saying, “Oh, look, we have this in common.” They’re really a beautiful group of people. They’re about finding that commonality as opposed to finding the differences.
But people do very much vehemently hold on to their versions of things. It’s my opinion that if Jesus were to show up today, he would not remotely recognize what passes for Christianity almost anywhere in the world.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve often thought that too. If you put Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Muhammad, or whoever, in a room together, they’d have a grand old time and they would basically be on the same page.
Michael: Yeah, they’d probably be—
Rick: Learning from each other, saying, “Oh, you see it this way. Very interesting. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Michael: Yeah, they’re like the old rishis. They’d sit around the campfire, I suppose, and not talk about making s’mores, but talk about the cognitions of the day, which would have been more interesting. Yeah, I think that’s true.
Rick: Okay.
Michael: And you also have to remember, too, that Christianity and, unfortunately, the Quran also have been reinterpreted and mistranslated, transcribed, and so on.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Muhammad was illiterate. He didn’t even know how to write, and he spoke Syro-Aramaic, not Arabic. So when you were translating—I’m not picking on the Muslims—
Rick: No, using it as a case in point.
Michael: Just a case in point. But when you translate it from Syro-Aramaic into Arabic, things could get messed up.
Rick: Sure.
Michael: I have friends who wrote a very fine book about that. I helped with some of the editing, and nobody wants to read that book who isn’t an academic, believe me. But you could say the same thing about early Christianity. I’m a huge fan of Bart Ehrman. Dr. Ehrman is a brilliant, in my opinion, early Christian Christology scholar.
Rick: And incidentally, you have a PhD in religious studies, I should mention. Another thing we could mention here is that people like Jesus and so on spoke from a certain level of consciousness, and their listeners could only listen from their level of consciousness. Something is lost right there—in the very room or building or crowd that is gathered. So if it’s lost right there, what’s to say of it being lost over hundreds and thousands of years?
Michael: Yeah, I think that’s exactly what Maharishi used to say. It was just the guilty party.
Rick: Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance.
Michael: Yeah, it’s time. Time’s the guilty party.
✨ Awareness through sleep and waking
Rick: I want to loop back to what you were saying. You almost looped back to this, and now we’re going to do it. You talked about how you had this realization, and within a few months you were in Brahman consciousness. There are certain earmarks of higher states of consciousness, including the initial one, cosmic consciousness or self-realization, and then stages after that.
One of the earmarks of cosmic consciousness, or the permanence of pure consciousness in the midst of waking, dreaming, and sleeping, is that you’re not supposed to lose pure awareness during sleep anymore. Did that happen to you?
Michael: I went back and forth a little bit in the beginning.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: But I don’t—my body sleeps. I’m old, decrepit, falling apart. As Monty Python said, my knees are knackered, and all of that. But it’s just—yeah.
Rick: What about now?
Michael: It’s just there.
Rick: Pure awareness is there.
Michael: Yeah.
Awareness Through Deep Sleep
Rick: And now people might wonder, okay, how do you know it’s there? Are you thinking, “Oh, here it is”? Because if you’re thinking, “Here it is,” then you’re thinking thoughts, and thoughts are characteristic of the waking state. So how do you know? Do you remember it when you wake up in the morning, or do you actually know it’s there throughout the night? Is that knowing some kind of activity taking place, which means you’re not sleeping as deeply as you might?
Michael: You can still sleep. You can sleep as deeply as you’re able, but awareness is awareness. It’s just pure awareness; there’s nothing but awareness. But I will say this: you can have thoughts in pure awareness.
Rick: Yeah, but are those thoughts part of the waking state coming in, or can you have thoughts and yet—because, yeah, pure awareness is there. But in addition to that, either you’re awake, you’re asleep, or you’re dreaming, right? Or what else could you be?
Michael: Just aware.
Rick: Yeah, but your body is in one of those three states.
Michael: Yeah, well, your body—there’s the perception that that’s what’s going on. I’m not completely convinced that that’s exactly the way it is anymore. I’ve had heart surgery, I lost my gallbladder, my knee has been worked on, and my shoulder’s been rebuilt.
Rick: Becoming bionic.
Michael: Yeah. When I was in India, I went to an Ayurvedic clinic, and the guy screwed up and poured boiling-hot oil down my sinuses. Yeah, that was not good, and so I’ve had sinus surgery.
Okay, all right. My point is, you can have all this stuff and still get enlightened, still experience pure consciousness. So if you’re in deep sleep, you could be watching yourself sleep. If you’re dreaming, you can watch yourself dream. You can design your dreams if you want. I’ve done that—you get to play Steven Spielberg. Lucid dreaming, do that kind of stuff.
In the waking state, you can sit in pure consciousness, but you’re having normal thoughts; you’re thinking. But thoughts aren’t who you are. Thoughts are just thoughts, thought forms. They come and go. I think one of the things that I learned along the way was not to pay attention to my own thoughts.
Rick: Okay, that pretty well covers it, I think. So, anyway, just a summary point: we’re talking about pure consciousness being maintained twenty-four-seven, including during sleep. That’s said to be—and I have a file on my computer with dozens of quotes from different people, Nisargadatta and various others, about that very thing, and that’s not always mentioned.
Do you think of that as a kind of acid test of awakening, that it is going to be the case for anybody who is validly awakened, or is it a special-case situation?
Michael: Well, I’m not able to answer that definitively because I haven’t talked to everybody on the planet who’s gotten enlightened. I do know one man who absolutely insists that witnessing during sleep is not a criterion of enlightenment, and I believe he’s enlightened. I do believe he’s enlightened.
Rick: I’ve had this discussion with friends, and there was one guy, for instance, who said, “Yeah, well, that went on for quite a while, but I got tired of it, and I’d just as soon really be asleep when I’m asleep.” Somehow he was able to shut it down, and yet he considers himself to still be awake.
Michael: Yeah, so I think that everybody… Again, it’s an infinite universe, an infinite possibility of experiences. You can cry with joy and you can cry with sorrow, but the mechanism is the same. So if we’re witnessing our sleep, great. If we’re not witnessing our sleep, when you wake up, what’s there? If you’re witnessing when you wake up and you’re witnessing all the time you’re awake, or you’re witnessing when you’re dreaming but maybe you aren’t doing it when you’re sleeping, I don’t know that it makes a difference.
Rick: Yeah, I think Ramana used to say, “When you wake up and you say, ‘I slept well,’ how do you know you slept well if there was no awareness?”
Michael: Yeah, exactly. There has to be something there.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: I don’t know. Maybe you remember one time Maharishi was being asked something and he said, “I don’t remember.” The guy who was asking got all upset. He said, “You? How come you can’t remember?” Maharishi very calmly looked at him and said, “In order to remember, you must first be able to forget.”
Yeah, so it’s the same thing. What’s memory? Memory is stuff lodged someplace in our brain, at least in part, but it’s also more holistic than that.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t have gotten upset with him saying that, or anybody saying that, because that implies that the enlightened person is supposed to be like Rain Man or something, who can go through the whole phone book and then recount it to you. That’s a special-case ability, which shouldn’t be confused with enlightenment.
Michael: I agree, and so maybe the analogy falls apart there. But is witnessing twenty-four by seven a special category, or is it a hallmark?
Rick: Yeah, well, maybe we’ll leave that question open-ended. It’s something that comes up every now and then, but I guess what I’m kind of getting at with questions like that is: Are there universal criteria for higher states of consciousness? Could they eventually be mapped out in a systematic way and correlated with certain brainwave patterns and things? Could we really understand higher states, or is there a whole lot of variation and subjective difference, and so on, such that we’ll never be able to standardize it?
Michael: I hope we’ll never be able to standardize it. That might take away some of the joy and the surprise.
Rick: Yeah.
Awareness That No Longer Gets Overshadowed
I think that my—I can only speak from my own experience. My own experience is that I am aware all the time, and it doesn’t get overshadowed anymore. I can still get upset. I can still feel fear. A friend of mine was driving and I was in the car with him, and we had a little bit of a close call. I can remember going, “Ahh!” But it didn’t stick. It didn’t stick like it used to. It just sort of went away in a couple of days. It was just gone.
Michael: I think that my—I can only speak from my own experience. My own experience is that I am aware all the time, and it doesn’t get overshadowed anymore. I can still get upset. I can still feel fear. A friend of mine was driving and I was in the car with him, and we had a little bit of a close call. I can remember going, “Ahh!” But it didn’t stick. It didn’t stick like it used to. It just sort of went away in a couple of days. It was just gone.
So I would say part of the hallmarks would be the impressions—the relationship to the impressions of the mind—and the physiology shifts and changes.
Rick: Yeah, a line on water or a line on air, as opposed to a line in stone.
Michael: Right, exactly, yeah.
🩺 Celestial perception and healing
Rick: Okay, so we’ve alluded to celestial perception, or we might say a perception or appreciation of subtle phenomena that ordinarily aren’t perceived with the grosser aspects of the senses, if that’s a good way of defining it. You’ve had a lot of this stuff throughout your life, and it might be interesting to talk about some of them just for fun. For instance, how you met your wife. Is this the wife you’re now married to, or are you talking about someone else?
Michael: Yes, it is.
Rick: And you mentioned she’s Korean.
Michael: Yeah, she is. That story starts about six months before we met. I was sitting in meditation and I heard a voice in my head. It just called my name, and I went, “Whoa, what’s that?” And I thought…
Rick: It was a woman’s voice?
Michael: Yeah, it was. It had a very distinctive voice; I would recognize it in a minute. And I thought, “Oh God, am I going schizophrenic or something?” Then, literally about a month later, boom, I got the voice again, and I was like, “Oh, geez.” It happened about every month, and I was starting to wonder if I should worry or not.
Then I went to a meditation retreat Tim held at the Cobb Mountain facility they used to have. At that point, I was sort of not dating anybody. I didn’t want to get involved with any women at all because I’d had more than my share of difficult times and decided that I wasn’t any good at it.
So I was sort of standoffish, but I was sitting at this table, and the woman who later became my wife came over and sat down. We were just chatting over lunch, and I was thinking, “I’m not going there.” She was beautiful and intelligent. Gosh, what wasn’t there to like? But I was like, “Uh-uh, I’m not going to go there.”
This went on for the duration of the course. I was resisting, but the attraction was there. Then, on the last day of the course, I went to the office to turn in my key. I was standing at the window and setting my key down because nobody was in the office when I heard the voice. It was going, “Michael!” I thought, “Oh, geez, you know, again.”
So I ignored it. I ignored it, and the voice went, “Michael!” really emphatically. I thought, “What’s going on here?” Then it was louder, and I turned around. It was my now-wife. It was her. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’d better pay attention to this.”
So we decided to have a date, which I was resisting, but we did, and we got married. I don’t remember how long afterward. You’d have to ask my wife. Men are terrible at that.
Rick: Yeah, as long as you remember your anniversary, you’ll be okay.
Michael: I do, I do, and it’s pretty amazing.
Rick: Yeah, so we wouldn’t call that celestial perception, but it’s something unusual, interesting, and different.
Michael: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a guy, Paul Morgan Summers, who had a similar experience like that. This name came to him. I interviewed him a month or two ago, and he’d never heard of this person or anything else. Then he was in a store or something and overheard some women talking, and they mentioned this name. It was an unusual name, so he went up to them and said, “You know, does this person exist? Does this name mean anything?” They said, “Yeah, yeah, she lives so-and-so,” or whatever.
So he looked her up in the phone book or something and called her. He said, “You know, I think I’m supposed to marry you.” She thought he was a total nutcase because she’d never heard of the guy, but he ended up marrying her. It’s a long story; you can watch the interview with him.
Michael: I’ll have to do that.
Rick: But okay, so then you had another interesting experience with her, where you were living in San Francisco or something, and she and some female friends went over to Berkeley or Oakland to have a ladies’ night out. Tell that story.
Michael: Oh yeah, we weren’t married yet; we were dating. She and her girlfriend went over to Yoshi’s, the jazz bar, for a ladies’ night out. I was, I guess, at my house in Berkeley, and all of a sudden I could see everything that was going on. There was a guy who was hitting on the two of them, and I thought that was irritating to me.
So I picked up my cell phone and called her. I said, “Hi.” She goes, “Oh, hi, how are you?” And I said, “Would you please tell the Black guy in the green jacket with the gold earring and the bald head to go away?”
She goes, “What? Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m at home.” She actually had to kind of live with that for a while. It took her a while to get used to me. It was kind of startling for her in the beginning.
Rick: Interesting. And then you had the thing where you started tuning into people’s bodies and diagnosing things. There was a woman with a hairline fracture below her elbow or something.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Tell that one.
Michael: Well, before I was married to my wife, I had a girlfriend, and she had a friend who was a nurse. My girlfriend was telling her stories because I could always tell what was going on with my girlfriend.
We had dinner together, and my girlfriend’s friend accosted me rather vehemently. She said, “Okay, she says you can see things and da-da-da-da-da. So, what’s wrong with my arm?”
It kind of upset me, honestly. I was like, “Well, what? I’m not doing a dog-and-pony show here. This isn’t show-and-tell. You don’t know anything,” you know, one of those things.
Then I looked at her arm, and I could see it. I said, “Oh, you have a hairline fracture.” I said, “It’s right here.”
She said, “No, I don’t.” It had basically happened in childhood, and she said it had been X-rayed and they hadn’t found anything. That was the last time I ever heard from her.
I found out a little while later. I asked my friend, “Whatever happened to her?” She said, “Well, her arm didn’t heal, and they did an MRI. It was exactly what you described. It freaked her out that somebody could be that tuned into her, or that she could be that transparent to them.” She couldn’t take it.
Rick: Yeah, it freaked her out. It kind of violated her paradigm, probably.
Michael: Yeah, totally. I felt bad about that, but she put me in the position of it.
Rick: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. So there are some more of these things while we’re on this theme. Let’s just tell a few more because they’re kind of interesting. For instance, you’ve had a number of situations, a couple of situations you mentioned, where you noticed that there was a breast lump in someone. I’m sure you weren’t staring. I’m sure the woman could say, “My eyes are up here,” right? But you cognized it.
Michael: I can honestly say I wasn’t staring because nothing was exposed. They were well-dressed women. And yes, I’m a guy, but I wasn’t staring. In fact, one of the women was a friend of the person I was talking to, and she was kind of tangential to it. Then I just went, “Oh,” and I don’t know why. I just turned, looked at her, and said, “Look, you don’t know me at all, but I want to tell you this because it may help you save your life.”
I told her what happened. She said, “Oh my God, thank you.” I found out from her friend that she did go check it out, and it was a lump in her breast. It probably saved her.
So there’s one that isn’t there. I’ll tell you one that’s a little bit more interesting. I haven’t written it down, but recently I went in to have my cardiology exam, last June. I go in, and I’m in the little room. This very nice young woman, very sharp and professional, comes in and starts typing my information into the hospital computer. I’m answering questions, and I look at her. I’ve gotten very careful. I don’t open my mouth and say things unless I know who my audience is, and for some reason I just blurted it out. I said, “What happened to your kidneys?”
She goes, “Oh my God, how did you know about that?” I’m like, “Oh God, what have I done?” She says, “You know, that happened when I was two years old, and I don’t even remember which one.” I looked at her and said, “Oh, it’s the left one.” She goes, “Oh, yeah.” So I’m thinking, “Why did that happen? Why did I do that?” I felt badly and apologized to her.
Well, a while later, another cardiologist’s physician assistant came in. She had a head scarf on and was dealing with chemotherapy and cancer. I think it was maybe ovarian cancer. I’m looking at her, and the chemotherapy had made her so cloudy that you couldn’t perceive her right away. But after we sat there and talked for a while, I could see that the cancer was not completely gone yet. I thought, “Oh, I’m not going to open my mouth. I’m not going to say a thing.”
But in another meeting we had later, on another date, she came in and I looked at her. I said, “Look, this is going to sound really strange to you. You can just think I’m some weirdo, but this is what I’m seeing.” I told her what I saw, and she was crestfallen. It really shocked her. I said, “Look, I don’t expect you to believe me, but the young lady in your office—you know, when I described her and told you her name—I said she and I had a conversation about her kidneys, and she had never met me before.”
What I took from that was that the reason for the whole kidney thing was so that when I had the conversation—
Rick: It would give you an excuse to say, “Yeah,” some reinforcement.
Michael: Yeah, there was some proof there.
Rick: Yeah, interesting.
Michael: Yeah, so I haven’t talked to her since. I don’t know how she is or anything else, but my sense was that she would live because I told her, “I think you’re going to live because you’re going to go back and finish this up.”
Rick: Yeah, interesting. Well, another interesting part that this story reveals is that, when a person is in a higher state of consciousness, they say and do things that they may not know why they’re saying and doing. Stuff just happens. Stuff comes out of their mouths. They find themselves doing certain things, and yet it turns out there’s a wisdom to it that they couldn’t have intellectually worked out.
Michael: That’s my experience of it. I’m trying to be much more open now, but I’ve had a number of times when people have been healed, and I can’t claim any doership in that.
Rick: Yeah, you mentioned something about healing some ribs, then a clavicle, and then an ACL injury, a knee injury.
Michael: Yeah. She’s a lovely, lovely woman, one of my students. She hurt herself, and we were talking. She was obviously in pain, and I don’t know why, but I just looked at her and said, “Oh, would you like to fix that?” She goes, “Well, yeah,” and I said, “Well, come over here.”
I don’t really have to touch anybody, but in her case, I felt that if I put my hand on her shoulder, the contact would signify to her that there was something going on. There were other people in the room watching this. I would never have touched a young woman without somebody in the room, particularly my wife. So I just put my hand on her shoulder. After less than a minute, I looked at her and said, “You’re going to be fine.” She had instant relief, felt better, and healed up. Then she felt so good that she went skiing.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: She took a tumble, and the ski patrol took her off the mountain and brought her to the local hospital. They did an X-ray, and she had this massive tear in her ACL. So she calls—
Rick: Which is a ligament in the knee, for people who don’t—
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not even actually sure where it is, except that I could see something.
Rick: Anterior cruciate ligament, or something like that, it’s called.
Michael: I’m not a medical person. So she calls me up on Wednesday, I think it was—Wednesday or Thursday—and says, “I’m going in for surgery on Friday. I’ve got this. I can have somebody drive me up there. Can you fix it?” And I just—
What really happens is that you take a sankalpa.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Okay, so—
Rick: Define that.
Michael: It’s the thought at the subtlest relative level, and then you fall back into the transcendent. In my case, I was already in the transcendent. So then it becomes a very powerful thought that comes to fruition, maybe more quickly than a regular thought might.
I just said to her, “No, no, you don’t need to come up. You’re going to be fine.” I didn’t really think about that. It just came out of my mouth, and I didn’t even think about what I meant by “You’re going to be fine.”
Well, she goes in Friday morning, and the orthopedic surgeon looks at the X-rays and says, “Oh, this is so bad. I’ve got to have an MRI.” So she sends her out for the MRI. She gets the MRI and comes back, and the MRI shows nothing wrong. Everything is totally healed. Perfect.
So, you know, how does that happen?
Rick: It happens.
Michael: Yeah, it just happens.
Rick: Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff—I mean, there’s a guy on TV. Harry—what’s the name of that TV show you’re watching with that healer guy from Australia? The Healer, I think it was called. Amazing. It took a lot out of him in his case; he had to really rest up after these incidents. But there were shows where football players had really screwed-up knees and could barely walk, and all of a sudden they were able to run. He’s really remarkable.
So this stuff is a little tangential, I’d say, to the whole awakening-enlightenment thing, but I think it’s somewhat related because it indicates that there is more to life than the ordinary gross mechanics and the things we happen to believe because they happen to fit our experience so far. I think it’s good to have an open mind about this stuff.
Michael: Yeah, I agree. One thing that I want to say, because I don’t want to get a thousand phone calls, is that I cannot automatically heal people. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t happen. You take the thought and get the feedback saying, “Nope, this is karmic,” or whatever—“the guy’s got to go through this. That’s the way it is.” Other times it just happens. I don’t put myself out as a healer. It’s not my thing.
Rick: It’s not your calling card.
Michael: It just happens around me.
🩺 Grace, healing, and Amma
Rick: Yeah, no, it’s interesting. Now, speaking of sankalpa and speaking of healing, you had an interesting experience with Amma. I mentioned sankalpa because she has done that kind of thing for a lot of people. I mean, it’s easy to say, “Oh, well, it could have happened anyway,” but there are so many instances where she’s done a sankalpa for somebody and then the thing works out.
In our case, even finding our house, we went to her and said, “We really want to have a house, and we can’t afford Sthapatya Veda,” which was all the rage around here. We asked what we should do, and she said, “Amma will do sankalpa. Don’t worry about Sthapatya Veda. Just buy it. Get the right house.”
Then I was at work when somebody mentioned some house for sale someplace. I called Irene and gave her an address. She went to look for it, got lost, came down this driveway, and found the house we now live in, which is perfect for us.
Michael: Oh, that’s great.
Rick: And actually, with a little modification, it’s somewhat in keeping with Sthapatya Veda. So anyway, that kind of thing could be brushed off, but there have been a lot of other little divine interventions like that. And you had a big one. Tell us yours.
Michael: Oh, well, I was sitting in meditation when my wife and I lived in Redwood Shores, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a little bit south of San Francisco. I was sitting in meditation, and it was like Amma’s voice in my head. It said, “Come to my ashram now.”
I thought, “You know what?”
Rick: Had you seen Amma before?
Michael: Oh, yeah. We’d been going to Amma for years. I was just thinking, “Oh God.” So I went back to the mantra, and then it was like, “No, now!”
I got up, went downstairs, and said to my wife, “Look, I got this cosmic telegram”—I think those were the words I used—“and I think I’m supposed to go to Amma’s ashram.”
My wife goes, “Well, go!”
Rick: And she didn’t mean San Ramon, California. She meant India, right?
Michael: She meant India, yes. So I booked a flight. I went, and I had a three-day delay because it snowed in London and they didn’t have any snowplows. But I got there and had the taxi ride from hell, from the airport to her ashram. Oh God, that was mind-boggling. The floorboards in the vehicle were sort of there, but you know how it is.
Rick: India is rough.
Michael: It’s rough, but beautiful and rough at the same time. So I’m at her ashram, up God knows how many floors—sixteen floors—in the building I’m in, and I’m in deep meditation again. All of a sudden, I get another voice, except I don’t know this voice. I don’t know if it’s a man’s voice or what I would say is a male voice, and it says, “Go downstairs.”
I went back to the mantra, ignoring my thoughts in meditation as we’ve been trained. Then the voice said, “Go downstairs.” So I thought, “No, I’m going to go downstairs.” I got up, took the elevator down, and walked out the front of the flat. I literally said, “Okay, now what?”
My feet just started moving. It was like my legs were propelled on their own. So I just relaxed and saw where they took me. They took me to a huge facility at Amma’s ashram that is a Kali temple, with a lot of seating in it, some business offices, and that kind of thing. To the right-hand side of that, there’s sort of a little alleyway and some small, low buildings. One of those low buildings is where she was born.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And that particular building is now a shrine and a small temple. I was walking down there, and I got there literally just as they were starting a Mahamrityunjaya Homa, which is a Lord Shiva Homa, a Homa for healing and enlightenment. There were maybe a dozen people there, and one place to sit right next to the fire, with a wall that I could lean my back on, which is really important for me. So I sat down there.
This young man—I’ve never seen anybody before or since like him—was conducting the Homa. Normally, when you see the pundits and stuff, they’re usually in orange robes or something like that when they do these Homas. Not all of them; they could be in white dhotis. He was in a white dhoti, and he had little, past-shoulder-length dark hair and the most illuminating eyes you could imagine.
There were two or three older gentlemen across from me who were assisting him. For some reason, I’ve never seen a man wearing a dhoti like that. Their dhotis were almost like they were made out of saris, kind of amber-colored and beautiful.
I’ve been to a lot of these Vedic ceremonies, and I’ve never before or since been to one that was as precise as this. This pundit, this guy, everything he did was like a robot, but with life. He was 100 percent focused and consumed in what he was doing. The job of the gentlemen was to hand him what he needed as it was needed.
I know the Mahamrityunjaya, so I was chanting along with him. When it was over, everybody just got up and left, and I got up and left.
The interesting thing is, I thought about him, and I realized I had not seen him around the temple the whole time I was there, either before or after it. Then I got to thinking about that. He was so familiar to me; he looked very familiar to me. Then I went, “Oh God,” and I pulled up my Autobiography of a Yogi book. I looked up the drawing of Babaji in that book, and I cannot say that it was Babaji that I saw. There’s no way I could ever say that. But all I could tell you is, he was the spitting image of that drawing. And I didn’t die.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, you haven’t really explained the situation with your heart and all, but you were sort of—your life was a bit in jeopardy.
Michael: Yeah, I was dancing on thin ice. I was still dancing, but it was thin ice. I had atrial fibrillation, where my heart used to do that for a month at a time, and it was just wearing me out.
I had a cardiologist who was an idiot, who misdiagnosed and mistreated me, which cost me my gallbladder. Most people get their gallbladders out and don’t have any problems. I have problems, and so forth and so on.
Before all this happened, I saw myself die. I could see it clearly. I knew exactly when it was going to happen—not the exact date, but I knew it would be in June. I knew it would be about three years away from that moment in time that I saw it. I saw everything.
So I literally got my affairs in order. I did my will, I talked to my wife, and I had a beautiful Jyotish ring. I gave that to my son, which he lost, which is okay. It was fine. It actually worked out; it was one of those things that worked out for the better.
But, yeah, I just didn’t see myself being around anymore. And then, after this, I lived.
Rick: Well, did you have the AFib anymore? Have you had any medical checkups that have indicated that something has actually been changed or healed?
Michael: I did have the surgery for AFib. I had radiofrequency ablation, and that was real fun—nothing like having your catheter removed.
So, yeah, it was dicey, but I’ve never had an atrial fibrillation symptom since, knock on wood. I have an EKG, a small, personalized EKG machine that I can check my heart with. It actually works with your cell phone; it’s pretty amazing. It’s called Kardia. I highly recommend it.
I could track it, and I have had no symptoms at all of atrial fibrillation in all these years since then.
Rick: And so you’re pretty confident, as far as you can be, that it was a result of this intervention by Amma—going to her ashram and having this whole yagna, possibly with Babaji?
Michael: Yeah, I would say her, and also Sri Karunamayi, which is another story.
Rick: Yeah, you can tell that one if you want.
Michael: Sri Karunamayi is—
Rick: Another nice example of a sankalpa here.
Michael: Yeah, Sri Karunamayi, who’s extraordinary.
Rick: Who’s been on BatGap.
Michael: Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s right, yes. She was in Portland, Oregon, and so I flew out and stayed with some friends to see her.
When it was my turn to go up, she gives you a little three-by-five card, and you can write things on there. I wrote, “I see myself dying, and this is the way it is, and fine. I’d like to see Shiva before I die, if possible.”
I gave it to her, and she just took it and held it. She looked at it, and she just nodded her head. Yep, and that was it.
So I thought, “Okay, cool.” I went to the back of the church, up in the choir loft, and thought, “Oh, I’ll sit down and meditate.” I sat down to meditate, but I had so much Shakti, so much energy, that I couldn’t. The mantra was just like a little ping out in outer space or something; it was just vibrating.
While I was sitting there with my eyes closed, all of a sudden I saw Amma. Sri Karunamayi is also called Amma by her people, so she was standing in front of me. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I opened my eyes, and she was standing in front of me, except that I could still see her sitting on the stage.
I thought, “Well, wow.” I closed my eyes and opened them, and it was the same thing. Then she morphed—I think that’s the right word—into Saraswati. It was Saraswati standing in front of me: the white sari, the whole thing. I mean, it was like, “Oh my God.” I was shaking.
These things are very humbling. I think I want to make that very clear. They’re really—I find them to be—they just cut you down to a very human being, in a beautiful sense.
Rick: I’m glad you’re saying that because I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about flashy experiences who seem to have very vivid imaginations and like to attract attention by the marvelous things they’re experiencing, but I don’t get that feeling with you.
Michael: Yeah, I don’t. I’ll come back to that point, but anyway, while I was sitting there looking at her, all of a sudden she showed me her divine form, and it was exactly like—
Rick: Saraswati.
Michael: Yeah, like the Gita describes Krishna showing Arjuna. The entire universe was there, and I totally got why Arjuna was going, “Hey, it’s okay. You can take it back.”
Rick: Take it back now.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, it was so overwhelming that I think if it had been a flash for a minimal fraction of a second longer, I would have fried and died. Then, boom, everything went back to normal. I sat there and went, “Well, who gives a damn if I die now? What difference does it make?”
So that was pretty cool.
I want to make a point, if I may. Maharishi, years ago, told me I should share my experiences because he said they were good experiences and people could benefit from hearing them. I didn’t for a very long time because I didn’t want to stand out and be that person. I also didn’t want to have people going, “Oh, I’m not wired like that.”
But one of his—well, his Minister of Yoga—is a very dear friend of mine, an extraordinary man. He kept encouraging me to talk about my experiences, so finally I started sharing them.
My whole spiritual life, I’ve said that my number-one job is to keep my ego out of it. I have met people who want to go, “Oh, Michael, you’re so special,” and I always say, “No!”
I think Maharishi was our example. He always gave all credit to his teacher and his tradition, and I honestly feel the same way. I can’t take credit for anything. I’m very cognizant that the statement “Only God is the doer” is rather accurate.
I think Maharishi was our example. He always gave all credit to his teacher and his tradition, and I honestly feel the same way. I can’t take credit for anything. I’m very cognizant that the statement “Only God is the doer” is rather accurate.
Only God is the doer.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that so people don’t think it’s grandstanding, or that somebody’s special, because I don’t feel I’m somebody special.
Death, karma, and what comes next
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. I’m glad you said that. About dying, do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you when you die?
Michael: Yes, actually, now I do.
Rick: What is it?
Michael: So—
Rick: You’re going to be put in charge of the whole galaxy.
Michael: No. Years ago, I talked to a Jyotish who’s world-famous.
Rick: Vedic astrology, Jyotish.
Michael: Yeah, thank you for saying that. He’s world-famous, a bestselling book writer, all that sort of stuff. I said, “Tell me about my life,” and he said that I came into human existence from the Nagas.
Rick: Which are the snake beings.
Michael: Yeah, very ancient dragon beings, and there are fundamentally three different types.
Rick: And just to interject here, my first interview with Sri M, he recounts a very interesting experience he had with a Naga. Anyway, that’s a footnote. So continue on.
Michael: I’ve had a lot of very wonderful experiences with Nagas, and so I thought that was interesting, because I came from there straight into being a human being without going through a lot of other rigmarole.
So I checked that with two other Jyotishis, asking for a second opinion from your doctor. Then I checked it with a woman I know who’s extraordinarily intuitive, and she said yes.
Rick: Now, when you checked it with these folks, did you say, “Hey, was I a Naga?” and then they said yes, or did they actually come out with the Naga thing from their side?
Michael: I’m actually a little more circumspect. I’m like, “What went on?” I just get an innocent confirmation.
These particular Nagas that I’m talking about are beings of light—very wise, ancient beings of light. I’ve supposedly been invited, when I leave here, to go back there and share my experience, my life, my knowledge, and my learnings with them, with that culture, and all of that.
Rick: This is maybe a dumb question, but do they reside on some subtler realm? Do they reside on a different planet, or how does it work?
Michael: A subtler realm. It’s a place.
Rick: But it doesn’t necessarily have a geographic location vis-à-vis the Earth?
Michael: Not that I’m aware of.
Rick: Okay, I just want to understand how that works. Okay, well, that’s interesting. So you have something to look forward to?
Michael: Well, yeah, but I was also told I have the option that I could come back. They’ve told me there’s no need; I could, you know—
Rick: Yeah, you did take a bodhisattva vow, remember?
Michael: Yeah, they’re going to give you a gold watch and you can retire. I’ve been told that if I wanted, I also have the opportunity to merge with the Absolute. If I’ve made up my mind, I’m not aware of having made up my mind.
Rick: So that brings up an interesting question. You have these options, right? A couple of the options involve continuing as some kind of embodied being. There are people who argue that there is ultimately no person, and therefore any notion of continuation of a person after the body dies is nonsense. There couldn’t be reincarnation; there couldn’t be this or that, because there’s nothing or no one to reincarnate. How do you sit with that argument?
Michael: Well, and yet the universe recreates itself continually in myriad ways that are filled with wonder, and I’m figuring if the universe wants that to happen, it’ll figure out a way to make it happen. I don’t feel like that’s something that we have to take an absolute point of view on and say it’s this way or that way, because there’s so much in the Vedic literature and other Tibetan Buddhist literature, and in other cultures, where, yes, you can come back and come into another body.
By the way, the one thing that I should have mentioned, which just came to me, is one of the reasons why I was going to die was because I had burnt up 100% of the karma that I came into this life with. Supposedly, when that happens, you’re done and you go and get a new container. I have a real sense that all of that stuff that I came in with is just gone. It’s not that things don’t happen to you and karma still happens because you’re in a body and stuff, but it doesn’t bind you anymore. You’re not stuck, so that’s the difference. The concept of reincarnation is fundamentally based on something binding you over to take another form.
Rick: Like it’s compulsory as opposed to voluntary.
Michael: Right, yeah. If you can do it compulsorily, why can’t you do it voluntarily?
Rick: Yeah, but then let me ask you this: What is it? Let’s say a person’s enlightened, they’re in Brahman consciousness. Is there still some sort of kernel that identifies them as an individual, if you can use the word individual, as a being that could actually take on another body? And if so, what is that thing? Apparently, if what I’m saying is true, it’s not something which disappears or dissipates or dissolves when enlightenment takes place. Yeah, you got it?
Michael: Yeah, let’s use the word soul.
Rick: Okay.
Michael: Your soul, theoretically, is immortal.
Rick: And we’re talking about an individual expression, not just the universal soul or something.
Michael: Right, yeah, your particular soul, that soul of yours. And so that soul can…
What happens to it? Okay, what happens to that piece? If you read the Vedic literature, it talks even about it carrying on for millennia or yugas, or coming out again after the creation dissolves and comes back.
Rick: And not just because you’re in ignorance and you have to be reborn, but even if you’re enlightened, it says this, right?
Michael: Right, yeah, it’s there. I’ve read it. Don’t ask me where, because I’ve read so much I can’t… I should have kept notes, but I didn’t. And so, yeah, I’d say that’s the soul.
And then the karma—what is that? That’s a whole lot… What is it? It’s a lot of cause and effect that somehow has attached itself… Well, the ego thinks that that’s what it is. It thinks that, you know, I am this wad of stuff that’s me. That’s a horrible explanation.
Rick: Well, but, yeah, and it has all kinds of likes and dislikes and preferences and opinions and attitudes and biases and yada yada.
Michael: So that stuff comes back and somehow it’s got to fulfill itself. Well, why is it fulfilling itself? That’s the question I was asking myself for years, and Maharishi made that very clear: It’s evolving toward full realization. So once you’re fully enlightened, you have the possibility of not returning.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Okay, and so…
Rick: Not the certainty, but the possibility, you’re saying.
Michael: Right, yeah.
Rick: The dog joined us. This is Luna.
Michael: Hi, Luna. Yeah, and if you read the Vedic literature, supposedly, since Luna stepped on it, that’s the exact right segue: Supposedly, when you die, you go to the moon.
Rick: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that the pitris live on the moon. I was in a room with Maharishi one time when he said that, and I thought, “I said, Maharishi, pitris on the moon? You know, there’s no air there.” And he looked at me like some kind of idiot.
Michael: Yeah. Well, I can remember there was a man on one of our courses who was dying, and Maharishi and he were having sort of a discussion, but I was able to overhear it. The man said, “You know, what’s going to happen?” And Maharishi said, “I’ll see you at the moon.”
Rick: Interesting.
Michael: Yeah, and I thought, wow, beautiful. He’s going to go and be there when the guy passes away and maybe intercede with him with the lords of karma. I don’t know, but it was going to help him along his way. Christina Olson, whom TM meditators would know, told me that Maharishi did the same thing for her mother when her mother passed. So I think that’s beautiful.
So, okay, I’m not a sports guy. I don’t know much about sports, but I do understand the concept of a free agent. So maybe the enlightened person is now a free agent and he can go sign on with whoever he wants to sign on with.
Rick: Yeah, or he can merge back into the absolute, right? I mean, you mentioned that as an option. And, you know, all this stuff—people at this point might be saying, “Yeah, who knows? This is all so speculative, and these guys are referring to stuff that is in ancient scriptures, and it may be all mythological and all.”
But one of the presumptions of these ancient scriptures is that there were people, and could be now, who could actually know this stuff with some certitude through a cognitive process that is available to those who have awakened, who have become enlightened.
Michael: Yeah, no, I think that’s correct. After all, that’s what the Vedic rishis did. They cognized the functioning of the universe and gave it forth, and eventually it got written down, and we have that. Those teachings have evolved as more knowledge has come on.
Now you have, you know, it went from Rig Veda to Sama Veda to Yajur Veda, et cetera, to the Upanishads and to Vedanta. So there’s this kind of progression, and even those deities referred to in the early Vedas grew and changed over time as more knowledge came on, according to what I read, anyway. So why not? Why not?
I can look at a lot of things now, and I’ve been sort of satisfying my curiosity a bit here and there, but I haven’t really taken a hard look—or a soft look, I guess, to be more accurate—at that whole decision point about what am I going to do next.
Rick: Yeah, maybe you don’t need to decide until it’s time, until you’re faced with the actual choice. You don’t need to worry about it.
Michael: Yeah, and the other thing is, I don’t see a death for me anymore.
Rick: Right.
Michael: So I figure I’m just more normal now, like anybody else. I don’t see something.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: So, in one sense, I will never die, and my body will go, and then what happens happens. So we’ll just see what happens.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: I’ll write you a letter.
Rick: Okay, please do, yeah. Incidentally, on this whole theme of what’s supposed to happen after we die and all that, these topics we’ve been discussing for a few minutes—I regard any idea that you want to consider as a hypothesis.
Michael: I agree.
Rick: Yeah, and hypotheses are not something to be believed in or disbelieved; they’re something to investigate. There may be some things which science can’t investigate because it doesn’t have the tools. But what we’re implying here is that spirituality, if properly understood and applied, provides tools to explore things which were heretofore considered metaphysical or mystical, or beyond any possibility of certainty.
Michael: Yeah, the Dalai Lama was asked, “Okay, what happens when you die?” And he said, “Well, I have certain beliefs. I’ve been trained; this is what we believe as Buddhists. Do I know? No.” He was real honest, real straightforward, and I feel the same way. I have ideas and thoughts and some cognitions that are pretty clear, but, like everybody else, I guess I’ll find out.
This is kind of what Nachiketa was asking Yama: What happens when he dies? Does he exist or does he not exist? And Yama said, “Oh, please don’t make me tell you that. I’ll give you anything—kingdoms, beautiful women, whatever you want—but don’t make me answer that question.” But Nachiketa held him to it.
Rick: Good for him.
✨ Service, community, and collective awakening
Now, you said earlier that you’ve been talking to me for a while and you kind of tuned into me, and my body becomes a part of your body or some such thing. Have you picked up on anything?
Michael: You’re very healthy, you’re very clear, and you’re very… I think it’s amazing how many enlightened people you’ve attracted around you. You’re clearly in your dharma, and your consciousness is amazingly clear. It’s like, if you’re not enlightened, somebody just needs to come along and go…
Rick: I don’t consider myself enlightened. I don’t make any claims whatsoever, but I haven’t had any big, flashy, head-exploding kind of things like you’ve had.
Michael: I hope—
Rick: Most people don’t, you know.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: I don’t witness sleep, although I’ve had that occasionally. But what I do find is that there’s a rock-solid presence or silence, or whatever you want to call it, that nothing shakes.
Michael: Yeah, your heart is beautiful.
Rick: Oh, thank you.
Michael: Beautiful, yeah. And I don’t, at least right now, pick up on any illness or particular life-threatening problems or anything.
Rick: I was hoping you’d fix this sore shoulder. I don’t know what’s causing it. I’m thinking of switching my mouse to my left hand. Maybe it’s that. No, don’t worry about it; I’m just kidding you. You don’t have to fix my shoulder.
Okay, so we’ve covered quite a bit. Is there anything that kind of pops into your mind that you feel like you’d like to talk about while we have the chance? Let people know.
Michael: Well, I’m not an Amway salesman, so, you know—
Rick: Herbalife, right?
Michael: I just can’t stand pyramid marketing schemes. Yeah, I’ve got a website up, if anybody wants to take a look at that. I think you’ve got a link.
Rick: Yeah, I’ll put a link.
Michael: And, you know, I’m not particularly… I guess what I would like to think about myself is maybe a spiritual consultant. If I can help someone understand their experiences and deal with mood-making versus the real thing, I would be delighted if I could help people that way.
I’m certainly open to visiting some place and giving talks, because I’ve done that for years. I’m open to teaching meditation to people on a one-to-one basis, because that’s what I do.
Rick: You have to do that in person, right? You don’t do that over Skype or something?
Michael: No, I don’t. I know of people who do things over Skype, but no, it would have to be one-to-one.
Rick: So they would have to come to Utah, or you would have to go somewhere.
Michael: Yeah, but I’m willing to talk to people. There’s a link on my website; they can write me and I will write back. It would be delightful, delightful to do that. I guess I’m still trying to help people have the awakening.
Rick: Do you feel like you’ve ever been instrumental in triggering an awakening in anybody?
Michael: Yeah, yeah. I’ve got six students of mine who are all awake now. Some of them I pointed to another person who was able to knock them over the line, but a couple of them woke up here. In my dedicated puja meditation room, they went, “Whoa, look! Light’s coming out of me. I’m shining light everywhere!”
Yeah, it was really beautiful, and I personally think we’re going to see more and more awakenings over the next few years. It’s just time, and it’s one way we’re going to rescue the world from the mess it’s in.
Rick: Yeah, I think so too. I mean, a lot of New Age types have been saying that this thing is going to happen, and a lot of ancient cultures have too.
Michael: Yeah.
Rick: There’s going to be an awakening, or a dawning of higher consciousness, in the world.
Michael: I hope so.
Rick: We’re all doing our part.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, I love it. You know what I always tell people who come to meditate? I never thought I would win the Nobel Prize or anything like that, but I always thought, as long as I was meditating, I was doing my part. You know that story of—
Rick: Krishna, yeah, the people holding up their sticks.
Michael: And I always felt like, okay, I’m holding up my stick. I’m doing what I can do. I think if people just do that, there’s a tremendous beauty to it, and it does make the world a better place.
Rick: Yeah, and I’m glad you said that. That story about the sticks, just briefly, is that Indra was jealous of Krishna because the people of Vrindavan were so into Krishna. So he started pouring down rain on the village to get at them, and the people pleaded with Krishna to save them.
Krishna went and picked up a hill, or a mountain, and held it above the village with his hand to act as an umbrella. After a while, all the people thought, “Oh, he can’t hold that up all by himself,” so they all grabbed a stick and came to help hold up the mountain. Of course, it actually didn’t do anything, but they felt like they were helping. So really, God is doing everything, but we can feel that we’re helping, holding up a stick.
Michael: Absolutely.
Rick: By whatever we’re doing in the interest of helping to awaken the world.
Michael: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s very special, and I think it also reminds us of our humanity, which is really important. I’ve worked around the world quite a bit, and I think one of the problems with America is that it’s very self-centered. We’ve gotten into this sort of “me generation”: here’s my selfie, and all that sort of stuff.
I think we need to be reminded of our humanity, that we are all in this together. I’m a huge, huge fan of and believer in the collective consciousness. When we have people here at my house, sometimes we have 20 or 30, or even more people, because my house can actually squeeze that many in. The effect is incredible. Everybody gets uplifted, and there’s a little trick I learned, too.
Rick: Were you here in Iowa when we had 8,000 meditating together one time in the wintertime?
Michael: No, I wasn’t able to make that course.
Rick: That was rich.
Michael: Yeah, exactly, it is, and that’s just it. When we have people together, if you’re Christian, you might remember that where two or three are gathered in my name, I grant their request. And if you’re Maharishi, he’s always told us about the power of the collective consciousness, particularly through the Siddhi Program.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an Amma devotee or a Rama devotee. It doesn’t matter. If you’re doing something and maybe you’re in a satsang or something like that, then you’re helping uplift everyone. I personally find that extraordinarily beautiful and important.
Rick: Yeah, it is. I read it a few weeks ago at the end of an interview that the last sukta of the 10th mandala of the Rig Veda, about assembly being significant in unity, talks about the potency of a group of enlightened people together.
Michael: It is very, very, very powerful, and we should do it as much as we can.
Rick: Yeah. You mentioned you have these gatherings in your house. What are they about, and if anybody lives in the Salt Lake area, can they come to them?
Michael: Yes. Mostly they’ve been students of mine, meditators, although some of them are non-meditators. My dearest friend, beautiful Dorothy Rowe, came and did a session here.
Rick: Who’s been on BatGap, by the way.
Michael: Yeah, I know. She’s so wonderful.
Rick: You’re whacking your microphone here with your hand.
Michael: Oh, sorry. I apologize. But yeah, she was here, and the eye of Kalki opened up. I saw it, and she saw it. I was like, “Whoa, it’s a big eye.” The Shakti coming out of that was extraordinary.
My house is also very special. There are Nagas that frequent it, and there are elementals around. I’ve walked out into my backyard and looked up, seeing lokas open up and celestial beings running around. This is kind of a cool place. It’s just a neighborhood, but the grounds seem to have a quality to them. People come in and they just feel it. They say, “Oh gosh, this place feels wonderful.”
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And they have good meditations here.
Rick: That happens. I mean, how long have you lived there?
Michael: Eight years.
Rick: Yeah. Places imbibe the influence of the people who frequent them. You walk into a bar, and even if it’s closed, there’s a feeling in the room. Or you walk into a temple which has been, like—I remember there’s a beautiful place in New Mexico called Santuario de Chimayo. We went there one time, and all these healings had taken place. There are all these crutches on the wall that people had been able to discard and stuff.
You walk in there and there’s just this feeling of holiness. I remember we sat down, and Irene started crying right away because there was just beautiful sweetness in the air. So it’s a thing. It’s kind of an interesting thing to understand, but different places get imbued with the qualities of the consciousness of those who frequent them.
Michael: Yeah, well, we’ve done a lot of pujas. We have Vedic music recitation and bhajans going on, so it’s a nice place. You and Irene are most welcome to come visit anytime.
Just to tempt you, we’re 30 minutes away from one of the world’s top ski resorts.
Rick: Was that Snowbird, Alta?
Michael: No, we’re—well, what I know is that I don’t ski anymore. It’s right over the mountain behind my house. I could look over and see the mountain.
Rick: Okay, I’ll figure it out when I get there.
Michael: Okay, yeah. They held part of the Olympics there.
Rick: Oh, cool, Squaw Valley. No, that’s in California. Anyway, we’re getting off track. But if we ever travel—we don’t travel much—but if we ever do by car on I-80, we’ll stop by.
Michael: Oh, that’d be wonderful. We’d love to see you guys.
Closing reflections
Rick: Okay, well, thanks for taking birth on this godforsaken planet. Good luck wherever you end up after this one. It’s been a lot of fun talking to you and getting to know you better.
Michael: Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Rick: Yeah. And to those listening or watching, Michael has indicated this is the same routine as with every interview. I’ll put a link to his website, and you can check out what he has to offer, get in touch with him, and possibly learn meditation from him or have a consultation, or whatever you need or whatever you work out. And we’ll see you next time.
Michael: Okay, that’s great.
Rick: Off the top of my head, I forget who I’m interviewing next, but it’ll be somebody. We keep scheduling about once a week, so stay tuned. If you’d like to be notified each time there’s a new one, sign up for the little email notification thing. And/or subscribe to the YouTube channel if you’re watching this on YouTube. The more subscribers, the better, in terms of YouTube’s support.
Michael: I think you’re talking to Richard.
Rick: Richard Schoeller. Yeah, who’s an interesting guy. I don’t know if he still does it, but he’s an undertaker. Ironically, he also sees the deceased in their subtle bodies or whatever. This all came upon him quite unexpectedly, and I haven’t really delved into his story because I completely focus on the person I’m about to interview. As soon as that’s over, I switch gears and focus on the next one. But anyway, that’s the—
Michael: I’m looking forward to it.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: Okay.
Rick: Good. Well, thanks, Michael, and thanks to all those who’ve been listening or watching. We’ll see you next time, hopefully.
Michael: Okay.
Rick: Bye-bye.
Michael: Bye-bye.
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