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 other ones archived. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and if you don’t like PayPal there’s a donations page which explains other ways of doing it. 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, I would say a much saner life than mine in that he had his first profound mystical experience when he was eleven and when I was still like totally confused little guy that hadn’t even gotten to Boy Scouts yet and 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 it’s had all kinds of beautiful mystical experiences all of his life. So I don’t know why I launched on 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 11 because that really kind of launched your spiritual quest.
Michael: Okay, my school took the 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 I ended up in the philosophy and religion section and 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 and 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 it but some book falls off, they look at it, it’s Ramana Maharshi or something.
Michael: Oh my gosh, wow. Well, I wasn’t quite like that. But yeah, and I opened up and I’m looking through it and there was a black-and-white photograph of the Portola Palace and my whole
Rick: Which is?
Michael: That’s in Tibet, in Lhasa, Tibet, the living quarters for the Dalai Lama.
Rick: Before he got banished or whatever. Yeah,
Michael: Right and so I looked at it and I just recognized that it was huge, just this huge emotional welling up and it just looked like home.
Rick: Yeah,
Michael: it just felt like my house, you know, 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’re eleven?
Michael: Yeah, later my wife and I had a shared experience of … oh my gosh, I was … and we had it at the same moment. We were sitting there talking, we both went like, “Did you just get that?” And I was riding on my horse, I was all decked out, I was going into this town somewhere in the Himalayas to collect my bride, who was my current wife, and she saw me coming and took off and beat feet, and we didn’t get married. But she could describe the horse and I could describe the horse and what I was wearing, 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 like 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 Alexandria David Neel’s works, and you know, she’s that woman who spent what it was, 18 years in Tibet, and I read the book and it talked about mystical things to me as a child, people levitating and melting snow around them, and little walking super-fast in the Himalayas guided by stars and things like that. And so I was smitten with that. I just was like, “Wow, man, I want to know how to do that.” And from reading the book she was talking about meditation, and somehow I cognized a meditation which later turned out to be a traditional Tibetan meditation, visualization meditation, and I practiced that pretty much almost every day until I was about profound experience of pure consciousness, you know, what in the TM movement they would call the transcendent. Very profound. And 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 just want to say to those listening, I usually mentioned this at some point, those listening to the live recording, if you want to post a question during this interview, go to the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com and you’ll see a form at the bottom of that page through which you can post questions, and 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 it 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 path is 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 that experience and I think what got in the way was my father passed away when I was fourteen, rather untimely and you know I think maybe as a young boy or young man you’re struggling with puberty and so it was a little bit difficult, although I kept practicing and then I tried other things. I tried Zen for a number of years, 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 and what an hour, two hours a day? I mean, how much?
Michael: I probably did an hour plus each time and the other thing is that I should say is my father was into gymnastics and my brother and I both were gymnasts, you know, from knee high. We even had some equipment in our backyard and through that I started a Hatha yoga practice and so I started doing Hatha yoga before I was age 11 and so I was doing that regularly so that may have had something to do with it and I had somewhere along the line, I don’t remember exactly where, but when I was young I learned about pranayama and so I’ve been doing some breathing exercises.
Rick: It’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 you know 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 and definitely to me, it’s sort of my way of thinking it indicates some kind of carryover from past lives. The only thing I ever had like that was I figured out how to put my legs in 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,” and 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 don’t know, it all just felt very normal for me, it just felt natural.
Rick: 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 like amazing to me.
Michael: I don’t know, those books, by the time I graduated, by the time I finished 10th grade, I read every single book in that library’s philosophy and religion section.
Rick: Wow, that’s impressive.
Michael: So I was like running out of things, and so I think that 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, you know, reading and studying and trying to learn, and that was always very inspiring. And then I had a We talk about 17 years old – my best friend from Boy Scouts’ father owned a bunch of horses and he would take people on hunting and fishing camps in the summer and he’d get us boys to work, you know, which was, wow, you know, we’d go up in the Sierras and so we used to go up from this base of Lone Pine in the Sierras and there was a cabin there and we always would stop to water the horses before going over the 8,000 foot pass, and we’d always knock on the door of the cabin, mostly nobody was there, but this one time a man answered the door and there was something about him, I didn’t know what it was, but there was something about him that was different, and 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 this extraordinarily brilliant man, PhD, mathematician, philosopher, got into Shankara big-time back in the 20s and 30s and had a complete realization, wrote a number of very fine books and had a small following, and he found LA, he was living in Los Angeles and he found it was too difficult, and so he moved, they moved to that cabin up there He and his wife.
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 and 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, the scout trip that I was with hiked about 60-70 miles of the John Muir Trail every summer and so we’d done that, it was the last day or last night before we hiked out and we were in this, canyon so to speak, a big broad canyon with mountains on both sides and at the end where we’d come off the pass down into, and there was a lake there and there this storm cranked up that was just mind-boggling, lightning, thunder, dark clouds, you know, it was really something, and it was coming down the valley right toward us and everybody was getting a little worried, so people, 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 you 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 and I just knelt down and I prayed, I literally prayed in a very like a Christian fashion of my childhood, which is a Catholic, high Episcopal Catholicism, and I just prayed and I just asked, I said, “Could we be spared this storm? It’s got to really wipe us out, you know, it could kill people, you’ll get lightning going everywhere.” There’s not much around there, just right there, just slightly above tree line, and the storm just came on down and it got right up to the edge of our camp where you could stick your arm out and get water on it, you know, get wet and pull it back and it’d be dry, and this wind came out of the north, blew that storm right around our camp, literally, like 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 and we were all dry. The other kids were like, “What are you doing? Why don’t you put up your tube tent?” You know, I said, “No, we’re not going to get wet, I just knew it.” It was powerful. I’ve always felt much closer to God, you know, 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’s some interesting other stories like that in your life but they happen later on, so let’s come back to those. And perhaps moving chronologically, which is sometimes an orderly way to go, tell us a bit about how you ended up getting into TM.
Michael: I had a friend, our parents shared the hospital room and he was born the day before I was, and so we just grew up together like family, and he had gone off to Humboldt State College, it wasn’t a university, but I guess State College in Northern California
Rick: in Eureka.
Michael: Yeah, actually north of Eureka there.
Rick: Arcata.
Michael: Arcata, that’s it, yeah, and he called me. I had gotten a job packing mules for the US Forest Service for the back country, you know, which was $2.75 an hour for sitting on your horse riding around God’s country, it was fabulous. But he said, “Why don’t you come up and help me pay the rent?” which is his modus operandi, he was always kind of like that. And then he said, “Oh, there’s this guy named Maharishi up here,” and I didn’t ring a bell with me, I didn’t know who that was, but I resigned my job and it was coming toward the end of my 90-day appointment anyway, so I just left and went up to Humboldt and turned out Maharishi was there doing that 1970 teacher training course. And I met all these, what I thought were really cool people hanging out there, I really liked the way they felt. And we, 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, did that I think three times, wasn’t impressed, but I kept going back, there was something that just, you know, like pulled me there. And then I think it was about the fourth time or so, there was a very well-dressed man standing there, you know, 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 talk to anybody, you know, I love talking to people, so we have this really amazing conversation. Maharishi arrived and then the doors opened and the whole crowd of people was out there just sort of, I got sucked along with them, pulled right in. And 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, amazing, amazing lecture. And just listening to Maharishi speak and being that close to him and how he felt to me, I thought this is my teacher, this is the guy who’s going to open this up for me. And so I went to ask if I could learn from him and as, he had a room that he would go to on campus and not where he was actually staying but for, you know, between things, and I went up and waited in line. I took a little flower with me, you know, stood there like this and he came out and as he was walking toward me I just had this thought that I shouldn’t take his time. I thought that I should, my thought, I can still remember it, was I should dedicate my life to freeing his time so that he could bring his teaching to the world. And then in that moment I took a classic Zen type bodhisattva vow, to not give up until all sentient beings reached enlightenment. And then I sat there and I thought about it, oh God, what did I just do? But that seemed to really pay off because, getting ahead, but later on after I’d become a teacher I was invited to join Maharishi’s staff and, well, a course staff and then that worked out to joining Marisi’s, the international staff, and that worked out to being Maharishi’s personal assistant.
Rick: Yeah, that’s nice.
Michael: Pretty cool.
Rick: What years were you on 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 I was just … there must have been some overlap. I was over there from like fall of ’73 through spring of ’76.
Michael: Oh, yeah, yeah, probably we crossed paths, you know, that’s not that there’s any lack of people around Maharishi Yeah, 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, you know, what you’d hoped it would be?
Michael: Oh, yes, yeah, first meditation, and I was like, wow, God, yes, one of those moments, it was very, very powerful, and then I promptly forgot my mantra, had to get that recovered, and then the other thing that happened was I just instantly was doing an hour 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 it, be an hour later.
Rick: Yeah, even though it’s supposed to be 20 minutes, but you like lose track, right?
Michael: Yeah, I did, I did,
Rick: Yeah. Cool. Yeah, well, I don’t want this to be … I mean, you know, TM had a profound effect on me. I tend not to be a proselytizer for it anymore, or in these interviews, certainly, but at the same time, you know, sometimes it was brushed off as trivial or just a stress reduction technique or something good for beginners and all, and I think that does it a disservice, because it, you know, it’s been very profound for many people, and many people have awoken as a result of its practice.
Michael: Absolutely, I think TM is one of the fast path methods, which is fast path simply meaning 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. Just the greatest teacher I’ve ever known, I learned the most around him than even anybody else, amazing, extraordinary man.
Rick: Yeah, so you mentioned that within six months of beginning, your grade point average went from a 1.28 to a 4.0. That’s nice, and, any … we’ll keep moving along here, but any particularly noteworthy, you know, experiences during that whole phase when you were like Maharishi’s personal attendant or anything?
Michael: Well, yeah, there’s … well, on my teacher training course, there was a lot of celestial perception, you know, or refined perception of things, you know, seeing through walls, watching people’s souls, cognizing their thoughts, healing people, there was a lot going on.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And it was pretty darn amazing.
Rick: You’re probably meditating 10-12 hours a day or something?
Michael: 18, for the first Maharishi asked … well, Maharishi was in silence and then he came out on the with him I think the next day or so, maybe that evening, I don’t remember exactly, and he said, “Okay, how long you’ve been meditating for?” And we’d all been doing twelve plus hours, you know. He got around a meeting, he was like, “Oh, well, it’d be good to, you know, cool it off a little bit.”
Rick: Yeah, so you mentioned in some notes I read that you had instructed like 17,000 people to meditate. How in the world did you do that many people?
Michael: Yeah, well, I have to put in there that that’s actually instruction in meditation, advanced techniques, and I’ve led a couple of TM Siddhis courses.
Rick: Oh, if you count all those people, okay.
Michael: Yeah, so you got to put it all in there. And Maharishi made me a TM Siddhis administrator, advanced techniques teacher, which really upset some people in the movement who weren’t on the call, so to speak, and boy, that had some interesting ramifications. Another one of the reasons 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, you became self-realized or something. You know, people post these videos on YouTube. There’s this guy just the other day that someone brought to my attention that said, you know, it was going on about how he had gotten enlightened. And he was, I didn’t watch the whole thing, just sort of spot-checked a few bits of it, but 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. And 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 and when you say that you became realized or awake, what happened?
Michael: How would you know that? Yeah,
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? Because 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 that I know to be enlightened, I’m not going to mention his name because I don’t have permission to do that, and he was asking me some questions, some hard-hitting questions and all of a sudden I just went whoa, boom, and 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 and he just kind of laughed and he said, “Well, there you are.” I said, “Okay.” I wasn’t going to necessarily take his word for it because I’ve had other profound experiences, nothing like that, but it never went away, it’s still there and 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 and I talked to another enlightened person that I know and I went over all my experiences and what was going on. The other thing that I would say is because Maharishi trained us so well and gave us such clear definitions of these things that 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 term “wow, 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 in California, who just sort of woke up. In fact, one of them was awake in 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, you know, a big flashy boom, that’s probably more rare.
Rick: Yeah, some people distinguish between like people who have these sudden dramatic awakening and “oozers,” you know, who kind of ooze into it and 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 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 just surrendered, is the word, and 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.
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 of 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, rather it’s advice to intellectuals, something in there shifts and changes until that surrender takes place. The word usually used is grace.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes they’ve used the analogy of like let’s say you have a pan of water and it’s a little choppy and you want the waves to settle down, 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, you know, so okay, so you’re a guy who had a rather marked and abrupt shift and so, you know, like what was life like let’s say the week after that shift that was different than the week before that shift, I mean what changed and you say it continues to this day, so what’s different about you now than was then prior to 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 know, you’re okay, yep dear, I’m fine, better than I’ve ever been totally awake, vivid, amazing, extraordinary 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, but it just everything was amazing and the top of my head felt like open and alive, just on fire and that went on for actually about a month and after that there was this sort of roller coaster ride where some days I felt just totally amazing and other days I felt like rock bottom again and that kind of fluctuated like that and that’s my understanding is that that’s not all that uncommon.
Rick: No, it’s not. So there’s a usually it’s an integration phase that’s going on, you know, 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, 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 is getting structured in me. That happens a lot with people, they come and see me and we just sit and talk and then I’ll look at them and I’ll say, “Oh my goodness, what happened to your ribs?” you know, and they say like, “Oh, I cracked three of them,” you know. You start to see on a more refined level. The other piece of it is, you know, you and I come from the TM tradition where Maharishi used English words to describe traditional states of consciousness and so 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 and my experience of that was just two and a half months later I was in what we call Brahman. Yeah, and that’s another one. I went back and I 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.” And each Upanishad, but the greatest part of that is it’s a feeling of coming home, it’s a feeling of complete naturalness, a freedom of total freedom, a freedom of equality with all things, a joy, a blissful state, not like what we might, you know, like winning the lottery would be joyful but it’s not the same thing. It’s more subtle, more powerful than that. So it was 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.
Rick: Okay, good, interesting. You know, I wanted to question you on some of the stuff you’re just saying about infinity and all. You know in mathematics you can have infinity and then you can have bigger infinities, like 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, you know, take it to the 10th power. And 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 a dimension that isn’t going to change or get bigger or vaster or anything else? It’s already infinite, what more could be added to it? And yet it’s that 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. You know, it started over here and it goes off infinitely in that direction. And 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. And 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 got to remember in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna when he 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 that Maharishi connected up with when he went to Hawaii back in ’59, before he even came to San Francisco, and 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, and 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, I mean, well, 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. So, I mean, 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 like specialized channels of knowledge and ability, right? But what we’re kind of alluding to here is, you know, what is it that is kind of 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 because 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?” And I’m going to guess that my experience might, at least this might be slightly different than somebody else’s, but have the commonality of that vastness, that awareness, and that unity because the unity piece is, for me, if I look at an object and I 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, yeah, which is probably that Lesha-vidya thing, you know, we got to still survive and be able to eat and all of that.
Rick: Yeah, lesh avidya meaning faint remains of ignorance.
Michael: Right.
Rick: And yet is it ignorance? Yeah, okay, so I mean is appreciation of any sort of duality ignorance or is it that the sort of 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, I want to appreciate that because that’s part of the reason for the creation we’re told. You know, the Vedic literature talks about that, all great saints have talked about the joy of God’s creation and experiencing that and living that and living that in its absolute fullness, but you 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, so I don’t see those as incompatible and frankly I get frustrated with these teachers who say, “Oh no, none of that, that’s all nonsense, it’s all illusion, you know, 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 and they use the example of a pot, you know, which it looks like a pot, it 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.
Michael: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: Maybe the clay thing is more fundamental than the pot thing but 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 the complete non-duality 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 and 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. You know, I spent a lot of years in the computer industry and one of the first things you do is you define your terms before you get into a discussion that makes sure you’re all on the same plate and I think that there’s. My backgrounds in religious studies and there’s a huge disparity between cultural context understanding. 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 like Alan Watts is a good example of a guy who completely blew it in my opinion. You know, he tried I think 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. You know, we read it, we see it at the level where we were and then you know later we go, “Oh, I didn’t see that before.”
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 and … I was thinking about like 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,” you know. 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. You know, cognitive dissonance should be studied in school by everyone, you know. Everybody should have that right on the tip of their tongue, the understanding that we tend to reshape things that fit our idea of the way things should be, which is based on our conditioning and our concept.
Rick: That’s actually some notes here actually 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, and I just want to make sure I didn’t write that. I plagiarized that one because I couldn’t say that any better, so why not use what was written. Yeah, that’s it exactly. So this is why we have a lot of problems we have in the world, you know, why some people like somebody’s politics and somebody else doesn’t, you know, or somebody’s religion. They get very vehement about their version of it and you know they’re not being gentle, they’re not being kind, they’re not opening up and living life in a more fundamental truth level.
Rick: Yeah, I guess one way I would frame it is rather than beliefs and actions that you know understanding and experience. Maybe that’s another way of saying the same thing, but you know, religious fundamentalists for instance, they they’re holding tightly to a certain belief or beliefs. Do they really experience that or are they just holding tightly to something that they can’t, that they haven’t experientially verified? And if they were to experientially verify it, would they lighten up and realize that, you know, other expressions in other cultures are actually saying the same thing just because they sound different because it’s 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 all are talking to each other, you know, Muslims, Jews, Christians, all versions are talking to each other and they’re saying, “Oh look, we have this in common.” Yeah. You know, they’re really … it’s 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 and then if you put Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Muhammad, you know, whoever in a room together they’d have a grand old time and they would just, you know, be basically on the same page.
Michael: Yeah, they’d probably be
Rick: learning from each other saying, “Oh, you see it this way, very interesting.” Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.
Michael: Yeah, they’re like the old Rishis, you know, they’d sit around the campfire I suppose and not talk about making s’mores but talk about cognitions of the days, you know, 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, etc.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: You know, Muhammad was illiterate, you know, 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 the Syro-Aramaic into the 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 person.
Rick: And incidentally you have a PhD in religious studies, I should mention. And another thing we could mention here is that, you know, people like Jesus and so on spoke from a certain level of consciousness and their listeners could only listen from their level of consciousness and something is lost right there. I mean right in the very room or building or crowd that is gathered. So, what, you know, if it’s lost right there what’s to say of being lost over hundreds and thousands of years?
Michael: Yeah, I think that’s exactly what Maharishi used to say, it was just, you know, the guilty party.
Rick: Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance.
Michael: Yeah, it’s time, time’s the guilty party, you know.
Rick: I want to loop back to what you’re, again, you almost looped back to this, now we’re going to do it. You talked about you had this realization within a few months you’re in Brahman consciousness. Now, you know, there’s 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 it’s, I don’t, my body sleeps, I’m old, you know, decrepit, falling apart, you know, as Monty Python said, you know, my knees are knackered, you know, all of that. But it just, yeah.
Rick: What about now?
Michael: It’s just there.
Rick: Pure awareness is there,
Michael: Yeah,
Rick: And now people might wonder, okay, how do you know it’s there? Because 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 waking state, you know. 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 and 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 deep as Whatever, what 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 waking state coming in or can you have thoughts and yet, I mean, because, yeah, pure awareness, okay, that’s there. But then 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, yeah, 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. You know, I’ve had heart surgery, I lost my gallbladder, my knee’s been worked on, my shoulder’s been rebuilt.
Rick: Becoming bionic.
Michael: Yeah, when I was in India, I went to Ayurvedic clinic and the guy screwed up and he poured boiling hot oil down my sinuses. Yeah, that was not good and so I’ve had sinus surgery. Okay, all right, so you can have, my point is, you can have all this stuff and still get enlightened, still experience pure consciousness and 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 know, get to play Steven Spielberg. Yeah, you know, lucid dreaming, do that kind of stuff. In waking state you can sit, you’re in pure consciousness but you’re having normal thoughts, you’re thinking, but thoughts aren’t who you are. You know, thoughts are just thoughts, they’re thought forms, they come and go. And I think one of the things that I learned along the way was to not pay attention to my own thoughts.
Rick: Okay, that pretty well covers it I think. So anyway, just a summary point then, we’re talking about pure consciousness being maintained 24/7 including during sleep. That’s said to be, and I have a whole, I have this 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 an acid test of awakening that 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 in the definitive 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 criteria 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 and so you know 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 know, 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, you know, when you wake up and you say I slept well. 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,” and the guy who was asking got all upset. He said, “You? How come you can’t remember?” And 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 that’s sort of, 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, you know, 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 7 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 and you know could we really understand higher states or is there sort of a whole lot of variation and subjective difference and so on that so we’ll never be able to standardize it, you know?
Michael: I hope we’ll never be able to standardize it. That might take away some of the joy and the surprise.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: I think that my, I can only speak 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 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, you know, it was just gone. And 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, line on water or line on air as opposed to line in stone.
Michael: Right, exactly, yeah.
Rick: Okay, so we’ve alluded to celestial perception and or we might say a perception or appreciation of subtle phenomena in which are ordinarily not perceived with the grosser aspects of the senses, if that’s a good way of defining it. And 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, like for instance how you met your wife. And is this the wife you are now married to or are you talking about?
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 and it just called my name and I went, “Whoa, you know, what’s that?” And I thought…
Rick: It was a woman’s voice?
Michael: Yeah, it was. It had that… It was very distinctive voice; I would recognize it in a minute. And I thought, “Oh God, am I going schizophrenic or something?” You know, and then like a month literally, about a month later, boom, I get the voice again and I was like, “Oh, geez.” And it happened about every month and I was starting to wonder if I should worry or not. And then I went to a meditation retreat Tim held at Cobb Mountain facility they used to have. And I… Honestly, at that point I was sort of like 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. And so I was sort of standoffish, but I was sitting at this table and the woman who later became my wife comes over and sits down and we’re just chatting lunch, you know, and I’m not going there, you know. She’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, you know. Gosh, you know, what wasn’t to like, but I was like, “Uh-uh, you know, I’m not going to go there.” And so this kind of went on for the time of the course and I’m resisting, but the presentation’s there. And then the last day of the course I go to the office to turn in my key, all right? So I’m standing at the window and I’m setting my key down because nobody was in the office and I hear the voice and it’s going “Michael!” and I go like, “Oh, geez, you know again.” And so I ignore it, I ignore it, and the voice goes “Michael!” really emphatically. I’m going, “What’s going on here?” and then it’s louder and I turn around and it’s my now wife, it’s her, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, you know, I better pay attention to this.” So we decided to have a date and which I was resisting, but we did and got married, but whatever, I don’t remember how long. 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 and 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 and then he was in a store or something and he overheard some women talk and they mentioned this name, it was an unusual name, and he went up to them and said, “You know, this person exists, this name?” and 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 and he called her up and 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. You know, 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 and she and her girlfriend, they went over to Yoshi’s, the jazz bar, for a ladies’ night out and I was, I guess I was at my house in Berkeley and she, all of a sudden I just could see everything that was going on and 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 I called her and I said, 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?” And she goes, “What? Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m at home.” And 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, like 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 this woman who was her friend who was a nurse and my girlfriend was telling her stories, you know, because I always could tell what was going on with my girlfriend. And so we had dinner together and the girlfriend of my friend accosted me kind of vehemently. She said, “Okay, she says you can see things and da-da-da-da-da, you know, one of those. And okay, what’s wrong with my arm?” You know, and so it kind of upset me honestly. I was like, “Well, what? You know, I’m not doing a dog and pony show here. This isn’t show and tell, you know. Well, you don’t know anything, you know, one of those.” And I don’t know, I looked at her arm and I could see and I said, “Oh, you have a hairline fracture.” And I said, “It’s like right here, you know.” And she goes, “No, I don’t.” It was basically childhood. And she says, you know, it was x-rayed and they didn’t find anything. And 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 and it was exactly what you described and it freaked her out that somebody could be, you know, that tuned into you or you’d be that transparent to them.” And she couldn’t take it.
Rick: Yeah, freaked her out, kind of violated her paradigm probably.
Michael: Yeah, totally. And I felt bad about that but then she put me in the position of it. So,
Rick: yeah, well, it’s interesting. So, there’s 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 couple situations you mentioned where you noticed that there was a breast lump in someone and I’m sure you weren’t staring. I’m sure the woman could say, you know, my eyes are up here, right? But you cognized.
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 and in fact one of the women was a friend of the person that I was talking to and she was kind of tangential to it and then I just went, “Oh,” and I don’t know why. I just turned, I looked at her and I 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.” And I found out from her friend that she did go check it out and it was a lump in her breast and it probably saved her. So there’s one that’s not there that I’ll tell you 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 and so I go in and I’m in the little room and that very nice young woman comes in, very sharp professional comes in and she starts typing my information into the hospital computer and I’m answering questions and I look at her and 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?” And she says, “You know that happened when I was two years old and I don’t even remember which one.” And I looked at her and I said, “Oh, it’s the left one.” She goes, “Oh yeah.” So I’m like, “Why did that happen? Why did I do that?” I felt badly and I apologized to her. Well, a while later another cardiologist physician’s assistant came in and she had a head scarf on and she was dealing with chemo and had cancer and I think it was like maybe ovarian cancer. And so I’m looking at her and the chemotherapy made her so cloudy that you can’t perceive her right away but after we sat there we talked for and I could see that the cancer was not completely gone yet and I thought, “Oh, I’m not going to open my mouth, you know, I’m not going to say a thing.” But in another meeting we had later, another date, she came in and I looked at her and I said, “Look, this is going to sound really strange to you.” I said, “You can just think I’m some weirdo,” but I said, “This is what I’m seeing,” and I told her what I saw and she was crestfallen, it really shocked her and I said, “Look, I don’t expect you to believe me but the young lady in your office, you know, when I described her, told her name, I said she and I had something went around about her kidneys so she never met me before.” And so what I took out of that was 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’s 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 said, “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, you know, when a person is in, you know, higher state of consciousness they say and do stuff that they may not know why they’re saying and doing it. It just kind of stuff 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, you know.
Michael: That’s my experience of it, so I’m I try to be very much more open now, but I have 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 and then a clavicle and then an ACL injury, a knee injury.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, she’s a lovely, lovely woman, one of my students and she hurt herself and we were talking and she was obviously in pain and I don’t know why, I just looked, I said, “Oh, would you like to fix that?” She goes, “Well, yeah,” you know, and I said, “Well, come over here,” and I don’t really have to touch anybody but in her case they felt if I put my hand on her shoulder that contact would signify to her that there’s something going on. So I just, and there were other people in the room watching this, I would never have touched a young woman without somebody in the room, you know, and particularly my wife, you know, and so I just put my hand on her shoulder and about, you know, I don’t know, less than a minute and I looked, I said, “You’re going to be fine,” and she had instant relief and felt better and healed up and then she felt so good she went skiing.
Rick: Yeah.
Michael: And she took a tumble and they took her off the mountain, ski patrol her off the mountain, took her to the local hospital. They did an x-ray and she had this massive tear in her ACL and so she calls…
Rick: Which is a ligament in the knee, people don’t…
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not even actually sure where it is but except I could see something.
Rick: Anterior Crucial Ligament or something it’s called.
Michael: I’m not a medical person and so she calls me up on Wednesday, I think it was, Wednesday or Thursday, she says, “I’m going in for surgery on Friday, you know, I’ve got this, you know, I can have somebody drive me up there, can you fix it?” And I just… So what really happens is 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. Well, in my case I was already in the transcendent but so then it becomes a very powerful thought that comes to fruition and maybe quicker than a regular thought might. So I just said to her, I said, “No, no, you don’t need to come up,” I said, “You’re going to be fine.” You know, and I didn’t really think about that, I just came out of my mouth and I didn’t even think about what I meant by you’re going to be fine, you know. Well, she goes in Friday morning and the orthopedic surgeon looks at the x-rays and goes, “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 come back and their 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, no, that’s 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, but hey, amazing. I mean, it took a lot out of him in his case, he had to sort of really rest up after these incidents, but there were shows where football players would really screwed up their knees and could barely walk or all of a sudden be able to run. He’s really remarkable. So, you know, this stuff, it’s a little tangential, I’d say, to the whole awakening enlightenment thing, but, you know, I think it’s somewhat related because it indicates that there is more to life than the ordinary gross mechanics and, you know, 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. And one thing that I want to say because I don’t want to get a thousand phone calls, I cannot automatically heal people. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t happen, and you take the thought and you get the feedback saying, “Nope, this is karmic” or whatever, “Guy’s got to go through this, that’s the way it is,” and other times it just happens. And 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.
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. I mean, in our case, even finding our house, you know, we went to her and we said, “We really want to have a house and we can’t afford Sthapatya Veda,” which was all the rage around here, and what should we do? And she said, “Amma will do sankalpa and don’t worry about Sthapatya Veda, just buy it, get the right house.” And so then I was at work when somebody mentioned, you know, some house for sale someplace. I called Irene and gave her an address and she went to look for it and got lost and came down this driveway and found the house we now live in, which is you know, perfect for us.
Michael: Oh, that’s great.
Rick: And actually with a little modification, you know, somewhat in keeping with Sthapatya Veda. So anyway, that kind of thing could be brushed off, but there’s 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, the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s a little bit south of San Francisco there, and I was sitting in meditation and it was like Amma’s voice in my head, it said, “Come to my ashram now.” And I was like, “You know what?”
Rick: Had you seen Amma before?
Michael: Oh yeah. Yeah, we’d been going to Amma for years and you know, I was just, you know, “Oh God,” you know. And so I was like, “Oh,” so I went back to the mantra and then it was like, “No, now!” So I got up, I went downstairs, said to my wife, “Look, I got this cosmic telegram,” I think was the words I used, and said, “I think I’m supposed to go to Amma’s ashram,” and 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 mean I went, and I had a three-day delay because it snowed in London and they didn’t have any snowplows, so I got a delay, but I got there, 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, I’m up, God, 16 floors in the building I’m in, and I’m in deep meditation again, and all of a sudden, I get another voice, except I don’t know this voice, I don’t know, it’s a man’s voice or it’s a what I would say is a male voice, and it says, “Go downstairs,” and I went back to the mantra, you know, ignoring my thoughts of meditation as we’ve been trained, and then the voice said, “Go downstairs,” so I thought, “No, I’m going to go downstairs,” so I got up, took the elevator down and walked out the front of the flat there and I literally said, “Okay, now what?” And my feet just started moving, it was like my legs were propelled on their own, and so I just relaxed and saw where they took me, and they took me, Amma’s ashram has a huge facility that’s a Kali temple, a lot of seating in it and some business offices and that kind of stuff, and to the right-hand side of that there’s sort of a little alleyway and some small low buildings, and 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, so I was walking down to there, I get there literally just as they’re starting a Mahamrityunjaya Homa, which is a Lord Shiva Homa, a Homa for healing and enlightenment, and there was maybe a dozen people there, one place to sit right next to the fire, and with a wall that I could lean my back on, which is really important for me, and so I sat down there and this young man, this young man I’ve never seen anybody Before or since like him, normally when you see the pundits and stuff they’re usually in the orange robes or something like that when they do these, Homas, not all of them, you know, they could be in the white dhotis, he was in a white dhoti, and he had little past shoulder-length dark hair, most illuminating eyes you could imagine, and then there were two or three older gentlemen across from me who were assisting him, and they were wearing, 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, you know, they’re kind of amber colored and beautiful, and 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, you know, but with life, and so he was 100% focused and consumed in what he was doing, and the job of the gentleman was to hand him what he needed as it was needed, and I know the Mahamrityunjaya, so I was chanting along with him, and then when it was over everybody just got up and left, and I got up and left. The interesting thing is, I thought about him, you know, and I realized I had not seen him around the temple the whole time I was there, either before or after it, and then I got to think about that, you know, he’s so familiar to me, he looks very familiar to me, and then I went, “Oh God,” and I pulled up my autobiography of a yogi book, and 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 spittin’ 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 you know, I was dancing on thin ice. I was still dancing, but it was thin ice. Yeah, I had a atrial fib where my heart used to do for a month at a time, and it was just wearing me out, and you know, I had a cardiologist who was an idiot, who misdiagnosed and mistreated me, which cost me my gallbladder, and most people get their gallbladders out, they don’t have any problems, I have problems, and so forth and so on, and I saw myself before all this happened, I saw myself die, and I could see it clearly, I knew exactly when it was going to happen, not the exact date, but I knew it would be 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, I got my affairs in order, I did my will, I talked to my wife, 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, it was, I just didn’t see myself being around anymore, and then after this I lived.
Rick: Well, did you, have you had the afib anymore, and 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, but so, you know, yeah, it was dicey, but I’ve never had an atrial fib symptom since, knock on wood, and I have a EKG, small little personalized EKG machine that I can check my heart with, it actually works with your cell phone, it’s pretty amazing, and it’s called Cardia, highly recommend it, and so I could track, and I have had no symptoms at all of atrial fib 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, stayed with some friends to see her, and when it was my turn to go up, you know, she gives you a little 3×5 card, you can write things on there, and I wrote, I said, I see myself dying and this is the way it is and fine, I’d like to see Shiva before I die, if possible. And I gave it to her and she just took it and she held it, she looked at it, and she just nodded her head. Yep, and that was it. And so I thought, okay, cool. I went to the back of the church, I went up in the choir loft and I thought, oh, I’ll sit down and meditate, and I sat down to meditate, but I had so much Shakti, so much energy, that I couldn’t, it was like the mantra, it’s just like a little ping out in outer space or something, you know, it was just vibrating. And while I’m sitting there, I had my eyes closed, all of a sudden I see Amma and she’s Sri Karunamayi, who’s also called Amma by her people, so she’s standing in front of me. And I thought, well, that’s interesting, you know, and I opened my eyes and she’s standing in front of me except that I can see her still sitting on the stage, you know, and I thought, well, wow. And so I closed my eyes, I opened my eyes, the same thing, and then she morphed, I think is the right word, into Saraswati and it was Saraswati standing in front of me, the white sari, the whole thing, I mean it’s like, oh my god, you know, and I was shaking and these things are very humbling, I think I want to make that very clear. They’re really, I find them to be, you know, 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, you know, listened to a lot of people talk about flashy experiences who seem to have very vivid imaginations and like to attract attention, you know, by marvelous things they’re experiencing, but I don’t get that feeling with you.
Michael: Yeah, I don’t, yeah, well, I’ll come, I want to make a point of that, but anyway, so 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 is like there and I totally get why Arjuna was going like, 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 that if it had been a flash of a minimal of a second longer I would have fried and died and then, you know, boom and then everything went back to normal and I sat there and I 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, 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 and I didn’t, I didn’t for a very long time because I didn’t want to stand out and be that person, you know, and I also didn’t want to have people going like, oh, you know, I’m not wired like that but one of his, well, his minister of yoga is a very dear friend of mine, extraordinary man. He kept encouraging me to talk my experience, so finally I started sharing them and I’ve said my whole spiritual life that my number one job is to keep my ego out of it. You know, I have met people who want to go, oh, Michael, you’re so special and I always, no!. You know, 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, you know, the statement that only God is the doer is rather accurate. Anyway, I just wanted to say that so people don’t think, you know, grandstanding or somebody’s special because I don’t feel I’m somebody special.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. 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 and who’s world famous.
Rick: Vedic astrology, Jyotish.
Michael: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for saying that. Who’s world famous, best-seller, book writer, all that sort of stuff and he’s, I said, you know, 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 dragons, you know, beings and there’s 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 you know, asking for a second opinion from your doctor. And then I checked it with a woman that I know of who’s extraordinarily intuitive and she said yes. And so,
Rick: now when you checked it with these folks did you say, “Hey, was I a Naga?” and then they said yes or did you did they actually come out with the Naga thing from their side?
Michael: I actually am a little more circumspect, yeah, I’m like you know, what went on, you know, and I just get an innocent confirmation. And so these particular Nagas that I’m talking about are beings of light, very wise ancient beings of light, and I’ve been invited supposedly to, when I leave here, to go back there and share my experience in my life and my knowledge and learnings with them and 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: Subtler realm, it’s a place.
Rick: But it doesn’t necessarily have a geographic location vis-a-vis the earth?
Michael: Not that I’m aware of.
Rick: Okay, 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 also have the option of I could come back, but they’ve told me there’s no need, I could, you know.
Rick: Yeah, you did take a bodhisattva vow, remember?
Michael: Yeah, we’re gonna give you a gold watch and you can retire, you know, I’ve been told that if I wanted, and I also have the opportunity to merge with the Absolute, and 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 know, you have these options, right, and a couple of the options involve continuing as some kind of embodied being. And 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. And 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 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, you know, Tibetan Buddhist literature, other cultures where that yes, you know, 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 with this life, and so supposedly when that happens you’re done and you go and you get a new container, and I have a real sense of that, that all of that stuff that I came in with it’s just gone. It’s not that things don’t happen to you and you know, 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, and so if you can do it compulsory why can’t you do it voluntarily?
Rick: Yeah, but then let me ask you this, you know, 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? I mean 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 like it carrying on for millenniums 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 that it’s evolving toward full realization. So once you’re fully enlightened and you can … 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 you know if you read the Vedic literature supposedly since Luna stepped on it, the exact right segue …
Rick: She knows what she’s doing.
Michael: Supposedly when you die you go to the moon.
Rick: Oh yeah, I’ve heard that the petris live on the moon. I was in a room with Maharishi one time when he said that and I thought, I said Maharishi, petris on the moon and 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 and 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 you know maybe intercede with him with the lords of karma, I don’t know, but it was going to help him along his way. And Christina Olson who anyway, TM meditators would know who she is, she told me that Maharishi did the same thing for her mother when her mother passed. So I think that’s beautiful. So if you’re, 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 who he wants to sign on.
Rick: Yeah, or he can merge back into the absolute, right? I mean you mentioned that as an option and you know I mean 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 I mean 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, you know, who have become enlightened.
Michael: Yeah, no, I think that that’s correct. After all, that’s what the Vedic rishis did. You know, they cognized the functioning of the universe and you know, gave it forth and eventually it got written down and we have that and those teachings have evolved as more knowledges come on. You know, now you have, you know, it went from Rig Veda to Sama Veda to Yajur Veda, etc., to the Upanishads and to Vedanta, you know, and 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, if you know, according to what I read anyway. So, why not? You know, 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 at or 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: And so it could, 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. And incidentally, I mean on this whole theme of what’s supposed to happen after we die and all that, these topics we’ve been just discussing for a few minutes which are kind of, 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. Yeah, and there may be some things which you know, there may be many things which science can’t investigate, 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, you know, the Dalai Lama, he 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, you know, he was real straightforward and I feel the same way. I have ideas and thoughts and some cognitions that are pretty clear, but you know, like everybody else, I guess I’ll find out. Yeah, this is a kind of what Nachiketa was asking Yama, you know, what happens when he dies, does he exist or does he exist not? And Yama said, oh, please don’t make me tell you that. I’ll give you anything, kingdoms, you know, beautiful women, whatever you want, but don’t make me answer that question, but you know, kind of Nachiketa held him to it.
Michael: Good for him.
Rick: Now, you said earlier that, you know, 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. I mean, 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, you know, in your dharma and your consciousness is amazingly clear. It’s like if you’re not enlightened, you know, somebody just needs to come along and go.
Rick: I don’t consider myself enlightened, I don’t make any claims whatsoever, but you know, 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, and 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 like beautiful.
Michael: Oh, thank you.
Michael: Beautiful, yeah, and I don’t, at least right now, I’m not picking up on, you know, 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, and is there anything that kind of like 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: Herbal life, 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, and if I can help someone understand their experiences and you know deal with mood making versus the real thing, I would be delighted if I could help people that way. I’m certainly open to visit some place and give talks because I’ve done that for years. I’m open to teach 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, you know. There’s a link on my website, they can write me and I will write back. It would be delightful, you know, delightful to do that. You know, 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, and some of that I pointed them to another person who was able to knock them over the line, but also a couple of them woke up here, and in my dedicated puja meditation room they went, “Whoa, look it! 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, you know, a lot of new agey 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, and you know what I always tell people who come to meditate, you know, I never thought I would win the Nobel Prize or anything like that, you know, 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, and I think if people just do that there’s a tremendous beauty to that, and it does make the world a better place.
Rick: Yeah, and yeah, I’m glad you said that. That story about the sticks, just briefly, is, you know, Indra was jealous of Krishna because people of Vrindavan were so into Krishna, and so he started pouring down rain on the village to sort of get at people, and you know, the people pleaded to 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, and all the people after a while thought, “Oh, he can’t hold that up all by himself,” so they all grabbed a stick and came and kind of helped to hold up the mountain, and of course it actually didn’t do anything, but they felt like they were helping. So, you know, we’re kind of like, you know, really God is doing everything, but we can feel that we’re helping, you know, holding up a stick.
Michael: Absolutely.
Rick: By whatever we’re doing in the interest of, you know, helping to awaken the world.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s very special, and I think it also reminds us of our humanity, and I think that’s 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, you know, we’ve kind of gotten into this sort of me generation, and here’s my selfie, and you know, all that sort of stuff, and I think that we need to be reminded of our humanity, that we are all in this together, and 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, 30, 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, you know, if you’re Christian you might remember that to a two or three are gathered in my name, I grant their request, you know, and if you’re, you know, 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, you know, 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 think that’s, 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 there’s a last mandala of Rig Veda, I mean last Sukta of the 10th mandala of Rig Veda about assembly is significant in unity and it talks about the kind of the potency of a group of enlightened together.
Michael: It is, it’s very, very, very powerful and we should do it as much of as we can.
Rick: Yeah, so you mentioned you have these gatherings in your houses. What is that 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 non-meditators. You know, my dearest friend, beautiful Dorothy Rowe came and did a session here.
Rick: Who’s been on that gap by the way.
Michael: Yeah, I know, she’s so wonderful.
Rick: You’re whacking your microphone here with your hand.
Michael: Oh, sorry, apologize. But yeah, you know she was here and the eye of Kalki opened up and I saw it, you know, and she saw it. You know, I was like, whoa, it’s a big eye, you know, Shakti coming out of that was extraordinary. So, my house is also very special. There are Nagas that frequent, there’s elementals around. I’ve walked out 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 it. People come in and they just feel it. They just go, 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, I mean, places imbibe the influence of the people who frequent them. You know, you walk into a bar and even if it’s closed there’s a feeling in the room there. Or you walk into a temple which has been this, like I remember there’s a beautiful place in New Mexico called Santuario de Chimayo. And we went there one time and all these healings have taken place. And you know, there’s all these crutches on the wall that people have been able to discard and stuff. And you walk in there and there’s just this feeling of holiness. I mean, I remember we sat down, Irene started crying right away because there’s just beautiful sweetness in the air. So, it’s a thing, you know, 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 a Vedic music recitation, bhajans going And so, it’s a nice place. You are most welcome, you and Irene are most welcome to come visit anytime. Just to tempt you, you know, we’re 30 minutes away from one of the world’s class ski resorts.
Rick: Was that Snowbird, Alta?
Michael: No, we’re … Oh, well, what I know, 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.
Rick: Okay, well, thanks for taking birth on this godforsaken planet. And good luck wherever you end up after this one. But 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’s 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, well, once a week, so stay tuned. And if you’d like to be notified each time there’s a new one, then 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 sort of support.
Michael: I think you’re talking to Richard.
Rick: Richard Schoeller. Yeah, who’s an interesting guy who actually, I don’t know if he still does it, but he’s an undertaker. And ironically, he also has, sees the deceased in their subtle bodies or whatever, and this all kind of 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, and then 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, and we’ll see you next time, hopefully.
Michael: Okay.
Rick: Bye-bye.
Michael: Bye-bye.