Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump, or BatGap as people call it, is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done this guy has the distinction of being number and would like to check out previous ones, go to BatGap.com and look under the past interviews menu and you’ll find all the previous ones, I mean organized and categorized in various ways. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page of the site. Today’s guest is Mike Jenkins. Hello Mike.
Mike: Hello.
Rick: Mike is in the UK. He was trained as an actor and has worked in theaters in London and around the UK. He later worked as a performing arts teacher and customer services trainer and now creates and manages websites to help people connect with their audience, but that’s not why I’m interviewing him. He has written two stage plays, a growing collection of poetry and is a good writer by the way. I really liked your dark cafe story which pertains to awakening and all, maybe we’ll talk about that. And he’s always been drawn to expressing his own perception and perspectives and exploring that of others through the creative arts. Mike loves to talk, sing, walk, read, write, cook, eat and sleep, not necessarily in that order, and to help others feel and know the deep joy, grace and peace at the center of all life. After many years of mental and emotional distress in his 20s and a diagnosis of cancer at the age of 29, Mike began an intense spiritual search that led him to teachings on non-duality that sparked a series of awakenings and set him on a journey to integrate those shifts into everyday life. So we’re going to talk about that. I particularly like that last sentence, the last part of the last sentence, “a series of awakenings that set you on a journey to integrate those shifts into everyday life,” because sometimes awakening is presented in such a way that it sounds like a black and white, cut and dried, on and off kind of thing, “Oh, I awakened, you know, I’m done, I’m finished.” And to my experience personally and observationally, it seems more like a series of awakenings is more appropriate terminology and also integrating those shifts into everyday life is huge and perhaps a lifelong undertaking.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, and that’s very much how I feel now. I’ll be honest, I didn’t initially, you know, when the first experience occurred, the first effective awakening, for me it was powerful. It wasn’t one of these, you know, angels and sort of dramatic moments that some people describe, but it was powerful enough to make me feel, for a while at Least, that that whole game of seeking to be something outside of myself and seeking for completion outside of myself was over. Definitely, in the last couple of years, it’s become very clear to me that if you’re coming from a place of clear seeing, seeing things clearly, seeing things as if you’re awake and certainly seeing things as if, for the first time, there’s definitely a process of integrating that into ordinary life. I seem to be surrounded by quite a lot of people who really aren’t interested in this journey. There’s ordinary people in my ordinary life, family, friends, co-workers who might have some bit of interest in it, and it’s quite a good marker, really, for those of us who do collect together and go to meetings and retreats and listen to teachers and read experiences, it’s quite a good litmus test, really, to be surrounded by those people. And I have a lot of them in my life who say, “Oh, so where’s your awakening now? So is this what awakened living is like then, you getting angry about something insignificant like traffic or these sorts of things?’ So it’s definitely a process of integration for Me. And I say “series of awakenings” Because, for me, it’s just been that way, I felt, very much, early on. I began blogging about these experiences in 2010 and I spoke a lot then that it was my gut feeling, if you like, that for me awakening was a gradual thing, that it was gradually Unfolding. It felt very much like a structure of egocentricity, if you like, was like this big building, this solid building. Initially there was this collapse of part of it, some of the central structures through that initial waking up, they became destroyed. So, some of the stronger elements were knocked out in that first event, if you like, first awakening. Then, over the years, over the following seven years, there’s just been this series of little , final collapsing of that structure. I don’t really have any sense that the structure is completely gone or what bits of it are still standing. But it seems to me That, if I really want to get analytical about that, I just have to look at my life. I just have to look at the relationships I have and the way that things are different in my life as a result of that.
Rick: Yeah, Ram Dass said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”
Mike: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or anyone who pushes your buttons. Interestingly enough, it seems to me, that the minute we really move into a space where we can handle, if you like, more than we did before, because to me, I’ll often describe being in an awakened space or just Awakening Itself as this infinite, endless capacity. In fact, that word seems to be coming to me a lot lately. Other people have used it, this capacity to allow and to hold all, this Infinite Openness, this open space that gives rise to everything. And so, interestingly enough, my experience has been, if I remain open to that, very quickly things come into that space, almost to test it, you know, almost to test the stability in that ground of being. Some of my new friends that I’ve made over the past couple of years, interestingly enough, seem able to push those buttons in me that, in the past, I might not be able to deal with as much, more readily. And interestingly enough, I’m thinking of one friend in particular, I’m not going to name any names, but this friend in particular,
Rick: He’ll know who he is.
Mike: She actually, [laughter] spends quite a lot of time, in my opinion, residing and exploring an Open Space. And interestingly enough, we seem to be almost like teachers for each other, trigger each other and test that stability. So yeah, going to live with your family for a week, most Definitely. I know I’m rambling on about this, but what I find interesting is that it seems to be those figures, like the people that test us the most, when you’re establishing yourself in this Awake Space, it seems to be life doesn’t seem to hold back on sending those people to you, in whatever form.
Rick: Do you have children?
Mike: No, I have no children.
Rick: I was wondering because there’s those little pictures on the wall behind you. I was wondering if those are little kids pictures or something.
Mike: No, no, they’re postcards actually that people have sent me. They’re little cards, birthday cards and things.
Rick: I see, because I was just thinking children are also good little testers.
Mike: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I’ll be honest, obviously if I had children come into my life, there’d be an acceptance of that, but I don’t feel in the place where I would willingly have children. I’m gay, I’m in a same-sex relationship. Where I am, at the moment, I don’t feel called to adopt or attempt to have children.
Rick: Right. I was just Curious. It was just a case-in-point example, because you know, kids are a great button-pushers.
Mike: Oh, definitely, definitely. And animals sometimes.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, although less so. I think that’s why a lot of people really like animal relationships, because they’re not as complex as human beings.
Mike: No, no, definitely. It’s an interesting point, because, certainly for me, awakening is really most useful, I think, in relationship, in relationship to other people, but even in relationship to our environment, to the world, to other people, to animals, to ideas. That certainly does seem to be where the rubber hits the road or, you know, we walk our talk.
Rick: Yeah. On your Openness point, there’s a lot of synonyms we could Use. Pure Consciousness or Unbounded Awareness or Vastness or Openness. I think people know what we’re talking about. but I often think of that as a kind of a solvent in a way, because to whatever, when it Dawns – I mean when that sort of inner freedom dawns – it tends to begin to dissolve things that are calcified or rigidly set in one’s own makeup perhaps, and in one’s larger world. And then the waters can get muddied a bit as things are dissolving. Then you work those things out and maybe there’s another expansion and then more dissolving of stuff. Tthat cycle can continue on for even Post-, you know, if we want to delineate or demarcate an awakening point, then post-awakening it seems to Continue.
Mike: I agree, yeah, I agree. I have to agree. That’s how it’s been for me. You’re Right. It’s a very good way of describing it. When I think of things dissolving, I think of liquid. I think of an open, you know, vast sort of space of liquid, and stuff comes into that, and it just dissolves much more easily, much quicker. And so it’s my sense that, let’s just say we were able to click our fingers and the entire human race was living from an Awakened Space, the same way that Christ figures or Buddha figures were doing. I would imagine, this is just a guess, I have no way of knowing, but I would imagine that stuff would still come into those waters. It’s just that we’d be operating from a place that would just deal with it much more skillfully and effectively and deal with it in an awakened way. Because Life is Life, isn’t it? There’s still going to be death, there’s still going to be suffering, what we might call suffering. There’s still going to be things that we don’t like happening. It’s just that the way we process that and deal with it and respond to it, it is different from an Awakened perspective.
Rick: Yeah. I think it’s very hypothetical to Suggest, of course, that we could click our fingers and the whole world would Awaken. But if that were to Happen, I think that 99% of the suffering and troubles that exist in the world would dissolve very quickly because most of them are man-made. But there could always be an alien invasion or an asteroid strike or something like that that would threaten us all. [laughter]
Mike: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But interestingly enough, what would that be like, knowing that that threat could potentially be there? What would it be like, if we weren’t living every day under the fear of that? I think certainly for me, I mean all through my a generally constant sense of unease and discomfort, either in the extreme form of anxiety and very tense, upset with myself and how I was feeling, or on the more mild side, just a background sense of unease, sort of a sense of something missing, which, when I was much younger, wasn’t very loud. I was thinking this morning about where I was, if we go back before I started writing the blog, back about eight or ten years, what seemed to happen before this big First Awakening experience was that that sense of something really missing in my life, although I just didn’t know What. I’d tried to. I’d moved from job to job. I’d attempted to find completion in relationships. Things that were bringing me pleasure I would chase after, and constantly seek to have better things and nicer things and improve stuff.
Rick: Like everybody.
Mike: Yeah, like everybody, like the sort of normal sense of acquiring in the world or going out there and living in the world, and getting and wanting and doing and being. But in the end, the last of a couple of years, there was just this Intense – like the volume had been turned up really loud – of longing with often no object in mind, like a state of perpetual feeling, like I was hungry and needing something, but actually never really knowing what it was. It’s just feeling that sense of desire, if you like, or craving or, feeling of lack, feeling that in isolation. without So if anyone was to say what is it that you want, I wouldn’t have known what to say. I just knew, well actually what I wanted was for that feeling to go away, that feeling of being empty, to die, which eventually did happen.
Rick: Yeah, well that’s a stage of progress, I would say, because most people could answer that question. They would say, well if I only had a boyfriend or a new car or a better house or a better job, they could actually put a label on what it is they think they want. You had, apparently, gotten to the point where you’d done all those things and still there was that craving or longing or wanting and you began to realize that it was something more fundamental that maybe wasn’t going to get fulfilled externally, although you probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way at the time.
Mike: No, no, exactly. How I feel now is that I still want things for comfort in life, and there are things that I go out into the world and seek to create or make happen. But I think if I was to describe it, the shift has been that I don’t want them because I think it’s going to give me something I don’t have already.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: It’s like wanting them for completion.
Rick: It’s like icing on the cake.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. So that feels much better. In fact, in a way it seems to make our efforts in the world, and certainly for me, it makes my efforts just much more skillful, I guess, or just much more organized. I don’t know, I’m struggling for words, but just less sort of chaotic.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: When I was seeking to look for a new job or write a play or do something in my life, attract a partner or whatever, when it was coming from that place of desperation, I often wasn’t working well, which is, you know, a surprise.
Rick: Well, here’s an analogy that might help. Let’s say you’re penniless and somebody gives you ten dollars. It’s like, “Whoa, ten dollars, fantastic.” Or let’s say, you hardly have a penny to your name and you lose ten dollars, it’s a tragedy. So your world really gets rocked up and down by little gains and losses. But let’s say you’re a millionaire. Somebody gives you ten dollars, “Hey, thanks, no big deal,” or you lose ten dollars, “No big deal.” So you have that baseline of wealth.
Mike: Yes.
Rick: Little relative gains and losses are just like ripples on the surface of an ocean.
Mike: Yes.
Rick: So I think people get the metaphor.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Rick: So when you discovered you had cancer, what kind of cancer, do you mind my asking?
Mike: It was mouth cancer, so it was on the floor of my mouth.
Rick: Really? Had you been smoking?
Mike: Yeah, since I was about 17.
Rick: That can cause it.
Mike: Yeah, they reckon it was a lifestyle cancer, so Smoking. I didn’t drink. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I drank a lot as a student in my 20s.
Rick: So did that freak you out pretty bad, when you discovered you had it?
Mike: Yes, it did. I mean, it didn’t really freak me out to the degree that some of the mental and emotional distress freaked me out in my a way I think that, I’ve often mentioned before in my blog, that that period was what I considered to be the beginning of a very conscious and intentional spiritual search.
Rick: Hm hmmm.
Mike: So when I think back to that time, there was certainly an element of shock and in a way just letting go. Going along to the consultations, surrendering really and letting the doctors take care of things. And also in that time there was, if I think back and place myself there again, there was certainly a sense of peace or quiet within me, emotionally I’m really speaking, emotionally and mentally. There wasn’t a lot of mental noise at that time and there was a lot of generally peaceful feeling, which isn’t uncommon in people who have been given frightening diagnoses.
Rick: But this was pre-awakening though.
Mike: Yeah, it was really. The treatment for that went well. I had an operation which was 12 hours long. I had six weeks of radiotherapy and during that six-week period two sessions of chemotherapy and that was all I needed. I went back for consultations every month for about five years, and each time they said, “Well, you’re healing well, nothing’s come back, there’s been no recurrence.” And then after five years, they gave me the All-Clear. In that period, in that five-year period, I would say my spiritual search began in earnest and I was a rampant spiritual consumer in that sense. A lot of stuff I’d never come across. I was brought up as a Catholic, an Irish mother, so Catholic upbringing, not particularly strict, but went to a Catholic school, so God was something that I was familiar with. But I still now can’t quote the Bible. I’m not a great Bible scholar and none of my family are. But certainly, I began to meditate. I began to read quite widely spiritual texts, not a great deal of classical spiritual text, I’ll be honest. I followed some teachers on YouTube. I listened to audio tapes. I listened to Eckhart Tolle a lot for a couple of years, experienced some shifts through that. And then, in my own life, that sort of recognition started to come about four years after the cancer.
Rick: Just for the sake of illustration, God forbid if you were to get another cancer diagnosis now, recurrence or whatever they call it, how do you think, how would you contrast how you would probably react with how you felt the first time around?
Mike: That’s an interesting question. I have thought about that and I do think about it. I don’t really know. I think probably I would be, there’d be a different response now, perhaps some of it would be similar. I don’t know.
Rick: I have a feeling you’d have more equanimity now, and kind of a broader perspective on the whole thing.
Mike: I certainly would feel that, but whether or not I’d still feel… I think I’d still feel some fear and some anxiety.
Rick: Hm hmmm.
Mike: But I do feel in a way, what was clear to me a few years after this is, what really happened in that period, is I made peace with my own death.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: I contemplated death a lot in that period and even now, I’ll still go back to… I think it’s actually a very good practice, if people want to sort of experience what it’s like to have a sense of No-self, well then you can sit and meditate and think about and contemplate your own death. In that meditation experience some people can experience falling away of a sense of self.
Rick: That’s how Ramana had his awakening.
Mike: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: He lay down on the ground and pretended he was dead. He even held his breath and caused a shift.
Mike: Yeah, and I think it can with a lot of people.
Rick: You often see those pictures of monks holding skulls and contemplating the ephemeral nature of life and so on.
Mike: Yes, yeah. There’s something quite beautiful about that because our culture just doesn’t want to look at it. It really doesn’t want to deal with it, because it doesn’t feel nice. And I think, certainly for me now, I’m less judgmental, I guess, about what comes into my world, whether it’s internally, feelings in the body or thoughts or situations, or externally in my life, I’m less judgmental about it. It’s not that I don’t make judgments, but I don’t mind so much what comes, because I feel more sure in the knowing that it will go as well, that everything has its death.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Everything comes and everything goes. And when you mentioned that awakened Mind, if you like, or awakened Self, as being like this space where things dissolve and where things are healed and resolved, that’s, in a way what it’s Like. Stuff comes in, but it’s also free to go.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: I used to describe it very early as feeling like I was slippery inside, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Things would come in and I might have an experience of sadness or grief or loss or anger or whatever it was, and then it would just go, be free to go.
Rick: Yeah, that’s very nice. I can think of so many examples of things that various teachers and so on have said in that regard. Nisargadatta comes to mind, of describing how he experiences something that might be upsetting. He said it just causes this momentary fluctuation and kind of passes through me. Or Eckhart Tolle, since you mentioned him, he gives that example of the ducks on the pond getting into a little fight, you know, and then they shake off their tail feathers and a few seconds later they’re back to just being ducks.
Mike: Exactly, and you know what? It really is like that. That doesn’t mean to say it’s always easy for people to be around me, you know? I’m not special, in that regard. I mean, I know several of my friends, would never think of themselves as awakened and would never describe this sort of process in this way. But they might have a spat about something and then it’s gone and it’s forgotten about. It’s had its moment. It’s resolved. It’s seen through, it’s passed on and returned to this space. And that in a way, you know… If anybody said to me, ‘Oh, why would you talk about this? Yhy would you write about it?’ One of the reasons is because that’s just such a wonderful approach to life. If you can live life in a way where you can get to be all the things that you are, do all the things you do as a human being, but you don’t hold on to them and they’re not, you know, they’re not causing any dysfunction in you,
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: then that’s freedom. We’re freely being as we are.
Rick: There’s actually physiological research on this sort of thing. There’s studies on meditators where they subject them to stressful stimuli and measure the reaction, in terms of galvanic skin response or various other measures, and compare that to people who don’t meditate. There’s an initial reaction that’s appropriate, but then there’s a very rapid adaptation among the meditators, where they don’t continually get triggered by the stressful stimuli, once it has been adjusted to. I don’t know, the physiology learns to adapt and it doesn’t hold on to the stress or the agitation that was caused by the stimulus, which of course has tremendous implications for PTSD and things like that.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean in a way, since we were talking about the cancer, in my mind I’ve no doubt really a combination of factors that led to that tumor appearing in my mouth. One of them was obviously smoking, another one was probably drinking. I mean some people just don’t have The… Some people’s physical biological systems are more sensitive than others. So although I wasn’t a rampant alcoholic, I probably drank more than my system could really handle as a young man. So smoking, drinking, staying up late, you know, eating all the wrong foods, bad nutrition, and add on top of that about 10 years of sincerely sometimes wishing to be dead, in a sort of suicidal thought way and being depressed and unhappy and anxious and often on high intensity alert, in terms of my nervous system. There’s no doubt in my mind that they were all contributive factors to the appearance of tumors.
Rick: Stuff takes a toll. So how do you figure that, through all this and this cancer and, [couoghs] excuse me, how was it that spirituality came on your radar? I mean, because some people go through the kinds of things you’ve just described in their 20s and they continue to go through them in their 30s, 40s, 50s, so what do you think was that got you on to spirituality?
Mike: I don’t know really. I guess I’d always been interested in things that… I mean certainly I was always interested in philosophy. I never studied it but, you know, kind of I would like to philosophize with friends. I’ve been interested in the bigger questions even as a young person. I love poetry. I like to write poetry and I read a lot of poetry as a young man. A lot of the plays that I was interested in as an actor, I didn’t always perform in the sorts of plays that I loved, but a lot of the plays that I was drawn to read and to go and watch often dealt with life’s big themes. So I guess there was always an openness to that kind of thing. I think, once I started to discover there were lots of spiritual writings and teachers talking about spirituality, but it wasn’t talking about religion, it wasn’t talking about some sort of prescriptive path, then that piqued my interest really. I think certainly growing up and coming out as a gay man at the age of I was really quite anti-traditional organized religion simply because, to my mind it had done a great deal of harm to minorities in society, or sections of society, that just didn’t fit in with their normative view of things.
Rick: How old are you now?
Mike: I’m 40, I turned 40 a few –
Rick: So that was like 22 years ago and obviously views on that were much less tolerant than they are now although they still got a ways to go.
Mike: Indeed they have. And yes, they were less tolerant, Although, interestingly enough, in England in the 1990s, which is when I was a student and coming to terms with my sexuality and discovering who I was, things were generally a bit more relaxed in the 1990s here in England. But legislation hadn’t really come that far. I think during my teens, the age of consent was reduced from 21 to 18, I think, so equality wasn’t quite there until a few years later. But interestingly enough, we do still find this in, certainly not obviously in organized religion, but sometimes even in spiritual circles, you know, a sense of maturity and deeper understanding around sex, sexual identity, sexual activity, orientation, gender, identity, all those sorts of things is still quite a sort of uncomfortable topic for many of us. Partly I think that’s cultural. There are some cultures that are more reserved about the body and sex, you know. But yeah, I do think that that in a way turned me off of organized religion. Certainly the faith I’d been brought up in, the Catholic faith, had such a horrific and horrible record in terms of walking its own, walking the truth of its own teachings. Horrific abuse in the Catholic Church of children and just in general.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: I know that’s not been everybody’s experience. I know there are lots of people who’ve had, I’ve met Christians who’ve had a wonderful experience of a Christian upbringing, before in my life as a young man and since then.
Rick: Were you ever the victim of that in the Church?
Mike: No, no, no, no, no, I wasn’t, no, no, thankfully not. And I don’t really know anyone who’s had. But I mean it was always in the papers, even in the
Mike: And recently even more so. I mean, I know, I think one problem with our modern connected world is there’s so much news, constant rolling news that it’s easy to miss a lot. And I don’t, certainly don’t, sit with the TV or the radio on constantly or read every Paper. But definitely, there’s dozens and dozens of cases of historic, you know, there’s lots of inquiries and trials and investigations going on in the UK into historic instances of child abuse in the corridors of power and local authorities and all sorts. So actually, I think weirdly enough, coming out as a gay man at the age of 18, and I think this is similar for lots of people who are in some kind of minority (it doesn’t have to be around sexuality) but funnily enough, I think that we somehow seem to spend so much longer as an outsider, if you like, to norms of society or to the majority, kind of always being on the outside somehow, that interestingly enough, I think in a way that gives some sort of grounding in a sense of, freedom, if you like.
Rick: I think I know what you mean. I mean, that wasn’t my issue but I was…. well, a lot of kids are like this, but I was rebellious as a kid. It’s like I dropped out of high school, I would, on a whim, go and hit the road, stick my thumb out and go to Boston or someplace, you know, without any money or plan or anything else, just trusting in whatever to work things out for Me. So there was a certain following one’s impulses, Which, of course, can be very reckless at times.
Mike: And would have been frowned upon in lots of ways.
Rick: But, you know, I don’t know. So, do you think that, just to wrap up what we were just talking about, so we’re all aware of how horrible established religions have been, and in many respects still are, with with regard to a number of things, but sexuality in particular, homosexuality, what do you think about the contemporary spiritual but not religious scene, the non-dual scene, all the various teachers, do you think that there’s a big improvement in attitudes and generally people have more accepting liberal perspectives?
Mike: Yes, I think in a way that the contemporary spiritual scene tends to attract a more liberal mindset, although not always. I think, for most people probably in the contemporary spiritual scene, whether it’s non-dual or slightly more new age or whatever, I think probably sexual identity and sexual orientation and all that sort of thing, it’s probably just a bit of a blind spot, you know? It’s something most people don’t think about.
Rick: Haven’t really worked through the issues in their own minds, you mean?
Mike: Well, no, I don’t necessarily mean that. Maybe they haven’t. In a way, most people often don’t need to, because they don’t see a problem with it. Yes, I think people can experience problems around sex and sexual expression, whatever their orientation, gay, straight, bi, anywhere in between. But I think it seems to sit, for me, it seems that, issues of sexual expression and just sexuality in general, seem to sit under the surface in most scenes I’ve come across. Whether it’s non-duality, Western non-duality teachers in London or groups that meet for meditation and what have you.
Rick: Sit under the surface, meaning it’s just not discussed or dealt with?
Mike: Meaning, yeah, it’s just not discussed, yeah, that’s my perception.
Rick: In a repressive sort of way or because it’s just not relevant to what they’re saying?
Mike: I think maybe for the most because it’s not relevant, although you have to speak to individuals, I think, to get a sense of whether or not that was a repressive, pushing down of things. But certainly, I feel generally, if you paint a picture of the United Kingdom, the sort of English sensibility about it, there’s a real discomfort, I think, as a culture around sex and sexuality, although that’s changing every year, you know.
Rick: As a case in point, I mean, our friend Francis Bennett is undergoing a transition these days to being a woman and he has just done a tour over there in the UK and other places in Europe. So how did that go in terms of audience reaction? Were people just sort of shrugging their shoulders and say, okay, fine, let’s get on with the satsang? Or was it an issue for a lot of people?
Mike: It wasn’t an issue at all,
Rick: Great.
Mike: you know, nicely enough. I mean, that’s not to say people probably don’t have questions and people do and were able to ask them. And what was lovely for me, being involved with Francis in this recent tour, was to see how really, it’s the communication of a truth, really. It seems that actually that’s the most powerful thing. And so while there may be some people who just find the concept of the idea that a person can be born into a body that doesn’t quite fit their identity, their sexual identity, their gender identity, it can seem alien or seem like some sort of confusion. Actually, first of all, Francis spoke about it very, very well and gave people the opportunity to ask questions. But in actual fact, certainly from my understanding Francis as I do and spending a lot of time with her, it’s made the communication clearer for what she’s talking about, which, for me, is a wonderful thing because, having met Francis, one of the things that has happened in my life is that there’s been much more inclusion and less of a spiritual bypassing of the stuff that I just didn’t want to deal with, which often was personal, was often the stuff around personal history or personal characteristics, that I certainly, two or three years ago, I probably would have rather just explained away as oh, just passing phenomena or whatever. But in actual fact, being awake, if you like, and returning to an awakened space just facilitates a much more honest dealing with this stuff we need to deal with, the stuff that comes up. And stuff just does keep coming up, you know?
Rick: Yeah. So are you saying that Francis’s example kind of enabled you to deal with your own issues that might have been unconscious or subliminal to some extent to sort of cure you of some degree of spiritual bypassing, is that what you just said?
Mike: Certainly, Francis’s teaching. And I think now it’s really impossible to separate Francis’s teaching from Francis’s example of living in the world, which is why I find what she’s doing such an incredibly courageous thing, to be a living example of everything that she’s teaching, which is that the Absolute is appearing here as clear, open, unconditional love and that includes, it transcends but also includes, the personal sense of self, which is, the egoic self, the characteristics of self, including everything that we used to think of as our identity, and then saw that that wasn’t our identity in an initial awakening is then welcomed again in the later stages. For me, I had no real understanding of the structure of these things. What’s been nice for me spending time with Francis and reading the things that she writes and the teachings is That there’s a very clear anatomy of that journey of awakening, which I just didn’t come across before. I just hadn’t read it so scholarly. So, and it seems to have made sense in my own experience that there’s this period where you sort of, you know, initially you wake up out of this sort of confusion of being attached to things that come and go in us, of being attached to feelings and thoughts and the past and all of that into this clear space, but then that’s not the end of it because you can’t sort of, in a Way… I tried to cling to that probably a bit too long, that Witness-Conscious space or that space of the Absolute. There is a sense of not really wanting, for me, not wanting to come off of that mountain and into the the mess of my life again.
Rick: It’s sort of like a refuge to just hang out there.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s not to say that I really enjoy peace and silence and if I can go and find it I will. I love silence now in a way that I just couldn’t handle when I was a young man. I meet a lot of, you know, I’ve got teenage nephews and they just have to have noise the whole time. Having said that, now in the last two years, and I say it’s related to meeting Francis because that was two years ago and I think just by osmosis, helping with the website and having being close to that, it’s had that effect. And certainly most recently, in her transition has made, if you like, our Identities, with sexual identity and sexual orientation much more on the talking topic really, because you can’t, you know, it’s something that in Francis’s life you can’t sort of ignore it, it’s a physicalthing in front of you.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: So it’s been incredible really to be around that.
Rick: Yeah, since we’re on this topic and since this is a topic that doesn’t get discussed that much on BatCap, let’s pursue it just a little bit more because it’s interesting and it might be very helpful for a lot of people. I mean, as a gay man who came out four, five, six years has been, has had this spiritual orientation and is something of a spiritual teacher, what kind of assumptions or stereotypes or misconceptions or attitudes have you found prevalent and ingrained in people’s mentalities regarding the whole issue of sexuality and spirituality that you feel could use more enlightening, more clarification or straightening out?
Mike: Yeah, sure. Well, I think the main thing that comes to mind is an obsession on sex itself. One of the big assumptions I guess – and this this happens had certainly happened in my life and to me long before, you know, long before any sort of interest in spirituality – was that depending on your sexual orientation, people would meet me and they’d either realize or they’d ask or they’d know and they’d see that I was gay or I would tell them I was gay if they asked. And then there’s just this overly inappropriate fascination with that, meaning that they, some people think, that they can understand who you are because they know now that you’re gay.
Rick: As if that were all there is to you.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And frankly, the way I feel is that a lot of a lot of the gay community, if there even is such a thing anymore, have done a lot to ….
Rick: Reinforce that?
Mike: Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for, reinforce that. I understand why. I’m certainly not having a go at any gay community for that. I mean, frankly, for so many years gay people, transgendered people, LGBTQI, whatever the acronym we’re using these days is, really didn’t have anywhere to go where they could safely express themselves.
Rick: So they’re compensating, letting off steam, so to speak.
Mike: Exactly, or even just being in a space where it’s safe to do so, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: So that’s, I think, one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most people, that there’s this obsession on what people do with their bodies in a sexual manner or in sexual activity, and a huge number of assumptions about, first of all, whether that’s right or wrong or natural or unnatural, and secondly, that you can somehow, make an assessment of someone based on their sexual orientation, which just doesn’t really happen when among straight people. Straight people could meet each other, you know, a straight guy could meet another straight guy, first of all, the conversation would never go, “Oh, by the way, you just must know I’m straight,” unless one thinks you’re straight. [laughter]
Rick: That’s funny.
Mike: And then the other one going, “Ah, I see, it all makes sense now, straight, [laughter] of course, it makes sense, loves cars, loves cars and loves football, of course. He’s straight.” [laughter] So when I tell people, “Oh, I don’t, I don’t really like a lot of West End musicals,” or, or “Judy Garland’s okay, but, it’s a bit boring,” [laughter] then you lose your gay credentials.
Rick: You could actually write a very funny skit of some sort. Kind of reminds me of that scene in the birdcage where Nathan Lane and Robin Williams were in that cafe having breakfast and Robin Williams was trying to teach Nathan Lane how to act straight. You could create a great Skit. You should do this. [laughter]
Mike: Yes, indeed. But the interesting thing is I think most, what…. Certainly the kind of deeper richness in going through that experience is more akin to what you were talking about in the sense of feeling somewhat like an outsider, or somewhat otherly to to a lot of people. I think that’s much more common among all people. It’s just on the surface much more, as a gay man or woman or LGBT person because we’re constantly having to realize that. For me, there were no role models really growing up. There was nobody that I could look at and go ‘Ah, right, okay, they’re like me.’
Rick: We had Elton John, right?
Mike: Yeah, you had sort of entertainers who often aren’t the best role models. And also, I mean, for a very short time I taught in a school, I taught drama in a school. Interestingly enough, you know, it was an interesting experience for me because I had no real… I’ve been, you know, I worked mostly as an actor, I’ve been around creative people, and so that’s really a very, generally quite a liberal, experience, creativel., I always used to say every artist or creative artist has to be blasphemous, I used to use that word and say. Because you can’t be worried about offending anybody if you’re creating great art. But, being in a school, in a community, was a completely different experience. I’d already spent a bit of time in, the corporate world, before that, so I was very well versed at being able to, adopt a very professional attitude, which I did. But I was certainly… it was very clear that we weren’t, I was not, allowed to tell the children that I was gay.
Rick: Right.
Mike: And although I never personally came across any severe prejudice directed at me, there was certainly this sense among, you know, parents, if you like, that, ‘Well it’s all right for Graham Norton on the television or that entertainer who’s making a clown of himself, it’s fine for them to be gay, but I wouldn’t want a gay teacher or a gay doctor or a gay, or I wouldn’t want anyone dealing with my children.’ And that’s another sort of, you know, difficulty because, you know, just sort of… there’s this assumption that it’s a perversion or a dangerous thing. That we’re running around doing unmentionable things in the world.
Rick: [chuckles] Yeah, well. I saw the cover of a Time magazine the other day and I didn’t get a chance to read the article because I was just walking past it, but it was, the whole cover story was something about how the whole concept of gender is, at least with the younger generation, is really getting redefined. I don’t know if blurred would be the right word, but redefined.
Mike: Redefined? Yeah, and I’m just wondering, from a spiritual perspective, in terms of, you know, you alluded earlier to, if we could snap our fingers and the whole world would be enlightened. Alright, so if we could snap our fingers and the whole world would be enlightened, what do you think the whole gender issue would look like in such a world? I mean, in an ideal society, if there were such a thing composed of highly awake individuals, how would that contrast with what we have now?
Mike: I think there would be much more fluidity around, much more open and accepted and unthreatened, a sense of being unthreatened by the fluidity of gender identity and the fluidity of sexual orientation or sexual preference or sexual desire. I’ve never really met anyone, if I speak to somebody for long enough, you know, I mean, providing they’re not completely closed, I can either sense or get a feel for, or they’ll tell me that they’ve had sexual feelings for a person of the opposite sex. It doesn’t mean to say that they are confused about that, but I can look at a female form and find it beautiful or even erotic or appealing in that way. It doesn’t mean that I’m, going to go and, you know, live with a woman and marry a woman and that’s going to be my identity. I think gender identity and sexual orientation are, in my opinion, more fluid than we would like them to be. So if I look within myself, I can find elements within me that are very, very feminine and I can also find elements within me that are very, very masculine. And they’re in a dance, they’re not fixed. You know, there are times when I naturally what’s called out of me is a very strong, clear masculine sense of being in the world. Other times what’s called out of me or what appears as me or how I act might be very feminine. But it might be a very strong, commanding, clear, wise feminine sense, you know? So I think actually these binary, I mean I don’t know much about gender politics, I don’t read much about it and there’s probably plenty of other people more qualified to talk about it, but my sense of it is that the world we’ve created, the society we’ve created for ourselves is quite binary. It is black and white. It is, you know, it functions in that way. It’s almost like it suits, you know, those who lead us as a population, to have it that way. But anyway that’s another topic. I think that probably all of these identities would be much more fluid and actually there’d be no fear around that.
Rick: Yeah. I mean if you buy into reincarnation theory, that whole understanding, we’ve all been Everything. We’ve been women, we’ve been men, we’ve been what. And we go from lifetime to lifetime and incarnate as what we need to be in order to learn our lessons, the next lessons we need to learn.
Mike: Yeah, and definitely, we can experience, just with our imagination, a lot of what that’s like now. I find that it only takes a little bit of time to intentionally sit with someone or something to see yourself in it or in that person.
Rick: Um hmm.
Mike: I would imagine an enlightened race of beings would probably resolve conflicts that way. They would somehow meet that personal, that entity on the level of absolute reality first of all, recognize that the absolute reality in you is the same absolute reality in me and that is our, [clears his throat] excuse me, our common inheritance, our common identity, our common primal sense of beingness. Then from that, resolve differences and learn to live alongside each other. It seems to be that actually when we really love something, we come to see ourselves in it, whether that’s a rock or a stone or another person. You actually, you meet that person on a deeper level. At the same time in form also. I guess meeting them in emptiness and then, meeting them in form at the same time.
Rick: Yeah, I’m reminded of that Rumi quote about the field beyond right and wrong, I’ll meet you there.
Mike: Yes, yeah, exactly, it’s a beautiful, beautiful quote and I think of that one often. In fact I often write it on my blog at the end of things and it’s so beautiful because actually in relationship that…
Rick: You might as well tell us the quote since you probably can have it memorized.
Mike: I think probably ‘Out beyond our ideas of wrong, right and wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there,’ I’ve probably not done it justice.
Rick: That’s about it,
Mike: It’s a roundabout that, isn’t it? Yeah. So yeah. So I guess gender identity, sexual identity, orientation, all these things really I think are probably much more, much more fluid than we’d like. It’s like when things…. It’s like with anything, isn’t it, you know, we don’t really like it when things change too much because it threatens our sense of security if we don’t know what things are. But coming from this space, it doesn’t take much to just return and remind myself, ‘Well actually, I don’t really know what anything is.’ It’s not knowing. It facilitates this incredible capacity to accept and to deal with, to be open to and see things in a new way which can be healthy and helpful.
Rick: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. I think that the ability to not grasp at adamant certainties or conclusions about things. I mean there’s often that, there’s that ‘don’t know mind’ Phrase, and it’s not that one doesn’t know anything. We know all kinds of things but it has to do with the rigidity or adamancy with which we think we know things.
Mike: Um humm.
Rick: Who actually does know anything with absolute certainty? Name me anything that you can know with absolute certainty.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there’s nothing, you know, when you really look. So then it’s like you were saying earlier, that this sense of Being, this space in which stuff comes in and it gets to be in it, it dissolves and transforms and moves.
Rick: Here’s a Bible quote for you, Jesus, since you said you didn’t know any, Jesus said, you know, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”
Mike: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Exactly, and yeah, there are probably many others that would see that as well. So yeah, for me I think, you know, identity if you like, it is something that is played. It’s not ultimately who we are. I mean, but certainly, I mean, this is interesting talking about sexual orientation. For me it was very clear at the age of 18 that what the world thought was a gay man was not who I was.
Rick: Right.
Mike: I think that’s probably what I was clumsily trying to get at earlier by saying, ‘If you don’t fit into something where you really know who you are because it’s confirmed all around you, you might get a sense of this freedom a bit earlier than others.’ It’s because I’ve never felt like any label has ever described who I am. I used to say that as a gay bar that I walked into, I looked around and first of all I thought, ‘Well, this is good because there are people here holding hands and it’s okay, they’re not going to get beaten up.’ But the second thought that came in straight after that was that I don’t feel like any of, I don’t feel like I relate on a really profound level to any of these people here. And I saw, on that very first night, some of the same prejudice from some gay men towards lesbians, and I just thought, how?
Rick: Wow.
Mike: And obviously we know how. But initially as a young 18 year old, I thought, ‘How can you have gone through life,’ this was from older gay men towards younger lesbians. And it wasn’t cruel. It was playful sort of bitching, but it wasn’t particularly nice for me. I thought I’d come to somewhere where I could finally be free of all that judgment and the stuff. And I just thought, ‘How can you go through life Being…’ – that person will have gone through some prejudice – ‘…and then be so unaccepting or bitchy towards the lesbians in the bar?’ And I just thought, even at that age I sort of realized you can’t really, you know, that’s just the way people are a lot of the time. Labels are for clothes, not people.
Rick: In case anybody listening is Wondering, at this point, what this has to do with awakening or spirituality and all that, I think it does. As we started out the interview by discussing, it’s one thing to realize one’s true nature, to have a taste of transcendence or unboundedness and whatnot. It’s another thing to integrate it into life, into the personality, into one’s behavior. And there are so many ingrained tendencies, I think they call them vasanas in Sanskrit, that are deeply etched in our psyches, in our nervous systems, and that stuff has to be worked out. What Mike and I are discussing here is one area of such tendencies, such vasanas, which is a big deal in our society these days. It’s a big cultural issue, political issue, so it’s something that I think pretty much everybody has to come to terms with in one way or another, whether they like it or not.
Mike: Exactly, and it’s a big deal. You know, on the one level, I am not my sexuality. My sexual feelings and desires, that’s not who I am, just in the same way it’s not for any person.
Rick: Right, you’re not your body, you’re not any of these individual expressions, you’re bigger than that.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. And yet, on the other hand, for me to be able to sit here and talk to you, knowing that this is being broadcast and it will be on YouTube and potentially seen by more people than normally see a video of mine, it’s a huge advance for me to talk about these things and not feel, within myself, any sense of shame or guilt or embarrassment. That’s a massive development in my life, you know? I always felt ashamed of myself in that way because I didn’t… that was being reflected back at me, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: People were not –
Rick: Yeah, people were making you feel that way.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, or they were certain, certainly it’s not so bad now, but there is a general view, you know, that’s still in lots of parts of society around the world. I mean in Chechnya at the moment there’s horrific –
Rick: Oh right, yeah. I signed some petition about that the other day.
Mike: Yeah, me too, horrific acts of violence against people because of their sexuality. So we’re not, as a race completely beyond it. But then we’re not beyond a lot of things. So certainly for me this is, you know, this is related to awakening and being in the world as an awakened being because awakening, on the contrary to what we might sometimes think at the beginning of our search for enlightenment or the beginning of our spiritual life, to seek a different way, it doesn’t rub out all of these difficult things, you know? It’s certainly not the, on one level, you know, it’s winning, it’s living the greatest, most valuable prize of all. But it looks nothing like what we thought it might do at the beginning.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: One thing I’ve been expressing a lot lately, and this really seems to sum up where I am in terms of living a life that’s true to this essence of peace and joy and unconditional love within me, to be true to that. I am living, going through a period of integrating all of that understanding in every part of my life. And one of the things that’s been really clear to me is that initially I began my spiritual awakening because I began seeking spiritual awakening because I was suffering and I wanted to awaken from that. I wanted to wake up up from, wake up out of that and be free of it. And initially there was that temporary, maybe even for four years I would say, I kept dwelling in that place of non-conceptual awareness, you know, whatever we call it. And yet the journey wasn’t, over because now it’s taking that understanding and that experience of non-conceptual awareness or witness consciousness or clear, you know, no-self, taking that understanding and experience into the world of my own life, into the personal life. So I feel very much now that I’m waking up to my life, not from it, which is wonderful, because not everything about that – I mean a lot of people will describe just dwelling in no-mind as a very dry, distant place, and yes, it is on some level, but for me – and I spent about two years in a different Flat. I was living in at the time, a different apartment, just in love with the cupboard door and really simple things, you know? And I can still find that now. I can still go out into the world, just simply sit with something long enough and you experience its essence, you know, including people.
Rick: Yeah, a friend of mine, Susanna Marie, said that one time too, that she just went through a phase where she would find herself just sitting and staring at a rock or something like that, just sort of loving it and having this deep experience. [laughter]
Mike: Yeah, which is lovely because in a way when you realize that that’s within you, that that’s what you are, that in a way what you are is gazing at what the rock is at the most elemental level, then you have this confidence. It certainly feels like that to me. You have this confidence in the world that actually nothing can take that away. Once you establish that, it’s like you can never really be bored or lonely.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: I mean, you might get periods, I mean, of course, you’ll get times I sit here and I think, ‘Oh, you know, I want to do something interesting.’
Rick: Sure.
Mike: But if there really isn’t anything to do, you know, if I can’t, then, you know, just sort of sitting with that is a beautiful thing, it’s wonderful.
Rick: This kind of segues us into another thing I want to talk to you about, which is actually an elaboration of what we started with. And, you know, if anybody listening has more questions about the whole gender identity sexual stuff that we’ve been talking about, feel free to send in a question and we’ll come back to it. But last week or so, I was listening to a talk that Stephen Bodian gave at the Science Nonduality Conference, and he was talking a lot about the contrast between the direct and progressive paths. I thought that would make a great panel discussion for the SAND conference. And so I started chatting with Stephen about that and I just submitted a proposal yesterday and hopefully we’ll have Rupert Spira and Robert Thurman involved too, although they haven’t been told yet. And a panel discussion. The reason I think it’s interesting and relevant to what you and I are talking about is that it’s a perennial discussion. I mean, it’s been going back probably thousands of years about direct realization versus this long drawn out path that one has to take in order to reach enlightenment. And I think that it may be a false distinction in the sense that one can, from the outset, one can have a clear glimpse of one’s true nature, but that doesn’t mean you’re finished. There can then be no end to the clarification and integration of that in one’s life. So I don’t know, it’s a… What are your thoughts on that?
Mike: Yeah, I agree with where you’re going with that actually. Is it a question of a direct path or a progressive path? And I would say, well, both. I think even if you take a direct path, you take a direct path to one’s awakening, well then after you awaken, the progressive part comes in because you’ve just still lived have many years in the body. So that would be my feeling. I know that perhaps the question isn’t necessarily asking that, that maybe you just take longer on the progressive path to gradually awaken. But I would say that, even if you take the direct path, and the direct path is successful, and you awaken in a direct way very quickly, then there’s still the job of living an awakened life, which I think can only be progressive.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I wonder how many examples there actually are of people who just awaken just like that. I mean, there are people who read books that say you’re already enlightened and they say, ‘Oh great, I’m already enlightened, you know, got check that off my bucket list.’ [laughter] But you know, you wonder how if they were able to pop into Ramana Maharshi’s perspective suddenly and contrast it with theirs, would it really be the same? I don’t know.
Mike: Yeah, I think each expression of awakened living would be different, but I see what you’re saying. I think probably that no one really has an instant awakening and even if they do, I mean – In a way every moment of awakening is out of time and is instant anyway because it’s occupying a timeless realm. But I would say even those familiar stories that some of us may have heard about stories of instant awakening, when you really read deeply into those, if the person has written a lot of books, if the teacher’s written a lot of books or there’s a lot of material to look through, you probably find somewhere that, you know, I mean… I’m thinking particularly of Eckhart Tolle. I listened to loads of talks of his, hours and hours worth that I think sounds true produced. And you know, he mentioned you have to listen to, you know, because he’s not written that many books. But you do hear him say, ‘Well, after that initial awakening, there was a period of three or four years where I had to get used to living that way, get readjusted.’ It’s like wearing a new, you’re getting into a new skin almost.
Rick: Yeah. Not only that but even now I bet you if you were to talk to him, which I hope to do one day, he would say, ‘Yeah, I’m still growing, you know, I’m still evolving.’ Adyashanti certainly does. And actually I heard from somebody who, I forget who it was, but they somehow rather knew Eckhart back in the day before he had his awakening and became famous and everything, and they said he was an ardent seeker. He was reading all kinds of stuff and practicing this and that. So I don’t know for sure, but I did hear that and so it wasn’t completely out of the blue. And then there’s always the issue, you know, I happen to think, some disagree with this, that these people who have these sudden profound awakenings, something is fructifying which they had actually built up to in previous life.
Mike: Yes.
Rick: And there had been a lot of spiritual practice. Then they hadn’t been much interested in it in this life, but then all of a sudden, kapow and it was just the resumption of a momentum that they had already established.
Mike: I could see how that could be the case and also I would say, even if you leave the question of past lives to one side, I would say that we can be practicing in our lives without really thinking of it as practice.
Rick: That’s a good point.
Mike: For me, the constant dissatisfaction with the way life was was my main practice.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Sort of, if you like, suffering was my main practice or dissatisfaction and feeling unfulfilled was my practice for many years, because that brought me, if you like, to the period where I just, you know, that was all I felt and that almost got so loud to the point where it would just zerod everything else out.
Rick: Yeah. That’s a very good point. It created an intense yearning.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, I’ve had probably several dark nights of the soul in that sense, that I’ve had very many periods in my life where everything just seemed to have gone wrong, you know? That everything went dark, you know? No money, no job, no relationship, nowhere to live, on several occasions in that situation. And, you know, it can only get so dark before the dawn starts to come.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: And so, I think often – and also, I mean, I do encourage people to practice in their lives. I mean, I’m not a great one for routine meditation, but that’s not really the point of it. The point is that, I might take what I experience in meditation into a feeling of unease in the body. Or, if I have an argument with somebody, it’s actually using that, using a sense of just exploring the timeless or unconditional love in those instances, which is practice as well. But what I was going to say is that I feel that a lot of people don’t think of themselves as practicing very much, but reading Facebook, commenting on spirituality blogs and talking about spirituality, watching YouTube videos –
Rick: Putting your attention on this stuff.
Mike: Exactly, exactly. It all amounts to, like you say, building up momentum if you like, and a will and a desire and an intention to wake up, to see things a different way.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: And I agree, sorry to go on, but I agree that – I agree that along with Adyashanti and probably Eckhart Tolle a as well, and I know Francis [Fran Bennett] thinks this way, is that my sense is that, you know, yes there may be a delineated period where you might say, ‘Well that’s when I began to wake up,’ but actually from that point onwards, and I think even in the clearest, most enlightened, awakened being, if they’re still in a body, they’re still here on the planet in a body, then that just goes on. It’s like awakened, like you – Actually, I think the subtitle of your website of Buddha at the Gas Pump says it perfectly, it’s ‘awakening people,’ you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: It’s not awakened.
Rick: It used to be awakened and then we changed it, I realized that that was wrong.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, and that’s it. It’s like we awaken in every moment then, you know? It’s being awake every moment and it just doesn’t end, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Possibly even on the metaphysical, non-physical plane, it used to say.
Rick: Yeah, I tend to think that, I mean it’s just an assumption, but I get that sense. And also like, Well, around this point, there’s a lot of times the whole notion of seeking is poo-pooed. ‘Oh give up the search, stop being a Seeker’ and all that stuff. I think that does a disservice to people who are in that phase very strongly, who are yearning and aren’t satisfied and are looking for something. It’s like you can’t just stop looking. It’s like saying to a hungry man, ‘Oh give up the hunger.” You just actually have to fulfill it with something and then it’s naturally going to drop off.
Mike: Yeah, I think so. I read a lot of those teachings and listened to a lot of teachers who counseled that, encouraged that, who suggested their teaching was, ‘Stop seeking,’ or see that actually what you’re looking for is the seeking itself.
Rick: Um hmm.
Mike: And I’ll be honest, a lot of that helped Me. That was very helpful.
Rick: Yeah, there was a flip side to that argument. Yeah.
Mike: However, it didn’t, for a number of years, it didn’t stop me seeking. Seeking did stop of its own accord. It seems that did drop away. In fact, the biggest thing – I was just reflecting on what has been different in my life since then – and I think the biggest, most noticeable thing for me is that this sense of feeling unfulfilled, this nagging background sense, that feeling dissatisfied or unfulfilled is just not there anymore.
Rick: Right.
Mike: And as I say, it’s easy for me to tell that because it was almost like that was up full volume before. I couldn’t rest for a minute, you know? I was constantly, even if I was sat still, I would constantly, ‘I want something, I need something, I’ve got to do something.’ I was never, I never had any serious addiction to drugs, but it was like that within me. It was like a sense of, you know, just couldn’t rest.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: That’s gone now. There’s a sense now of, well, ‘This is enough,’ you know, and I still do things.
Rick: And did it go because, at some point you decided, ‘Hey, I’m tired of seeking, I’m going to stop seeking,’ or was it more that you found somehow some fulfillment dawned and then almost in retrospect you realized, ‘Hey, I don’t have that seeking craving thing going on anymore.’
Mike: Yeah, yeah, it was really in the recognition that what I was looking for was already here.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: That was a huge, that really was the initial breaking away. Like I say, it felt like this big landmass of suffering or some might call it the big element of self-structure just fell away, and that was upon the recognition of, ‘Oh my goodness me, it’s here.’
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Like the whole time, glasses were on the top of the head thing, or that what I was looking for in everything even- and I would say even in our worldly seeking- I might say I want to go out there and buy a new car or look for somewhere else to live. And that’s fine, to go and do those things. I have absolutely no problem with that, and I’d like to do some of those things. But it’s like the essence of what I want, if I think about that, well really I want those things so that I can feel something, you know? I want to feel more satisfied, more fulfilled. I want to enjoy that, the comfort it might bring. But really, the essence of all of that is already, it’s available now. What I was seeking through… It just didn’t occur to me until some of more modern non-duality teachers of non-dual wisdom, if you like, Advaita Vedanta teachers that we see around, said that, pointed in that way, that what you’re looking for is already here –
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: – and you are what you seek. that was a huge,T huge shift for me. I hadn’t considered that before.
Rick: Yeah. Let me just make one quick point and then I want to talk about what you just said, and that one point is just that, for me that a helpful way of phrasing it is to just say that, the seeking energy or seeking tendency gives rise to or gives way to just an ongoing sense of wonder and adventure and exploration and, words like that where certainly the journey continues.
Mike: Yes.
Rick: But it continues on a platform of fulfillment rather than a platform of emptiness.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, or lack, absolutely.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: I completely agree. So it’s almost like then, it’s not so much seeking anymore, it’s more just being in the world or creating.
Rick: Yeah, exploring, having fun in a way.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Not seeking, I mean it was always the distinction for me that now, if I’m seeking for Something, it’s to enjoy that in and of itself, not to find some sense of completion within it, you know? What’s gone is the belief that I must have that thing or I must do this or be that to feel whole and complete and satisfied.
Rick: Yeah, because you already feel whole and complete and satisfied, regardless of whether or not you get that thing.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, exactly and that’s what’s lovely is that actually then everything you do in the world is an expression of your wholeness and completeness and your beingness.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Like you say from that platform, from a platform of already being whole, already being complete, everything you do in the world, then, is an expression of that completeness.
Rick: Yeah, very nicely put.
Mike: Yeah, it just feels so much better. [laughs]
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: You know, the relief of that is just – Still now when I, if I look again I think, ‘Oh yeah.’ It’s like discovering that for the first time.
Rick: I find it fascinating that you and many others experience such a radical shift just by hearing the teaching of ‘That what you’re seeking is what you are,’ that kind of talk. It’s almost like you were primed for that, you were ready for that, you’d gotten to a point. I mean maybe if you’d heard it 20 years before, it wouldn’t have done the trick but you had reached a point at which just that knowledge evokes a big reorientation in you.
Mike: Completely and it did feel like that. And I didn’t go to loads of meetings. I went a few times to hear Jeff Foster speak and sat with him in meetings for a few times and maybe one or two others. But I watched a lot and read a lot and it was like that. I mean certainly when I first read, in fact the first time I picked up ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle – a friend had come to stay with me and she was reading it and I was intrigued and I picked it up. It was like reading a foreign language, it made no sense to me. I was interested, you know, and I thought, ‘Hmm, what is it?’ But I just couldn’t follow it, you know, it wasn’t making any sense. Then, a couple of years later, actually while I was recovering from the cancer, and I was now really spiritually interested in seeking these things and I’d heard about Eckhart Tolle. ‘Ah, that’s that book that Laura was reading,’ and so I went and got it. It was just like, it was just speaking my language then, and it was to do with that. I think I probably was primed and ready and there was a willingness to hear and a willingness to see. The same thing with Tony Parsons, with Jeff Foster, with a lot of those teachers sharing things, ten years ago, seven years ago really for me was the first time I encountered a lot of that. It just suddenly was like ‘This is just making total Sense.’
Rick: Um hmm.
Mike: I’ve shown those videos to other people and they just cannot, they’re like, ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.’
Rick: Yeah. Well, part of the whole rationale of Batgap is just to throw out so many different voices that people can find something that resonates with them and very often I’ll put out an interview and we’ll get feedback. One person will say, ‘That’s the worst one you ever did,’ another person will say, ‘That’s the best one you ever did.’ Because it’s just, you know, different strokes for different folks.
Mike: Yeah, different flavors and different things resonate at different times. You know, there have been some expressions I came across seven years ago and I just think, ‘Oh, I just don’t get it at all. I don’t like the way it’s expressed. It doesn’t feel right to me.’ And then, five years later, you read it again and go, ‘Oh, actually.’ Because it’s the same with poetry or Shakespeare. Anything that’s got some ring of truth to it, some real depth, you come back to it later in life, it just goes Deeper. It’s got layers and layers to it, you know, that unfold.
Rick: That’s very true, I mean there are all kinds of books, like the Bhagavad Gita or you know, books like that that you could read for the rest of your life and it becomes a new book every time because there’s a deeper understanding that resonates. These books, a lot of this knowledge is crafted in such a way that it appeals to people at whatever level of experience they have.
Mike: Yeah, I agree. But it does seem to be that there needs to be a kind of readiness I think is a good word, a readiness to hear these teachings or to hear what’s being pointed to, particularly in that sense.
Rick: That’s true, Yeah. A lot of the traditional teachers have said that too, Shankara, Ramana, they don’t say one size fits all. They say, well, if Ramana would say to somebody, you know, well, ‘You are that,’ and if they didn’t get it and then you say, ‘Well, do self-inquiry’ and if they couldn’t relate to that he’d say, ‘Okay, well, do some service, go work in the kitchen, feed the hungry,’ you know? So, there are different things that are appropriate or suitable to people at different stages of their development and also to different types of people and one thing leads to the next.
Mike: Yes, exactly.
Rick: So, in your own case, has it been primarily watching videos and reading and contemplating and thinking, or did you, and have you, and do you engage in some sort of spiritual practice to any extent?
Mike: Yes, I did. I meditate now still a bit. I don’t have a timetable meditation practice, but I spend time in silence sitting and even, you know, seven years ago, in fact, yeah, 2010 through till about 2013 ,I was unemployed, I wasn’t working, so I had a lot of time. I wrote a lot, reflected, reflective writing. I’ve always written a diary in a Journal, but I was reflecting on self-inquiry processes and methods. I was reflecting on the teachings that I’d been listening to and I was exploring existence within myself, sense perceptions and, you know, just sort of experience. So I guess I do a lot of different types of practice that, you know, they’re not perhaps all very thought of as strict kind of methodologies. But certainly I do, I mean to me, you know, just spending time in the park or going out for a walk in nature mindfully, and sort of presently and consciously just being in a space without thinking. And that’s another incredible, for me, place to be at, because when I first got the advice from Eckhart Tolle to say, ‘Well, just stop thinking, that’s the key, just stop thinking.’ R’ Eckhart Tolle said that?
Mike: Yeah, he did, yeah. It’s actually in some of the books, you know.
Rick: Easier said than done.
Mike: Well, yeah, and I just thought, ‘Whoa, there’s no way I can do that.’ I tried and tried, but interestingly enough, even before 2010, I was Reading. So this is from Eckhart Tolle a lot and listening to his stuff. Interestingly enough, with more just practice, it did become easier, whereas now I feel that when I don’t need to think, if I don’t need to think, it just seems to be quite quiet.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: And if there is thought going on, if there’s a momentum of thought going on, in a way, it’s more like, I don’t really listen to it that much, unless I really think I need to.
Rick: Yeah, it’s like you don’t have three radio stations going in your head at the same time, it’s relatively quiet.
Mike: Yeah.
Rick: I’ve heard it.
Mike: And I just-
Rick: Go ahead.
Mike: No, I was just going to say I just don’t really take it all that too seriously, unless it’s something quite serious. If I hear, you know, if I hear some commotion on the street and I think, ‘Oh, something’s going on in the street, sounds like police cars and sirens, I should get out of here,’ you know, I obviously take that seriously.
Rick: Sure.
Mike: But I just generally don’t take anything too seriously that I think about and if I do, I’ll go away and decide to think about it, ‘Okay, well actually I need to go away and contemplate this and think about it.’
Rick: Yeah. But this brings up an interesting point, I think that, you know, if we could describe the enlightened mind, it’s not a mind that’s utterly free of thoughts. It’s a mind that is efficient in its thinking, that thoughts occur as and when they are appropriate, and aside from that, the mind isn’t cluttered with a million other thoughts that aren’t appropriate. And so ,this is tremendously conserving of energy.
Mike: Yes.
Rick: The thoughts we do think can be much more powerful than the actions we take on those thoughts that are much more appropriate, we’re not kind of scattering our energies in every direction.
Mike: Yeah, exactly, and it’s like, yes, exactly, so it feels like you’re just less attached to the thoughts that come into the mind. They’re not, and you know – I feel I make less conclusions about what I think. You know, in my 20s I had real problems with mental health issues and emotional disturbances, and had some quite frightening experiences in my very early 20s around sort of nervous breakdown, mental sort of emotional collapse type experiences, and they were terrifying because on some level I was believing what my mind was telling me. There’s just less investment in that, you know? As a creative – my mind’s always been quite creative – I can sit here and imagine a wonderful creative world and think about ideas and things, but then that’s allowed to just play and then go its own way. So it’s not that the mind’s not capable of that, it’s just that it doesn’t really conclude too much more, unless it’s asked to make a conclusion.
Rick: In other words, you don’t take your thoughts all that seriously. They happen, but it’s not like you’re totally convinced that you’re thinking it, therefore it must be true.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Rick: Which is what a lot of people do, you know, ‘I think such and such about Muslims or about gay people or about Republicans or whatever, therefore it must be true.’
Mike: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Mike: Interestingly enough, I’m challenged in that sense by the people around me, you know –
Rick: – who are more certain of their Opinions?
Mike: Yeah. Or, if there’s something I really care about, I can seem to really stick to it for a while, ‘So I really want to do this,’ you know, ‘There’s reasons I don’t want to do that today because we don’t have time to do that,’ and ‘I want to go there and that’s what I want to do.’ And so it can seem like it’s really, really important to me, which in that moment it might be, which might be why I’m sort of, going out for my version of things.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: But really when it comes down to it, it doesn’t – there’s less concern, you know, over what the mind says about things.
Rick: Yeah. There really is. And, you know, like we were saying earlier, there can be this dance of, you know, activity in life, in our lives, conversations, interaction, just life lived together with others and all that that entails, disagreements, arguments, whatever. I’m quite fiery and feisty person, as well as enjoying being peaceful and quiet and generally unpredictable, you know. A lot of people who know me might say, ‘Well, Mike’s a really, interesting person but he’s not consistent, you can’t always predict how he’s going to be on a particular day.’ And there’s just less investment in all of that, which funnily enough, if any of that is dysfunctional – which I think when I was younger, that way of being in the world was pretty dysfunctional – it wasn’t necessarily serving me that well. And a lot of the people who cared for me found it difficult. But there’s more a sense that that’s just more functional when there’s less investment in the thinking that goes with it and also the attachment to that as of who I am.
Rick: Yeah, well I think another good point comes out here, which is that we’re talking about how more, I don’t know what terminology, let’s just say more enlightened mind for the sake of convenience, is less attached to its opinions and less adamant that, you know, ‘My way or the highway,’ that kind of thing. But on the other hand, that is not to say that such a person is going to just be wishy-washy, whatever goes, you know?
Mike: Yeah.
Rick: You can see many examples if we want to take well-known examples of people like Papaji or Ramana or Nisargadatta, who had fiery determination when they set their mind on something and weren’t about to be swayed by others’ opinions. They said, ‘This is the way I want it to be, this is the way it’s going to be.’ On the other hand, they could just totally turn on the dime and go with whichever way the wind blew. So it’s a little unpredictable, but let’s not stereotype and say that it has to be this way or that way and let’s not assume that you’re just going to be a pushover necessarily if you’re in this state.
Mike: Yeah, that’s a very good point to make because I think that certainly I kind of wanted more peace and more relaxed experience of life when I began seeking to awaken. But in actual fact, as I said earlier, like awakening to my life, it’s very clear to me that there are some core aspects to my character or personality that haven’t dissolved in a puff of you know, enlightened smoke. And actually I’m glad they haven’t because they, they’re a sort of particular unique flavor to who I am and I think that that’s a very interesting point that actually maybe we become more determined in our, in the things we care about from an awakened space, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: I think this idea that, this idea that, being, having an awake mind and body and being awake in the world just means that you’re just, oh, just very passive, you know? ‘Everything’s fine, it doesn’t matter,’ you know? [laughter] ‘It’s all okay anyway, there’s nothing really happening,’ you know? You know, there’s some peace to be had in that and there’s some deep truth in that sort of perspective. But actually I think sometimes, coming from a more enlightened, more awake perspective, almost always, I think, will bring out, will call out the best in us.
Rick: Yeah. So what I find and observe is that there’s a paradox here, where both of those things can live in one life at the same time. There can be this sort of laser-like focus on, determination to achieve a certain thing, and at the same time, this sort of surrender to God’s will.
Mike: Yes.
Rick: And even on the very same point sometimes there can be the, it’s like, what is that verse in the Gita? You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. So there can be the laser-like focus on achieving a certain thing but surrender to the fruits of that action, however they may turn out.
Mike: Yes, yeah, exactly. Which again is the freedom to create and to be, from that Space, because you’re not necessarily clinging doggedly to the outcome.
Rick: Yeah, that’s the key.
Mike: Yeah, and you’re even maybe not, you know – certainly I often feel like this – is you’re not totally invested in the idea that you’re wholly doing that yourself.
Rick: Right, absolutely, important point because you’re not.
Mike: Yeah, whenever I’ve written anything that people go, ‘Wow,’ you know, ‘that was a really good poem’ or, you know, ‘How did you come up with that idea in that play?’ Or ‘How did you do that?’ you know? I have to, if I’m really honest, I go, ‘I don’t really know.’ There’s an element of mystery to it, you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: Because in actual fact, when you’re really writing well, most of what you’re doing is letting go and getting out of the way and you’re kind of… There’s one writer who writes about the process of writing called Julia Cameron. She’s written ‘The Artist’s Way’ and probably some people have heard of her. She talks about it as taking dictation.
Rick: Yeah, very good.
Mike: When she gets out of the way, she just listens and she’s more listening than writing, writing down what she hears, just writing down what’s coming through her. Then it’s really fun, it’s really playful, because it loses its seriousness. It’s not like, ‘Well, yes, of course, I’m very clever because I wrote that and, you know, the only way I could do that is because I’m incredibly creative and intelligent. Yes, aren’t I wonderful?’ [laughter] It’s just never felt right. It’s just, well, actually I don’t really know, it’s a strange mystery.
Rick: Yeah, and that ties into the whole thing of no personal self and no sense of self and all. It’s like, you know – which again is one of those nuanced understandings, ideally, where sure, there’s some sense of a self but it’s not like predominant, at least for me anyway and for many people. Like, what was it, Francis [Bennett] always says, he says, ‘Of course you’re a person. You’re just not only a person.’
Mike: You’re not merely a person, you’re not just a person here, you’re the absolute appearing as the relative.
Rick: Yeah, so your relative personhood is serving as an instrument or a conduit or something, but there’s a much larger Intelligence that’s actually running the show.
Mike: Which is a completely different way of experiencing life compared to ‘I’m only this little me. It’s just me here,’ you know. ‘Nothing means anything,’ you know, ‘there’s no point in anything because, you know, life’s hard and uncomfortable and we’re all going to die,’ you know. It’s a completely different, you know, As, it’s completely different to just being nothing, where I’m just pure Consciousness, pure Being, there’s no one here, no self here, it’s all just an illusion, you know? Which on one level, it is, but it’s a relatively real illusion, you know?
Rick: Yeah, try telling that to your partner if he or she has a problem with something that you’re doing, say, ‘You’re just an illusion, [laughter] there’s really no me doing that, so lighten up.’
Mike: [laughing] It’s quite a quick way to lose a lot of friends, you know. ‘You didn’t turn up, we had a meeting to drink the other day.’ ‘Oh no, no, no, I was not really here.’
Rick: [laughing] There is no meeting, there was not.
Mike: [laughing] Exactly, so yeah, to me it just feels very much like part of a, just, you know, much larger and more enjoyable process, you know, that I really feel that at this point in my own journey, this is where the real juice and pith and, you know, zest of life is, is just in, you know, what’s it like, you know, because I constantly think now, well, you know, if I’m experiencing something, what what’s it like to live in an awakened space with that? It’s just some different words to use, but, you know, if I feel anxious about something or bored or, you know, if there’s a problem in my life, a situation, a difficulty with somebody, a relationship problem, whatever, is, well, where’s my awakening now, then what difference is that making?
Rick: Yeah. Are you’re able to sort of shift into it a little bit more, fall back on the self, so to speak.
Mike: Yes, exactly, is that it’s always, you know, the solution now.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: The solution is always at the root, the root, the solution is always the same, and it might be that something resolves itself just because I spend a little bit of time just being. I might meditate for 20 minutes or just sit and write, you know, sit and look at the trees, go and sit in the park and just look at the sky or go and do something which, you know, is enjoyable yet doesn’t really require an awful lot of, you know, mental focus.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: And some of these things can resolve or even taking something into, you know, a practice of surrender. You know, Francis really teaches a lot about surrender and that’s a huge part of integrating any kind of deep awakening, I think, is that you go through this process of allowing, accepting, letting things be.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: And you know, I can feel in my own being when I’m not doing that because it’s suddenly things become, you know, constricted and difficult and things just aren’t working well, there’s less flow, you know, things aren’t flowing as well. And then you realize, ‘Ah, okay, I’m obviously holding on to something.’
Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of like riding a bicycle. There’s always a balance thing going on, and it becomes almost automatic after a while, as it does with riding a bicycle. You don’t have to think about it, but you’re still balancing, you’re still steering around potholes and correcting for things and this and that. And what I mean by that analogy is just that there are a lot of things which do have to be dealt with and you can’t just hide out in the transcendent. I remember I was driving along with my mother one time and the car broke down and I just sat on the side of the road and opened a Shankara book and started reading it. [laughs] This is back in the 70s, and I wasn’t dealing with the situation. I can probably think of many other examples in my life like that. So there are times to fall back into the absolute or into the more unbounded perspective and you know things are going to work themselves out. And there are times to take action. I mean, to quote the Bhagavad Gita again, Arjuna at one point said to Krishna, “Can’t I just live on alms and forget about this whole battle thing that you want me to do?” And Krishna said, “No, this is something you’re going to have to deal with actually.” But the way he put it was, “Well, get established in being first and then perform action and then from that foundation, you’ll do the right thing.”
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And that is just such a great comfort, when you know this on a certain level. Because for me I knew this for a couple of years very much on the level of the mind, you know.
Rick: Um hmm.
Mike: I think, this is just my opinion, but I think a lot of modern expressions of non-duality or modern expressions of spiritual teaching sometimes, I think they actually require quite a good intellect in order to follow the conceptual game of unraveling the mind with the mind, sort of using that thing. And so, I had a good mind in that sense, to be able to conceptually follow these sometimes quite abstract sort of expressions. And so definitely for a while there was this clarity and understanding in the mind about this and almost, if you like, an awakened mind. But then there had to be some embodiment of that, and that’s really where this process of, like you say, balancing and surrendering and returning to and trusting it as well. I feel that there comes a point when you know all of this stuff, if you’ve had a deep awakening, genuine insight to things, and that’s starting to become an abiding thing. Then I think there’s a sense that you know this through being it.
Rick: Um hmm.
Mike: You just don’t know it through the being of it. And then that is, I think, what you’re talking about, that there’s this sense of you just adjusting and you’re doing that, like you say, from the perspective of being, the ground of being. And so that’s just such a comforting thing to me that I think, “Oh okay, if I feel I’m getting carried away here or swept up – I keep thinking of this analogy of being swept up by the river of, Stuff – I can just remind myself that actually, there’s an element of my beingness which is untouched by any of that, it’s sort of undisturbed and it’s the capacity holding all of it. And then you go, “Of course.” Then it becomes easier, I think, and more skillful and more effective, even if part of that balancing is you’ve got to go out there into great battle with something or someone.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. There’s a couple of stories which come to mind. One is from, I forget, these are both sort of Vedic things, but one is that it was said that when Brahma, the creator, first emerged from the unmanifest and he looked around and he was supposed to be the creator but he couldn’t create, didn’t know what to do or how to do it, and the voice came to do tapas or to go within, and so he kind of went within, in these stories, for eons and then from having drawn back like, that he was able to come out and create. And there’s another saying which is, I think, from Krishna – people pardon me please for quoting all these Hindu things, but it’s kind of what I’m familiar with – where he says, “Taking recourse to my own nature I create again and again.”
Mike: Absolutely.
Rick: So again, there’s a principle of taking recourse, it’s like drawing the arrow back on the bow and then shooting it forward. Taking recourse to my own nature, I create again and again.
Mike: And that’s beautiful and that, I think, very nicely sums up what we’re talking about there. We’re drawing from being, if you like. God is creating out of Itself again and again and again for the sheer joy of it, for the thrill and the enjoyment of it, for the love of it, because It can. That’s just such a, you know, it’s such a completely different way of experiencing life to previously, where I felt life was happening to me. I couldn’t get ahead, things were just difficult, the way was always blocked, never satisfied and fulfilled and just dreadfully unhappy and, you know, stressed and tense all the time.
Rick: And if that’s the way God operates, and if we’re made in the image of God, to throw another Bible quote at you, then we’re like a little miniature version of the principles I just explained. It works that way in us.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, exactly, which is, you know, which is the great good news. That’s what it is. It’s not, when we do look around the world ,we’ve got all these , ideas of God and what they’re telling us to do in this church and that church. Well, really that’s just us having created God in our image.
Rick: Right.
Mike: The God who says you can’t do this and you can’t do that.
Rick: Not the other way around.
Mike: Yeah, it’s actually. There may be an inherent ethical approach and a morality that comes with being this free creating force. I have no doubt in my mind about that, that there is an ethical nature to this beingness, this Brahma or whatever we would call it. But not in the way, not in man’s idea of morality or ethics.
Rick: Right.
Mike: We do create it in our expressions of it, but I think it’s God-given in that sense.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. If I were to try to put that ethical nature that you just alluded to into words, it would be that there’s an evolutionary imperative to the universe, an evolutionary trajectory that might seem ruthless and cruel at times, but if you step back far enough and see the big picture, there’s this ever-evolving, ever complexifying, ever more full expression of Divine Intelligence in the world, through the world.
Mike: Yeah, indeed. And that whatever that ethical framework or essence is, it’s intelligent, like you say, it’s a Divine Intelligence, which is very different, I think, often from the morality that human beings concern themselves with in terms of conflict and debate and this is right and that is wrong.
Rick: Right.
Mike: But there’s a sort of, almost like an unquestionable, sort of provenance, an unquestionable sort of ring of truth about that ethical approach, which actually, in a way, it’s like, if we are this beingness, if we are the essence of God, if we are this open-hearted, this clear, unconditional openness that we might call God, well then it’s its own authority.
Rick: Yeah.
Mike: It’s almost like, well, in a way, you know, that’s what informs your ethical approach in the world, or that’s what informs, you know, your relationships to other people. So, like you say, coming back again to, what was that quote about the book?
Rick: “Taking recourse to my own nature, I create again and again.”
Mike: Yeah, yeah. It’s like going back each time, returning to that essence of ourselves, reminding ourselves, remembering who we are, and then going out again in the world. It seems to me that, if you like, is the cycle of all of this, isn’t it? And it just goes on deeper and deeper levels as a person’s life, unfolds.
Rick: Yeah, very good. So, you give meetings around the UK and you do Skype consultations with people. What do you actually do with people in these meetings and consultations?
Mike: Well, I don’t really give many meetings in the UK.
Rick: Maybe you’d like to give more if you were invited. [chuckles]
Rick: Maybe, if I was invited to talk on something I might. Initially, when I first started writing the blog, I was invited to give a few talks, and initially I felt that the role of teacher just wasn’t for me.
Rick: Right.
Mike: In hindsight, I realized there was an awful lot I still needed to integrate within myself in order to have any real confidence in teaching as such. But certainly, I will write my blog and talk to people via that and on Facebook. For a while I was consulting with people via Skype. That’s still available. If people want to talk to me via Skype and discuss or ask questions or ask for guidance in this awakening journey, I will do that. But for a number of years, I decided to step away from all of that and focus on living my own life, aside from putting myself out there as someone to talk about things and teach.
Rick: sure.
Mike: I get a sense that probably my own expression will naturally fall more into the creative field, I don’t know. But I like talking about this and I certainly have a passion for assisting people who are perhaps already on this journey, but just talking from my own experience and what works for me.
Rick: Yeah, you know one thing you might enjoy doing is just – and you have the technical skills to set this up on Zoom or whatever – is just doing a little webinar thing once a month or something where people can either join for free or you ask for a modest donation or something voluntarily, and you just talk for a bit and then let people throw in their two cents and you just get a little discussion going with 15 or 20 people.
Mike: Yeah.
Rick: You might enjoy that.
Mike: Yeah, indeed. I’m sure I would, yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Rick: Good.
Mike: Certainly, a good idea.
Rick: Great. Well, thanks Mike. Is there anything that comes to mind that we haven’t covered that you want to mention before we wrap it up?
Mike: I don’t think so, no. I was going to read one poem actually.
Rick: Oh, please do.
Mike: Which is just difficult to know which one to choose, but I’ll choose, actually this one I’ll choose because it’s one of my favorite ones. So this is something I wrote probably about six months ago, maybe seven months ago. I just often will write poetry expressing this sort of stuff Sometimes. It’s not always this stuff. So this is called ‘Gloriously I Am.’ “If you are here as the prickles in my skin and as the sensation of my own breath entering and leaving my body, and if you are here as the carpet and the sofa and the dwindling bottle of wine and the ticking or marching or bending of time, and if you are here as the memory of autumn beech leaves and of conkers and of my dear sweet friend Peter walking twin-like with me round and round the playing fields, and if you are here as the sound of these fingers Tinkle-tapping their dance across the screen, and if you are here as the beautiful face I kiss and the beautiful hand I hold and the soft sweet care of his heart, and if you are here as the ground on which I walk and the skin in which I’m in and the Crazy, screwed up, messed up, wired up mind that just does its own bloody thing, and if you are here as everything that could be named or not named or claimed or not claimed, as every thought, every memory, every movement, sound, taste and smell, well, I am gloriously lost for words.”
Rick: That’s great, that gives people a nice taste of your writing ability. You know I’ve listened to another number of things in the last few days that you had written that were just really nice and enjoyable. I hope you keep writing.
Mike: Yes, same here.
Rick: So thanks, I really appreciate it, it’s been a really enjoyable conversation for me and hopefully for the listeners.
Mike: Hopefully, yeah, I really enjoyed it too. Thanks Rick.
Rick: Sure, let me make a few little wrap-up points. So I’ve been speaking with Mike Jenkins, those of you who are familiar with the show know everything that I’m about to say. Those of you who are new to it, I’ll just say a few things. This is an ongoing series of interviews, if you’d like to be notified of future ones go to batgap.com and you’ll see a place to sign up to be notified by email when new ones are released or you could subscribe on YouTube and YouTube will notify you when I put up new ones. And explore the site there at BatGap, look under the “At-a-glance” menu and you’ll see a summary of some of the things that are available. And the donate button is there, as I mentioned in the beginning, enables us to devote all our time to this. So I really appreciate your attention listening to or watching this and we will continue to schedule them and do this. We’ve got them scheduled through late September now, not entirely every week, but some go that far out and it’s a great honor and pleasure to be able to produce this series and to meet so many wonderful people. I’m the prime beneficiary of this. It’s my selfish little secret. So I really appreciate it and it’s been great getting to know you Mike, perhaps we’ll meet in person one of these days. Thank you, yes that would be nice. Yeah, definitely. So thanks to everybody who’s been listening or watching and we’ll see you next time. Thank you.