Nirmala Interview

Summary:

• Introduction: Rick Archer introduces Nirmala and his spiritual journey, including his teachings and influences.
• Spiritual Awakening: Nirmala discusses his profound spiritual awakening in India and his teacher Neelam.
• Nondual Spiritual Mentoring: Nirmala offers satsang and nondual spiritual mentoring, influenced by Ramana Maharshi and Adyashanti.
• Current Theme: Nirmala emphasizes the importance of recognizing the present moment and the profound nature of every experience.
• Beingness: Discussion on the concept of beingness, which includes both cosmic and individual experiences.
• Exploration of Truth: Nirmala talks about the continuous exploration and realization of truth in every moment.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Nirmala. Welcome Nirmala.

Nirmala: Hi there Rick, nice to be here.

Rick: Yeah, here’s a little bio about Nirmala on his website which is endless-satsang.com. After a lifetime of spiritual seeking, Nirmala met his teacher Neelam, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago, or a month, a devotee of HWL Poonja, Papaji. She convinced him that seeking wasn’t necessary and after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening in India, he began offering satsang and non-dual spiritual mentoring with Neelam’s blessing. This tradition of spiritual wisdom has been most profoundly disseminated by Ramana Maharshi, a revered saint who was Papaji’s teacher. Nirmala’s perspective was also profoundly expanded by his friend and teacher Adyashanti. Okay, so where would you like to begin?

Nirmala: How about right here, right now?

Rick: Okay, good. I listen to, as I often do, to many hours of your talks. A couple of hours of ‘Never Not Here’, and both of your books, and a lot of your satsangs. You even said in one of your satsangs that at any given time you tend to have a kind of a theme that you like to dwell on in your satsangs, and then maybe over time it becomes a different theme. So, what’s your theme these days?

Nirmala: Actually, my theme these days is right here, right now. It’s just a recognition that all there is, is this one beingness, that one consciousness, and that every experience of it is equally profound, equally beautiful. In a sense, a lot of spiritual seekers are looking for that big spiritual realization, and even when it comes, then beyond that is the recognition that every moment is a realization. Every moment you’re realizing something about your being, whether it’s your ability to experience the biggest truth, or whether it’s your ability, your capacity, to be fully identified with the ego and lost in illusion. That’s part of the capacity of your being.

Rick: So, what I hear you saying here, when you refer to your being, is really not an individual thing. We’re talking about our essential being, which is, we could say cosmic, which is without limitation whatsoever, and which contains the whole universe, or universes, and so on. And that’s your being, right?

Nirmala: Right, but within that being, that includes your individual being, your experience of being a particular human being. So that’s like a subset within that. And so, everything that you realize, everything that you experience, everything that you discover about this, is profound, is mysterious, is worth exploring, worth discovering.

Rick: And we might say, “Who’s discovering?” Is it just the individuality is discovering, or is it that cosmic being, is, has evolved an infinite number of individualities as a sensory apparatus?

Nirmala: Right, right. Different fingertips.

Rick: Right.

Nirmala: Yeah, and it’s probably both. I mean, some realizations happen right here. Some realizations don’t fit within the individual, separate self. To realize it, you have to be out here. You have to be bigger than that. So, it’s, another theme that actually has lasted for years, and years, and years, is that the truth is whatever, the way you measure the truth is by how big a sense of self it gives you. And so, if something gives you a sense of self like this, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It doesn’t mean it’s not part of the truth. It just means that it’s a very narrow or limited truth. And when something gives you a sense of self that is beyond your body, beyond your usual identification, that just happens to be a much bigger truth, much more complete. It’s like the measuring stick you can use to determine how true things are, how real, how important.

Rick: So, if you go and watch ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and you come out feeling all expanded and wonderful and all, maybe there’s more truth in that movie than if you go and watch some slasher flick and you come out feeling all kind of yucky and violent.

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, or it evoked a bigger truth in you, a bigger sense of possibility, a bigger sense of connectedness to the greater possibilities and realities out there.

Rick: Now a minute ago you said something about, even if you’re completely identified and caught up in the illusion, that’s just as profound, maybe in some way, as having some expanded, kind of cosmic experience.

Nirmala: Yeah, it is, it’s different. When you’re contracted, it’s different than when you’re expanded. When you’re identified, it’s different than when you’re either disidentified or identified with something truer. So, whether it’s equally profound, it just is. It just still has value. It still has reality. Some of the experiences we have, have very, very little reality. Very, very little truth. My favorite example I always use of something that’s true but not very true is a lottery ticket, because if you buy a lottery ticket, it’s absolutely true that you could win, that no one can deny that. It’s within the realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, it’s not very true. It’s like, unfortunately, it’s like ridiculously small truth. And so, some of our realization, some of, when we realize the capacity of our being to become very overly identified with some, hurt feeling within us, it, it’s real, it’s meaningful but not very.

Rick: Yeah, they say lotteries are taxes on the arithmetically challenged.

Nirmala: That’s good. It’s not a good retirement plan.

Rick: Well, it’s interesting because, as individuals we have our druthers. I’d rather be sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon enjoying the view than in some Syrian prison being tortured or something. There’s definitely preferences we have as individuals. But if you think about it, again, from the perspective of the cosmic self, I’m both of those, undergoing both of those experiences for whatever reason.

Nirmala: So when, when you focus on that preference, your sense of self will get very small. It’s interesting how whether you focus on the positive side of it or the negative side of it. If you focus on the possibility of being tortured, you can get very contracted. But if you focus on the desire, because you’re not, I can tell, not sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon right now. If you focus on that.

Rick: You’re a lot closer to it.

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, but still a couple hours away. But if you focus on that desire, even though it’s a positive desire, even though it’s a positive illusion you could say, when you focus on it, your sense of self, your awareness, your experience becomes very narrow, very contracted. It has to be in order to stay in touch with something that’s just an image in your mind. That’s a very small reality, so you have to get very small to inhabit it, to fully experience it.

Rick: So, when you say focus on it, do you mean that when you kind of dwell on it, your fulfilment is contingent upon the achievement of a desire, and you’re kind of dwelling on that desire, and with the orientation that you won’t be fulfilled until that desire is gratified?

Nirmala: Yeah, that’s one of the ways to focus on it. Anything that kind of pumps it up, keeps it going, elaborates on it. A lot of times the first thought that we have that takes us into a small reality is not, it’s just like you can have a passing thought. Like I can tell you that the walls in this room are kind of a putty-colored beige. So what? It’s like, okay, that thought just goes.

Rick: Yeah, it doesn’t have much significance.

Nirmala: Right, but if I tell you, there’s, like a couple weeks ago there was a solar eclipse that happened on the, you could watch it from the rim of the Grand Canyon. If I had told you that two days before and you were like, “Oh God, I’d love the Grand Canyon. Oh, wouldn’t that be cool to see a solar eclipse on the Grand Canyon, and there’s condors there, and maybe I’d see a condor, and it’s like those are each little thought is adding to that sense of contraction just by maintaining it, just by keeping you involved with it. It’s not, the default position is for your awareness to open up. That’s what naturally happens when you’re not thinking, when you’re not in a sense focusing.

Rick: Well, it kind of seems to me to depend on how you’re wired, and you can change your wiring over time. But you know, there might be some people who are in Iowa who would love to be at the rim of the Grand Canyon watching the eclipse or the sunset or whatever, but it’s not going to bum their day if they don’t get to go. It’s like because there’s a certain baseline of contentment that’s not dependent upon whether this or the other desire is fulfilled or not. And there are other people whose whole, I mean, I know people who’ve moved, so many times because they get to a place and after a while they feel they’re not fulfilled and they’ll be more fulfilled if they move somewhere else, and then they go through all the trouble of moving somewhere else, and then the same thing happens again, and they just don’t see it, they just keep doing it.

Nirmala: Exactly, and in psychotherapy they call that the geographic cure, where people go and try and cure all that ails them by moving.

Rick: Right, or getting a new partner or whatever, the people who’ve been married eight times and whatnot.

Nirmala: Right, and you said it’s different depending on your wiring, it’s also different depending on your life experience, your conditioning, which things, some people you mentioned, the Grand Canyon, and they get bored, they wouldn’t be interested at all. So, the specific content is unique for every individual, and especially the specific stuff that can get us not just momentarily contracted, but can get us kind of like on a roll, where we’re totally engaged with that little fantasy, or that fear, or that hope, or that wish, or that doubt, or that worry. It’s like we’re rolling with it; we’re going with it. And even people who are very, very free in most respects, you can often find something that will push, like we say, push their buttons. Something that will put them into that contracted state.

Rick: I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody, or very few people, who don’t still have some buttons that could be pushed. I’ve met some pretty enlightened people.

Nirmala: Yeah, and of course the good news is that consciousness is not harmed by being contracted.

Rick: Yeah.

Nirmala: Like I said, that’s one of its capacities. In fact, if you’re eating chocolate, the absolute best thing you can do is contract the hell out of your consciousness. Why be in cosmic consciousness when you’re eating chocolate? It’s like a total waste of good chocolate.

Rick: Well, this is an interesting point, and I actually thought about this a lot when I was listening to your various talks. And I guess we could frame this point with a phrase, which would be, the ability (letting a dog out), the ability to focus sharply and yet maintain broad comprehension. And that, to my knowledge, definition, would be what I would call cosmic consciousness. In other words, that cosmic awareness, unbounded awareness, is maintained while you’re performing brain surgery, or flying and landing a 747 in a snowstorm, or doing something that demands tremendous focus. And in fact, the focusing is actually enhanced or improved by the ability to maintain broad comprehension. Otherwise, the big picture is lost somehow.

Nirmala: I maybe say it a little bit differently, in that I describe it as a flexibility. In the actual moment where you’re trying to work your way around one of the major blood vessels of the brain, when you’re doing brain surgery, the predominance might be very focused.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely, laser-like.

Nirmala: laser like.

Rick: And you might be standing there for 10 hours focusing like that.

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah. And yet in any moment, like when you put down the scalpel and for a minute you take a drink of water, and the nurse is wiping your brow, the sweat from your brow. In that moment you can just slip back into a much more expanded state. And so, whether it’s like a simultaneous thing where you’re focused and expanded at the same time, or whether it’s just this flexibility, in a sense, to me the value of the big expanded states is when they bring you to this place where it just doesn’t matter anymore.

Rick: Yeah.

Nirmala: And they bring you to a place where you know that’s what you are, you know that’s possible in any moment, at any time. And so, it doesn’t matter anymore, whether right now you’re doing brain surgery or eating chocolate, or whether right now you’re just literally sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon and just loving the spaciousness, the literal spaciousness in front of you.

Rick: I think the word “flexibility” is very apt, and I think it’s something unique about human beings that they’re able to incorporate within their experience a very broad range of, spectrum, spectra of reality.

Nirmala: Yeah.

Rick: And to do so in such a way that it’s not a black/white, on/off kind of arrangement. But, you’re performing the brain surgery, yet that broad awareness can be there in the background. It’s not like you have to sit and just dwell in that. You’d kill the patient probably if you did.

Nirmala: Exactly.

Rick: But that it’s there, despite the sharp focus. Or it can be, I mean maybe it isn’t for many people. In fact, I want to get on to that a little bit. You mentioned illusion earlier, and it seems that the vast majority of people in the world are very much in the matrix, very much caught in the illusion to the exclusion of, or unaware of, the fact that there’s a deeper, more expanded reality. We’re like focusing machines, we humans, or all beings are, I think. But the focusing becomes so ingrained, so habitual, so conditioned, that the broad awareness, the unbounded awareness is just kind of lost.

Nirmala: Sure, yeah. At least the capacity is never lost, but the experience can be lost for a long time.

Rick: Yeah, for lifetimes.

Nirmala: Yeah, good thing we are eternal.

Rick: Good thing. Yesterday I watched this video presentation about the fact that they’ve now determined with the Hubble Space Telescope that the Andromeda galaxy is moving toward our galaxy, and then in about eight and a half billion years the two galaxies will collide. And they sped the whole thing up, and you could sort of watch the Andromeda coming in and then kind of circling around and colliding with our galaxy, and then kind of going out again, and then coming back in again, and eventually just forming one big galaxy. I just kind of love that stuff because it puts it in perspective.

Nirmala: Yeah, let’s start planning a party where we’ll all get together and watch.

Rick: And you can imagine, as that’s taking place, all the lives and all the billions of inhabited planets spinning out their destinies, thinking that this little thing that I’m experiencing now is it, this is what’s real. Whereas really, from a broader perspective, there’s something, there’s a different perspective.

Nirmala: Yeah. If consciousness is eternal, then all of that is good play. There’s a definition of illusion I came across recently, that illusion is something real that simply appears to be something other than what it is. And so, all of this illusion, including the illusion of galaxies colliding, it ultimately is that there’s reality there, and yet the appearance of it is the illusion, the idea that somehow something’s lost or something’s gained. Because all those people whose little solar system gets all disrupted because another star comes into it and their lives are changed, or their lives, life on that planet is ended, it’s like that’s the illusion that that’s somehow a problem, that that will end consciousness, that that will end the play.

Rick: That’s a great definition, something, say it again, something real that appears to be something other than what it is.

Nirmala: Yeah, like all the magic tricks, that when you get right down to the nitty-gritty of illusion, for doing illusion for a living. A magician is using real smoke and real mirrors to make it look like something’s happening that’s not actually happening.

Rick: Yeah, or the old snake and string analogy in Vedanta. I mean there’s really a rope lying on the road, but you see it as a snake and so you get all scared and heart rate speeds up and everything, but it’s just a rope lying there. It’s a real rope, so to speak.

Nirmala: Yeah, you probably won’t see a snake there if there wasn’t a rope.

Rick: Yeah, and of course they use that analogy as a pointer to what we’re all doing, what everyone does, which is mistake what is really essentially Brahman or consciousness as being something, that’s not that.

Nirmala: Yeah, anything that we leave out. I find it kind of ironic how in the current Advaita scene, the current non-duality scene, that there are people who seem intent on determining what is not part of Advaita. And if there’s something that’s not part of Advaita, if there’s something that’s not included in Advaita, then it’s not Advaita. I mean how could that be Advaita? It’s non-dual, only one. So as soon as you have something that’s not included, you’re no longer actually speaking about non-duality.

Rick: Yeah, actually the founder of Advaita, well the whole tradition of it really, they use the word “Brahman,” and Brahman is supposed to be not just the Absolute, but the Absolute and the relative contained within a larger wholeness.

Nirmala: Yes, yeah, both, again, everything’s included.

Rick: Yeah, you use the word “space” a lot in your talks, with reference to consciousness, and that kind of bothered me a little bit. Not bothered, but I kept thinking there must be a better way of phrasing it, because space, although you can attribute quality of spaciousness to consciousness, because it seems there’s this feeling of expansion and vastness and so on, and emptiness perhaps, but in reality space itself is a relative thing. It’s considered to be one of the five elements in the Eastern perspective, and in Einsteinian physics, space is something which can curve, and if you move through it fast enough, then time will dilate and so on. So maybe you don’t mean it literally, maybe you’re just kind of using that as an adjective.

Nirmala: Yeah, probably both, because space is a quality of our being, and it’s a very fundamental quality, because it turns out that that’s actually everywhere you go, there’s space. Even if you can bend it or curve it or experience it in different ways, it’s still always, always present. And so, like I speak of awareness as actually a fundamental quality of our being, and often we just do that, we use the adjective, we use the quality, the particular aspect of something as the name for it. So like somebody who’s a doctor, that’s an aspect of their personhood, that’s an aspect of their individuality, but we sometimes refer to them as a doctor, because it might be a fairly predominant aspect of their experience in life. And so, awareness is so fundamental to what we are, that it’s always present, it’s always happening. And, well, “always” is maybe a little strong, but almost always, almost always present. It’s obviously present in every experience, because without awareness there is no experience. And so you can say the same thing about space, it’s actually present in every experience. Without space there is no experience. And so it seems to me it’s a little bit more fundamental than some of the other qualities, like the other four elements, if you want to say.

Rick: Well, that’s actually considered to be the most fundamental or subtle of the five elements.

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s tricky because sometimes, just in my language and in my speaking, I use a word like that, that’s actually a quality of this mystery, to try to describe or use it as the label for the entire mystery.

Rick: And that’s fair enough. I mean, that’s done traditionally also, they speak of sat-chit-ananda, for instance, qualities of consciousness and bliss and existence, attributing those to consciousness or to being.

Nirmala: Yeah, using that as a name for being. The real names, like “being” is a good example, but probably the best names are the ones that no one can define. It’s like “being” or “presence” or “source” or “that.” The more vague and hard to pin down a word is, the better it is for describing that which includes everything and beyond.

Rick: Yeah, okay, good.

Nirmala: And space is, because it’s so present everywhere, because it’s such a fundamental quality, it’s a wonderful touchstone. It’s like if you focus on it, if you bring awareness to the space, if you even just notice the space around your body, the space within your body, if there is a strong emotion or something really stirring things up and you literally give it space or just notice that there is lots of space for that emotion. It doesn’t matter if that emotion is bigger than the state of Arizona, there’s still space for it. And so, by noticing the space, it brings you more in touch with that bigger truth. And like I said, it’s a handy one to use because it’s not like you can ever forget to bring it with you or misplace it or run out of it, or something like that. Like awareness, by noticing awareness you can get back in touch with something that’s bigger than the particular experience you’re having.

Rick: Yeah, for some reason your space thing reminded me of a story from the Upanishads where the teacher tells the student to go and get a banyan seed, and he comes back with a banyan seed and he said, “Okay, now break it open.” “What do you see inside?” He said, “I don’t see anything, it’s just empty.” And the teacher says, “Well, that huge, mighty banyan tree came out of that emptiness.”

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ultimately space is the source, or emptiness is the source of everything.

Rick: Yeah. On the flip side, that emptiness is fullness. Physicists would tell us that in every cubic centimeter of empty space, there’s incredible energy at a certain level, more than all the atomic bombs and everything else, just immense energy inherent in every tiny bit of space.

Nirmala: Yeah, and there’s this really, really cool physicist out there named Nassim Haramein, and he’s figured out the structure of space. And the structure of space means that within that little, tiny little cubic centimeter of space, there’s infinite energy. This is where it gets really weird, there’s actually infinite space.

Rick: Ah, interesting.

Nirmala: The structure of space is like a, you know those Russian dolls where you open it up and there’s another doll? The structure of space is like that, that wherever you are in space, there’s a similar structure, a smaller structure within that, and then a similar, smaller structure within that. And it goes on to infinity. So not only does infinity extend this way out into space, but infinity is actually here. Infinity goes this way also. R

Rick:Interesting.

Nirmala: Yeah. I love, like

Rick: I love it too. Pondering that stuff is like a spiritual practice.

Nirmala: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: That and astronomy. In fact anything, I mean, even I think of it, I think, how could a doctor be an atheist? A doctor who’s thinking of this incredible intelligence, how could they not see it?

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Gina has been listening to Bruce Lipton, and he was a very, he rejected religion and all that kind of stuff, and became a scientist and started studying the cell. And when he started realizing what’s really going on in the cell, which is the usual idea that the DNA controls the cell, he found that that’s not true at all. The DNA is just like a blueprint that’s stored on the shelf for when you need to make a protein. But what controls the cell is all the interactions happening on the membrane of the cell. And so, when he got really into studying the cell, he started having this mystical perspective, that the intelligence was the whole field that these tiny, little individual cells exist in, and the membrane was the key element, not the DNA, not the nucleus.

Rick: That’s a beautiful point, and it sort of touches back on several things we’ve talked about so far. And sometimes we speak of existence or being or consciousness or whatever in a very kind of, it doesn’t have much life in it, the way it’s referred to. But what we’re touching on now is that it’s actually percolating with intelligence, percolating with infinite creativity.

Nirmala: Right, right. That’s another fundamental quality of it, actually, is the aliveness, is the movement, is the creation within it, the endless creation, endless dynamic aliveness. And so again, everywhere you go in your consciousness, in the universe, inside your body, what you find is this incredible activity, movement, aliveness. And so that is a fundamental quality.

Rick: And actually, what you were saying a few minutes ago, when we were talking about the rope and the snake, how illusion is looking at something and mistaking it for something other than what it really is. If we kind of consider for a minute that consciousness is omnipresent, that everything is just this ocean of consciousness, then what are we actually seeing when we see the world and all the things going on in it? We’re actually seeing in a sort of a manifest form the aliveness of consciousness.

Nirmala: Right, and so no matter what you’re seeing, to some degree you’re seeing an illusion. If you’re looking at a physical object, you’re seeing a certain, it appears to be something other than what it is. What it is, is this alive consciousness appearing to be a chair or a table. If you’re even more involved with your mental experience, with your thoughts, and yet so involved with them that you’ve in a sense forgotten that they’re thoughts. You see them, you think that what you’re imagining in your mind is actually there. You’re having a conversation in your mind with your boss and you’re getting all upset because you’re going through all these mental gymnastics, and it’s like for a moment you’ve forgotten that they’re just thoughts. And so, you’re involved with them in a way that is in a sense lost in the illusion. You’ve lost track of the reality, that it’s just a thought.

Rick: Yeah, taking them very seriously.

Nirmala: Yeah, and we do that. We take our thoughts, I love how even in an argument, people will, that will be justification for their position, like, “Well, that’s what I think.” Somehow that makes it infallible, accurate, the ultimate truth, because “that’s what I think”. I heard Dick Cheney do that in an interview. They were asking him why, something like why we had to invade Iraq. And he gave his reasons and the person said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah, well that’s what I think.” Like, okay, end of discussion.

Rick: It’s funny you should mention Dick Cheney because just this morning I was re-listening to an interview by Bill Moyers with a fellow named Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T. Maybe I’ll link to that interview from the BatGap page. But he was talking about how people get locked into political perspectives, and to the point where they demonize the other side because the other perspective seems so polar opposite that it couldn’t possibly have any value in it, because theirs is so right. Theirs is the righteous, true one, and the other one is evil.

Nirmala: When you’re in that narrow, contracted, identified way of viewing, it does seem like that other stuff, I mean, clearly that stuff is illusion, but this, this is real. Because again, that’s what I think. When I heard Dick Cheney say that it struck me, and then there was this moment of humility and realizing, “How many times in my life have I said that?” or just had that, or just assumed it, assumed that because I’m thinking something, well, I must be right.

Rick: I quoted this just last week, but there’s a line from a Dylan song, “I’m right from my side…” “You’re right from your side, and I’m right from mine.”

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, maybe all there is, is rightness.

Nirmala: Yeah, good point.

Nirmala: And that doesn’t, the danger in that is to assume that therefore all truths are equal. I think all truths are true, and some are much more true than others.

Rick: Yeah.

Nirmala: It’s like, they were right that if Iraq had been able to, they would have had lots of weapons of mass destruction. There was some truth in that that was within the realm of possibility. It was something that you would expect Saddam Hussein would be interested in. And some people even suggest that he was being misled by his own scientists into thinking that they were developing weapons when they had no clue. And they just said, “Oh yeah, yeah, we’re working on that. We’re getting there. Don’t worry. We’ll have one soon.”

Rick: Yeah, don’t kill us.

Nirmala: So, you know, there’s always some truth, but then there can be a little or there can be a lot. And so, in the media, when they present both sides as a way of being balanced, well, if this is a small truth and this is a big truth, then presenting them as equal is not balanced. That argument falls over, because this one is much bigger. When you put them on the scale, it’s going to go like this.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, to take an absurd example, you could say, “Okay, well, Hitler was nice to his grandchildren,” or something.

Nirmala: Yeah, he deserved to continue killing off all the Jews. That doesn’t make sense. Those are unequal truths.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. I mean, it’s kind of funny we’re talking about this, because to me it shows that all this spiritual talk and spiritual practice and satsang and all that, it actually does have relevance in the relative world, in politics, in morality, in social issues and stuff like that. Personally, I think it, I mean, certainly a person who is really gung-ho about spirituality can become very fundamentalist, but perhaps if it really ripens and matures, it enables you to bring a softer, gentler approach to these issues. Which is not to say, as you just said, that you’re going to become totally wishy-washy and not take a stand, but you won’t take it so adamantly.

Nirmala: Right, you don’t have to hold it so rigidly or make the other person wrong or go to war about it. First of all, this discriminating how true things are – ideally it’s not a mental activity, it’s more an activity of your heart, of your being. It’s almost like a visceral response when we can tell whether something is very true or not very true. It’s not really true or not true, because again, all there is is truth. So even something that is in a sense total imaginary, total illusion, is still true in the sense that you can imagine it, but it’s just not very true. It’s like less true than a lottery ticket, less likely than a lottery ticket. And so that’s very, very little truth. And our being responds to it. It’s not by logic-ing it out. I always say to the mind, everything looks equally true. The mind is like an electron microscope. Whatever you put in it, it looks big. Whatever you look at, it looks true. Whatever you think about in that moment, that is your experience. So, it seems just as real as what you were thinking about a moment before. Whether it’s a fear or a desire or a memory, all of a sudden that’s your reality. The thing that measures how true it is, is really more our heart, more our felt sense of being, and whether that gets contracted or expanded. So, it is possible to weigh these things, like you said, to bring this spiritual reality into play in the world, and really discriminate how true things are, what’s true for me, is it true for me to eat that whole plate of cookies, is it true for me to marry this woman, is it true for me to move to Hawaii and live off the land? You can actually weigh all these relative truths in your heart, in your being. So, it turns out that capacity, this capacity to not just be alive in the world but to discriminate, to distinguish, that’s another fundamental quality of consciousness. You can’t have awareness without being able to distinguish differences.

Rick: Or it’s either a quality of consciousness maybe, or it’s a faculty which becomes more finely tuned and reliable when consciousness is more clearly reflected in the physiology.

Nirmala: Yeah, all these qualities of consciousness are like fundamental capacities of consciousness. It’s able to be aware, it’s able to be infinite in space, in the terms of space. It’s able to be, like you said, exquisitely discriminating. Like I say, I always point out that it’s not the mind that has that, the mind discriminates in another way, the mind discriminates the content of experience. The mind is what tells you, has learned when something is red and when something is blue. The mind knows those kinds of differences. But this is, like you said, a more subtle capacity to weigh difference, to engage with this world by distinguishing what’s real, what’s true. And when you encounter a big truth, I was saying you can use it to decide whether you eat a plate of cookies or not, right? But when you encounter a big truth, of course your sense of being goes way out there. Your sense of being gets to the size of the truth that you’re experiencing. So, it’s also discriminating when you can no longer find a sense of me, because the sense of being is so all-inclusive, so vast. That’s that same discriminating capacity.

Rick: Yeah, but then at the same time, there has to be the capacity to function in that vastness. One time, many years ago, it was like 1971, I was giving a satsang or a presentation to a group of TM practitioners, and we played the film “Powers of Ten.” I don’t know if you ever saw that.

Nirmala: Yes, yes, I love that film, I love that.

Rick: And it stretched me so much that by the end of it, I couldn’t speak. But I had to speak, because I was supposed to be talking to these people. So, for about 15 minutes, the best I could do was say a word or two, and then just kind of zoom out again, and then focus in a bit, say another couple of words. Because obviously there wasn’t somehow a very developed capacity at that point to be unbounded and focused at the same time.

Nirmala: Or again, the flexibility to just let go of this. It was probably so cool to be out here.

Rick: Yeah, I couldn’t come back. Give me some Thorazine!

Nirmala: And I think that happens a lot. And somewhat, spiritual people kind of idealize that. They hear about how Ramana sat there in the little hole in the ground and had rats chewing on his legs.

Rick: Right, and they didn’t know it. That’s cool.

Nirmala: Yeah, and that becomes the ideal. And of course, if you haven’t experienced that, it’s kind of premature to talk about, “Well, it doesn’t matter, and the thing that really matters is flexibility.” When you’re stuck here, yes, it’s absolutely important to be able to do that, to be able to let a movie, a sunset, anything, or even for no reason, to be able to go like that. But if you then get stuck there, then you’re right. I think in this culture, there might be a lot of cases of people who do end up just parked in a mental hospital, because they got out here and they said, “Well, I’m not going back. Why should I go back? I’m staying.” There was something about that experience that they just never again came back into a functional orientation.

Rick: It’s interesting, I want to come back to this point about the ability to discriminate and discern truth, but it so happens that somebody sent in a question that they wanted me to ask you, which hits on the point we’re talking about just now, and that is, “Why don’t any of the non-dual people have regular jobs? Why are they all just traveling around and talking about the Self? Can one lead a normal life if one is really dissolved?” Not just speaking of awakening here, but, not just speaking of awakening here, but true end-of-the-line enlightenment. Could you be a brain surgeon or a 747 pilot and yet be truly enlightened, or does it render you incapable of doing anything so gross and practical?

Nirmala: That’s a good question. I think it’s totally within the realm of possibility, and I’m sure if you, like Papaji himself, until he was in a sense at retirement age, he worked as an engineer. He travelled all over, had a normal job. I don’t think there’s any contradiction. And I would also add from my own experience that traveling around giving satsang turns out to be incredibly ordinary, in that you still have to schlep yourself to the airport, be there on time, find the right gate, get on the plane, organize it, send out the email announcements. Either you’re doing that or someone’s doing it for you, in which case, if someone’s doing it for you, you still have this kind of very ordinary experience of being the boss, and you have to deal with all of their stuff. And when they call in sick or they do something that’s not quite the way you wanted them to do it. No matter what you in terms of the specifics of what you do, you are still doing, you are still in a sense managing this ordinary world, unless again, you are just sitting in a cave. In which case, that, and to me, again, it’s the flexibility. The ideal is not one or the othe

Rick: the ideal is to discover your capacity for all of that.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s a matter of dharma too, to some extent. Ramana Maharshi, perhaps, it just wasn’t his dharma to go out and run a business; he wasn’t that kind of guy, that wasn’t his manifestation.

Nirmala: But see, that’s a great example, because after that time when he sat in a cave and the rats chewed on his legs, then finally some people discovered him and dragged him out of there, and started beating him and shooing the rats away. And then later, this is much later in his life, there was this big ashram, and he got up every morning at 3 a.m. and made the breakfast, for 4 a.m. I think it was about 4 a.m., according to the story I read. And I’ve also heard that he was an absolute tyrant in the kitchen, that you did it the right way, or you got it from Ramana. He was actively involved in the building program that was one of his little pet projects. There was this guy, Anamalai Swami, who was in charge, and every day Ramana would check in with Anamalai Swami and see what they were doing and make suggestions or give him instructions. So, he experienced this place where it didn’t matter if rats chewed on his legs, and then he also became functional. And it’s not like he was, he ran the ashram totally himself, but he was involved with it. He didn’t leave it all to let the forces of cosmic consciousness determine everything.

Rick: Yeah, good point. And I’ve had a fair amount of experience with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Amaji both, and they are both examples of highly enlightened beings who are just working like dogs to manage all kinds of stuff.

Nirmala: Yeah, when it gets that big. I was sitting around, this was years later, I was sitting around talking with Adya one time, and I suddenly realized, I was really curious, like, “What’s it like to have 400, kind of curious about that, like, “How is that for you?” And then what I noticed is That, he, I could tell he was feeling really nostalgic.

Rick: For the good old days.

Nirmala: or the good old days, he was asking me all these questions about, “So you guys just do it all yourself, don’t you?” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, pretty much we do it all by ourselves.” He was like, “Oh yeah, that was great when I could do that.” And I was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great to have 10 people do everything for me?” And he was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great not to have anybody doing anything for me?”

Rick: The grass is always greener.

Nirmala: Yeah.

Rick: So, I want to get back to this point about using, having the capacity to discriminate with the heart and determine the truth. There is this saying in Sanskrit, ‘ritambhara pragya’, which means ‘that level of intellect which knows only truth’. And Shankara wrote a book called ‘The Crest Jewel of Discrimination’. So, this word ‘discrimination’ and being able to discern truth from non-truth at a very subtle level is kind of real central to spiritual tradition. And in the case of the phrase I just used, the word ‘intellect’ is used, but I think at the level we are talking about there is really no distinction much between intellect and heart. We are talking about a deep intuitive faculty.

Nirmala: Right, and I use the word ‘heart’ just because it can tend to bring people into a more complete experience of their being than just the intellect. And so, it is more like the whole being’s intellect. They call it ‘heart wisdom’ in some traditions. And it is energetically the center that responds most subtly, most directly to either this sense of expansion, softening, opening, or this sense of contraction, tightening, rigidity. And that’s the discrimination right there, that movement. It’s, and I always say it is working perfectly. It is not something that anybody needs to get better at. Your whole life, your being has been either expanding or contracting appropriately to the moment. And when someone lays a really small truth, when someone lays a trip on you and it is not very true, the right way for you to feel in that instant, in that moment, is to contract. I always say it is like the little kids game where they say you are getting warmer or you are getting colder. If you were playing that with someone, and no matter what, they said, “Oh, you are getting warmer,” it is like after a while you would want to slap them. You would want to say, “No, wait a minute! How can I play this game if you just always say I am getting warmer?”

Rick: Yeah, I would have found it by now!

Nirmala: Yeah, exactly! So, you need that capacity. You need to notice, to trust, to acknowledge the sense of contraction when something is narrowing or limiting or distorting the truth. And you can also obviously trust it when your heart, when your being, when your sense of being opens and softens.

Rick: Yeah, I totally agree with all that, except the part about not being able to get better at it. I mean, I have made some pretty lousy judgments in my life, and over the course of the decades I feel like my capacity to be sensitive to what is right and what is inappropriate has refined tremendously.

Nirmala: When I say you can’t get better at it, I am talking about the raw response of your being, because that has always been there. It is just that for possibly much of your life you either didn’t pay attention to it, or even if you were experiencing it, there is this funny thing we do, which we learn to do, we were taught to do it, but most of us when we get contracted, our response to it is to try to contract our way out of that contraction. Most of us, the contraction itself does feel limiting, it does feel constrictive, and so we move into a position of judging whatever was just happening, or we reject it, or we grasp out for something different. And we don’t actually just experience that contraction. Like you were saying, subtly discriminate, “Oh right, this is just not very true for me,” without any need to get away from the contraction. It is ironic how trying not to be contracted contracts you, and allowing contraction to be here expands you. And by the way, the reverse is true too. Trying to get expanded contracts you. And see what that points to, right there, again I am talking about this visceral response. Anyone who has ever tried to get expanded has gotten more and more contracted. And so, what that’s pointing to is that being expanded is not actually better. It’s just different. I would take that so far to say that you are more subtle, you are discriminating more subtly, but that that’s not actually better, it’s just different. It’s just you are experiencing it in a different place. Better is one of those experiences that’s purely conceptual. There isn’t really anything called, I always say that if there really was a thing called ‘better’, some thing called ‘better’, we’d all just go to the store and buy it. We’d all just go get a big tub of better and rub it all over our bodies and we’d feel better. It’s purely conceptual. There’s nothing that it actually points to. It’s a useful concept, you can still hold it.

Rick: Yeah, when you say that though, I say, “Okay, well I can get that as long as I’m looking at it from the broad perspective that we were talking about in the beginning, creators of galaxies.” But is there a qualitative difference from an experiential standpoint between the enlightened sage and the psychotic in a mental hospital? I think the enlightened sage is having a smoother ride, a more enjoyable state of being than someone whose mind is completely confused and psychotic and crazy. So, you can use the word ‘better’ there.

Nirmala: Absolutely, and like I said, even though it’s purely conceptual, it’s still true. It still has its usefulness, and that’s a good example, especially in orienting. Why not use this concept of ‘better’? Why not move towards things that are better? But like you said, either through, when you step out and you realize, “Hey, that psychotic, identified experience is not actually harming the consciousness. It hasn’t taken away that being’s capacity, that individual expression of being’s capacity to transcend all that stuff.” And sometimes, surprisingly, it even happens in those most psychotic moments that people have, awakenings. And also, not only can you get that perspective from there, but you also can get that perspective just from having been through a lot of life experiences, big ones, small ones, that after a while you start to hold this whole idea ‘better’. You just hold that very lightly, because you realize, “Who can say what’s better?”

Rick: That’s true. I have a friend who got sent to jail for five years, and I wouldn’t trade places with him, but it’s probably precisely what he needs for his evolution, his growth.

Nirmala: It could be profound, along with all of the horrors of that, all of the terrible aspects of it. But again, ‘terrible’, ‘better’ and ‘worse’ are both conceptual. So even those things that are worse might be, like you said, just what he needs, like a really good Zen stick on the side of the head to really shake him loose in a way that you or I can only imagine, because we have had that experience.

Rick: Well, like you say, nothing can harm consciousness. I mean, an asteroid could crash into the planet, and we’d all be dead in five minutes or whatever, but consciousness isn’t perturbed by that; it’s unshakable.

Nirmala: And like I said, you can still take on this small truth of ‘better’ and use it to orient. If you do that though, you start discovering that you make a million dollars and you discover, “Well, yeah, it’s different, it’s not better.” Years ago I had a friend, you know how a heroin dealer or a drug dealer will give you the first couple of doses for free, because they figure then they have a customer for life? That’s a good business practice. So, this friend of mine, he reviews high-end stereo equipment. Many years ago he gave me a pair of $2,500 speakers. He just said, “Here, these are in my garage, you can have them.” And I brought them home and it started me on this whole journey, because once I had $2,500 speakers, I needed a better amplifier. And then it turns out that it really matters what the wires are that you hook your speaker up to your amplifier with.

Rick: Yeah, you have to have these big fat ones with gold in them and stuff.

Nirmala: Yeah, exactly. So, I went on this whole journey searching for ‘better’ sound, right? And then at a certain point I started to notice that no matter what I did, and literally it gets ridiculous, no matter what you do, even rearrange the furniture in the room, or what you ate for lunch before you sit down to listen, everything, even very, very subtle energies affect how your system sounds. So, I found that I was making, buying things, trading things in. I used eBay a lot to sell stuff so I could buy other stuff. And I started realizing that no matter what I did, all it did was it gave me ‘different’ sound. I could no longer actually tell you what ‘better’ sound was.

Rick: Well, you sort of reached the fringes of quality.

Nirmala: Yeah, my sound was very good. I mean, it was still using that concept. I had gotten to a point where now all I was doing was making these little unremarkable changes. When I realized that I just got bored with it. It’s like, if I want to listen to music, I listen to music, but this idea of ‘better’ sound, it’s like I wore it out, I wore out that concept, not by transcending it, but by wearing it out in the literal sense.

Rick: Well, does it really matter to Mark Zuckerberg that he lost a few billion dollars in the last couple of weeks? He’s got 30-something billion, a few billion here and there, chump change.

Nirmala: Yeah, and of course, saying that the truth has all these different sizes, it’s always relative.

Rick: That brings up an interesting point, which is that if you’re a pauper, then any slight loss in gain is a big deal. If you’re a multi-millionaire, then you can lose and gain large amounts and it doesn’t shake you that much.

Nirmala: Right, unless you’re focused, still so identified with it. Years ago, a long time ago, I was a massage therapist and I lucked into this, all these, my clients were some of the wealthiest people in Boston, and of course, they told their friends. So, it was pretty soon I had a lot of very, extremely wealthy, hundreds of millions of dollars type wealthy clients in Boston. And what amazed me was, as I got to know them, because they were wealthy enough, they were weekly clients. And as I got to know them, I discovered that they worried about money more than I did. They thought about it more, and so there’s this other dynamic at play, which is how identified are you with it? Are you able to step outside of that truth? Because money by itself is a very small truth. It’s real, it exists, it happens, but does it really make that much difference? How real is it in terms of how happy you are, how fulfilled you are, how exciting your life is, doesn’t seem to really have much impact on that. It turns out to be a small truth.

Rick: So what happened to you? It says in your bio that you were an ardent seeker for many years, and then you met Neelam and she told you to give up seeking, and then you had this profound awakening in India. Can we talk about all that a little bit?

Nirmala: Sure, for sure. Eventually I got so tired of telling this story that I just put it on my website so I wouldn’t have to tell it again, but I’ll make an exception.

Rick: I just see the short paragraph version of it here. We want the more elaborated version.

Nirmala: So how big a time frame do you want?

Rick: As much as you feel like telling. Maybe from the time you got over potty training, from then on.

Nirmala: Wait, that’s the best part! You’ll hear me laugh! All those accidents, man, they were great! So, I’ll address first that statement, “I was a lifelong spiritual seeker.” It does seem like it was something I was engaged with, years later I reflected on this, when you’re a kid and kids want to be firemen or baseball players or stuff like that, I wanted to be a minister. That’s what I wanted to be. My mom took me to talk to our minister about it. He actually gave me great advice. He said, “Well, if you want to be a minister, then you should, until you’re an adult, you should just, if possible, be as curious as possible about everything.” Wow, that’s a very open-minded minister. Some of them say, “Don’t think too much, it’s the devil.” Exactly, this guy told me, “Go out there and learn everything you can.” Of course, he was talking to a fifth grader, so it was perfect advice. And so that was my motto for a long time, was to be curious. Then the actual directly spiritual focus began when I was about 15, I stumbled on a book by Alan Watts. Back then, he was one of the few things out there in the West. So, I stumbled on this book, and I read everything I could by him. I was very involved with all this stuff as a teenager, going to meditation groups and practicing Tai Chi. I still remember an interaction with an acquaintance. It wasn’t somebody I knew that well, but an acquaintance in high school where he walked into one of the classrooms that I was in. It was just the two of us in the classroom. And he said, “So how are you?” And speaking very genuinely, very sincerely, from my experience in that moment, I said, “I’m not.” It was great. He literally ran out of the room screaming.

Rick: Really?

Nirmala: He said, “Hey, you’re so weird! I can’t stand it!” And he ran out of the room.

Rick: Did you go through a drug phase? We’re talking about late 60s here. Yeah, the only thing I ever used was a little marijuana, and even that I didn’t do much. I just don’t think my system needed it. In fact, another story from high school, when I ran into an acquaintance a few years later, and we were talking about high school and about all the drugs that people were using at that time, and I said, “Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I was probably only stoned at high school.” And this was just marijuana, maybe once, maybe twice. And he said, “Really?” He said, “Ma, I thought you were like tripping on LSD all the time!” So, maybe I didn’t need it. So anyway, I was precocious in that way. I was very involved in all this stuff, very interested in it. But I think there was just another aspect of my being, something else that needed to be experienced. And so, it’s like I needed to make it in the material world. I needed to find out what, and so I needed to have a career, I needed to get married. And so, I did that, and I ended up marrying this woman. First it was massage, and then I was going to become a naturopathic physician. And I was very wrapped up in things. And so, all the spiritual stuff kind of went on the back burner. It became like a hobby. At one point in our massage office, we had a flotation tank, and at night I would go in there for four hours, five hours at a time. But all that stuff was just sort of like stuff that I was just interested in. But my real life was about trying to make my marriage work, trying to make my career thing work. And that was, that’s the trajectory of my life, until partway through the first year of naturopathic medical school, when, and by the way, they don’t tell you this in the medical school brochures, but over half of all marriages don’t survive medical school. And so halfway through the first year of medical school, my wife suddenly announced that she had fallen in love with another man. And that, it was sort of like that whole illusion, that whole dream, like suddenly wasn’t there anymore. And in the process of trying to sort through that, what happened was that all of a sudden, up to that point I could kind of keep a lid on all the stuff inside of me, all the feelings. And when that happened, the feeling suddenly got turned up, the volume got turned up to ten on the volume scale of feelings. What I realized was that I had all these equal and opposite feelings. So the fact that she was leaving me was both the scariest thing I could imagine, it created all this fear, and at the same time I was really excited. And the problem was that both of those feelings were so strong. I would have moments of terror and moments of uncontrollable excitement. I was totally devastated, I was totally sad, distraught, devastated by this loss. And at the same time, there was this huge sense of relief. And they were both huge, a huge sense of relief, a huge sense of devastation. I was like spinning every which way. Around that time I heard about this thing called the Sedona Method. The Sedona Method, at least at first, it’s all about releasing and/or just allowing feelings. I was like, “Wow, that sounds perfect. That sounds like just what I need.” So, I sent away for the, at that time you could take a home course on video. I sat down and went through this whole Sedona Method course, letting go of emotions. There’s this one point in the course where they teach, first they teach you to let go of all the negative emotions, and then they interject this new thing where they say, “And what happens then is you start having more positive emotions, feelings of peace and courage and acceptance and things like that.” And they suggest that then you let those go.

Rick: Is that more easily said than done?

Nirmala: It’s surprising when you just kind of do it. It was a week between semesters in medical school, and so I had this whole week I just immersed myself in this process, watching the videos. After that little section about letting go of positive feelings, I actually went for a walk. And as I’m walking around our neighborhood, I’m letting go of feelings, letting go, letting go, letting go, letting go. And then I started having these positive feelings, and I said, “Okay,” and I started letting those go, letting those go, letting those go. And I got to this moment where it was incredibly quiet. There just wasn’t any, it was like the stillness was remarkable. Not only that, but then suddenly I could really hear the birds, really see the colors. Everything was suddenly much more vibrant and alive than I was used to. It was so remarkable, that experience was so strong that I literally turned around, walked home, and picked up the phone and called Hale Dwoskin, who runs the Sedona Method, and said, “I see that there’s this advanced retreat coming up.” And I said, “I’m a total beginner. I’m just halfway through the beginning course. Can I come to the advanced retreat?” He said, “Yeah, sure, come on in.” So, I took a week off. I mean, it was in the middle of the semester. The next semester I just didn’t go to class for a week, and went up to Sedona for this advanced Sedona Method retreat. And what I didn’t realize when I signed up for it, to me, at that moment, the Sedona Method was mostly like this really cool stress reliever, this really great way to handle my emotions. What I didn’t realize was that Lester Levenson, who developed the Sedona Method, actually developed it as a tool for awakening. That was the real intention of it. And it turns out that at this particular retreat, which was going to be led by Hale and also by Pamela Wilson, who you’ve interviewed, that it was all these old-time Sedona Method people who had been desperately seeking, trying to awaken, some of them for decades, were all gathering together because word was out that Pamela had had this big awakening. And so, they were all gathering together to see, to check out one of their gang who had ‘made it’. So, I come into this room with 40 other people who are all desperate to awaken. That’s their remaining suffering, because they’ve let go of everything else, but they’re still desperately wanting to awaken. Then there’s Pamela, and she is shining in a way that I’d never experienced. She’s just, especially in that first flush after a big awakening, it’s a lot of fun to be around. And so, she was just incredibly a beautiful presence.

Rick: She still does, by the way, but these days she’s working some stuff out still that’s been actually quite challenging, but that doesn’t detract from her beautiful presence in the living.

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, I’ve stayed in touch with her through these years. During that time frame, she and I became good friends. So here I am, and at one point, Hale even gives this talk about the different desires or wants and how. Because eventually, after you let go of feelings, you start letting go of desires, because that’s you letting go at an even deeper level. He gave this whole chart of desires, and it turns out that the final desire is the desire to awaken. Eventually that has to be let go of also. That has to fall away also. So that’s the whole milieu. And I’m kind of looking around the room and saying, “I want to be like Pamela, but I don’t want to end up like all these other people. I don’t want to somehow have this whole new way of suffering.” So, one night, I’m by myself in my room, and late at night, and I’m kind of weighing this dilemma. And then I remembered what Hale said about that in the end you just let go of the desire to awaken itself. And I thought I had this great idea! Like, “Oh, I got it! I’m just going to let go of the desire to awaken first! And I’ll just skip all those steps.” It’s like, “Why not go for the golden ring on your first time out?” But I’m lying there, and then this little doubt comes in, like, “Oh, I don’t know if you can do that. Is that kosher? Is that allowed?” Thought, “Well, maybe I’ll ask Hale about it in the morning.” And then I remembered that when you ask Hale a question like that, mostly what he does is he just has you release until you get the answer. He has you do the Sedona Method until you get your answer. So, I said, “Well, I guess I can do that. I don’t have to wait for Hale in the morning.” I just had this sense, “Okay, I’m just going to go in and hold that question, really hold the question. Can I just bypass all of this struggle to awaken and just go there directly?” And I got really quiet, and the answer came. And it was a totally unexpected answer. It came from some deep place within my being that knew this, not just, it wasn’t just intellectual, it was like a deep knowing, a deep truth. And the answer was, “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not up to you.” At the same moment I really, really got that, I also really, really got that I already did want it more than anything else. I was playing a game with myself, saying, “I’m not going to end up like those other people.” No, that’s where I was.

Rick: You were like those other people already.

Nirmala: I had probably been like that my whole life, but seeing Pamela and having it be that real, in a sense, had reignited that desire inside of me. Right at the same moment I realized that I wanted it more than life itself. I also had realized in a very deep level that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The combination of those two things, it just broke me open. I literally was not just crying, I was wailing, just in my room, this whole thing was just tearing me apart. It was like somebody was doing open heart surgery without anesthesia. It was just this hugely devastating experience, and yet I couldn’t undo it, I couldn’t stop it. At that point it was already the way it was. Something in me had just become very humble, very tender, very soft. It turns out, at that very same week that the Sedona Method thing was happening, there was also, Pamela had actually kind of arranged this, it also turns out that Neelam was in Sedona giving satsang every night. And I had never even heard the word ‘satsang’, never heard of ‘Ramana Maharshi’, all this stuff. But everybody in group, after we did the Sedona Method all day, everybody would pile into cars and drive into town and go to satsang with Neelam. So, I got in the car and went to satsang with Neelam. I got there, and whatever it was that I saw in Pamela, it was there, maybe even more so in Neelam. She had been doing her thing for a while, and she was, it’s like I couldn’t, it’s like when you get a hold of something that you can’t get hold of, you also can’t let it go. After seeing Neelam, I actually came back another weekend. A few weeks later, she came back to Sedona and did a weekend retreat. And I did that, and partway through that weekend, the only way I can describe it is like she moved into my heart. It was just like, and suddenly I knew, even though it made no sense, the last place on earth I ever wanted to go was India. Yet that’s where Neelam was going. And I suddenly knew that wherever Neelam was going, I was going. So, all of a sudden I was going to India. And it’s like, “Wait a minute, I’m a medical student!” I’m running up all these big student loans, trying to become a doctor, and no, I’m going to India. And so

Rick: Talk about deciding something with the heart.

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah. I’d say it was like a choiceless choice. I made the choice, but I had no choice. And by the way, this part, none of this part really, it’s not like a formula. Nothing about this is a formula.

Rick: No, no, everybody shouldn’t just pack up and go to India.

Nirmala: Exactly. But I did. By this point my wife and I were really splitting, and I had kind of argued with her so that I could stay in the house we had just bought. So, I went back to her and said, “Well, if you’ll take over the house again, pay the mortgage, you can have all the equity.” So basically I gave her all the equity in our house, I dropped out of medical school, and packed up to go to India with Neelam, the last place on earth I ever wanted to go. And so, there’s a couple more points along the way. Like there was one point where we were in Satsang in London, actually on the way to India, and Neelam said something, and it was another one of those kind of deep knowings. And it was like the complementary truth to the knowing that there was nothing I could do about it. And it was this knowing that there was nothing I had to do about it. That this whole project of doing something about it was not, it was like the wrong question. That was this huge sense of relief, like, “Oh, right, I don’t have to, I can let go of this whole project of either becoming a better person, or which had become, becoming awakened.” And so that all fell away. And that was kind of like the thing Hale was actually talking about, where that desire to awaken fell away in that moment. From that moment on, I just kept getting happier and happier. I ran the sound system for Neelam, and one time in the middle of Satsang it just completely stopped working, and I just got really happy. I mean, I kept trying to fix it, and I couldn’t fix it, and that just made me really happy. Or I just felt really happy, happier every moment.

Rick: There’s a book out called “Happy for No Reason.”

Nirmala: Yeah, yeah, that was what it was like.

Rick: Yeah, a friend of mine ghost-wrote it.

Nirmala: Oh yeah, that’s sweet. So anyway, just to finish the story, I travelled with Neelam to India, ended up falling in love with India. And we went to Rishikesh, and we spent all our days in satsang and singing bhajans at night. The ashram we were at was right at the junction of the Gold River and the Ganga. I can’t think now of the name everybody uses for it.

Rick: The confluence, or the sangha.

Nirmala: The Ganges, that’s the word.

Rick: Oh, yeah, the Ganges, right.

Nirmala: Yeah, right. So, we were right on the banks of the Ganges River, right at this section of these huge rapids. Every night, after everybody else had pretty much gone to bed, I would go down and I would sit, like five feet away from these gigantic white water waves. I just sat there, and this went on for several nights. One night I was sitting there, leaning against a rock, just taking in the sound, the presence of the river. I suddenly noticed that the rock was inside of me. It no longer was outside of me. It was now as much a part of me as my shoulders, as my legs. And it wasn’t intellectual. It was just directly experiencing the rock inside of me, as me. This was kind of like logical, but it was also experiential, in that if that rock was inside of me, what about this whole big field of boulders, right here along the river? “Oh, yeah, those are inside of me also.” And then, if it was this field of boulders, what about the field of boulders on the other side of the river? Oh, right, suddenly that was not intellectually, but experientially, was me. Of course, that meant if it was both sides of the river, suddenly the river, these white-water rapids, were just so natural, so obvious, that those were inside of me, that that was me. And then it kind of like, “whoosh,” it suddenly included the entire river, which meant the entire continent of India. It just kept going like that, the entire planet, the entire solar system, everything. It was totally, obviously, me, inside of this thing called ‘me’, not at all intellectual, totally experiential. Then this weird thing happened where it

Rick: So, it just expanded out eventually to the stars and the whole universe?

Nirmala: Way beyond what I could conceptualize. I was actually directly experiencing it inside of me, inside of now this huge me, but it was still inside of me. And then it did this weird thing where it popped, so that it was not just all space that was inside of me, but it popped in time. Suddenly it was really obvious that that’s what I’d been all along, forever. And suddenly I started laughing, like literally rolling around in the gravel, just laughing my head off, because it was suddenly so funny to me that I ever thought I had a problem, that I ever believed that I was really suffering, or that I’d ever thought I was anything else. That went on for like half an hour, just laughed my head off for half an hour. It took me, I think, maybe an hour to walk the hundred yards back up to the ashram, I think I stopped and hugged some of the bigger rocks. And I was like, just all of this sense of presence, this sense of completeness. From that day, it just started happening where people would ask me, come to me to ask lots of questions. People would catch me before or after one of Neelam’s satsangs. They would drag me aside and just want me to explore with them. Had you told the group that you had had this awakening, or did they somehow just sense that you were someone that could give them a decent answer if they asked a question? I think the word had gotten out, because I did tell people. I didn’t hide it from anybody. And so that was happening, and it happened even when I wasn’t around Neelam. It was just everywhere I went that this was happening. So, at one point I went to Neelam and I said, I told her what was happening. And I said, “The thought has come to give satsang, but I don’t know how you do that. What do you do to give satsang?” And Neelam always gave me really, really good advice. And her advice was, “Don’t give it another thought.” She said, “If it’s meant to happen, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. If it’s not meant to happen, nothing you can do will make it happen.” And I’m, have a, very basically lazy, so I really like that kind of advice. So, I just said, “Oh, okay. I’ll just let whatever happens happen.” And the very next day, one of the people who had been on this whole trip to India came up to me and said, “Hey, Nirmala, how would you like to come and give satsang at my house in Seattle?” And so, as I was saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do that,” inside I was going, “Oh, this is how it happens.” And that is basically how it’s happened ever since. I just wait for the invitation.

Rick: So that awakening that you had there on the banks of the Ganges, did you, is that still your experience? That everything is contained, everything is the Self, everything is contained within the larger, sort of?

Nirmala: Back to what we were talking about before, the flexibility, that experience is as easy for me as planning my day for tomorrow. If I sit down and just give that a little bit of attention, it starts to open up.

Rick: Yeah, but it’s not like in your face all the time.

Nirmala: Right, it’s not like, because like I said, I could barely walk during that experience. So yeah, it fluctuates in intensity, but there’s also that deeper kind of conviction that it’s always here, that that’s what I am, and that’s what I always was. In fact, I sometimes call it my ‘non-awakening’, because I realized that’s what was always true. So, realizing that all there is, is awakeness, and how does that awaken? How does awakeness awaken? It’s like, you can’t do that part! So, I sometimes call it my ‘non-awakening’.

Rick: It’s interesting, in terms of the word ‘flexibility,’ it’s like, it’s there, that aspect is enlivened, you could say, and it informs or enriches or inspires or guides maybe the more manifest, specific aspects of your life. Kind of like, just to take a crude example, if you had completed medical school, you wouldn’t always be dwelling on the facts that you had learned in medical school, but if someone came to you with a problem, you’d be able to deal with it because there was that knowledge instilled in you.

Nirmala: Yeah, it would just come after you. Sometimes, I think I’m even more, the central thing is not the sense of, ‘Is this experience continuous?’ It’s whether or not you’ve developed a sense of trust in that reality. The example I always use, like I’ll ask you right now, Rick, do you have a car?

Rick: A car?

Nirmala: Yeah, do you own a car?

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Nirmala: Yeah, can you see it right now where you’re sitting?

Rick: Nope.

Nirmala: Do you doubt that it exists?

Rick: Nope.

Nirmala: Yeah, and like I even said, if God forbid you went out to where you parked your car and it wasn’t there, at that moment would you doubt that it exists?

Rick: I figure it existed somewhere, but maybe no longer in my position, my possession.

Nirmala: Yeah, you’d call the police. So, most of us have developed a really strong trust in physical reality that actually allows us to function without having, we don’t have the sense that you have to experience it all the time in order for it to be real. Which sometimes, when somebody, the first time in their life they buy a brand-new car, suddenly there’s a little bit of that again. They’re always like peeking out the window and saying, “Yeah, look at my new car!” Because they can’t quite believe it yet that they own a brand-new car. But for the most part, we just trust that when we put something in a drawer, and we go away and we come back; it’ll still be there. And that trust is based on a lot of experience. That’s what does build that sense of trust. So, my sense is that’s the same thing that can happen with these bigger experiences of being, is that you need to experience them, but the real gift, the real freedom that they bring to you is when you’ve had so many experiences of them, when you’ve had so much, it’s been so available to you that after a while you just trust. On a deep level, you know that’s true, whether you’re experiencing it or not, just like you know your car exists, whether you’re experiencing it or not. That’s a bigger freedom.

Rick: They say that the final stroke of realization is the dispelling of doubt, the elimination of doubt. And that’s just what you’re saying, I mean, I don’t doubt that I have the car, although I think my wife might have taken it into town.

Nirmala: Yeah, but you don’t doubt that it exists.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. And so, you can sort of picture the classic seeker, who’s like, “Oh my god, when will I ever get there? My life sucks and I have to get enlightened, and yada, yada, yada, maybe I should go on another retreat.”

Nirmala: And then even when they have a big experience

Rick: Yeah, “Was that it?”

Nirmala: “Was that it?” And they try to hold on to it, which of course makes it go away faster, and they try and get it back. And so, they’re still in that place of doubt. They still don’t really trust what they experienced.

Rick: Yeah, so what you’re saying is doubt was kind of dispelled, and now you just kind of live in a simple, natural, easy state of trust, and it’s there.

Nirmala: And what’s been really sweet, really rich in that, is it comes back to what I spoke about right at the beginning of our conversation, that there now is this ability to really enjoy and explore and appreciate the simplest, most ordinary experiences that appear in life. And even experiences of physical difficulty, getting ill, or having argument with my wife, or losing something really precious, a good friend, or something in the, and actually experiencing all the very human emotions. And because there’s this trust, there’s this willingness to just go with that experience, just dive into it, like that minister told me, just be really curious about everything. It turns out that all of that, again, is like a facet of the jewel, all of that is real, is part of reality, and it’s all sacred, it’s all beautiful, it’s all worth it.

Rick: This kind of brings up a couple of points. One of the things I heard you say in the satsangs that I listened to was, you can just kind of plunge in, just don’t worry about exhausting awareness or running out of it, just go for it. And I thought, “Well, I thought that might be misinterpreted as advocating hedonism, “I can snort meth, I can go to prostitutes, I can do all kinds of crazy stuff, and I’m not going to run out of awareness.” You know, people are going to pay the price for something like that, so probably that’s not what you meant.

Nirmala: The antidote to all of that, the antidote to the indulgence side, is if you really are, in a sense, plunging in with full awareness, that to me that’s the antidote to addictive processes.

Rick: Doing stupid things.

Nirmala: Doing stupid things, and also if you’re really paying attention. I’ll share, this was 30 years ago, for most of my life I had this really, really intense sweet tooth. Earlier I used the example of the plate of cookies, because at that time in my life

Rick: That was you.

Nirmala: Yeah, if there was a plate of cookies, they ended up inside here. They ended up in my stomach. Yet, I was also extremely sensitive to sugar. Like, I was probably, they say on a physiological level, you often crave stuff that you’re kind of allergic to or reactive to, and so I did. The antidote, the thing that shifted that whole experience for me, was it’s like I didn’t expand my awareness in terms of distance. It’s more like, what I was saying about popping in time. It’s like suddenly I learned to, when I looked at a plate of cookies, to imagine how I would feel in half an hour, if I ate them. And when you do that, especially if you’re somebody who gets really nauseous and often ends up with a headache when they eat sugar, then it was like if I held out a pill to you and said, “Here, take this pill. It will make you nauseous and you’ll have a headache.”

Rick: Right.

Nirmala: “No, thank you. I’ll pass.” And so, when someone hold out a plate of cookies, I included in my awareness. I was more complete in telling the truth about that plate of cookies by saying, “I’m not going to feel that good if I eat these, especially if I’m on an empty stomach and have them.” And then with that greater awareness, I suddenly was no longer eating cookies.

Rick: Interesting. And of course, the obesity epidemic is on the news all the time, and you kind of get the feeling that people are trying to fulfil themselves by more and more. And the mayor of New York City just outlawed the super-duper huge soda drinks, because there’s such an obesity problem. But perhaps if people had that inner fulfilment, then there wouldn’t be this craving to get fulfilment from more and more and more and more food.

Nirmala: Right. Again, even in a more relative sense, in between those two places, if there was just more awareness of the actual experience,

Rick: consequences, yeah.

Nirmala: yeah, within a slightly bigger time frame, then some of those cravings, like I said, it was just this weird thing, suddenly, whenever I looked at sweets, I would do this mental calculation that included how I would feel in half an hour. What’s nice about that too is that it did actually allow me to be flexible, because if I had a full stomach, if I just eat a big meal, I discovered I could eat a little bit and not have all those symptoms. So, if I ate a lot, I still would, but if I ate a little bit, I was okay. So, it’s like I found a balanced way of experiencing sweets. It’s not, it wasn’t that I never had to go cold turkey. I just found a balanced way. It also allowed for moments where, like when my grandmother had just baked me a plate of cookies, I could eat a cookie.

Rick: Yeah, not upset your grandmother.

Nirmala: Yeah, and maybe say, “Gee, Grandma, can I take the rest home in a bag?” And then throw them out when I got home.

Rick: Yeah, there are actually verses in the Gita where yoga is defined as a state of balance, in which you don’t either overly indulge in or overly shun various experiences.

Nirmala: Yes, yeah. And then the relative truth can unfold and function. Balance is more like a balancing.

Rick: Yeah, maybe that’s what Buddha meant by the middle way also. Harkening back to a few minutes ago when we were talking about whether that experience you had in Rishikesh was retained and stabilized and so on and so forth, somebody sent in a question about abiding in the Self, what that really means and would it be truly abiding if one is still doing a regular meditation program twice daily, which is a jab at me because I’ve been meditating regularly for 44 years and I happen to really enjoy it. And she’s saying, “Well, if you really were established you wouldn’t need to do that anymore.” And I said, “Okay, fine, maybe I’m not really established, but I really enjoy it.” It’s extremely nourishing. So would you say that, I mean, different people have different paths and different habits and so on, and some people awaken without ever having meditated, and some people meditate regularly and so on, and maybe you keep doing what you’re doing, but would you say that meditation is likely to drop off when awakening has really dawned, or is it hard to?

Nirmala: It’s great that you asked me this question because my experience is the complete inverse of what you might expect, in that I discovered meditation after my awakening and have fallen in love with it, and I meditate regularly, and I never meditated before.

Rick: Cool.

Nirmala: So, my experience, again, I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, and I don’t doubt that it’s possible to move into a particular experience of contact with a fullness of the Self, and in a sense never lose it even experientially, let alone, sort of separate from whether or not you have this deep, abiding trust in it. But that’s not my experience, and what my experience brought me to was a place where that doesn’t even matter anymore. It’s so available, I trust it so completely that I don’t have any sense of lack when it’s not happening. Just like you don’t feel the lack of a car right now. It just doesn’t compute because you know, you’ve got one, and when your wife gets home you can go to the store if you want to. So, from that place, I just discovered how sweet, how amazing it is to meditate. And directly in response to that person, I would, again, my perspective is that we all abide in the Self, that we all are the Self before we realize it, during our realization of it, and after our realization of it. So, whatever she is experiencing, whatever you’re experiencing while you’re meditating, whatever somebody down the street is experiencing when they’re eating popcorn, watching a movie, it’s all part of the Self. It’s all worth experiencing. And it might be kind of a truism that it seems that consciousness feels that way too, because consciousness seems to go to a lot of trouble to have different experiences. It never makes a snowflake the same way twice. It never has this whole experience we’re speaking of, called ‘awakening’, the same way twice. Here I am, this guy who never meditated, and now I love it. I don’t think I’m addicted to it because it doesn’t really matter to me if I don’t, then I just don’t. But whenever the opportunity comes, I love to do it.

Rick: I think the word ‘meditation’ has different meanings too, just as the word ‘liquid’ has different meanings. I mean, you’re drinking some water right now, if you were drinking motor oil it would be a different experience. So, I mean, there are kinds of meditation which are very, I’ve read descriptions of certain types of Buddhist meditation where you’re supposed to clench your teeth and force the thoughts out, and it’s just like this really intense kind of thing. So, if a person has even a flavor of that kind of association with the word, which I don’t think my questioner did, but I can see why one would proscribe a practice.

Nirmala: Yeah, though why not? Why not try that? And sometimes by exaggerating something, that thing I talked about where the awareness suddenly becomes more complete, so you exaggerate the effort, any kind of efforting, and that can pop you out of the illusion that the efforting is going to make you happy.

Rick: There’s another question that the same person sent in. All these are actually specifically for you.

Nirmala: Oh great.

Rick: And I don’t know if you can answer this or not, I don’t think I’d be able to because I’d have to look up in some books and make sure I really understood my definitions here. But she asked – What is the difference between a jnani and a yogi? There is massive confusion around this issue. No felt sense of mission except to transmit the silence. I guess that’s what a jnani would have, according to this, and help people wake up from the dream. Only a jnani can awaken another. And she’s asking for you to contrast that with a yogi. Any comments on that?

Nirmala: Yeah. You know, even if you did look up the definitions, you would find a lot of different ones. I often say that, we were talking earlier about different sizes of truth, and I say there’s a shorthand way to tell whether something is true or not, or how true something is. And if there are words, then it’s not very true. But once you put it in words, you’ve left out, just by definition, you’ve left something out. So, whatever I say about a jnani, whatever book you open up and read the description of, it’s a partial description. It’s not complete. Even her description, which is very, very beautiful, very, I’m sure, true in a lot of cases. But I’m also sure there are lots of jnanis who don’t have any desire to transmit or teach or awaken anybody, because what’s the point? At a certain depth of realization, everybody you look at is so incredibly awake that, “What are you going to teach them? What are you going to show to them?” And so that’s another definition, right? But is that The definition of jnanis? Is that the experience of every jnani? No. And it’s the same thing with anything you say about a yogi, it would be true of some yogis, but not all. I mean, what about Yogi Bear?

Rick: I heard a funny story about him yesterday. He was being interviewed by Bryant Gumbel, and Bryant Gumbel said, “Okay, just give me a one-word answer to the following things, and I’m going to give you some names. I want a one-word answer.” And so, he said, “Okay, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra.” And he said, “What about them?”

Nirmala: I was actually referring to Yogi Bear, the cartoon character.

Rick: Oh, the cartoon character! Yogi Berra is a source of great spiritual wisdom, actually, if you look at some of his quotes.

Nirmala: Sure, sure. That’s just playing with the word ‘yogi’, but it is just a word. No one can really give a final definition. And if you do, in a sense that can be used to then deny or reject the experience of a yogi who is having a different experience, or to deny or reject the experiences of true nature that somebody is having just because it doesn’t fit their definition of a jnani. And people do that even to their own experience. It’s like the question before about, ‘Is it an abiding experience?’ When that’s held so rigidly, then people who are having genuine experiences and genuine realizations, and then they wake up the next day all contracted, and it’s like they just throw the baby out with the bathwater. They say, “Well, that can’t have been a true realization because, look, I’m not abiding.” And so, it’s like that rigidity of definition is the

Rick: Or that they’re expecting the sort of profundity and flashiness that it had initially to be with them all the time, and when that gets integrated and they take it for granted, then where did it go?

Nirmala: Exactly. And so, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with words, or with definitions, or with even finely discriminating and coming up with an even finer description of something. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you recognize that once it starts coming out of your mouth, once it’s in a book, it’s by its nature not complete. You can enjoy it. It might be the piece of the puzzle that you, that is just what was missing for you, a perspective, an understanding, a definition. In that moment is actually a fairly profound truth because, again, it allows your being to relax. The other experiential quality of when you experience something that’s truer is, it quiets the mind because you have less to think about. Even if I just give you directions to the post office, you suddenly have one less thing to think about. If somehow life or I somehow evoke in you a really, really big truth, you suddenly have nothing to think about. There’s nothing left to figure out, even who is and isn’t a jnani, what is and isn’t a jnani. From an actual experience of a really big truth, those things kind of fall away.

Rick: Another point that came to mind when you were speaking, which is that there are degrees of realization. When you get your bachelor’s degree, let’s say, you got a bachelor’s degree, then you go on and get your master’s degree, you still have a bachelor’s degree, and then you go on and get your PhD, and you still have your master’s and your bachelor’s degrees, and so on. So, there can be an unfoldment in which, I don’t know what the exact order would be, but there’s this jnana aspect and the bhakti aspect, devotion, and the yogi realization, oneness aspect, and I don’t know what they’d all be. So, it’s kind of like not an either/or, or this or that kind of situation.

Nirmala: And my sense is that any experience, at least that I’ve had so far, always just seems like a new beginning. Like, “Okay, now what?” Because it doesn’t stop. Nothing, life, like I said, one of the fundamental qualities of being is this movement, this aliveness. And it’s very possible, I mean, I sometimes even hypothesize, “Okay, let’s say consciousness itself has completely woken up, and all illusion has, in a sense, fallen away, because it’s all been seen through so completely that it’s like my sweet tooth.” The whole interest in illusion has fallen away, it’s just this pure stillness, infinite presence, nothing happening. My sense is that somewhere in there, somewhere within that consciousness, he wants Back in or out?

Rick: Out.

Nirmala: somewhere within that infinite, pure stillness, there’s basically a thought, something’s going to arise, something like, “Wow, that was fun! Let’s do it again!”

Rick: Yea, I was just going to say.

Nirmala: And then, “Woo!” the universe pops into existence again, only this time, gravity works the opposite, it pushes things apart, it just says, “Let’s do it again, only different! Let’s try it all again!” So, I don’t know, when you get, even on an individual level, it seems like from a certain place of expansion, there’s really only one way to go, which is to kind of get wrapped up in something again. And from a certain depth, I think that’s why sometimes people have these big openings, big awakenings, in the most contracted moments of their life, because from a place of utter, unbearable contraction, there really is only one direction to go. It’s like at a certain point, maybe you can contract a little more, but then, at a certain point, you can’t do it anymore. Sometimes then, when you stop, it’s like it just goes all the way, it drops away completely in that moment, in that instant. So, who knows? Is it better to be expanded, or is it just different? Is it better to be jnani, or just different?

Rick: I’m glad you brought that up, because towards the end of my interviews I usually ask people, “Where do you go from here? Do you have a sense of continuing unfoldment or development or whatever?” And some of them say, “No.” They say, “Where could I go?” And it seems like this is it.” But a lot of them, and many of whom I would consider to be very spiritually mature, say, “I don’t know where it goes from here.” Adyashanti, for instance, just seems to be unfolding more and more, deeper and deeper into the mystery.

Nirmala: There’s all kinds of new challenges that you as an individual have to face, like getting old. To say that you’re done with getting old, well, I don’t know. Even if you are literally done with getting old, then guess what, that means you’re dying. And it’s like, “Wow”

Rick: and then what?

Nirmala: and then what? Who can say what happens after that, especially if there has been a huge realization in this life? Maybe the doorways that open at death are much more profound, the possibilities that present themselves. You might be greeted by a little committee who says, “Very well done! Now, wait until you see the next assignment!” I hold everything lightly, but there’s this guy here in Sedona where I live, David Hawkins, who created the scale of consciousness.

Rick: Oh yeah, numbers.

Nirmala: Yeah, numerical value. He just arbitrarily said, “0 to 1000.” But then at some point he explains, a thousand is just the highest level of consciousness that the human form can withstand.

Rick: Interesting.

Nirmala: And he uses this is a part I hold very, very lightly, but he uses muscle testing to determine things. In one of his later books, he actually talks about how they got curious about it, and they started discovering that when they checked, there actually were beings that went way beyond a thousand. They just were not physical, walking around on this planet. And in fact, beings that go up to 50,000 that they identified. And it’s also interesting because it’s a logarithmic scale.

Rick: I have friends who actually perceive those beings as clearly as you and I perceive ourselves here, and I’m going to be interviewing one anonymously in a month or two.

Nirmala: Great, yeah.

Rick: But in the Vedic cosmology, they have what they call 16 kalas, which are supposed to be like levels of evolution. And it starts out with rocks and stuff like that, and the humans are supposed to be within maybe 4 and 8, between that. And the greatest saint who ever walked the planet would be 8. But beyond that, there’s another 8.

Nirmala: Yeah, I know. I mean, who knows what that’s like, those 8 beyond all of this, beyond what we call enlightenment. It’s like, “Wow, what a trip!”

Rick: Nice.

Nirmala: So check with me in a couple thousand years, I’ll tell you what I find.

Rick: Will do, yeah. We can have spiritual arm wrestling or something.

Nirmala: Yeah, there you go. Well, like I said, we’ll be sitting in a bar watching the galaxies collide.

Rick: Right, yeah, the restaurant at the end of the universe. That’s a Douglas Adams thing, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Okay, on that profoundly frivolous note, let’s wrap it up. This has been a joy, as I knew it would be.

Nirmala: Yeah, a real pleasure.

Rick: Yeah. Let me just make some concluding, do you want to make any concluding remarks before I do?

Nirmala: Just thanks, I really appreciate having this time to chat.

Rick: Good. So, to those who have stayed with us for the last two hours, you’ve been listening to an interview with Nirmala, who lives in Sedona, as he said, but travels around occasionally and gives satsangs and also has a website, what is it? endlesssatsang.com?

Nirmala: Yeah, endless-satsang.com.

Rick: Dot org?

Nirmala: Dot com.

Rick: Go ahead.

Nirmala: I was just going to say, you were probably going to mention, there’s all kinds of free stuff in there. There are whole books that you can download for free, and videos and audios and articles, and you could spend hours on there just

Rick: Poems.

Nirmala: Yeah, a book of poetry that they can download the whole thing for free. There’s also a point of that, because we talked a lot this time about the way our heart, our being, discriminates how true things are by the expansions and contractions. And one of the free downloads on the free e-books page on my site is part 2 of my book, “Living from the Heart,” and part 2 is all about the heart’s wisdom. It’s all about how we naturally discriminate how true things are if we listen to our heart.

Rick: Nice, yeah, I listened to that one last week or so. It was very enjoyable.

Nirmala: Yeah.

Rick: Good. So, I’ll be linking to, in case you’re driving in your car and you didn’t have a chance to write that down, I’ll be linking to his, Nirmala’s site from mine, batgap.com, so you’ll see that there. And also, of course, this is an ongoing series, so if you go to batgap.com you’ll see all the other ones archived and each week a new one is posted. And so, if you’d like to be notified each time a new interview is posted, you can just sign up for the email newsletter there, it’s just a one a week email. And if you’re listening to this on YouTube, you can just subscribe to the YouTube channel and YouTube will tell you when there’s a new one. It’s also available as a podcast, so you can listen to just the audio while you’re riding your horse or whatever. So great, thank you, and thanks to those who are listening. Oh, and there’s a donate button there I should mention, I don’t like to be crass about it, but it does help to have a regular flow of donations, and there’s a page which explains what I do with them. So, thanks to everyone, thanks to Nirmala, and we’ll see you next time. [Music]