Paul Levy Transcript

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Paul Levy Interview

Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now and hope to do hundreds more. We were just joking around before starting about when to start collecting Social Security. And I said, Well, I plan to live a long time. So I’m gonna wait till I’m 70, which isn’t that far off. Anyway, if you if you haven’t heard this show before, and you’d like to check out previous ones are about 465. To check out, go to batgap.com Bat gap and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll find many of them, all of them. In fact, this show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it, if you feel like it’s benefited you in some way and might be benefiting others and you’d like to help support it. There’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. My guest today is Paul Levy. Paul is a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence. He describes himself as a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of quantum oops hero shot show the book quantum Revelation, the quantum revelation, a radical synthesis of science and spirituality, which I’ve been reading and enjoying very much. He’s also the author of awakened by darkness when evil becomes your father, dispelling with Tico, breaking the curse of evil and the mat and final book, the madness of George W. Bush, are a reflection of our collective psychosis. He is George W. Bush, who seems quite sane now by comparison with anyway, he is the founder of The Awaken of the awakening in the dream community in Portland, Oregon. Paul’s an artist and is deeply steeped in the work of Carl Gustav Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 30 years, he was the coordinator for the Portland Padmasambhava Buddhist center for over 20 years. So, welcome, Paul.

Paul Levy: Hi, I am so happy to be here. Thank you.

Rick Archer: Yeah, happy to have you, I really enjoyed getting to know you over the past week, through your book and various recordings that are listened to. And since the most of those who are listening won’t know anything about you, before we dive into your book, and which is about quantum mechanics and the topic of what Tico which you’ll have to explain, let’s hear a little bit about you so people can get a sense of your background.

Paul Levy: Yeah, no, I, I really appreciate that. Because my background is not typical, in that. I, when I was in my early 20s, I had this spiritual awakening that came out of intense this, this, this suffering that I was going through. And I how I dealt with this suffering was to go into it was to really assume the position of trying to be sort of the observer. And you know that really by doing that, which is just to be doing spiritual meditation practice, and I was doing it for maybe about four hours a day, for close to a couple of years. And it was the only thing that I found that was helping to alleviate my suffering.

Rick Archer: During those four hours, were you just sort of feeling the suffering even more acutely, but kind of grinning and baring it, so to speak, and just kind of powering on through?

Paul Levy: No, not it wasn’t so much like powering on through it was just assuming the point of view of just, you know, instead of trying to figure my way out of my suffering by being absorbed in my mind and trying to figure it out or thinking about it, it was just to sort of step back and just to to watch and and whenever a thought came up just to notice it as a thought and just to let it go. So it was more and more just assuming the position of that spacious awareness that was witnessing, and that’s really what I was doing. And that was the only thing I had figured out. And you know, I guess just to be a little bit more specific, the suffering was because my father wound up being a really sick man from the emotional point of view. And like any person who has an integrated their abuse, he had acted it out on the only child on to me, that was the suffering. And you know, so many of us can relate to that. You And so by doing that, that meditation at the after almost two years, I had I got hit by a bolt of lightning. But it wasn’t from outside in the sky, just instantaneously this lightning just ignited in my brain. And within a day I went into such an extreme altered state like I had had this, this personality change just overnight, that I got thrown in a mental hospital.

Rick Archer: here first, yeah. So when you say bolt of lightning was, is that metaphorical? Or was there actually sort of a flash of light? I mean, do you attribute that now to some kind of sudden Kundalini awakening or something? Yeah, yeah, it

Paul Levy: was, it was not metaphorical. It was definitely a Kundalini. I mean, that became clear to me. And it was just out of the blue it was, it was as if an actual bolt of lightning came into my brain and just ignited. But that was the subjective experience was all of a sudden, just sitting in meditation, and boom, this, this lightning bolts just ignited in my mind. And it was definitely Kundalini. And then within hours of that happening, what happened for me on the internal plane was I began to see oh, this is some sort of collective dream. We’re all interconnected, and interdependent, and we’re like, create co creating together. And I was so filled with enthusiasm and excitement about that realization, that that’s what got me locked up, because all of a sudden, I just was like, I couldn’t contain, how excited I was at what I was realizing. And so that that was the first hospitalization. And within within

Rick Archer: a year of kind of shouting from the rooftops, so to speak. And yeah, sort

Paul Levy: of shouting from the rooftops, and not quite like that. But just it was like all of a sudden going from being this normal, ordinary condition person, to just feeling like the creativity of the universe just flowing through me at every moment, and having this realization of oh my god, this is a collective dream. It was just overwhelming. And I would say that I couldn’t have possibly had been prepared for what I was realizing, because I was just an ordinary person I was in, right, like, I was 24. At that point, but but the thing is within the minute of getting, so I was brought by ambulance, to this hospital. And within a minute, I had like this synchronistic the most synchronistic event, I think, or one of the most that had ever happened in my life, that totally changed the whole trajectory of my life, within one minute of being in that hospital. And I don’t know if maybe I should, was that

Rick Archer: about the blind woman? Yeah, yeah, it was like to tell that I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah, you could

Paul Levy: say that. So I get I get brought in by ambulance to to Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. This is in 1981. And they bring me it’s, it’s at night, it’s probably you know, after dinner, and they bring me into this lounge for the psychiatric patients. And I’m in this complete altered extreme state. And I see this woman, this older woman, and she’s blind her eyes are, you know, totally sort of opaque. And I just find myself I just without even thinking, I just go right up to her. And I look at her eyes. And out of my mouth as if I’ve been given this script to say, just spontaneously comes to words. All you have to do to see is open your eyes and, and look, and I keep on repeating those words and keep on getting closer to her. And then the whole thing took about a minute and in front of my eyes. She regained her sight. And at that moment, as if it was choreographed, they came and they took me and they strapped me up on a tap. And that was where I spent the night just strapped up on a bed. And I knew that I was having a spiritual awakening. I mean, it couldn’t have been more obvious to me. And, you know,

Rick Archer: let me ask you about the woman before we go on, say her eyes were all occluded. You know, they’re, the lenses were opaque or something. And yeah, she suddenly gained the ability to see I mean, if you looked at her eyes, did they? Did they become clear?

Paul Levy: Yeah, yeah, it was like night and day, it was like seeing a person whose eyes are clearly blind, and there’s no vision and just dead. To all of a sudden, these radiant, these luminous eyes that were filled with the ability to see and how that got confirmed. So when they unstrap me that next morning, they put me in a room. And coincidentally, the only other person in the room is this, this ex, this blind person. And she’s sitting there across the table from me, and she’s just smiling from ear to ear and not saying a word. And then all of a sudden, my heart chakra just just just opened. And I had never had that experience before. And then I understood Oh, I get it physically, her eyes were fine. But inwardly, psychologically, she wasn’t allowing herself to look. And somehow I had what in whatever way saw that. And it was clear to me that oh, she was ready to heal, and I was sent by by central casting to pick up the role of just saying my lines, which I said, you know, properly, that helped her to like step out of her blindness and to heal her in her blindness. And then she says to me, the only word she ever said to me, she says, aren’t you going to answer the phone call from and she mentions my father’s name. And then within like, seconds, the nurse comes into the room and says, To me that my father was on the phone, because they my parents had just heard I had had a psychotic break and was hospitalized. And so that’s sort of that synchronicity story. And then within three days, I got out of that hospital, because the doctor in charge of me, he reflected, hey, you have to show us that you’re not completely insane. Or we’re gonna keep you here for a really long time. And I took that in and it was spring, it was beautiful outside, and I thought, well, I don’t really want to stay inside here for a really long time. So I just totally became normal, and began talking about my problems, and my neuroses and all this stuff. And he said, he literally said to me, Well, you can go, you can leave and, and we got together for lunch the next week, and I told him about the blind woman, he became very uncomfortable. He didn’t want to talk about it. But he said to me, he says, the fact that I could do that, that I could be fluid in my identity, and just step into being normal. To him that prove that I wasn’t crazy.

Rick Archer: Interesting. Now, but that wasn’t your only hospitalization was it? Weren’t there subsequent? Yeah,

Paul Levy: so what happened? What happened, then within a few days of that, I knew something when you have an experience like that, it’s really clear that something really profound was happening. And all my friends, they all thought, oh, Paul, just, you know, had this nervous breakdown this psychotic break. So I kind of knew I had to find somebody to talk to who understood. So I found out about this Buddhist monk in San Francisco, who I went to tell what happened. And he said to me, Oh, you’re in luck, the most enlightened Buddhist master of all of Southeast Asia, this 85 year old, great master had just arrived into town that I should get his blessing. So I actually went and we had an incredible connection, and I got his blessings. But over that next, you know, maybe one and a half, like two years, something like that, three or four times, or, you know, something like that, I was also hospitalized. Because even though I had met him, I wasn’t in a container. I wasn’t in an ashram or a monastery, I was a free agent out in the world having this this wild awakening, and I had an integrated enough to figure out how not to freak people out. So a number of times, you know, three, four times I got hospitalized, medicated diagnosed, and the psychiatrists who are guaranteeing that I had this chemical imbalance that was just discovered, the DSM three had just come out in, you know, one year before. And they guarantee that I had this mental illness that I would have it for the rest of my life that I would need to be on medication to my dying breath, or I would have a psychotic break immediately. And I should just, you know, kind of comment. I haven’t been on any medication for like, 35 years with no episodes, they can take it for a while. So they gad they made me take it for a number of months. And it was horrible. I

Rick Archer: must have been really darling. Oh, yeah, I

Paul Levy: remember, you know, there was one point, they made me take this anti psychotic. And I remember feeling this is in the anti creative, because I’m a creative, we’re all creative. And so I quickly I just figured out how to take myself off and how to appear normal, so that I could continue the awakening. But the tragic part of the awakening, it totally destroyed my family. My parents bought into this psychiatric, you know, they saw doctors as authority figures. So they both died thinking that all Paul’s just in denial of his illness. And the rest of my family has excommunicated me because Oh, Paul is just this mentally ill person who just doesn’t really can’t deal with that. He’s crazy. So it had a tragic aspect. But I’ve been really fortunate in that I have, you know, this huge, you know, soul family. And I’ve continued my awakening and deepen my work. Do you have

Rick Archer: times even now where you feel like you’re not quite integrated? And and you get a little get a little nutty? And you need to integrate somehow?

Paul Levy: Well, Oh, totally. I mean, that’s every day. But that’s, you know, I would be really suspicious if somebody you know, said, Oh, they don’t have those moments. Because for me, I’m a work in progress. Yeah, like all of us. Like, that’s what I mean about, um, this wounded healer. And that, yeah, there’s this incredible wound, and instead of, you know, being in avoidance of it, or doing drugs or drinking or whatever one does to avoid experiencing that pain. No, I sit with that for hours and hours a day. And that’s the source of my creative work. Yeah, as

Rick Archer: far as I’m concerned, and not everybody likes to hear this kind of thing. If you’re if you’re still breathing your work in progress, and that would include the Dalai Lama and Ramana Maharshi. And this Artha Donta

Paul Levy: everybody. Absolutely. And they actually say that his holiness Dalai Lama says, oh, with my altruism with my compassion, I’m always increasing it. Yeah. It’s not like we ever get to that to the end, right?

Rick Archer: And Nisargadatta said, Forget I am that that was the name of a book. He said, he said, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve learned so much since then it’s so much deeper. You know, this is 10 years after I am that was published. So yeah,

Paul Levy: and if I could just say one thing about that, because when you know, when you awaken, you begin to discover that you’re interconnected with the field. And think about it. There’s this shadow in the field, there’s this abuse and wounding and trauma, we’re all in having PTSD. And as like this, this, you know, this sort of like a shaman or wounded healer, like we all are, we’re like these organs to to metabolize the shadow in the field. So of course, every day, we’re going to feel a little bit like out of sorts, but then the question is, how do you carry that?

Rick Archer: Yeah, I have a friend who said recently that she felt like she had somehow worked through her individual karma. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that she felt that she was kind of now taking on collective karma and processing that, in fact, I’ve, I’ve interviewed and spoken with a number of people who have said things along those lines, so Right, yeah. And if we get right down to it, as I’m sure you and I will be discussing, there’s, you know, where does the individual end and the collective begin? It’s like, you can’t find a demarcation point.

Paul Levy: Exactly. Totally. No, that’s exactly right. As you were saying that with your friend, I was like, yeah, it’s not this, like, you know, like, chronological process. Oh, now I’ve, I’ve emptied out my personal karma. Now I need to deal with the collective, it’s really hard to find that boundary between the two.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay, so you’ve written a number of books over the years, and I imagine those books in themselves are sort of symptomatic of various stages of development that you’ve undergone as your experience and understanding have matured. And so you know, we’re just you’re just relaying some stuff that happened in the early 80s. What, before we get into the meat of your book on quantum physics, and perhaps into a discussion about what Tico? What would you consider to be some significant points that people should know of what has transpired over the last 3040 years?

Paul Levy: Yeah, well, that’s a really good question. Because in 1981, that was when I began to have the realization that we’re having this collective dream. And that, that inside, I’ve just been continually integrating that insight. And it’s been, you know, just ever like this, this deepening insight, and, and that lead into the work with like, the, the what Tico idea, which then led into the quantum physics thing, and all three of those, the, you know, this being a dream, what Tico, and quantum physics are all interrelated. And I guess one final thing that ties them all together, is that if I hadn’t connected with being creative with finding my creative voice, that I would have been in trouble, then I would have really, you know, I don’t even want to think about what what my life would have been like with that. So the idea being that I was having whatever is subjective, you know, experience of the nature of things and of myself, and the fact that I was able that I’ve been able to continually creatively articulate what I’ve been realizing that and I’m saying that because it’s not just my process, I’m saying that that every single person and because I have a healing practice, every person who I work with, that’s the key thing for them to really connect with their creative voice.

Rick Archer: Okay. What when you say that you’re a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, how would you define spiritual emergence?

Paul Levy: Yeah, well, I would say it’s like to see through the, the illusion that we exist as a separate self, as as like this, this reference point in time, that’s isolated from the environment and from the universe and from other people, and to have the recognition that we’re all actually, you know, interconnected, that we’re actually dream characters and each other’s dreams, which is to say, when you have a dream, and you contemplate, oh, they’re all these figures in the dream. They’re these these, these characters, these dream characters, what that means is that they’re just reflections of parts of yourself. And so there’s no separation. And that’s when you begin to really step into that. And out of that comes the compassion the real compassion. That’s what I mean when I talk about like when somebody’s having like a spiritual emergence.

Rick Archer: And is the murder is the word emergence in any way related in this case to emergency because at think sometimes. I mean, you had a busy day, you know, you were right, hospitalized. But but it’s not necessarily emergency if one can handle it properly understands what’s going on.

Paul Levy: Right, right. And the thing is, like, for me, totally, it was an emergency in that. I mean, it could have been, if I was in DC, the thing that saved me when I was hospitalized was that it could not have been made more clear to me that I was having an awakening. So every my entire universe, my family, my friends, the doctors, everybody was reflecting back, that I was mentally ill that I had a chemical imbalance. And I’m just thinking, wow, they’re really stupid. They just have no idea what they’re talking about. And I was able to have that point of view, because I knew I was having an awakening, it couldn’t have been more obvious. And that’s what that’s what saved me. And so that was an emergent emergency in the sense that certain these, these episodes can be really dangerous. Because you know, without having experience, what that’s like, you can’t even imagine the energy that’s unlocked, when you step out of that separate self, and you have some form of whether it’s Kundalini, or you have recognition of what the nature of your situation and who we are, it’s so overwhelming, that it’s very typical that it takes a while, sometimes a number of months, sometimes a number of years, to metabolize that energy in what you’re realizing and to integrate it so that you’re imbalanced enough to not like freak people out. And it’s that sort of so I guess, the one final thing, I’m of the opinion, so many people, it’s very tragic, are hospitalized and diagnosed and medicated and Miko their whole their whole lives in that state, who were or are potentially having a spiritual emergence. But it isn’t being recognized like in indigenous cultures, they might understand when somebody’s acting kind of weird or abnormal, oh, they might be being called by the Spirit by they might be having a spiritual, you know, form of like awakening in in modern culture that’s not recognized. And immediately, they’re just pathologized and medicated. And it can be really, really tragic.

Rick Archer: Have you seen an improvement in that over the last several decades? Is it? Yeah, I

Paul Levy: would say both. Yes. And no, because even now, in the appendix of the DSM, there’s a little two line thing saying something like, oh, there’s this a religious, spiritual sort of problem. That’s what it refers to it as it’s actually making some sort of reference to that there could be a spiritual process that’s happening, that’s not pathological. But where the no part is, is more and more psychiatry is just biochemical. Yeah. So it’s just like, Oh, if you have any sort of symptom, or any sort of weird behavior, just take this pill, and it might make it might make the symptom go away, but then it will abort the deeper spiritual process. So it’s both Yes. And no,

Rick Archer: yeah. And I think that many in are the predominant paradigm, in that field, and in science in general, is, although there are obviously exceptions to it, and among some interesting people, is that any experiential experience, as with any experience, is some kind of biochemical thing, including, like, if you have a near death experience, it’s because your brain is deprived of oxygen, if you have some spiritual experience, there must be some, you know, I don’t know, serotonin, or DMT, or something getting secreted, but it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with an actual cognition of deeper reality because they just don’t have that in their toolkit.

Paul Levy: Right, right. And that’s the whole, like, the materialistic point of view that the fundamental what’s fundamentally primary is is is like the physical world, where you know, when we get to quantum physics that turns that on its head and says, Oh, actually, consciousness is the primary fundamental source of all of manifestation. And the physical reality is just like this, this more like a superficial manifestation of the underlying field of consciousness. So it really it turns that on its head, yeah,

Rick Archer: I guess it’s in a way we’re making progress because four or 500 years ago, people would had experiences like yours might have been burned at the stake or something and suspected of possession and these days, at least they’re treated more humanely but we definitely got a ways to go

Paul Levy: ya know, or four or 500 years ago they might if they were in the right culture they might have met people have been been honored and recognized and then you know just a support them in their process because they understand if the person comes back from that underworld because what happened for me for years without for years but for a while, I was like you know, feeling well I screwed up the hospitalization were a mistake. It really stopped my awakening. And then at a certain point, I had the realization No, no, no, the hospitalizations and the abuse. I suffered the The intense psychiatric abuse that was part of the awakening that was the descent into Hades into the underworld. And as soon as I like was able to reframe that, then will that’s how it showed up in my experience, and then it became part of the perfection of the awakening, good.

Rick Archer: We’ve thrown the word vertigo around a few times, is less of something you want to say to kind of wrap up stuff we’ve just been saying they’ll shift into that.

Paul Levy: No, totally, and the what Tico thing is like so one other way I could describe my awakening process. So I was saying, Oh, I was recognizing the dreamlike nature. And we’re collectively having this mesh shared dream and we’re interconnected. The other half of that is that I was having this this direct encounter with with archetypal evil, and whether it was through my father being the instrument or psychiatry, but I was beginning to have the recognition there was like, almost like a higher dimensional field that had a real dark side to it. And I was fortunate, and I’m, like, you know, it goes back to yums still, like this work in progress, really assimilating what I what I’m being shown. But that darker side that’s, that’s, that’s like, in like, the tradition like indigenous, Native American tradition. That’s what they call what Tico it’s the spirit of evil, is the source of evil that’s informing all of the incredible destructiveness that we’re enacting in our own selves, through our relationships, and through the body politic of the world. And it’s informing that you know, that we’re calling, we’re actually enacting this this collective form of suicide. And so the idea of what Tico it’s like this cannibalistic spirit, that to the extent that we’re unaware of it, we just literally become taken over by it, and it’s informing our self destruction. But what I point out is that encoded in in this in what Tico it’s actually helping us to evolve. It’s helping us to wake up that if it didn’t exist, we would actually have to invent it, because it’s actually a catalyst for our collective awakening. And that’s what my book about what Tico was about.

Rick Archer: I just want to interject and remind listeners, viewers that if you’re viewing the live interview and wish to submit a question, you can do that on the upcoming interviews page@batgap.com. There’s a form at the bottom. I was listening in the last couple of days to an interview by Krista Tippett with Cory Booker, you know, the senator from New Jersey, and fascinating interview, I recommend that people listen to it. But he was saying that we kind of live in Shiva times that she was said to be the destroyer in Hinduism, you know, there’s a lot of that sort of a lot of destruction apparently taking place. But, you know, she was not portrayed as a bad guy in Hinduism is portrayed as one of the necessary three main influences. There’s, you know, Vishnu, the creator, Brahma, the maintainer, and Shiva, the destroyer, and the two, the three kind of change their balance as as time goes on, and sometimes destruction becomes predominant, but it does so as a precursor to, you know, a new unfolding of a higher level of, of society or whatever, you know, is coming forth.

Paul Levy: Right? And I would, I would, I mean, that’s really interesting for me, because, of course, as a creative person, and any creative person, they know this, there’s such a fine line between the creative and the destructive. And it’s almost like, you know, we tap into this, this deeper, transpersonal energy. And if we don’t channel it in a constructive way, then it gets enacted, you know, unconsciously in this destructive way. But I just want to contemplate what you just said about Shiva and the destroyer. Because what I point out in my book is that, yeah, we’re destroying ourselves. There’s no question about that. And yet, I go encoded in that process of self destruction, it’s the way that we’re teaching ourselves, how to not destroy ourselves. And I’d point out that we clearly haven’t, haven’t gotten how to not destroy ourselves, or we wouldn’t be destroying ourselves. So the actual act of destruction, it’s the it’s the medium through which we’re actually helping ourselves to wake up. But if we don’t get the message that’s encoded in or acting out our self destruction, then we’re really going to destroy the biosphere and ourselves.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And I mean, there are plenty of individuals who destroy themselves are on the path of self destruction and at a certain point, turn it around. I was one and, and but obviously, as the headlines are constantly telling us, there are many who don’t turn it around, they die of an opioid overdose or whatever. Right. And so collectively, societally, you know, it’s not necessarily a done deal that we’re going to sort of turn it around Then some people are quite pessimistic about it, but but there’s definitely other things that probably shouldn’t continue to exist if we’re going to have a more enlightened society. And perhaps those are self destructing. I don’t know, what are your reflections on that?

Paul Levy: Yeah, well, I mean, it feeds into like the quantum physics thing, because quantum the quantum physics book and the idea of like, what Tico they’re really interrelated. And I talk about, you know, when you go into quantum physics book, Quantum Physics points out, you know, we’ve been entrained, to think certain things are possible, and then other things are impossible. And quantum physics has enlarge the scope of what is possible, to the point where, you know, like, because, as an example, so many of us, it’s so easy to fall into despair and pessimism about Oh, my God, you know, we’re destroying ourselves, things are just getting worse, you know, there’s no hope. And then we assumed that point of view of pessimism. And I would point out, well, if you have the pessimistic point of view, then you’re actually going to, you’re going to invoke a universe that’s going to confirm that point of view, which you know, makes you more entrenched in your pessimistic point of view. So then you’re actually complicit in the very destruction that you are reacting to is seemingly outside of yourself. But what quantum physics is pointing out is that, for example, it might be, you know, really unlikely that our species is actually going to have a collective awakening, but it’s possible. And in quantum physics, saying, as long as it’s possible, that means that it can actually happen in this reality. So don’t close off that possibility. And when you actually just assume that it’s actually in the realm of possibility that that a sufficient number of humanity is going to awaken that will catalyze this global awakening, that instead of being complicit with the evil that’s playing out, you then become an agent of the light, you then make it that much more probable that that is what’s going to happen. And that’s the power of our dreaming of you know, it’s the incredible, invisible untapped power that we have in our minds, to actually help to invoke the very universe that that we’re inhabiting.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, I think it is happening, as evidenced by my show, for instance, and others like it, where every week I interview another person who’s having some kind of spiritual awakening, or has had one, that’s a perfect example. Yeah, I don’t think that could have done this in the 1950s. Even if, even if even if we’d had the internet and Skype, those people weren’t there to find so much. actly.

Paul Levy: Exactly. I just wanna say that weight is such a great point, because it’s so easy to focus on all the negativity. But yet people I know, who are really awakening in a genuine way, they’re all optimistic, because and one of the main reasons is exactly what you just pointed out. Because they’ll they’ll say, yeah, there are so many people around the planet who are having a spiritual awakening, it’s almost like a compensation for the darkness. Like, think about the unconscious. When we go to sleep at night, if we’re like, you know, having this this, this one sided point of view, the unconscious will compensate and show us the other point of view to bring us more imbalance. So it’s almost always not almost as if it is like that there is such darkness in the world, that the compensation is that so many individual people are actually having spontaneous awakenings. And the point for me is what if we actually which is what’s happening in this show, for example, what if we actually connect with each other, who are awakening, and then we can, you know, conspire to co inspire, we can we can help each other to deepen the collective awakening, as we put our collective genius and activate our collective genius, in a way that where we can actually help each other to wake up?

Rick Archer: Yeah. Now, whether this collective awakening that we’re seeing, gets the upper hand or not, is remains to be seen. You know, because it’s, we’re really talking about a tiny fraction of the world’s population. But yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Paul Levy: Yeah, so I was gonna say that’s true. But one way to think about it that I think is a beautiful image. It’s like if you have a glass of water with like, if you add like, Oh, here’s a grain of like, sugar, you add grain after grain of sugar, and it’ll just dissolve into the water up until it reaches the saturation point, then you add one more grain of sugar and a crystal will spontaneously manifest. In the same way, any of us in this moment, having the recognition of the dreamlike nature or seeing our shadow, connecting with compassion could be that grain of sugar that precipitates a global awakening in the entire universe because where we’re not separate from the field, this is a non local field that transcends third dimensional space and time. And any one of us having any sort of realization could be or actually is that great No sugar that’s getting deposited into the collective unconscious of our species in a way that could really like I was saying could precipitate this worldwide global awakening. Yeah.

Rick Archer: And, and physical phenomenon, there’s a, there’s the phrase phase transition. And a simple obvious example is the boiling of water. So you can have water at 99 degrees centigrade, and doesn’t look like much is happening one more degree, and it starts to boil all sudden, you didn’t quite see that coming. Right. And there are also examples, I’ve used these on the show many times, such as 1%, of the heart cells being pacemaker cells, which synchronize and regulate the beating of the entire heart, or in a laser, the square root of 1% of the photons, if they begin to align with one another, the rest of the photons and train with them. And the whole thing becomes as if one coherent beam, a laser. So, you know, we’re not necessarily talking about, you know, getting 75% of the population or something involved in this sort of thing. The potency, I think of people who are awakening is significant such that even a small percentage of them will have an effect. We portion with their numbers. Yeah, it’s

Paul Levy: like, you know, I mean, the 100th Monkey phenomenal. Bible, they talk about the 144,000 in the the Book of Revelations, and it’s the same idea that if you’re making a loaf of bread, you have to have is sufficient this this, whatever, like, you know, that has the bread has to lemon, there has to be enough yeast, but there doesn’t have to be 100% use just a certain critical amount, and then it lemons and that’s and we’re the bread that’s living in a way. Yeah.

Rick Archer: Or Yoga, you know, put a little yogurt starter in there, the whole thing becomes yogurt. So many examples. Okay, so regarding your book, and we’ll I think as we begin to talk about the book, we will also probably loop back and talk more about what Tico and all kinds of other things. But first of all, I was pleased to see that my friend Manasa capital’s endorsed it. He’s a physicist who has been on BatGap a couple of times. And the reason I was pleased with that is that yesterday, I was listening to a recording of a conference that took place at Cal Tech a few years ago, with Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, mediated by Dan Harris, of ABC News, and they pretty much excoriated Deepak for his use of quantum physics, to explain, you know, consciousness and to his correlation of the two. And they were saying things such as, you know, quantum mechanics has to do with, you know, extremely microscopic levels of creation. And for you to take all these quantum mechanical terms and try to suggest that there’s some societal significance to it is just woowoo. And you’re, you’re not being scientific and you’re not qualified to talk this way. And Deepak did his best to defend himself, but he was a little bit out number and he,

Paul Levy: right, right. Sure, sure. No, that’s it. That’s interesting to me. Because I mean, I should make clear, I’m not a physicist, right. And so I mean, even when I give my talks on the book, I just contemplate how, how amazing and how crazy it is. That here I’ve written a book on quantum physics, and I’m going around speaking about quantum physics. And I’m not a physicist. And that’s really interesting. But like, what I point out is that all of the founding fathers of quantum physics like for example, with with Einstein, Albert Einstein, he has a quote where he says, quantum physics, so he was one of the discoverers of quantum physics, but it’s so freaked him out what it was pointing out that he couldn’t embrace it. And so but he actually said that quantum physics is so uncommon, uncommonly important, that it should be everyone’s concern. And then other physicists are saying, it’s an incredible pity that most of humanity isn’t awake to the revelations emerging from quantum physics. The point is, is that there is something that’s being being shown to us through the revelations emerging from quantum physics, that are a game changer that are like so profoundly important. The other day, I was on a TV interview, and I spontaneously said this, and when I watched the video, I, I was like, Wow, I can’t believe I said that. But it’s true. And what I said is quantity, the revelations emerging from quantum physics from from physics, are the solution to the world crisis. And that’s what my book is about. And so what I’m pointing at is what is the meaning because we’ve developed this incredible technology, you know, that have changed. It’s changed the course of history. It’s changed our world through quantum physics, but the real you know, the the real founding fathers and the cutting edge quantum physicists are saying that’s the low hanging fruit. That’s only like less than 1% of the benefit that technologies have what quantum physics is showing us. It’s showing There’s something about who we are. It’s showing us something about our thinking process, about the place of consciousness in our world. And it’s literally invoking this new this epoch in human history. That’s how major it is. So if I were there during that Deepak Chopra interview, I would have been totally trying my best to support Deepak Chopra’s point of view.

Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s funny, there was a physicist in the audience, whom you quote, In your book, in other ways, named Leonard McLeod now, and he co wrote a book with Stephen Hawking. And, and so he got up on the mic and said, Deepak, you know, I’d like to give you a lesson lessons in quantum mechanics. And so apparently, Deepak took him up on it, because the two of them ended up reading a book called War of the worldviews science versus spirituality. And in it, the scientific worldview is represented by letter Milan now, and, and the spiritual review by by Deepak and Muladhara, suggested the universe operates according to laws of physics, while acknowledging that science does not address why the laws exist or how they arise. Whereas Deepak says that the laws of nature as well as mathematics, share the same source as human consciousness. So I guess, to summarize, you know, Deepak is saying, and many others, that consciousness is fundamental, and the world the universe is an emergent, quality or, or expression of consciousness, whereas other the opposite view is taken by mainstream science still, which is that, you know, material creation is predominant, and consciousness is a byproduct of the brain. And but as you’re suggesting, if scientists as a whole really understood quantum mechanics, I think that they would have to adopt the pucks point of view. Or at least,

Paul Levy: you know, totally, and the thing is, I think of, you know, some of the greatest quantum physicists of the last century, there was one who says the only law in physics is that there is no law, that any law you have is changeable. Is is mutable. And so one of you see, the thing about the typical physicists, they go to physics, graduate school, they get their PhD, but they’re not trained, you know, to how do they deal with, because it’s such a taboo thing in academic corporate physics to talk about, what about consciousness? Yeah, as soon as you mentioned, where consciousness so consciousness, one of the ways of understanding quantum physics is that consciousness intruded itself into the physical app. And this isn’t what the typical physicists signed up for, they don’t know how to deal with it. So if you mentioned that the idea of consciousness that typical response is shut up and calculate, that’s the real famous phrase. And they’re the whole point is, is that there is an edge there’s a taboo against inquiring into, wait a second, it’s, you know, it’s clearly a factor in the equation of the universe, ie consciousness, what to do about it. What I’m interested in, and I talked about this in the book, is that physicists have this incredible unconscious reaction against the implication of their own theory that in other words, consciousness is part of the universe. And I’m interested in Oh, what is the physics of that? What is the physics of that internal psychological reaction? Because it’s a way into understanding that psyche, and soma and the world and physical matter and spirit are actually not separate. That’s what my book is about, that you actually when you go down that rabbit hole far enough, in a particular way, with open eyes, really trying to integrate all of the data, you invariably get to the point where you discover that there’s no that the opposites This is an alchemy, the coincidental repository, that the opposites of spirit and matter are indistinguishable, that you actually can’t separate them. And that actually separating something that is inseparable, and its nature is the very source of the all the world crises that we’re struggling with.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I want to go into that more with you. You’ve probably read Thomas Kuhns, the history of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shifting, and so a paradigm is a worldview and people tend to get calcified in a certain worldview that works for them that they’ve been trained in that their livelihood depends on and so on. And they’re they’re resistant to changing that worldview. Because it’s, you know, it’s takes a lot of reshuffling to do so. And so the thing that usually changes worldviews, is anomalies, to use coons term and anomaly, the things that just don’t fit the paradigm. And the anomalies sort of have to gain a certain critical mass before the paradigm can shift. So I mean, what how do you see or what do you see the stage of that shift right now? To what extent Under the anomalies really impinging upon, you know, the physics community or science scientific community in general or Yeah.

Paul Levy: Right. Yeah. And I would just want to contextualize that you know, the thing about quantum physics, it didn’t emerge out of a void, it emerged out of like, Newtonian physics, just as classical pre quantum physics. And the way of characterizing classical physics is that they actually thought that this universe objectively existed independently of the observer, and that we were just passive observers who were trying to figure out this objective world. And what quantum physics has absolutely indisputably proven, is that there is no such thing as an objective world to talk about an objective world separate from the observer is nonsense, that they’ve actually proven again and again and again, that the act of observing actually influences the world observed that the the observer, the thing observed, and the act of observation are interconnected, inseparable parts of one quantum system that you can’t separate that out. Now, that’s the portal that when you filled out in my book, I really contemplate that because that’s the portal to really understanding in a way what quantum physics is showing us. Because in essence, what that’s showing us quantum physics, it has proven indisputably that this is a dream. And that’s what I’m so I’m an outsider, I’m not a physicist, the typical physicist and trained to like interpret their data in this particular way. Well, maybe that’s where I’m coming in. I’m saying look, in a dream. As you’re observing the dreamscape, the dreamscape is nothing other than a reflection of the mind that you’re observing with. So if you change your perspective, in a dream, the dream has no choice but to spontaneously shape shift, and, and, and reflect back your changing viewpoint. And then you have all the seeming evidence to confirm the objective truth of your viewpoint, which makes it even more entrenched in your viewpoint. And the more entrenched you are, the more the dream is going to reflect back the objective truth. So basically, what I’m describing, we have this this genius for CO creating reality with this universe. And it’s getting turned against us in a way that’s destroying us because we aren’t awake to it. Quantum physics, that’s what it’s pointing at. That’s what I mean, when I say the revelations that are emerging from quantum physics are the solution to the world crisis. That’s what I mean. And what I just described, that’s what he called the what Tico virus, it’s a mind virus, it works through the projective tendencies of the mind, in such a way that we become entranced by our projections onto the waking inkblot. Thinking that these these projections objectively exist, we then react to them become conditioned by them. And we’ve actually been then programmed or we’ve hypnotized ourselves. And it’s all the source of that as our own mind. That’s what he go. And that’s hopefully has to do with like, the revelations emerging from quantum physics.

Rick Archer: Okay, so let’s take an example. So you’re saying that the quantum physics is the solution to world crisis. And we know that quantum physics is already responsible for a lot of technologies. I mean, the computers we’re using right now, wouldn’t be possible without certain discoveries in quantum physics and, and a number of other technological things. But, to me, to my mind, the most critical problem in the world is climate change. And it’s not many people. Not everyone accepts that part, in part because it’s a slow moving problem, although it seems to be speeding up more and more. But to take a practical example, how would you say that quantum physics can help address that problem?

Paul Levy: Right? So sure, now, the thing about quantum physics, it’s pointing out that we as observers actually influence the universe we’re observing. So we’re participants in this universe, we’re not separate from the universe. And that is to say that the act of observation is creative. So the climate the people who are you know, saying, oh, climate change, it’s a Chinese hoax, they’re denying it. They’re in a sense, they’re denying the sense the fact that we’re actually participating in this very universe that we’re experiencing. And quantum physics is saying, no, no, we’re active participants, we’re actually invoking the universe and we’re having an effect on the way we interact with the universe. And climate change is a perfect example of that. Because by by our actions in the world, we’re actually investing in in feeding and supporting our own demise through one example being climate change.

Rick Archer: But you know, the quantum physics to conclude that I mean, you just look at, you know, carbon emissions and things. Yeah, no, totally,

Paul Levy: but they’re called carbon emissions. And that’s the practical aspect and that there’s no debating that if you’re interested in truth. The thing that I’m pointing out is that quantum physics is sort of why The underlying, you know, the foundation of how we’re actually created creating our experience of ourselves and our creating our experience of the world. And when you actually add conscious to that, then all of a sudden, instead of just feeling like a victim or a passive observer, you actually discover Wait a second, I have this incredible creative power to create my experience of the world and to create my experience of myself. And that’s, that’s the tap in to our God given power, where we can actually make a difference. And that’s evolutionary, when any one of us taps into that, but particularly when we connect with other people, and we get in phase with other people who are also tapping in to that creative power that we have. That’s the point. And really, in connecting with each other, we can change the waking dream. And that’s evolution. And that’s what this, that’s what my book is about.

Rick Archer: Okay. So perhaps a way of restating what you just said is, whatever we see as the world, the condition of the world, it’s a manifestation or expression or reflection of the subjective state of the majority of people living in the world, it’s just sort of the dream, the dream that we’re creating, so to speak, right.

Paul Levy: And that’s, that’s what I meant when I said, when I had my awakening in 1981, that I was having the recognition that we’re having a collective dream that we’re all dreaming up like with, with Donald Trump, whether you whether you like think he’s great or horrible, we’re all dreaming him up as a dream character as an embodied reflection of a certain part of ourselves, as you know, with climate change with nuclear weapons with all of it, that that’s what all of the wisdom traditions are saying that, you know, in the macrocosm in the external, that’s a reflection of the internal and to see that, that’s to all of a sudden, think about if you’re in a night dream, and you don’t know that you’re dreaming, you’re reacting to the forms of the dream as if they’re other and separate and solid and objective. But when you have the recognition of the nature of your situation in that night dream, ie Oh, I’m dreaming, all of this is my own energy, all of a sudden that you have the recognition, oh, it what I’m experiencing out here in the dream is actually reflecting what’s going on inside of my mind, then you’re not going to be like reacting to it in the same way when you didn’t recognize that.

Rick Archer: Yeah. So it follows from what you’ve just said that if we can change the inner state, then the outer state will naturally change and the outer condition, and if we try to change the outer condition, without changing the inner state, we’re bound to fail.

Paul Levy: Right? But there’s a shadow part there. Because I know a lot of spiritual people who, you know, are so freaked out by what’s happening in the body politic of the world, that they’re just going, Oh, let me just do my prayers, and my mantras, and my meditation and everything will be great. And that and that’s true on one level, but it also it freaks me out. Because what about actually stepping in to the dream into the universe into the world, and actually, in whatever form being an activist, even if it means maybe your form of activism is to be a hermit and to do your prayers, but the idea being that they’re not exclusive, the idea of doing your inner work and being active in the body politic of the world, they actually complement each other. And they in a way are like these cross pollinators of each other. So it’s important not to marginalize one or the other.

Rick Archer: Yeah, this there was an interesting story about Ramana Maharshi, where Papaji was with him if you know who Papaji was put into G. And PAC, India and Pakistan were dividing. And it was a very dangerous situation, a lot of people were killed. And Papa John’s family was in Pakistan and had to get to India. And Ramana said to him, Well, you should go, you know, help them get out of there. And then Papaji said, Well, isn’t the world just an illusion? It’s only a dream, you know, why should they bother? And I forget how Ramana phrased it, but it was basically like, get out there in the dream and you know, help the dream characters and not forgetting that you yourself are a dream character. But you can’t just sort of brush the whole thing off as a dream and just sit here and marinate in my presence. You have to take action in this case.

Paul Levy: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the idea, you know, in, like I do, Tibetan Buddhist practice. And they’ll talk about these, these different dimensions of reality. There’s the relative level and the absolute level and the absolute level, we’re all one, it’s all a dream, everything’s perfect. And from the relative level things are sub optimal beyond belief, and on that level, there is suffering and problems and separation. And they point out that those two levels the relative and the absolute interpenetrate there that you can’t just either, you know, because I know spiritual people who hear the absolute teachings may immediately identify Everything’s perfect. It’s all we’re all one. It’s all a dream. And and they’re just marginalizing the relative the idea is you have to honor both Yeah, absolutely.

Rick Archer: And and there’s a lot of Talking Buddhism, of course, if compassion and you know, taking compassionate action, I heard a story of a young guy who was in India and he got an infection on his leg and he was declining medical treatment. He kept saying, Well, it’s an illusion, you know, no biggie. And, and it got to to make a long story short, he got to the point where he was he almost lost his leg in his life, before he finally realized that this was an illusion that needed attending to its own level in order to, you know,

Paul Levy: yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, totally. And so. And the thing I just want to go back to with like, the what Hiko idea, because it’s important how it ties into quantum physics. And it ties into everything, in the sense that it’s, it’s this, you know, we’re in the middle, like the thing about what Tico it’s a collective psychosis, and we’re in the middle of a collective psychosis. And that’s one of the crazy things is that very few people are even talking about, that our species is in the middle of this psychic epidemic, you know, and you can call it what Tico or whatever. But the, what, what Tico does, how it works is through the unconscious and through the part of us that has a blind spot. And it operates through the projective tendencies of the mind in such a way that we hypnotize ourselves. And so what Tico is a form of like, being blind, it’s a psychic blindness that actually believes it’s being sighted. And, you know, and so the point is, is that what Tico is a quantum phenomena in that encoded in in the disease that can destroy our species. And keep in mind it in the ultimate sense, there’s no such thing as with ego, it doesn’t even exist, it has no objective, independent existence. So what I don’t want to do is create any fear for people when they hear me talk about this. And yet it doesn’t exist, and it could destroy our species at the same time. And that’s pointing at the incredible unconscious, untapped invisible power, we have in our own selves, to actually call forth you know, this universe. And so but by being a quantum phenomena, what, what Hiko? What I mean by that, is that superposed, in what Tico it’s the greatest source of evil, and it’s the greatest blessing and medicine that can help us to wake up and to evolve, and how is it going to manifest? It depends how we can dream it, how do we observe it? Same thing like in quantum physics, with light? Well, what is the nature of light, sometimes it manifests as a wave, sometimes as a particle, depending on how we observe it? Well, that’s the observer effect. That’s what I’m pointing at, in quantum physics, that we have this incredible power to like actually influence this universe, by the way we observe by the way we interpret by the way we place meaning on the waking inkblot of our world.

Rick Archer: Yeah. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term Maya. And like I talked about in the book. Yeah. And the actual sort of etymology of the word is the to measure my Yeah, means which not? So my is that which is not. And so that, you reminded me of that when you said that what Tico doesn’t actually exist, and yet, it’s very powerful. So I mean, you know, there is actually no snake, it’s only a rope. But you know, we we react to the rope, you know, if we, if we don’t see through the mire of it,

Paul Levy: right. And the thing about the Maya is like, now think about quantum physics. If if you know one person or if a Duff, if seven and a half billion people think, have the perspective of Maya, that this world is objective and independent of us? Well, then this world being like a dream will give us all the will manifest as if it’s objective, it will give us all the evidence to confirm or viewpoint that it is objective. So then we like I was saying before become even more fixed in our viewpoint of seeing the world separate from ourselves as being objective. And then of course, we’re actually feeding into the world manifesting as if its objective, the point being that we then by the power of our own mind, created an imprint created ourselves to be imprisoned. And so what I’m trying to point out is that whether it’s with the idea of what Tico are dreaming, or quantum physics, I’m trying to shed light on that process that wait a second, we have this incredible power through the way we perceive that actually can really change can really make a difference in the world, not in a woowoo New Agey way that says, fluffy and cotton candy. But this is what like the implications of the you know, of quantum physics are really pointing at. And I point out in my book, this is a game changer. This is the good news of the Bible. This is it’s like an analogue to the Buddha becoming enlightened but this is through the medium of science. It’s the Holy Grail. It’s the Philosopher’s Stone, on and on and on, but it means nothing at all. If one person has the realization of it, so what but if like as more and more of us are able to share the realizations that are emerging from quantum physics and really embody it That’s where all of a sudden that the blessing aspect of this discovery enlarges, and amplifies, becomes incredibly potent, to the point that we can literally change the dream we’re having. And that’s, you know, that’s what I continually in a creative way through my imagination. Just point that again and again.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And I think it’s really cool that there was a point in your book, which I just read, wonder if I could find it really quick. I don’t know. But basically, the point was, that quantum physics, it was talking about how quantum physics is instrumental in bringing about a spiritual revolution, or spiritual awakening in the world. And, and it would have to be something from science that could do that. Because science is by far the biggest gorilla in the room, you know, it’s, it’s the most influential thing in the world. And so, you know, where I’m going with this. So it’s Yeah, yeah, go ahead and

Paul Levy: elaborate about science. Science is the is the wisdom tradition of the West. Yeah. And, you know, and I’m not a scientist, and I’m, you know, way more just in my soul, an artist and a dreamer. And, you know, I do meditation and all that, you know, so from that point of view, it’s crazy that I’ve written a book about science did a good job at it, actually, yeah. But it makes sense in a certain way. Because what science, what the real cutting edge quantum physicists are pointing at is that the real the real benefit of cutting edge science now isn’t necessarily going to be technological, but it’s going to be in the realm of ideas. It’s going to actually because, okay, here’s, here’s though, one way of really getting to where it becomes a spiritual path, in that quantum physics is proving that there’s no such thing as an objective world. Okay? When you actually really get that, and I’m not just talking intellectually, but really more and more deep in your integration, your experience of Oh, wow, there’s nothing out there, that my act of observing is actually evoking the universe that I’m observing and one quantum whole system? Well, to really integrate that and take that in, then what happens to the subject, what happens to you as a subject, if there’s no object to be in relationship to all of a sudden, your idea of yourself as a reference point in time is this going encapsulating the ego has to revision itself? Because if there’s no object, if there’s no objective universe, what happens to you is a subjective center of operations. All of a sudden, that comes into deep questions. That’s where when you really contemplate the, you know, the insights that are emerging from quantum physics, it necessarily becomes a spiritual path. Because it brings into question Who are we, which is what the quantum physicists are saying? That’s ultimately the most fundamental question in science is who are we?

Rick Archer: Yeah. And incidentally, I should say that, you know, every single page of your book has at least several quotes from reputable quantum physicists, such as John Wheeler, and Niels Bohr and others. So this is not just Paul Levy, saying this stuff. I mean, you just put it all together very nicely. And they’ll build a strong case, you know, based upon the testimony of people who really knew what they’re talking about. Yeah,

Paul Levy: no, totally. It’s not just me talk. I just feel like no, this has nothing to do with me. I’m just the interpreter. And, you know, here’s John Wheeler, who is, you know, colleague of Einstein, and Bohr. And he was the one who really brought in, you know, oh my god, this, you know, the act of observer participants see that by were actually by the act of observing, you know, invoking the universe observed. So what I’m pointing at, I’m just standing on the shoulders of these giants. And I’m just because of maybe not being a physicist, and being an outsider, in my experience, in my own awakening, I’m able to, like actually interpret what they’re actually because the thing about what they discovered in quantum physics like 100 years ago, is so radical, that you know, when when you have such to say it’s radical is an understatement. It’s beyond radical. It’s like something they couldn’t even have imagined what they stumbled onto. But when you have when you make a discovery like that, it typically takes a century or two to be even begin to unpack, what is the meaning of this? And that’s, it’s been 100 years. And we’re first beginning to like, unpack and to decode what is the meaning is the deeper meaning of what we’ve discovered in this quantum physics? Because keep in mind, quantum physics, there’s one thing that’s not in debate that every quantum physicist that they all that they all say and that is, this is the greatest discovery ever in all of human history in the realm of science. That’s not up for debate. They all agree with that. It’s also it’s never been proven even the slightest bit to have any inaccuracy in any way. So here it is the greatest discovery in all of human history in the realm of science. And, you know, and it’s so you know, me a lot of other people, not just me, we’re trying to like, understand, cuz I’ve never come across a field where all of the experts, they all disagree on what is the meaning of their theory? And that’s actually empowering, because then it makes me feel, Oh, well, if they can’t agree, what about if I just sort of contemplate it as just a curious person, because here, the quantum physicists are saying, this universe, it seems like this classical universe where there’s linear causality and all that, but all the quantum physicists are saying, this is a quantum universe through and through, that the quantum dimension pervades both the microcosm and the macrocosm that we ourselves are living quantum entities. And that’s like such a radical statement. But that’s what quantum physicists are actually, that’s what they discovered. And I’m saying, Well, I’m just a curious person. What is the meaning of that? How does that affect my life? And they’re actually saying this affects your life. Usually, they this is like everything to do with our everyday day to day lives. And that’s why in the book, I have like this huge chapter on how quantum physics it’s actually like, you know, in forming our our relationships, and our everyday lives.

Rick Archer: Yeah, there was a, that was part of the thing that Deepak was going through with Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, they were saying, Well, yeah, the quantum quantum theory has to do with the world of the very small has no pertinence to our everyday lives. But I was I just don’t think that metaphor, I know, I was thinking of a counter argument to that, which would perhaps be let’s say, you had a statue that was made of marbles that were glued together, and it looked like a big statue and you, you could see it from 100 yards away on this really cool statue, you might say, that has nothing to do with marbles. It’s this great big statue. But if you got up close and started looking at what you’d say, it’s all it’s only marble. So it’s nothing but marbles here.

Paul Levy: Right? Right. And I could just like, because that’s such a great point. Because, say, for example, here in in quantum theory, they’ve discovered that these elementary particles, you know, atoms or electrons, or whatever, that the properties they have, are a function of our observation that before we observe them, they’re in a state of potentiality, with no property per se, the act of observation, being creative invokes that particular property. Okay, well, then take it the next step, what if you like, take off each of the properties to try to find what is the substance that actually the properties adhere to? When you take off the last, the last property, there’s nothing there. There’s just emptiness. And that and that’s, that correlates to the emptiness in Tibetan Buddhism, they say that’s the nature of our of the universe and of ourselves. And like, so one other way of understanding that is that say, for example, if you actually, quantum physics is inquiring into what is the micro substructure of this universe, what is the building block of the physical world, and they they try to find the smallest little fundamental building block. And what what you discover what they’ve discovered, is that inseparably, that gets to the mind that you can’t, that they’re that that, that interfacing with what they have found as the fundamental building block of the physical world, is consciousness. So they get to the same place, when a meditator goes inside of their own mind and contemplates their internal process of the psyche, they also get to that place of consciousness is primary. So quantum physics, in inquiring into the microstructure of the physical world, and Buddhists, or any spiritual tradition, who contemplate the inner workings of their own mind, get to the same place, which is consciousness. And so quantum physics is basically saying that you have to factor in consciousness into the equation of this universe, that there is no getting away from that. And, of course, you know, a lot of corporatized academic quantum physicists, who aren’t, you know, trained in that way. They’re having, you know, an incredible reaction. No, no, what we need or what’s only real is what’s measurable and all this stuff. Well, consciousness is the actual underlying substructure in which measurement happens. So in a way that I can’t see itself, that’s kind of like the dilemma we’re in. Anyways, I could go on. It’s good.

Rick Archer: I mean, it’s rather there’s a lot of hubris involved in saying that, well, it’s only real is what’s measurable, because, you know, it sort of implies that the universe is sort of dependent upon our ability to measure it for what it does, and you know, I think,

Paul Levy: yeah, am I gonna say one other image that just came up like one of the things that in in Tibetan Buddhism, they’ll use this metaphor and quantum physics, they’ll use the same metaphor, they’ll say, when you look in the sky, and there’s this this rainbow, that rainbow doesn’t object, it doesn’t exist objectively. It’s the conflict It’s a three factors of light of this, there’s water, and there’s a mind there’s consciousness, you have those three factors in a certain relationship, and you all of a sudden experience inside of your mind the image of a rainbow, but the rainbow doesn’t objectively exist. If you take out any of those three factors, there’s no objective rainbow, right? Quantum physics is saying that’s the nature of this physical world is like a rainbow. And just what that means is that say, if the two of us are outside, and we’re looking at a rainbow, we’re not seeing the same rainbow, you’re seeing your own private rainbow, I’m seeing my own private rainbow, because we’re at different angles. And so the point is, is that there is no objective world that we’re just seeing through our subjective lens. No, there is no objective world, we’re each experiencing our own image of what seems to be the world and that image exists inside of our mind. And, you know, the insanity the what Tico, the collective psychosis is that we’re going to work with each other. And it’s based on whose rainbow is actually true. When there is no true rainbow. It’s all we all have our own private universe.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I want to come back to that point. And to the whole point about, you know, whether the moon exists, if nobody’s looking at it. And the question of, you know, if if the universe requires observers in order to exist, you know, how did it develop to the point where there were observers, because it obviously started out as a rather inhospitable place. But, but before I do that, I want to interject a couple of questions that come in, that have come in that are kind of more of a personal nature in terms of people’s personal experience. So this will be a little bit of an intermission here. And we’ll come back to these points. So here’s one, from Scott and Half Moon Bay, California, asks, is seeing how I had been living in a world misinterpreted by my mind to the extent that I was divorced from reality. And then as a result of seeing that finding myself automatically living from an impulse of light from the heart, and finding peace, is that the beginning of awakening?

Paul Levy: Yeah, I would say that’s the beginning and the end of I mean, that’s, you know, that sounds great. How can anyone argue with that, you know, and then the thing I want to say is that for a lot of us, it’s like, traumatizing to see, oh, my God, I’ve been living in illusion, what I’ve been thinking it’s being real, it was actually not what’s happening, that that can be kind of traumatizing. So for a lot of people, there’s like a counter incentive to like, look at that and to realize, well, I’ve been kind of fooling myself and out of my mind. So it’s actually so much to Scott’s credit, that he has this strength to see how he’s been fooling himself. And to not just dissociate from that, but to really integrate that realization into the heart. That’s that’s really that’s the his credit,

Rick Archer: good. Yeah. They kind of like to think that the word disillusionment has a positive connotation, you know, because if we really want to live a real life, we want to come out of illusion, and therefore it’s good to become disillusioned. You can’t live your whole life thinking that Santa Claus is real, is there’s some value to realizing he isn’t.

Paul Levy: Right. And the thing is, you see the thing that so that’s one person’s experience. But imagine, collectively, there is such an a, you know, in the consensus reality, there’s such an agreement to, like certain things are true, or oh, that this world is objectively exist. And that’s not even necessarily a conscious agreement. But it’s so like, is this thought form or this filter that pervades like, the collective unconscious, that when so many other, you know, people, they’re all holding a particular viewpoint, that creates like an inertia that maybe makes a little bit hard for somebody to step out of it when, like, you know, seven and a half billion people all agree in a certain way it takes incredible courage and strength. You see, one of the ways so in the what in the quantum physics book, I talk about, that they discovered a disease in physics and the diseases what he called what I actually have a chapter on this and and one way that they articulate the the actual, this illness in quantum physics is that we just assumed and took for granted that what our answers to what our ancestors were saying was true. And example being Oh, that this isn’t objective, this world objectively exists. That’s just an assumption that we an unexamined assumption that we’ve just assumed is correct, because we have all the evidence that seemingly proves it. And in the in quantum physics, they said, Oh, we found a solution to the disease. And that is the and the solution is not take anybody else’s idea for reality as being true to actually be an empiricist and do the experiment yourself and see what the nature of your experiences and of course, that’s exactly what the Buddha said the Buddha when he was giving his teachings, he didn’t say, Oh, just have faith in me. Just believe me. He says, no, no, don’t take my word for They’re all do the experiment yourself, to look within your own mind and see if what I’m saying is true. And that’s exactly what quantum physics is saying. Yeah,

Rick Archer: important point. I always say, you know, somebody might recommend a restaurant and say it’s a really great restaurant. And, you know, believing them doesn’t nourish you, you got to go and actually eat the food, you get some benefit from it. Totally. Here’s another question. This is from Marie someplace in the USA, she has, there are some terms such as the natural state and ordinary mind, commonly used to describe awakened realization, that would seem to imply that from the point of view of awakening itself, it really is nothing special. It’s the most obvious ordinary thing or no thing. And it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do at all with extraordinary experiences, expanded states of mind Kundalini arising, etc. Can you please come in?

Paul Levy: Yeah, I fully agree. And when I, you know, I was having with with my awakening, like I shared the one experience with a blind woman, but I had many, many experiences that were way more like out of the ordinary. And actually, some of them were impossible. The blind woman thing, at least was in the realm of possibility, it was an auspicious coincidence of factors. And I would share them with my that I met my teachers, these great Tibetan lamas and other teachers, and I would share with them these amazing experiences. And they would just be very unimpressed. And they would say, well, that’s just phenomena, just don’t focus on that just try to cultivate more compassion. And that was really interesting to me. And so yeah, what what he says, I fully agree with and that as I’m more stabilized my awakening, it’s the natural state, it’s like just who we are. But we don’t have the recognition of it. So then when we’ll have a thought form a thought forms like a dream, we absorb it, it, we identify with it, we react against it, and then we’re all caught without recognizing the context in which all the content in which all the thought forms have rise, the context is the spaciousness, and that’s always there. And that’s always pure. And that’s always accessible. And it’s just a question if we recognize it or not. And then when you recognize it, you just more and more developed that habit of just, you know, abiding in and as that and then all of a sudden, as any thoughts arise, you don’t even have to do anything, they just spontaneously self liberate. It’s the Cleese he in like both quantum physics and Buddhism, they’ll talk about it’s the clinging onto our each moment of I see this in my I’ve seen this in myself so profoundly over the years, to the extent that I’m not embracing and not recognizing just that natural, spacious awareness, that is my nature, if I don’t recognize that, then I’m clinging to whatever thought form or whatever feeling or body sensation or whatever. And that clinging can take the form of identifying with it, pushing it away, whatever. But that clinging itself, then is the root of the mind of samsara. So with each and every moment, we have the opportunity to have the recognition of the nature and just to relax in and as that or to not recognize that. And that that not recognizing that is the clinging, that then creates the seeming problem. So one, I guess one final thing, what the Buddha realized, because he was a physician who really cured his disease of like that clinging, which is the source of the suffering, what he realized was that our situation is not problematic, that, you know, here we’re creating our circumstance to appear as if it’s problematic. And then we try to create the very problem whose source is our own mind. And that becomes that is samsara that is cyclic existence. He saw through that whole process and realized, Oh, our situation is not problematic. And when you stabilize that, then you just then you can, in a way, just be be who you are in a happy, joyful way.

Rick Archer: Yeah. So to Maria’s question, I would say that, you know, there are potential states of experience, either specific experiences or abiding, state abiding states of realization, that if you were to transition into them, suddenly, as you kind of did, Paul, could be quite unnerving and quite overwhelming. And you know, you wouldn’t be able to function normally. But through integration, which takes time, such dates can become normal, and you can be running a business and raising a family and doing everything else. Living from a perspective and you know, which the average person would find extraordinary. But to you, it’s just normal. And because it’s been integrated, it’s been stabilized.

Paul Levy: Yeah, and then it’s like you’re not you’re just an instrument, like with the quantum physics book. I’ll I’ll look at it now. And I’ll go wow, this is really good. Like, I wonder who the author Yeah, yeah. Because in a way Yeah, I wrote the book, but it was like I was just an innocent They’re meant for something to come through. And that’s what I was meaning before about how the real healing has to do with connecting with the creative spirit. You know what, it doesn’t make a difference what medium, you know, and but you know, to just actually connect with that part of ourselves that interfaces with like the transpersonal, or the archetypal dimension in such a way that we become a conduit for stuff to express through us and for us to express our experience. That’s the very healing, you know that if we don’t do that, if we don’t connect in whatever way to that. That’s the place where stuff can get really stuck in us. And it can we can develop, we can become sick.

Rick Archer: Yeah. I get that with BatGap to people saying, Oh, it’s so incredible what you’re doing. And I think, Am I doing anything like, this thing is just kind of happening. Right, right. Totally. Yeah. All right. So I want to shift back to where we were, you know, there’s this argument, I believe it was Rabindranath Tagore and Einstein had an argument about whether or not the moon exists if, if no one’s looking at it, and perhaps others have had that argument. And, and you’re talking about the collective dream. And obviously, there’s some kind of more universal level to the dream than just our individual perspective, or otherwise, the world would be complete anarchy and chaos. I mean, let’s say a stop sign, you know, we see a stop sign, we know what it means we stop at it, other people see the same stop sign, a bird sees the stop sign, and maybe sees it as a place to land. An ant sees a stop sign through its own perceptual lens and climbs up it or something, maybe builds a nest in some little nook or cranny of it. So but that same stop sign is there for all those different forms of life. And if we all go to sleep at night, nobody’s looking at the stop sign, we wake up in the morning and still there. So I mean, does the stops. And let’s say be, let’s say, a million years ago, before, there were sentient beings, there weren’t stop signs. But there were, are a couple of million 100 million years ago, they were just dinosaurs or whatever, those dinosaurs perceive the world very, very differently than human beings now perceive and understand it. And yet the world worked perfectly well, then, the ferns and whatever else we’re growing had the same, you know, cellular structure that firms now have, and, and, you know, performed photosynthesis. And there are all sorts of laws of nature that were operative, that nobody understood, because there wasn’t anybody around to understand them. And yet, you know, the whole thing unfolded and got us to the point where we are now where there are people who have enough sophisticated understanding, and you know, instrumentation and systems of gaining knowledge that we understand a lot of stuff which dinosaurs couldn’t understand. So you know, where I’m going with this question. It’s like, it seems like the universe has has evolved over billions of years, without there being anyone around to really understand or appreciate it as we now do. And yet it wasn’t dependent upon anyone understanding or appreciating it in order for it to evolve, as it did.

Paul Levy: Right. Well, there’s a couple of things that come up with what I think is your question. And one of the things that quantum physics really puts into question is, what is the nature of this thing we call, time, time time, I think of John Wheeler, who says, Here, he says, time is in trouble today. And so this whole idea of time, is the quantum physics is pointing out that in folded within the present moment is both the past and the future, we typically think that the past is causing the present to manifest a certain way. And that’s true to a certain degree. But quantum physics is also saying, but the potential futures are actually extending themselves backwards in time, through the present moment, and they’re influencing the present moment to so both the past and the future are unfolded within the present moment of time. And not only that, but in this present moment of time, when we think about the past that the past doesn’t exist, according to quantum theory in this concretize objective way. But the way we actually consider the past in this moment in the present, actually determines what we can say about the past. So in some way, so here’s the universe, which was given birth to in whatever however, that happened, whether it was the big bang or whether it’s eternal and who knows, you know, I certainly don’t, but the idea being so here we are these billions of years later as observers who are observing this universe, and we’re observing backwards in time as we even think about the past. We’re somehow it’s like completing the circle and giving it away this tangible reality to what happened then Even though we’ve come in linear time after whatever happened happened by us, observing it or thinking about it, were, in a sense, helping to create it to have a certain manifest, pass. So there’s one final thing quantum physics is saying, in this moment, when we think of the past, unlike classical physics, we’ve had one particular past, which led up to this moment, quantum physics is saying, No, it’s poly historic. There are multiple paths that could have been formed and created this very moment. And the act of observing in this moment, actually conjures up that particular past. A funk, no, it’s a function of our observation in this very moment. So the idea being that the idea of past and future because quantum physics is a timeless theory, that it doesn’t even have as part of the equation, something happening over time, because there’s only the Now moment, there’s only the moment of observation. Okay, so it really revisions the whole idea of what actually is this thing we call time?

Rick Archer: Okay, but it’s still, to my mind, it seems to me that there’s a sort of a deeper template or reality that is not incumbent upon anyone’s perception in order for it to exist, or that there is a sort of a intersubjective agreement about so called outer reality, let’s say, there are probably millions of civilizations, which are able to perceive the Andromeda Galaxy, throughout throughout the our galaxy, and perhaps other nearby galaxies. And they all see it there. And they have no way of communicating with each other anything else. But there’s this sort of inner subjective agreement that there’s the Andromeda Galaxy, it’s, it’s exerting certain gravitational pull on the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies and so on. It just seems to me that it’s it kind of, I can’t wrap my head totally around the notion that subjective experience or perception is entirely responsible for bringing the universe into manifestation.

Paul Levy: No, no, but it’s not it’s not if I can jump in, it’s not entirely responsible, because there’s sort of like this interfacing or this this like cooperation. You know, there’s there’s something out there out seemingly outside of us what what I’m pointing at, and what quantum physics is saying is that it just isn’t objective. You can’t think of it as an object separate from us as subject, that there is some sort of interfacing that we’re doing. So it’s and it’s not just entirely dependent on us as that’s part of the equation. The so in the same way, you know, people who think, Oh, well, if I think this means a certain thing, well, that it means that way? Well, it’s not that simple. Because here’s nature, it’s going to give its own answer. And it’s not fully dependent on on the questions you ask or the Met, or the how you’re interpreting the meaning. That’s only part of the equation. There’s like this, this, this collaboration between, you know, outside seeming nature and inside of our own mind. And I guess another idea that comes up with your question, what quantum physics is showing is that this universe, every moment is like actually refreshing itself, every moment in and out of the void in and out of the implicate order. And, and it looks like it’s a continuous world, because it has a seeming continuity. But quantum physics is saying nothing. Oh, each moment, it’s simulating itself with like a slightest little change, but we don’t notice that. But it’s like every moment is a new refreshed universe, instead of because you know, even your your struggle which I go through my own version of that same struggle wreck, the idea of how do you wrap your mind around, you know, that they’re not being objective universe, and that our perception is influencing? Well, that’s an expression of how deeply pervasive the classical point of view, it’s like, really insinuated itself so deeply into the collective unconscious. And that you know, that because it’s the lens that we view everything. And by the, you know, what quantum physics is saying is by the creative power of the mind, when we view things in a certain way, then that’s actually going to influence the whatever we’re observing to manifest that way, which proves to us our point of view, like I was describing, in a feedback loop that self perpetuating who sources our own mind. And all that I’m saying is that that’s happening 24/7 Every moment with everyone, but most of us are doing it unconsciously in a way that is resulting in the incredible destruction that we’re seeing in the world. And all that I’m saying is what about if we just become awake to what actually we’re all doing? And what actually our nature isn’t what actually our creative power that we’re using 24/7 Anyway, but what if we actually do it consciously? That’s in a sense, what what you know, the whole point of my book is,

Rick Archer: okay, well, let me throw Couple more at you. There may have been a time when everybody thought the world was flat, that didn’t make the world flat. Didn’t it didn’t matter what people thought, right? Or Or this one? I mean, let’s say that we somehow get everybody in the world to agree not to look at the moon, does the moon cease to exist? Yet there’s still tides, you know, the tides are happening. So the moon is doing something even though nobody is perceiving it or looking at it. I mean, how do you respond to those kinds of objections?

Paul Levy: Ya know, and those those I appreciate those objections. And, you know, in a way, I’m an empiricist, just in my own life, and that, like I was saying before, I don’t take people’s words for it. And all I know is that if I look at the moon, and I look away, and then I look at the moon, again, it appears to me as if it’s been there the whole time, even when I was looking. That’s the data, that it certainly seems as if it’s really there. And I’m not just assuming as an element of faith going, Oh, no, well, it’s really not there. I mean, I’m still deepening my inquiry into the into it. So I guess I’m not even sure how to answer your question. But I appreciate I mean, you’re actually giving voice to, like a profound inquiry into really taking seriously what quantum physics is saying and trying to say, Well, what about this? And what about that, and I’m just not at the point of being able to, like help you in that way. But I’m right there with you doing my own inquiry in that. But that’s the point to really, with intelligence to inquire into, and to try to understand what is this showing us? And I’m still a work in progress. I’m not saying oh, I have any answers. As a matter of fact, though, one of the most interesting things in my study of quantum physics, is all these physicists are saying what’s way more important, then finding the right answer is asking the right question. You know, and that’s really interesting to me.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I think one thing that might help to resolve it a little bit is that when we get right down to it, you know, there is, is there is, there’s only just one thing, so to speak, it’s not a thing, but it’s all one substance, as it were consciousness. And, you know, we are that the moon is that, as the as the Upanishad, say, you know, that thou art and I am that doubt that all this is that and all that kind of statement. And so, you know, it’s sort of erroneous to think of individual perspectives. Whereas, because ultimately, we’re all just kind of like, lenses through which the same light is shining, you know, apertures, writing what lights

Paul Levy: and if I could just say something that ties into the wetiko idea, because one of the things about what Tico so it’s this, this psychic blindness, it’s a virus of the mind, that influences our perceptions, and how we place meaning on on reality. And one of the things it feeds off of, or the primary thing that feeds off of is fear and polarization and separation. So as an example, if I see like, whatever politician, and if I see, oh, they’re really evil, or bad, or all they have what Tico. And if I think that they have what Tico, and I don’t, then that perspective is an expression that I’ve fallen under the spell of what Tico by by other rising them. So the idea is, is to the extent that we see other and separation, that is to be feeding, you know, what Tico, which is, you know, and that that that will just will just elaborate itself fold that over all the dimensions of our experience, into the evil that’s playing out on our world. So the point is going back to what you were saying is sort of seeing that singularity, seeing that oneness that there is that there, because quantum physics is saying, yeah, there’s no such thing as discrete, independent, intrinsically, intrinsically existent objects or things. There’s actually no thing, there’s nothing that’s the emptiness out of which everything is emerging. And the emptiness and the forms like The Heart Sutra says In Buddhism, the Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, they’re inseparable. And actually, you just see that is to really have that attitude. That’s the coincidence of the opposites that I was talking about an alchemy before. And that’s actually to dissolve what you go and and to begin to see that oneness that interconnectedness. But that oneness, it embraces the multiplicity. It’s not just like, oh, there’s not room for multiplicity, no, it’s such a, an all embracing oneness, that it’s a oneness that embraces the fact that on one level, there is seeming separation, but to not get entranced by the separation and thinking that that’s the objective reality, or that’s the fall under the spell of your own mind.

Rick Archer: Yeah. One metaphor that came to mind as you’re speaking is that you know, the, the heart cell might say, I hate those liver cells. They’re such jerks. You know, And, you know, I wish they would die or something. But really, it’s all one body. And so the heart cell is talking about part of itself. And yet sort of kind of separating in its own mind.

Paul Levy: That’s and that’s what’s happening in the body politic with the people, the 1%, or whoever the people with the multibillionaires. They’re wanting to just like that heart cell. Just imagine if that heart cell said don’t know, I want all of the bodies nutrients just for myself, it’ll die more important. Yeah, the whole organism will die. And that’s actually what we’re counting out. Yeah, yeah. And that’s and that and what Tico is a form of it’s a psychic form of cancer, in that it’ll metastasize. It will actually it’ll take over the executive function of the psyche in such a way that all of the healthy parts of the psyche become in service to the pet to the pathogen to the what Tico pathogen in such a way that we can appear to be normal, but we’re actually feeding the disease. So one way of thinking about it, it’s like a tapeworm, a psychic tapeworm, like a parasite that gets into our system. And when you have a tapeworm, it will secrete chemicals, where you’ll crave food that will feed the tapeworm, the tapeworm grows bigger and bigger until it until it kills the host, which is you, but it doesn’t want to do that too soon, or else it’ll suffer the inconvenience of having to find another host. So that’s another way of describing what Tico and I’m pointing out that that what Tico that is informing that’s informed science. And that’s where, in a way, you see, okay, I’m glad I remember this. Quantum physics is a is a spiritual treasure. That’s one of the things I point at. And in Tibetan Buddhism, the there’s a lineage where they have this idea of a spiritual treasure. It’s called Terra and Terra, it’s actually not just a woowoo, fairytale thing, it’s actually studied by scholars at, you know, the great enlightened energy, it would actually plant in the universe, these hidden treasures were these teachings or objects that had blessing power, and they would this enlightened energy would discover the people who are destined to, you know, bring forth and discover the terrible the hidden treasure. Centuries later, the person destined to discover it would find the hidden treasure at exactly the right moment when it was needed, when there was a one sidedness when there was an unconsciousness in the community, and the person would discover the hidden treasure. And that would like you know, help people to like to remember and to get back in balance. And to wake up. Well, I’m pointing out now I’m not I have no authorization to say, oh, that this is a ter Ma, that’s a hidden treasure. I’m not authorized at all to do that. But what I am authorized to do is just to point out everything I know about terma. And everything I know about quantum physics, from all indications, quantum physics seems to be a modern day form of a terma, that our species has literally dreamed up into manifestation through the medium of science, to help us get more imbalanced and to awaken the incredible creative power that we have in us that we’ve been unconscious of.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, that kind of jumped out at me when I was reading your book, the idea that their ideas, or you know, facets of knowledge, that are inherent are in the fundamental nature of the universe, that are just awaiting the emergence of someone who is capable of appreciating and understanding and expressing them. And I think that happens in so many different fields. I mean, so many great composers have said that they didn’t feel like they can post anything, they just almost like took notation of some beautiful symphony that came through. Or, you know, people like I always felt like people like Steven Spielberg, or George Lucas, or some of these guys, they, there’s something larger than their individual intelligence in the movies they created and the impact that that had on the collective consciousness, it was like an idea who which needed to be propagated in collective consciousness, such as, you know, the force, and so that these, this great career would come for larger than than just the capabilities of any one man to dream up because of the oversized influence or impact it has on the whole world. And, you know, Einstein, you know, what, what he came up with in terms of relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. And it just, we could go on and on all day, citing examples of ideas whose time had come, but which already had existed in a latent form, awaiting the opportunity to sprout, you know, just like it does in the spring. Totally.

Paul Levy: Okay, so, I’m back and I have I have actually what you just said, I have a response to it, if I may.

Rick Archer: Yeah. If we say that I mean, just show you tell you one quick thing. There’s a verse in the Rig Veda, which I won’t bother with the Sanskrit and I don’t even know if I can remember all the Sanskrit but the gist of it is that the the impulses of intelligence which structure creation, reside in the transcendental Akasha, their ritual, Akshay they occur, and that those who know that field, those impulses of intelligence support them. And but those who don’t know that field, they can’t do anything for that individual. So anyway, I’ve loosely isolated it. But that’s the same concept we’re talking about here.

Paul Levy: Right. And for me, so what what that brings up in me going back to when I was, you know, hospitalized in the psychiatric hospitals, you know, from the psychiatric point of view, it would have been a successful treatment, if I would have subscribed to their viewpoint. And just think about the madness of this. And their viewpoint that they wanted me to agree to was that, oh, I’m mentally ill, and I’ll have this mental illness for the rest of my life, and I’ll have to be on medication for the rest of my life, which would have completely aborted I never would have found my voice, my work I would have, I wouldn’t have written my books, and all that. And but I knew that no, wait a second, something deeper, something beyond myself is coming through me. And not, you know, and of course, there’s a danger of being inflated and Megalo maniacal and thinking, Oh, I’m something special. But no, I wasn’t feeling that. You know, I was actually just like having the recognition of what you were just pointing out that there was some sort of deeper non local field of intelligence that we’re all potential instruments for. And when we get out of our own way, and let our light shine that year, we all have a contribution to make and has to do with what is our vocation? What is our mission? Who are we what are we here to do. And interestingly, that has to do with like, you know, there’s a word di Mon, and the DI Ma, the guidance, Spirit or the inner voice. And it has to do with finding the genius and finding your calling and hearing the voice and on your angel and all those things. But the point being is that if you don’t get in relationship to that time on, which is a higher dimensional energy, that can literally take you over, and then you can, you know, become possessed by it. If you don’t get in, if you don’t honor it and get into conscious relationship with it, it becomes a demon. And so the idea being that we all end the diamond has to do with the calling. And the calling has to do with a shaman, a shaman, somebody, never in a million years, if they were in their right mind would decide to become a shaman. Oh, I’m going to Shama in graduate school, or, you know, taking a weekend workshop and I’m getting certified as a shaman, it doesn’t work that way, you get called by the Spirit by some higher dimension, you know, higher dimensional energy. And if you don’t ascend and agree and cooperate, that’s when you can get sick and die. And so one way of understanding my experience, and a lot of our experience is that like some sort of like this demonic energy, this spirit, called me through my suffering, and I was either going to just split off or become possessed by the pathology of it. Because with awakening, there’s always a combination of pathological elements, and healthy elements, because it’s our abuse and trauma and wounding that catalyzes, the awakening, you know, but the point is to more and more, just identify with the healthy part, and then let the pathological part just naturally fall away. And so the idea being is that, you know, when that dime on, which is the calling of the shaman of the healer, of the creative artist, you need to really honor that and in a way off yourself to be an instrument for that. And that’s what I keep on talking about being creative, to let something higher than your own conscious ego come through, that’s going to be healing for you, and it’s going to be of benefit for other people.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And I think you have to, you know, take efforts, make efforts to make yourself a fit instrument. It’s not just going to happen necessarily. I mean, everybody says, I want to know what my purpose is, and all this stuff. But you know, Jesus said, first, Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added unto thee. You know, Lord Krishna in the year it says, you know, first transcend the relative field then established in being perform action. So there’s always this principle of, you know, going, kind of pulling the arrow back on the bow before trying to shoot it.

Paul Levy: Yeah, yeah. And the idea of I mean, in Tibetan Buddhist practice, you’re continually purifying yourselves to be an appropriate you know, container and vessel for the teachings for the realization to come through. But the interesting thing that that verse you just quoted, you like to seek ye first the kingdom and then you’ll get everything. He didn’t say, oh, when you find the kingdom, you’ll get everything he said, Seek ye first the kingdom. And the idea being it’s a seeking itself. It’s the turning our intention towards prioritizing. You know this spiritual point of view of like, who are we, that that that that itself, in a sense becomes not just a means to an end, but that itself becomes the end itself? That’s very interesting.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And there’s something in my original question, which I don’t think we’ve quite addressed yet, which is that there, you know, when I was referencing various scientists and musicians, and movie makers, and so on, who have been conduits for some deeper knowledge to come into the world, you know, it’s just just the point that there’s a kind of a treasure trove of possibilities, residing in whatever deep level of creation they reside. And anyone speaking in terms of our current situation, I’m quite sure that there are solutions to every problem, which faces humanity and Environment, Health and economics and every other field you could consider. But how do we access those things? And how do we become? How do we become conduits for those solutions?

Paul Levy: What it one of the things and there’s a lot of answers were like a lot of perspectives to get into the answer with that, but what came up in me is that so here, quantum physics is pointing out consciousness is primary, you know, this role it’s playing in, in the universe, in the manifestation in the creation of the universe. And one other way of saying that is that so the opposites here’s matter here is the physical world, here’s matter. And here’s, here’s mind, that you begin to realize, Oh, wow. Similar, like when you have a dream, and you have lucidity, and a dream, oh, when you have that lucid moment, you realize you’re inside of your psyche, that this world is, in a sense, psyche. And so this world, in a sense, is a reflection of what’s going on inside of us. That’s to connect, we’d like the deeper, sort of like, the synchronistic matrix, that’s always informing things. And that’s to realize the dreamlike nature, when you realize that the dreamlike nature that’s also to see the non local field, that’s to see the interconnectedness, the interdependence, all of a sudden, that’s where the compassion comes in. But when that’s in a way, the one answer for all of those, you know, crises, because the sense that we’re not separate, that we actually depend on each other for our survival, that we can actually help each other, that, you know, because to the extent that we’re in trance, and thinking we exist separate, and I just want to get me in mind and all that stuff. You know, that whole that narcissistic, that self centered point of view, which is a self propagating idea, you know, and that’s, that’s like to be under the sway of the wetiko idea. But the whole sense of actually seeing that seeing the true nature of this situation, which is that we actually, that there is no separation, it’s not like we have to create that, we just have to recognize that that is the nature of our situation, I would say that’s like the fundamental solution. Because out of that, then everything changes. It’s kind of like this, it’s kind of like, say, you have a big mess, and you’re typing on your computer and everything’s coming out wrong. Well, if your fingers are one thing, or to the right, yeah, every is going to look like an unbelievable disaster, and oh, my God, this solution is going to be so unbelievably challenging and difficult. But the solution is just to move your fingers one key over, and then everything just magically, it resolves, it’s a similar thing to us, that we actually have been trained to have like this, this, this mistaken idea of who we are. And that’s in a sense, what my work and what Tico with work with quantum physics is actually helping to unlock

Rick Archer: it. One thing I liked in your book is the references I guess, from Wheeler and others that fundamentally, nature is very simple. And the more the deeper you go, the simpler gets. And, and if that is true, then ultimately, the solutions to all the problems are not going to be complex, the ultimate kind of core to all solutions is going to be simple, you know, latch on to that. And the complexities will kind of fall into place, like you said, with the keyboard shift thing, you know, that which seemed in trend to impossibly complex, and insoluble and intractable will all sudden seem like, oh, this makes sense. We can do this.

Paul Levy: And you see, the thing is for any if there’s any one person who does that, who integrates sufficiently to the point where they, you know, they connect with their nature of the mind or ordinary mind or however you whatever work you put on it. And, and they really embody that and they’ve stabilized that realization, and then hanging out with other people who also, you know, have that same experience. It’s contagious. Yeah, in the same way that what Tico is contagious. When you have these insights. It creates It’s a contagious feel that gets really potentiate it for more synchronistic phenomena to happen for more this realization for more healing to happen, and like one, like a perfect image to express that, say if you’re in a dream, right at night, and say if you as the dream ego have the realization that you’re dreaming and you have lucidity. Okay, that’s one thing. But imagine then, if other of your dream characters in the dream, also have that realization, of Oh, wow, we’re having a mash our dream and you come together and hang out. And you you like, you know, contemplate Oh, well, what are we what are we discovering? Well, I would imagine you would say something like, well, we’re discovering that this dream world we’re in this universe, is actually it’s nothing other than we’re dreaming it up moment by moment into materialization, to manifest the way it is. And as we more and more deepened our understanding of that we can get in phase with each other and change the way this this dream is happening. Now I’m describing a night dream. But that’s totally applicable to the waking dream, when more and more of us hang out with each other, and connect with our true nature and connect with that genius that we have to actually consciously call forth and create reality in a way that’s more in alignment with who we are. And we could connect with other people, we can activate the collective genius, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, in a way where we can, in a real way, change the world. And that’s, that’s quantum physics is saying, that’s within the realm of the possible, you know, and, and to, to, you know, to entertain even that that’s possible, is so inspiring for people, because one of the deep dangers in our day and age, is to fall into despair and pessimism and depression. And then we’re unwittingly feeding the very darkness, that we’re like, you know, you know, experiencing out there.

Rick Archer: Yeah, when I think about different changes that have taken place in this society, such as the ending of slavery, or, you know, women’s right to vote, or gay marriage or any number of things, it’s, it’s sort of like, it wasn’t top down, really, that these things happen. Sure, laws were enacted and Emancipation Proclamation was signed, and so on, and so forth. But it seems like there was a shift in collective consciousness, which then made it possible for politicians to pass the laws.

Paul Levy: Right, and that’s shifting collective consciousness that started with with the individual. So when you get really down to it, like historically, and you study this stuff, it’s not just like, oh, yeah, this law really changed things. No, like you were saying it’s a function of a change in consciousness. But that change in consciousness started in each individual perfectly. Right, you know, and that’s, so that’s really, I think, an important point, because that’s like really pointing to each and every one of us that profound importance of us doing our own inner work, both psychologically and from the spiritual point of view. And that us doing that is non locally having an effect on the whole field.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, expecting the government to do something that’s going to change the whole society, it’s kind of like, expecting to make a forest green by spray painting it, you know, by flying airplanes over, you know, with green paint, but really, each individual tree has to become healthy, and then boom, you have a green forest.

Paul Levy: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s absolutely true. And so that’s where, you know, like, for example, with like, the wetiko idea of the quantum physics idea, it’s really pointing at the profound importance of any one of us, you know, sort of, however you say it owning our shadow or, you know, seeing the dreamlike nature. And, and you know, and I want to point out the thing with what Tico it’s a Native American term, but every spiritual tradition has something, well, they have something like that. I mean, that’s what makes them this wisdom tradition, is if they have a symbol system, pointing out what Tico because what Tico, being that it works through the ego through the blind spot through the unconscious, it can only operate the the shadow in other words, as long as it’s not seen, just like a vampire, when you know, when the light comes up, vampire has no power, the same thing when you see what Tico how it operates out in the world, through the non local field through our reactions to the evil we’re seeing out there. And through our own mind, when you actually add consciousness to how what Tico works. Not only does it take away any power it has it has over us, but we then empower ourselves. So you know, it’s kind of like I’ve had this recurring dream of like that I’ll be like, on the lookout for this vampire with a number of people. And that was one dream of these was the morning Two of my teachers were coming to visit from Tibet. And I guess I was all excited like well woken up by this incredible dream where we’re searching for this vampire that’s amidst us, you know? And I see him and I recognize him. And I start I think I started saying like, Oh yeah, no, I think we’re all chanting Bela Lugosi, Bela Lugosi, you know, the guy who played Dracula.

Rick Archer: Robert Pattinson, for that matter. Okay, yeah.

Paul Levy: So, and I see the vampire. And I tried pointing him out to other people in the dream, but no one else can see him. And in a way I was realizing, and that dream was like, 20 years ago, when I was realizing, oh, that dream is very alive in my psyche, and it’s unfolding more and more. And as I gain fluency, and as I gain articulate, or being able to articulate this stuff, I’m more and more able to turn people on to that vampire that I’m seeing. And that vampire is once you go, and and how its operating. You know, in each one of us, like to the extent I’m not writing is like, oh, there’s this what Chico disease and I’m like a healer, and I’m free of it. No, I’ve been infected with what Tico in every molecule of my body, but yet somehow I’ve had whatever the strength or something, to, in a sense, not only not be killed by it, but to more and more transmuted into something positive. And that’s what enabled me to write my books. And that’s like the deeper archetypal template for any of us that, you know, part of like the archetype of the shaman. What does the shaman do, they get in, they take on the illness of the community of the client, they literally fall ill themselves. But if they’re an accomplished shaman, they’re able to gradually metabolize and assimilate and integrate and transmute that illness, into healing. And then non locally, the person, the client, or the community gets healed through the shaman doing that the point is, we’re all shamans and training every single one of us. And that helps us to recontextualize our subjective experience and take it out of the realm of pathology and an understanding. Oh, yeah, there’s a deeper spiritual process that we’re all and the shaman that is the wounded healer. I just want to make that.

Rick Archer: Okay, cool. A rather long question came in and Irene spent some time editing it down, and she feels like it’s a good one. I haven’t read it yet. But here we go. I’m gonna read it to you. This is from Florence. I don’t know her location. She asks, I’m very experienced with lucid dreams and expanded states of awareness. I experienced that the only way to change the personal dream is to transcend desires. Without desires and losses we live in a in a perceptual experience of now, there is peace of God, well being and infinite possibilities when you aren’t attached to an outcome. However, I’m left with no direction. Once I get here, the outside world has not changed and ego has to engage in order to make choices or Karma creates no better choices. I’m not enlightened enough to change physical reality. How do you know what to do? Once you get to a detached state? I understand that there is another force that guides and manifests in all sorts of amazing ways. But what do you do if there is no desire or the desires leave? No better direction? Almost. Almost done. Let me finish. What do you do with nothing propelling you such as synchronicity, or spontaneous right action, or any one of those magical things? Just sitting in awareness of awareness goes nowhere for me. And this is observing the dream. It’s not creating the dream you want to live or better dream? What do you do, right?

Paul Levy: Yeah, no, I, I really appreciate that question. And what it brings up for me is my own experience, when all have these lucid dreams, and they’re all these these, you know, sort of a degree of lucidity. There are some dreams we’re all have some lucidity and still think there’s like evil negative energies. And then I’ll have to like deal with that and transmute that in the lucid dream. But then there are these lucid dreams I’ll have where it’ll be kind of full lucidity. And it was the very first day of the lucid dreams. I had you 30 something years ago, where as soon as I had the realization of lucidity, and it was a full realization of lucidity. I mean, as much as I could imagine at that point, spontaneously. I began chanting Omani pemi. Home, the monitor of compassion. Now, it’s interesting. It was so long ago, this was like over I think over 35 years ago, that it was before I even started doing any sort of, of these Mantra practices and Tibetan Buddhism. So I didn’t even really, I haven’t didn’t have experience with that Mantra. And now that Mantra is the Mantra of compassion. Now, when Buddhism they say that it’s real awakening, it’s always the combination of two factors of emptiness and compassion. Now, emptiness, that’s the lucidity that’s to recognize there’s nothing objective and Trinsic we independently existing separate from our own mind, that’s the lucidity and compassion will Omani pemi home is the Mantra of compassion. So the in Buddhism they’ll talk about and this is also interesting, and this ties in with compassion, peace, that whenever any student starts doing practice, they always cultivate what’s called bodhichitta The heart of awakening. And this is like, you know the good altruistic heart of compassion. And they say, and that’s the start of your of when a beginning person starts to do practice, you have to cultivate the bodhichitta. Then they say when you become fully, totally and utterly enlightened, what you get is bodhichitta. So it’s the same thing at the beginning of the end, is the bodhichitta. And the bodhichitta is that heart of compassion. So the point being, is that yeah, if you have you know, this genuine like, you know, sort of awakening this lucidity in the night dream and the waking dream, and you’re not sure yet, what do I do? You know, what do I whatever? Well, the idea being that the energetic expression of that realization, if it’s genuine lucidity is compassion is the bodhichitta. And then how do you express that? Well, how does that inform your behavior? That’s up to you. That’s where you need to get creative. But you know, just your and your whole question I really appreciate. But it just, you know, I was flooded with, oh, that has to do with bodhichitta, and compassion, and that I imagined, at least in my imagination, that will inform what there is to do in each and every moment.

Rick Archer: I just want to add in case Florence finds it useful that in my experience, there’s, there’s a transition that takes place from feeling that one is an individual. And as such, one is in control of what happens to kind of the other pole, where one realizes that one is not an individual or as much more than an individual and something else is predominantly in control. There’s a there’s a Vedic phrase, Brahman is the charioteer. So you know going from I am the territory to prominence a charity, or Brahman being cosmic intelligence, or Universal Intelligence. And this transition doesn’t happen overnight doesn’t happen with a snap of your fingers. It takes time. And as it as it progresses, there can be vacillation and sort of swinging to, you know, the ease of having Brahman be the charioteer, to the difficulty of, of holding the reins yourself. And you know, when kind of swings back and forth, and that can be very uncomfortable. But as time goes on, it eventually shifts and there’s a sort of a fluidity or an ephah, effortlessness to life. And there’s still going to be, you know, individual little things cropping up here and there, but they become much more in the backseat, and the sort of the cosmic flow of things becomes much more characteristic or predominant in your life. So it’s a matter of culturing, you know, this and through whatever practice you find effective and having patience and just kind of keep on keeping on. And can I say something? Yeah, please. Yeah,

Paul Levy: go what you said rec was so great. I just loved it. It made me one association, is because I have so many people who say, Oh, I have these lucid dreams, and then I can control the dream. And right away, I can’t Oh, they’re not really having lucidity. If they’re controlling the dream, because who’s the you who’s controlling the dream? Really lucid? That’s, that’s the that’s what you see through that the you who you’ve been, you know, having an identification with? That’s just a model for who you are. That’s not who you are. So what I would point out to them as Yeah, it’s not like that you’re able to control the dream, what you’re able to control is yourself.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And I would say that if, if you the individual are controlling the dream, whether the night dream, or the Daydream that we’re all having, then you’re in trouble, because the the, the intelligence of the EU is extremely small compared to the intelligence governing the universe. So it would be nice if that intelligence, were running the show, and you were just showing how come you were just along for the ride, you know, not isolated, hold that.

Paul Levy: Totally, totally. And that was why you like when I was saying before, like with a quantum physics book, you know, when I would, when I would look at it, I would be like, wow, like, Who, who, you know, who was the author of this, because it literally felt like some sort of like intelligence was just, you know, that was way smarter than me was coming through. And I was just offering in a way I was offering myself as a vessel for this information to come through. And coinciding with that I also had a strange feeling a lot. And the feeling was, I could imagine that people who would get in the future would get to be the readers of the book. And I was I was feeling unwell. Whether this was total hallucination, I’m willing to own that. I was imagining, they were literally dreaming me up in the present moment that I was in to find the words to write into the book that they would want to read 10 years down the road. So that was just an interesting experience that I was having. Yeah,

Rick Archer: you know, I kind of got that feeling. I was I was reading the book and I’m not finished reading it, but I want to, and that is that I thought I could never write a book like this. And I don’t know Paul very well, but But I don’t think he’s smart enough to write a book like this either.

Paul Levy: Yeah, no, that’s I fully agree.

Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s like, you know, you kind of got inspired and something came through. Right? No,

Paul Levy: that’s exactly what I’ll say. I’ll say something like I’ll say to people, because I don’t like tooting my own horn. But I say yeah, like something came through this book, you should look at it.

Rick Archer: Hey, just out of curiosity, how did sting the musician? Find out about the book because you have a little quote from him the quantum revolution, Revelation ism is mind blowing.

Paul Levy: Yeah, so staying, you know, I’ve known him over maybe 12 years, or 13 years or something like that. And he contacted me, like, one day, I’ll never forget, I woke up. And there was an email in my inbox from staying saying, Hey, I love your work on backstage, he was, you know, somewhere overseas, giving a concert. And I remember that, that my girlfriend at the time, she thought, Oh, she was how do you know what’s really staying and blah, blah, blah, we began corresponding and then I’ve met him, you know, a few times. And he’s a big supporter of my work. He’s endorsed the last three books I’ve written. And we correspond a lot and everything that I that I, you know, he’ll he’ll read and, and all that. And yeah, I just feel really, really fortunate, because I think so highly of him. He’s a super amazing, beautiful, very intelligent guy really talks about bodhichitta. I mean, I just feel like he’s really in whatever way he can, is here to serve. And I think when he when he connects with somebody who’s doing work that he thinks is helpful, he’ll do anything he can to support. So I just feel really fortunate.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And you also have a foreword from Jean Houston, whom I’ll be interviewing in a few weeks. So that’s cool that she it’s a beautiful forward to. Anyway, I really sound like I’m like, big fan of yours here. And I am. I mean, I really appreciate what you’ve written here and have appreciated this conversation. And you know, I’m not here to sell people’s books. But this was it was it’s a good read if you’re into this kind of thing, which I am. And or at least I tried to be like you will a layman who is not really a scientist, but who finds this. This topic. Fascinating.

Paul Levy: Yeah, and the thing I just want to say to as a layperson, I’m not a physicist. So there’s no you know, if I pick up a physics books, and there’s equations and math and all that stuff, that’s like, that’s not my thing. You know, yeah. And I have one, there’s one mathematical equation in the book, and it’s three, three plus one equals four. That’s the one equation and it’s an alchemical maxim that I talk about, but there’s no so it’s totally for the Layperson. And I have like a bunch of friends who are not scientists at all, and they’re just, they’re getting so psycho aggravated, because in a way, the book is like a psychedelic, I openly talk about this, in, in the sense that, you know, if you’re open to this sort of thing, you know, it can really by psycho activating it activates the psyche, it really can, you know, like, when you take a medicine, it really can, you know, can expand your awareness, I think, least I hope that’s what comes through the book.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, before Paul, and I started this interview, I was talking about how we might do it. And I was saying, Well, you have these two sections in the book, two major parts. And at the end of each one, there’s a summary of key points in that part. And I thought, maybe I’ll just read each key point, and then we’ll talk about it. But what ended up happening is we talked about all kinds of things just in a more organic way, slowly, I just appreciate that. I think we probably covered a lot of the things we would have covered if I’d read those things point by point for sure. Yeah. So I hope we’ve given people a taste. And, you know, Buddha at the Gas Pump is kind of a smorgasbord. And each week, a new dish is brought out and, and, you know, maybe not all dishes appeal to all people. But what I usually find is that, you know, that, you know, all of the interviews appeal to some people. And I think this one will appeal to quite a few because it covers some pretty universal themes. And I think some things that are germane to all of us in our possibly critically important to the survival of our species.

Paul Levy: Yeah, and I just so I really appreciate Rick, you know, giving me the invitation to come on and talking with me. So thank you.

Rick Archer: It’s great fun. So thanks, Paul. Um, so let me just make some wrap up points. You’ve been listening to an interview with Paul Levy. And probably everyone listening to this realizes this is an ongoing series of interviews, and there will have been many and there will be many more. If you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews page. If you’d like to be notified of future ones, subscribe to the YouTube channel that helps and I think there’s two different levels of subscription you can do it in a certain way that YouTube will definitely notify you when a new thing is posted. But better yet, just go to batgap.com and sign up to be notified by email. Whenever I post a new interview. I send out an email about once a week. And you can always unsubscribe from that if you’d like. And while you’re there, check out the other menus. There’s an audio podcast of this and a bunch of other things you may find interesting if you check out the different menus. So thanks for listening or watching and thank you, Paul. Next week, I’ll be speaking with you. Yeah, thank you. I’ll be speaking with a woman who has written a book called the spiritual life of animals, which is kind of a different topic that than I have than I have you covered in any previous interview. And a lot of people are animal lovers. We are a lot of people that listen to this and a good friend of mine, who always watches BatGap hands or BookOut like candy. He actually has a horse whisperer, he trained with a guy who about whom that movie was made. And so I’m kind of interested to dive into what she has to say and that’s what we’ll do next week. So thanks again. Thanks for listening and watching. See you next time.