Summary
Paul Levy discusses spiritual awakening arising through suffering, including the difficulty of distinguishing transformative experiences from mental illness. He explores interconnectedness, the dreamlike nature of reality, Kundalini energy, creativity, and the need for compassionate support and integration.
Questions This Interview Explores
- How can spiritual awakening be distinguished from mental illness?
- What can cause a spiritual awakening, and how can intense experiences be integrated?
- How can meditation help someone work with deep suffering?
- Why is creativity important during spiritual emergence?
- How are individual healing and collective suffering connected?
Key takeaways
- Suffering can become a doorway to awakening when it is met with awareness instead of avoidance.
- Meditation can create distance from thoughts and reveal a spacious witnessing awareness.
- Awakening may initially be overwhelming and require careful support and integration.
- Creative expression can help transform intense inner experiences into healing.
- Personal wounds and collective suffering are deeply intertwined.
- Spiritual experiences should not automatically be reduced to biochemical problems.
Transcript
Rick: 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 going to wait until I’m 70,” which isn’t that far off.
Anyway, if you haven’t heard this show before and you’d like to check out previous ones, there are about 465 to check out. Go to www.batgap.com 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 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 Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, and the final book, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis. George W. Bush seems quite sane now by comparison.
He is the founder of the Awakening in the Dream community in Portland, Oregon. Paul is 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: Hi. I am so happy to be here, Rick. Thank you.
Rick: Yeah, happy to have you. I really enjoyed getting to know you over the past week through your book and various recordings that I listened to. Since most of those who are listening won’t know anything about you, before we dive into your book, which is about quantum mechanics and the topic of wetiko, which you’ll have to explain, let’s hear a little bit about you so people can get a sense of your background.
✨ Paul’s awakening and hospitalization
Paul: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that, because my background is not typical. When I was in my early 20s, I had this spiritual awakening that came out of intense suffering that I was going through. How I dealt with this suffering was to go into it, to really assume the position of trying to be sort of the observer.
By doing that, which is just doing spiritual meditation practice—I was doing it for maybe about four hours a day for close to a couple of years—it was the only thing that I found that was helping to alleviate my suffering.
Rick: During those four hours, were you just sort of feeling the suffering even more acutely, but kind of grinning and bearing it, so to speak, and just powering on through?
Paul: No, it wasn’t so much like powering on through. It was just assuming the point of view of, 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, just stepping back and watching. Whenever a thought came up, I would notice it as a thought and just let it go.
It was more and more just assuming the position of that spacious awareness that was witnessing. That’s really what I was doing. That was the only thing I had figured out.
I guess, just to be a little bit more specific, the suffering was because my father wound up being a really sick man from an emotional point of view. Like any person who hasn’t integrated their abuse, he had acted it out—I’m the only child—onto me. That was the suffering, and so many of us can relate to that.
By doing that meditation, after almost two years, I got hit by a bolt of lightning. But it wasn’t from outside, in the sky. 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 personality change just overnight—that I got thrown in a mental hospital.
Rick: Let me stop you here for a second. When you say “bolt of lightning,” 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?
Paul: Yeah, it was not metaphorical. It was definitely Kundalini—I mean, that became clear to me. It was just out of the blue, as if an actual bolt of lightning came into my brain and just ignited. That was the subjective experience. All of a sudden, I was just sitting in meditation, and boom, this lightning bolt ignited in my mind.
Kundalini and the Collective Dream
It was definitely Kundalini. Within hours of that happening, what happened for me on the internal plane was that I began to see, “Oh, this is some sort of collective dream. We’re all interconnected and interdependent, and we’re co-creating this together.”
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 couldn’t contain how excited I was at what I was realizing. So that was the first hospitalization, and within a minute—
Rick: So you were kind of shouting it from the rooftops, so to speak?
Paul: Yeah, sort of shouting it from the rooftop, but not quite like that. It was just that all of a sudden I went from being this normal, ordinary, conditioned person to feeling like the creativity of the universe was flowing through me at every moment, and having this realization of, “Oh my God, this is a collective dream.”
It was just overwhelming. I would say that I couldn’t possibly have been prepared for what I was realizing, because I was just an ordinary person. I was in my—like, I was 24 at that point.
The thing is, within a minute of getting—so I was brought by ambulance to this hospital—and within a minute I had this synchronistic, the most synchronistic event, I think, or one of the most, that had ever happened in my life. It totally changed the whole trajectory of my life within one minute of being in that hospital. I don’t know if maybe I should share that.
Rick: Was that about the blind woman?
Paul: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, why don’t you tell that? I thought that was kind of interesting.
Paul: Yeah, you could say that. So I get brought in by ambulance to Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. This is in 1981, and they bring me—it’s at night, probably after dinner—and they bring me into this lounge for the psychiatric patients.
I’m in this complete, altered, extreme state, and I see this woman, an older woman, and she’s blind. Her eyes are totally opaque. I just find myself, without even thinking, going right up to her. I look in her eyes, and out of my mouth, as if I’ve been given the script to say, just spontaneously come the words, “All you have to do to see is open your eyes and look.”
All you have to do to see is open your eyes and look.
I keep repeating those words and getting closer to her. The whole thing took about a minute, and in front of my eyes, she regained her sight. At that moment, as if it was choreographed, they came and took me and strapped me up on a bed. That was where I spent the night, just strapped up on a bed.
I knew that I was having a spiritual awakening. I mean, it couldn’t have been more obvious to me. And, you know—
Rick: Let me ask you about the woman before we go on. You say her eyes were all occluded—the lenses were opaque or something—and yet she suddenly gained the ability to see. If you looked at her eyes, did they become clear?
Paul: Yeah. It was like night and day. It was like seeing a person whose eyes are clearly blind, with no vision, just dead, to all of a sudden these radiant, luminous eyes that were filled with the ability to see.
Here’s how that got confirmed. When they unstrapped me the next morning, they put me in a room, and coincidentally, the only other person in the room was this blind person. She’s sitting there across the table from me, and she’s just smiling from ear to ear, not saying a word.
Then, all of a sudden, my heart chakra opened. 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.”
Somehow, I had, in whatever way, seen that, and it was clear to me that, “Oh, she was ready to heal.” I was sent by central casting to pick up the role of just saying my lines, which I said properly, and that helped her to step out of her blindness and to heal her inner blindness.
Then she says to me—the only word she ever said to me—”Aren’t you going to answer the phone call from…” and she mentions my father’s name. Within seconds, the nurse comes into the room and says to me that my father was on the phone, because my parents had just heard I had had a psychotic break and was hospitalized.
So that’s sort of that synchronicity story. Within three days, I got out of that hospital because the doctor in charge of me reflected, “Hey, you have to show us that you’re not completely insane, or we’re going to keep you here for a really long time.”
I took that in, and it was spring and beautiful outside. 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.
He literally said to me, “Well, you can go. You can leave.” 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, “The fact that I could do that—that I could be fluid in my identity and just step into being normal—to him, that proved that I wasn’t crazy.”
Rick: Interesting.
Paul: Yeah.
Rick: Now, that wasn’t your only hospitalization, was it? Weren’t there subsequent admissions?
Paul: Yeah, yeah. So 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 profound was happening. All my friends thought, “Oh, Paul just had a nervous breakdown, a psychotic break,” so I knew I had to find somebody to talk to who understood.
I found out about this Buddhist monk in San Francisco, whom I went to tell what had happened. 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, has just arrived in town. You should get his blessings.” So I went, and we had an incredible connection, and I got his blessings.
But over that next year and a half, maybe two years, something like that, I was hospitalized three or four times, 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 wild awakening, and I hadn’t integrated it enough to figure out how not to freak people out.
Psychiatric Diagnoses and Lifelong Medication
A number of times, three or four times, I got hospitalized, medicated, and diagnosed. The psychiatrists guaranteed that I had this chemical imbalance that had just been discovered. The DSM-III had come out one year before, and they guaranteed that I had this mental illness, that I would have it for the rest of my life, and that I would need to be on medication until my dying breath, or I would have a psychotic break immediately.
I should just comment that I haven’t been on any medication for about 35 years, with no episodes.
Rick: Did they make you take it for a while?
Paul: Yeah, they made me take it for a number of months, and it was horrible.
It must have been really dulling. I remember there was one point when they made me take this antipsychotic, and I remember thinking, “This is an anti-creative,” because I’m a creative person. We’re all creative. So I quickly figured out how to take myself off it and how to appear normal so that I could continue the awakening.
But the tragic part of the awakening was that it totally destroyed my family. My parents bought into the psychiatric explanation. They saw doctors as authority figures, so they both died thinking, “Oh, Paul’s just in denial of his illness.” The rest of my family has excommunicated me because, “Oh, Paul is just this mentally ill person who can’t deal with it. He’s crazy.”
So it had a tragic aspect, but I’ve been really fortunate in that I have this huge soul family, and I’ve continued my awakening and deepened my work.
Rick: Do you have times even now when you feel like you’re not quite integrated, and you get a little nutty and need to integrate somehow?
Paul: Well, totally. I mean, that’s every day, but that’s normal. I would be really suspicious if somebody said, “Oh, they don’t have those moments,” because for me, I’m a work in progress, like all of us.
I’m a work in progress, like all of us.
That’s what I mean about being this wounded healer. There’s this incredible wound, and instead of avoiding it or doing drugs or drinking or whatever one does to avoid experiencing that pain, I sit with it for hours and hours a day, and that’s the source of my creative work.
That’s what I mean about being this wounded healer. There’s this incredible wound, and instead of avoiding it or doing drugs or drinking or whatever one does to avoid experiencing that pain, I sit with it for hours and hours a day, and that’s the source of my creative work.
Rick: Yeah. As far as I’m concerned, and not everybody likes to hear this kind of thing, if you’re still breathing, you’re a work in progress. That would include the Dalai Lama, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta—everybody.
Paul: Absolutely. They actually say that. His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, “With my altruism, with my compassion, I’m always increasing it.” It’s not like you ever get to the end.
Rick: Right, and Nisargadatta said, “Forget I Am That.” That was the name of a book. He said, “I’ve learned so much since then. It’s so much deeper.” This was maybe, I don’t know, ten years after I Am That was published.
Paul: Yeah, and if I could just say one thing about that, because when you awaken, you begin to discover that you’re interconnected with the field. Think about it: there’s this shadow in the field. There’s abuse, wounding, and trauma. We’re all having PTSD, and as a kind of shaman or wounded healer, like we all are, we’re organs that metabolize the shadow in the field.
Of course, every day we’re going to feel a little bit out of sorts, but then the question is, how do you carry that?
Rick: 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 she felt that she was now taking on collective karma and processing that. In fact, I’ve interviewed and spoken with a number of people who’ve said things along those lines.
If we get right down to it, as I’m sure you and I will be discussing, where does the individual end and the collective begin? You can’t find a demarcation point.
Paul: Exactly. As you were saying that about your friend, I was thinking, “Yeah, it’s not this chronological process: ‘Now I’ve emptied out my personal karma, and now I need to deal with the collective.’” It’s really hard to find that boundary between the two.
🕊️ Spiritual emergence and the meaning of wetiko
Rick: Yeah. Okay, so you’ve written a number of books over the years, and I imagine those books in themselves are symptomatic of various stages of development that you’ve undergone as your experience and understanding have matured.
You were just relaying some things that happened in the early ’80s. Before we get into the meat of your book on quantum physics and perhaps into a discussion about wetiko, what would you consider to be some significant points that people should know about what has transpired over the last 30 or 40 years?
Paul: That’s a really good question, because in 1981, I began to have the realization that we’re having this collective dream. I’ve just been continually integrating that insight, and it’s been an ever-deepening insight.
That led into the work with the wetiko idea, which then led into the quantum physics thing. All three of those—this being a dream, wetiko, and quantum physics—are interrelated.
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, then I would have been in trouble. I don’t even want to think about what my life would have been like without that.
The idea is that I was having some subjective experience of the nature of things and of myself, and I’ve been able to continually and creatively articulate what I’ve been realizing. I’m saying that because it’s not just my process. Every single person I work with in my healing practice—that’s the key thing for them, to really connect with their creative voice.
Rick: Okay. When you say that you’re a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, how would you define spiritual emergence?
Paul: I would say it’s seeing through the illusion that we exist as a separate self, as this reference point in time that’s isolated from the environment, the universe, and other people, and recognizing that we’re all actually interconnected—that we’re actually dream characters in each other’s dreams.
When you have a dream and contemplate, “Oh, there are all these figures in the dream, these dream characters,” what that means is that they’re reflections of parts of yourself, and so there’s no separation.
That’s when you begin to really step into it, and out of that comes compassion, real compassion. That’s what I mean when I talk about somebody having a spiritual emergence.
Rick: Is the word “emergence” in any way related in this case to “emergency”? I think sometimes—I mean, you had a bit of an emergency. You were hospitalized. But it’s not necessarily an emergency if one can handle it properly and understand what’s going on.
Paul: Right, and the thing is, for me, totally, it was an emergency. It could have been, if I hadn’t—you see, the thing that saved me when I was hospitalized was that it could not have been made clearer to me that I was having an awakening.
My entire universe—my family, my friends, the doctors, everybody—was reflecting back to me that I was mentally ill, that I had a chemical imbalance. I was thinking, “Wow, they’re really stupid. They just have no idea what they’re talking about.” 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 saved me.
It was an emergency in the sense that these episodes can be really dangerous. Without having experienced what that’s like, you can’t even imagine the energy that’s unlocked when you step out of that separate self and have some form of Kundalini, or a recognition of the nature of your situation and who we are.
It’s so overwhelming that it’s very typical for it to take a while—sometimes a number of months, sometimes a number of years—to metabolize that energy and what you’re realizing, and to integrate it so that you’re in balance enough not to freak people out.
I guess the one final thing—I love the opinion that so many people are hospitalized, diagnosed, and medicated, and might go their whole lives in that state, when they were or are potentially having a spiritual emergence, but it isn’t being recognized.
In indigenous cultures, they might understand when somebody’s acting kind of weird or abnormal: “Oh, they might be being called by the Spirit. They might be having a spiritual form of awakening.” In modern culture, that’s not recognized. They’re immediately pathologized and medicated, and it can be really, really tragic.
Rick: Have you seen an improvement in that over the last several decades?
Paul: I would say both yes and no. Even now, in the appendix of the DSM, there’s a little two-line thing saying something like, “There’s this religious or spiritual sort of problem,” referring to the possibility that there could be a spiritual process happening that’s not pathological.
But the “no” part is that psychiatry is becoming more and more biochemical. It’s just, “If you have any sort of symptom or weird behavior, take this pill. It might make the symptom go away, but then it will abort the deeper spiritual process.” So it’s both yes and no.
Rick: Yeah, and I think that the predominant paradigm in that field and in science in general, although there are obviously exceptions among some interesting people, is that any spiritual experience, as with any experience, is some kind of biochemical thing.
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 serotonin or DMT or something being secreted. 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: Right, and that’s the whole materialistic point of view: what’s fundamentally primary is the physical world. When we get to quantum physics, that turns it on its head and says, “Actually, consciousness is the primary, fundamental source of all manifestation, and physical reality is just a more superficial manifestation of the underlying field of consciousness.”
So it really turns that on its head.
Rick: Yeah, I guess in a way we’re making progress, because 400 or 500 years ago, people who had experiences like yours might have been burned at the stake or suspected of possession. These days, at least, they’re treated more humanely, but we definitely have a ways to go.
Paul: Yeah. Or 400 or 500 years ago, if they were in the right culture, they might have had other people who had been honored and recognized support them in their process, because they understood that if the person came back from that underworld…
What happened for me for a while was that I was feeling, “Wow, I screwed up. The hospitalizations were a mistake. They really stopped my awakening.” Then, at a certain point, I had the realization: “No, no, no. The hospitalizations and the abuse I suffered, the intense psychiatric abuse, were part of the awakening. That was the descent into Hades, into the underworld.”
As soon as I was able to reframe that, then, well, that’s how it showed up in my experience, and it became part of the perfection of the awakening.
Rick: Good. We’ve thrown the word “wetiko” around a few times, unless there’s something you want to say to wrap up what we’ve just been saying.
Paul: No, no, that’s fine.
Rick: Did you shift into that?
Paul: No, totally. The wetiko thing is like… One other way I could describe my awakening process is this: I was saying, “Oh, I was recognizing the dreamlike nature, and we’re collectively having this mass-shared dream, and we’re interconnected.” The other half of that is that I was having this direct encounter with archetypal evil.
Whether it was through my father being the instrument or through psychiatry, I was beginning to recognize that there was almost a higher-dimensional field that had a real dark side to it. I was fortunate, and it goes back to the fact that I’m still a work in progress, really assimilating what I’m being shown.
Wetiko and Collective Destructiveness
That darker side is what, in the tradition of the Indigenous Native American tradition, they call wetiko. It’s the spirit of evil; it’s the source of evil that’s informing all of the incredible destructiveness that we’re enacting in ourselves, through our relationships, and through the body politic of the world. It’s informing the fact that we’re actually enacting this collective form of suicide.
That darker side is what, in the tradition of the Indigenous Native American tradition, they call wetiko. It’s the spirit of evil; it’s the source of evil that’s informing all of the incredible destructiveness that we’re enacting in ourselves, through our relationships, and through the body politic of the world. It’s informing the fact that we’re actually enacting this collective form of suicide.
The idea of wetiko is that it’s like this cannibalistic spirit. To the extent that we’re unaware of it, we literally become taken over by it, and it’s informing our self-destruction. But what I point out is that encoded in wetiko, it’s actually helping us to evolve. It’s helping us to wake up. If it didn’t exist, we would actually have to invent it, because it’s a catalyst for our collective awakening. That’s what my book about wetiko is about.
Rick: I just want to interject and remind viewers that if you’re viewing the live interview and wish to submit a question, you can do that on the Upcoming Interviews page at 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, the senator from New Jersey. It was a fascinating interview, and I recommend that people listen to it. He was saying that we kind of live in Shiva times, and Shiva is said to be the destroyer in Hinduism.
There’s a lot of that—a lot of destruction apparently taking place. But Shiva is not portrayed as a bad guy in Hinduism. He’s portrayed as one of the necessary three main influences. There’s Vishnu, the creator; Brahma, the maintainer; and Shiva, the destroyer. The three change their balance as time goes on, and sometimes destruction becomes predominant, but it does so as a precursor to a new unfolding of a higher level of society, or whatever is coming forth.
Paul: Right. That’s really interesting to me, because, of course, as a creative person—and any creative person knows this—there’s such a fine line between the creative and the destructive.
It’s almost like we tap into this deeper, transpersonal energy, and if we don’t channel it in a constructive way, then it gets enacted unconsciously in a destructive way. But I just want to contemplate what you said about Shiva and the destroyer, because what I point out in my book is that, yes, we’re destroying ourselves. There’s no question about that.
And yet, encoded in that process of self-destruction is the way that we’re teaching ourselves how not to destroy ourselves. I point out that we clearly haven’t learned how not to destroy ourselves, or we wouldn’t be destroying ourselves. So the actual act of destruction is the medium through which we’re helping ourselves to wake up. But if we don’t get the message that’s encoded in, or enacted through, our self-destruction, then we’re really going to destroy the biosphere and ourselves.
Rick: Yeah, and there are plenty of individuals who destroy themselves, or are on the path of self-destruction, and at a certain point turn it around. I was one. 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.
So collectively, societally, it’s not necessarily a done deal that we’re going to turn it around, and some people are quite pessimistic about it. But there’s definitely a lot of things that probably shouldn’t continue to exist if we’re going to have a more enlightened society, and perhaps those things are self-destructing. I don’t know. What are your reflections on that?
Paul: Well, it feeds into the quantum physics thing, because the quantum physics book and the idea of wetiko are really interrelated, and I talk about wetiko in the quantum physics book.
Quantum physics points out that we’ve been trained to think certain things are possible and other things are impossible. Quantum physics has enlarged the scope of what is possible to the point where, for example, so many of us can easily fall into despair and pessimism: “Oh my God, we’re destroying ourselves. Things are just getting worse. There’s no hope.”
Then we assume the point of view of pessimism, and I would point out that if you have the pessimistic point of view, you’re actually going to invoke a universe that confirms that point of view. That makes you more entrenched in your pessimistic point of view, so you’re actually complicit in the very destruction that you’re reacting to as though it were seemingly outside of yourself.
What quantum physics is pointing at is that it might be really unlikely that our species is actually going to have a collective awakening, but it’s possible. In quantum physics, it’s saying that as long as it’s possible, it means that it can actually happen in this reality. So don’t close off that possibility.
As long as it’s possible, it means that it can actually happen in this reality. So don’t close off that possibility.
When you actually assume that it’s in the realm of possibility that a sufficient number of people in humanity are going to awaken and catalyze this global awakening, instead of being complicit with the evil that’s playing out, you become an agent of the light. You make it that much more probable that that is what’s going to happen.
That’s the power of our dreaming. It’s the incredible, invisible, untapped power that we have in our minds to help invoke the very universe that we’re inhabiting.
Rick: 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, or something.
Paul: Right. That’s a perfect example.
Rick: Yeah. I don’t think I could have done this in the 1950s, even if we’d had the internet and Skype. There weren’t so many of those people there to find.
Paul: Exactly. I just want to say that point is such a great point, because it’s so easy to focus on all the negativity. Yet the people I know who are really awakening in a genuine way are all optimistic.
One of the main reasons is exactly what you just pointed out. 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.”
Think about the unconscious. When we go to sleep at night, if we’re having this one-sided point of view, the unconscious will compensate and show us the other point of view to bring us more into balance.
It’s almost as if it is that there’s such darkness in the world that the compensation is that so many individual people are actually having spontaneous awakenings. The point for me is, which is what’s happening on this show, for example, what if we actually connect with each other as people who are awakening? Then we can conspire to co-inspire. We can help each other to deepen the collective awakening as we put our collective genius into action and activate it in a way where we can actually help each other to wake up.
Rick: Yeah. Now, whether this collective awakening that we’re seeing gets the upper hand or not remains to be seen, because we’re really talking about a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Go ahead.
Paul: I was going to say, that’s true, but one way to think about it, which I think is a beautiful image, is this: If you have a glass of water and you add grain after grain of sugar, each grain will 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, seeing our shadow, and connecting with compassion could be that grain of sugar that precipitates a global awakening in the entire universe, because we’re not separate from the field. This is a nonlocal field that transcends third-dimensional space and time.
Any one of us having any sort of realization could be—or actually is—that grain of sugar being deposited into the collective unconscious of our species in a way that could really, as I was saying, precipitate this worldwide global awakening.
Rick: Yeah. In physical phenomena, there’s the phrase “phase transition,” and a simple, obvious example is the boiling of water. You can have water at 99 degrees centigrade, and it doesn’t look like much is happening. One more degree, and it starts to boil. All of a sudden, you didn’t quite see that coming.
There are also examples I’ve used on the show many times, such as the fact that 1 percent of the heart cells are pacemaker cells, which synchronize and regulate the beating of the entire heart. Or, in a laser, if the square root of 1 percent of the photons begin to align with one another, the rest of the photons entrain with them, and the whole thing becomes a single coherent beam—a laser.
So we’re not necessarily talking about getting 75 percent of the population, or something, involved in this sort of thing. I think the potency of people who are awakening is significant, such that even a small percentage of them will have an effect in proportion to their numbers.
Paul: Yeah. It’s like the hundredth monkey phenomenon, or the Bible’s reference to the 144,000 in the Book of Revelation. It’s the same idea: If you’re making a loaf of bread, you have to have sufficient yeast. The bread has to leaven; there has to be enough yeast. But it doesn’t have to be 100 percent yeast. You just need a certain critical amount, and then it leavens. We’re the bread that’s leavening, in a way.
Rick: Or yogurt. You put a little yogurt starter in there, and the whole thing becomes yogurt. There are so many examples.
✨ Quantum physics and consciousness
Okay, so regarding your book—and I think as we begin to talk about the book, we will also probably loop back and talk more about wetiko and all kinds of other things—first of all, I was pleased to see that my friend Menas Kafatos endorsed it. He’s a physicist who’s been on BatGap a couple of times.
The reason I was pleased with that is that yesterday I was listening to a recording of a conference that took place at Caltech a few years ago with Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer, and Sam Harris, moderated by Dan Harris of ABC News. They pretty much excoriated Deepak for his use of quantum physics to explain consciousness and his correlation of the two.
They were saying things such as, “Quantum mechanics has to do with 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 them is just woo-woo. You’re not being scientific, and you’re not qualified to talk this way.” Deepak did his best to defend himself, but he was a little bit outnumbered.
Paul: Right. No, that’s interesting to me because I should make clear that I’m not a physicist. Even when I give my talks on the book, I contemplate how amazing and how crazy it is that I’ve written a book on quantum physics and am going around speaking about quantum physics when I’m not a physicist. That’s really interesting.
But what I point out is that all of the founding fathers of quantum physics—for example, Albert Einstein—have said things about it. Einstein was one of the discoverers of quantum physics, but what he was pointing out freaked him out so much that he couldn’t embrace it. He actually said that quantum physics is so uncommonly important that it should be everyone’s concern.
Other physicists have said that it’s an incredible pity that most of humanity isn’t awake to the revelations emerging from quantum physics. The point is that something is being shown to us through those revelations that is a game changer, something that is so profoundly important.
The other day, I was on a television interview and spontaneously said this. When I watched the video, I thought, “Wow, I can’t believe I said that.” But it’s true. What I said was, “The revelations emerging from physics are the solution to the world crisis.” That’s what my book is about.
The revelations emerging from physics are the solution to the world crisis.
What I’m pointing at is the meaning of all this. We’ve developed incredible technology that has changed the course of history and changed our world through quantum physics, but the real founding fathers and the cutting-edge quantum physicists are saying that’s the low-hanging fruit. That’s less than one percent of the benefits and technologies that quantum physics is showing us.
It’s showing us something about who we are. It’s showing us something about our thinking process and about the place of consciousness in our world. It’s literally invoking a new epoch in human history. That’s how major it is.
If I had been there during that Deepak Chopra interview, I would have been doing my best to support Deepak Chopra’s point of view.
Rick: Yeah, it’s funny. There was a physicist in the audience whom you quote in your book in other ways, named Leonard Mlodinow. He co-wrote a book with Stephen Hawking, and so he got up to the microphone and said, “Deepak, I’d like to give you some lessons in quantum mechanics.”
Apparently, Deepak took him up on it, because the two of them ended up writing a book called War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality. In it, the scientific worldview is represented by Leonard Mlodinow and the spiritual worldview by Deepak.
Mlodinow suggests that the universe operates according to laws of physics, while acknowledging that science does not address why the laws exist or how they arise. Deepak says that the laws of nature, as well as mathematics, share the same source as human consciousness.
I guess, to summarize, Deepak is saying—and many others are saying—that consciousness is fundamental and the universe is an emergent quality or expression of consciousness. The opposite view is still taken by mainstream science: that material creation is predominant and consciousness is a byproduct of the brain.
But as you’re suggesting, if scientists as a whole really understood quantum mechanics, I think they would have to adopt Deepak’s point of view, or at least some of it.
Paul: Yeah, totally. I think of some of the greatest quantum physicists of the last century. One of them said that the only law in physics is that there is no law—that any law you have is changeable and mutable.
The thing about typical physicists is that they go to graduate school in physics and get their PhD, but they’re not trained to deal with the question of consciousness. It’s such a taboo subject in academic, corporate physics: What about consciousness?
As soon as you mention consciousness, one way of understanding quantum physics is that consciousness has intruded into the physics lab. This isn’t what the typical physicist signed up for. They don’t know how to deal with it. If you mention the idea of consciousness, the typical response is, “Shut up and calculate.” That’s the really famous phrase.
The whole point is that there is an edge, a taboo against inquiring into this. Wait a second: Consciousness is clearly a factor in the equation of the universe. What do we do about it?
What I’m interested in—and I talk about this in the book—is that physicists have this incredible unconscious reaction against the implications of their own theory. In other words, consciousness is part of the universe, and I’m interested in asking, “What is the physics of that?”
That internal psychological reaction is a way into understanding that psyche and soma, the world and physical matter, and spirit are actually not separate. That’s what my book is about. When you go down that rabbit hole far enough, in a particular way, with open eyes and really trying to integrate all the data, you invariably get to the point where you discover that there’s no separation—that the opposites, in the sense of the coincidentia oppositorum, are indistinguishable.
The opposites of spirit and matter cannot actually be separated. Separating something that is inseparable in its nature is the very source of all the world crises that we’re struggling with.
Rick: Yeah, I want to go into that more with you. You’ve probably read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Yeah, the whole paradigm-shift thing. 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. They’re resistant to changing that worldview because it takes a lot of reshuffling to do so.
The thing that usually changes worldviews is anomalies, to use Kuhn’s term—things that just don’t fit the paradigm. The anomalies have to gain a certain critical mass before the paradigm can shift.
How do you see the stage of that shift right now? To what extent are the anomalies really impinging upon the physics community or the scientific community in general? Yeah, you’ve got the question.
Paul: Yeah. I would just want to contextualize that. Quantum physics didn’t emerge out of a void. It emerged out of Newtonian physics, classical pre-quantum physics.
The way of characterizing classical physics is that physicists thought this universe objectively existed independently of the observer, and that we were just passive observers trying to figure out this objective world.
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. They’ve proven again and again and again that the act of observing actually influences the world observed; that the observer, the thing observed, and the act of observation are interconnected, inseparable parts of one quantum system; and that you can’t separate them.
There is no such thing as an objective world.
That’s the portal. In my book, I really contemplate that because it’s the portal to understanding what quantum physics is showing us. In essence, quantum physics has proven indisputably that this is a dream.
I’m an outsider; I’m not a physicist. The typical physicist isn’t trained to interpret the data in this particular way. 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.
If you change your perspective in a dream, the dream has no choice but to spontaneously shape-shift and reflect back your change in viewpoint. Then you have all the seeming evidence to confirm the objective truth of your viewpoint, which makes you even more entrenched in it. The more entrenched you are, the more the dream is going to reflect back the objective truth.
Basically, what I’m describing is that we have this genius for co-creating reality with the universe, and it’s getting turned against us in a way that’s destroying us because we aren’t awake to it. That’s what quantum physics is pointing at. That’s what I mean when I say the revelations emerging from quantum physics are the solution to the world crisis.
What I just described is wetiko. The wetiko virus is 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 projections objectively exist.
We then react to them and become conditioned by them. We’ve actually programmed or hypnotized ourselves, and the source of all of it is our own mind. That’s wetiko, and it totally has to do with the revelations emerging from quantum physics.
👁️ Seeing the dream without abandoning the world
Rick: Okay, let’s take an example. You’re saying that quantum physics is a solution to the world crisis, and we know that quantum physics is already responsible for a lot of technologies. The computers we’re using right now wouldn’t be possible without certain discoveries in quantum physics, along with a number of other technological developments.
To my mind, the most critical problem in the world is climate change. Not everyone accepts that, in part because it’s a slow-moving problem, although it seems to be speeding up more and more. To take a practical example, how would you say that quantum physics can help address that problem?
Right, sure. The thing about quantum physics is that it’s pointing out that we, as observers, actually influence the universe we’re observing. We’re participants in this universe. We’re not separate from the universe. That is to say, the act of observation is creative.
Paul: Right, sure. The thing about quantum physics is that it’s pointing out that we, as observers, actually influence the universe we’re observing. We’re participants in this universe. We’re not separate from the universe. That is to say, the act of observation is creative.
So the people who are saying, “Climate change is a Chinese hoax,” are denying it. In a sense, they’re denying the fact that we’re actually participating in this very universe that we’re experiencing.
Quantum physics is saying, “No, we’re active participants. We’re actually invoking the universe, and we’re having an effect on the way we interact with it.” Climate change is a perfect example of that, because through our actions in the world, we’re actually investing in, feeding, and supporting our own demise—one example being climate change.
Rick: But you don’t need quantum physics to conclude that. I mean, you just look at carbon emissions and things.
Paul: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. But carbon emissions—and that’s the practical aspect of it—there’s no debating that if you’re interested in truth. The thing that I’m pointing at is that quantum physics is sort of like the underlying foundation of how we’re actually creating our experience of ourselves and creating our experience of the world.
And when you actually add consciousness 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 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 get in phase with other people who are also tapping into that creative power that we have, that’s the point where we can really, in connecting with each other, change the waking dream. That’s evolution, and that’s what my book is about.
Rick: 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, expression, or reflection of the subjective state of the majority of people living in the world. It’s just sort of the dream they’re creating, so to speak.
Paul: Right, and 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. We’re all dreaming up, like with Donald Trump—whether you 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.
With climate change, with nuclear weapons, with all of it, that’s what all of the wisdom traditions are saying: in the macrocosm, in the external, that’s a reflection of the internal. And to see that is to all of a sudden think about how, 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, separate, solid, and objective.
But when you have the recognition of the nature of your situation in that night dream—that is, “Oh, I’m dreaming. All of this is my own energy”—all of a sudden you have the recognition, “Oh, 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 reacting to it in the same way as when you didn’t recognize that.
So it follows from what you just said that if we can change the inner state, then the outer state will naturally change, and the outer condition will change. If we try to change the outer condition without changing the inner state, we’re bound to fail.
Right, but there’s a shadow part there, because I know a lot of spiritual people who 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’s true on one level, but it freaks me out, because what about actually stepping into 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, the idea is 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: Yeah, there was an interesting story about Ramana Maharshi, where Papaji was with him. If you know who Papaji was—Poonjaji—in India, Pakistan was dividing, and it was a very dangerous situation. A lot of people were killed, and Papaji’s family was in Pakistan and had to get to India.
Ramana said to him, “Well, you should go help them get out of there.” And Papaji said, “Well, isn’t the world just an illusion? It’s only a dream. Why should I bother?” I forget how Ramana phrased it, but it was basically like, “Get out there in the dream and help the dream characters, not forgetting that you yourself are a dream character. But you can’t just brush the whole thing off as a dream and sit here and marinate in my presence. You have to take action in this case.”
Paul: Yeah, and that’s the idea in—like, I do Tibetan Buddhist practice, and they’ll talk about these different dimensions of reality. There’s the relative level and the absolute level. On the absolute level, we’re all one, it’s all a dream, everything’s perfect. From the relative level, things are suboptimal beyond belief, and on that level there is suffering, problems, and separation.
They point out that those two levels, the relative and the absolute, interpenetrate. You can’t just, because you hear the absolute teachings, immediately identify with “Everything’s perfect, we’re all one, it’s all a dream,” and marginalize the relative. The idea is that you have to honor both.
Rick: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a lot of talk in Buddhism, of course, about compassion and taking compassion into action. I heard a story of a guy who was in India and got an infection on his leg, and he was declining medical treatment. He kept saying, “Well, it’s an illusion, no big deal.” To make a long story short, it got to the point where he almost lost his leg and his life before he finally realized that this was an illusion that needed attending to on its own level in order to, you know…
Paul: Yeah, no, totally. And the thing I just want to go back to with the wetiko idea, because it’s important how it ties into quantum physics and how it ties into everything, is that we’re in the middle of—a collective psychosis. The thing about wetiko is that it’s a collective psychosis, and we’re in the middle of one.
One of the crazy things is that very few people are even talking about how our species is in the middle of this psychic epidemic. You can call it wetiko or whatever, but what wetiko does, how it works, is through the unconscious and through the part of us that has a blind spot. It operates through the projective tendencies of the mind in such a way that we hypnotize ourselves.
Wetiko is a form of being blind. It’s a psychic blindness that actually believes it’s being sighted. The point is that wetiko is a quantum phenomenon, in that encoded in the disease that can destroy our species is—keep in mind, in the ultimate sense, there’s no such thing as wetiko. 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. That’s pointing at the incredible unconscious, untapped, invisible power we have in ourselves to actually call forth this universe.
By being a quantum phenomenon, wetiko—what I mean by that is that, superposed in wetiko, it’s the greatest source of evil and the greatest blessing and medicine that can help us wake up and evolve. How is it going to manifest? It depends on how we can dream it, on how we observe it.
It’s the same thing as in quantum physics with light. What is the nature of light? Sometimes it manifests as a wave, sometimes as a particle, depending on how we observe it. That’s the observer effect. That’s what I’m pointing at in quantum physics: that we have this incredible power to influence this universe by the way we observe, by the way we interpret, and by the way we place meaning on the waking inkblot of our world.
Rick: Yeah, I’m sure you’re familiar with the term “maya.”
Paul: Yeah, I talk about it in the book.
Rick: And the actual etymology of the word is the two parts, “ma” and “ya,” meaning “that which is not.” So maya is “that which is not.” You reminded me of that when you said that wetiko doesn’t actually exist and yet it’s very powerful. There is actually no snake; it’s only a rope. But we react to the rope if we don’t see through the maya of it.
Paul: Right. And the thing about maya is, now think about quantum physics: if one person—or if enough, if seven and a half billion people—have the perspective of maya, that this world is objective and independent of us, then this world, being like a dream, will manifest as if it’s objective.
It will give us all the evidence to confirm our viewpoint that it is objective, so then we, like I was saying before, become even more fixed in our viewpoint of seeing the world as separate from ourselves and as being objective. And then, of course, we’re actually feeding into the world manifesting as if it’s objective.
The point is that we then, by the power of our own mind, create ourselves to be imprisoned. What I’m trying to point out is that whether it’s with the idea of wetiko, dreaming, or quantum physics, I’m trying to shed light on that process: “Wait a second. We have this incredible power through the way we perceive that can really change things, that can really make a difference in the world.”
Not in a woo-woo, New Agey way that’s just fluffy and cotton candy, but this is what the implications of quantum physics are really pointing at. I point out in my book that this is a game changer. This is the good news of the Bible. It’s analogous 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 more and more of us are able to share the realizations that are emerging from quantum physics and really embody them, that’s where all of a sudden the blessing aspect of this discovery enlarges and amplifies and becomes incredibly potent—to the point that we can literally change the dream we’re having.
And that’s what I continually, in a creative way, through my imagination, point at again and again.
Rick: Yeah, and I think it’s really cool that there was a point in your book, which I just read. I wonder if I could find it really quick. Basically, the point was that quantum physics is instrumental in bringing about a spiritual revolution or spiritual awakening in the world.
It would have to be something from science that could do that, because science is by far the biggest gorilla in the room. It’s the most influential thing in the world. So, you know where I’m going with this?
Paul: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Go ahead and elaborate on that point.
Paul: Well, the thing about science is that science is the wisdom tradition of the West. I’m not a scientist, and I’m way more, just in my soul, an artist and a dreamer. I do meditation and all that. So from that point of view, it’s crazy that I’ve written a book about science.
Rick: You did a good job at it, actually.
Paul: Yeah, thanks. 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 benefit of cutting edge science now isn’t necessarily going to be technological, but it’s going to be in the realm of ideas.
Here’s the one way of really getting to where it becomes a spiritual path: quantum physics is proving that there’s no such thing as an objective world. When you actually really get that—and I’m not just talking intellectually, but really more and more deeply in your integration, in your experience of, “Oh, wow, there’s nothing out there”—your act of observing is actually invoking the universe that you’re observing in one quantum whole system.
To really integrate that and take that in, 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, as something that can encapsulate the ego, has to revision itself, because if there’s no object, if there’s no objective universe, what happens to you as the subject, the center of operations? All of a sudden, that comes into deep question.
That’s where, when you really contemplate 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 is ultimately the most fundamental question in science: “Who are we?”
Rick: Yeah, and incidentally, I should say that 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 build a strong case based upon the testimony of people who really knew what they were talking about.
Paul: Yeah, no, totally. It’s not just me talking. I just feel like, “No, this has nothing to do with me. I’m just the interpreter.” Here’s John Wheeler, who was a colleague of Einstein and Bohr, and he was the one who really brought in, “Oh my God, the act of observer participation—that we’re actually, by the act of observing, invoking the universe observed.”
What I’m pointing at, I’m just standing on the shoulders of these giants. Because of maybe not being a physicist and being an outsider in my experience, in my own awakening, I’m able to actually interpret what they’re saying.
The thing about what they discovered in quantum physics 100 years ago is so radical that to say it’s radical is an understatement. It’s beyond radical. It’s something they couldn’t even have imagined. What they stumbled onto, when you make a discovery like that, it typically takes a century or two to even begin to unpack what the meaning of it is.
It’s been 100 years, and we’re first beginning to unpack and decode the deeper meaning of what we’ve discovered in quantum physics. Keep in mind, there’s one thing that’s not in debate among quantum physicists, that they all say: 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 never been proven to have even the slightest bit of inaccuracy in any way. So here it is, the greatest discovery in all of human history in the realm of science, and it’s so—me, and a lot of other people, not just me—we’re trying to understand it.
I’ve never come across a field where all of the experts disagree on the meaning of their theory. That’s actually empowering, because then it makes me feel, “Oh, well, if they can’t agree, what if I just contemplate it as a curious person?”
The quantum physicists are saying this universe 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.
That’s such a radical statement, but that’s what quantum physicists have actually discovered. I’m saying, “Wow, I’m just a curious person. What is the meaning of that? How does that affect my life?” They’re actually saying this affects your life hugely. This has everything to do with our everyday, day-to-day lives. That’s why in the book I have this huge chapter on how quantum physics is actually informing our relationships and our everyday lives.
Rick: Yeah, that was part of the thing that Deepak was going through with Sam Harris and Michael Shermer. They were saying, “Well, yeah, quantum theory has to do with the world of the very small. It has no pertinence to our everyday lives.”
I was thinking of a metaphor, a counterargument to that. Let’s say you had a statue that was made of marbles that were glued together. It looked like a big statue, and you could see it from a hundred yards away. You might say, “Oh, this is a really cool statue. That has nothing to do with marbles. It’s this great big statue.” But if you got up close and started looking at it, you’d say, “It’s only marbles. There’s nothing but marbles here.”
Paul: Right, right. I could just—it’s such a great point because, for example, in quantum theory they’ve discovered that these elementary particles, atoms or electrons or whatever, have properties that are a function of our observation. Before we observe them, they’re in a state of potentiality, with no property per se. The act of observation, being creative, invokes the particular property.
Then take it the next step. What if you take off each of the properties to try to find what the substance is that the properties actually adhere to? When you take off the last property, there’s nothing there. There’s just emptiness. That correlates to the emptiness in Tibetan Buddhism. They say that’s the nature of the universe and of ourselves.
One other way of understanding that is this: Quantum physics is inquiring into what is the micro-substructure of this universe. What is the building block of the physical world? They try to find the smallest, fundamental building block.
What they’ve discovered is that, inseparably, that gets to the mind. You can’t—interfacing with what they have found as the fundamental building block of the physical world is consciousness.
They get to the same place that a meditator goes inside their own mind and contemplates the internal process of the psyche. They also get to that place of consciousness as primary. Quantum physics, in inquiring into the microstructure of the physical world, and Buddhists—or anyone in a spiritual tradition who contemplates the inner workings of their own mind—get to the same place, which is consciousness.
Quantum physics is basically saying that you have to factor consciousness into the equation of this universe. There’s no getting away from that. Of course, a lot of corporatized academic quantum physicists who aren’t trained in that way are having an incredible reaction: “No, no, no. What’s real is only what’s measurable,” and all this stuff.
Well, consciousness is the actual underlying substructure in which measurement happens. In a way, “The eye can’t see itself”—that’s kind of the dilemma we’re in. Anyway, I could go on.
Rick: That’s good. I mean, there’s a lot of hubris involved in saying that what’s only real is what’s measurable, because it sort of implies that the universe is dependent upon our ability to measure it for what it does.
Paul: Yeah. Can I say one other image that just came up? One of the things that in Tibetan Buddhism they’ll use this metaphor, and quantum physics uses the same metaphor. They’ll say, “When you look in the sky and there’s this rainbow, that rainbow doesn’t exist objectively. It’s the confluence of three factors: light, water, and a mind—consciousness.
“You have those three factors in a certain relationship, and all of a sudden you experience inside 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.”
Quantum physics is saying that’s the nature of this physical world. It’s like a rainbow. What that means is, 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.
The point is that there’s 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.
There is no objective world that we’re just seeing through our subjective lens.
The insanity, the wetiko, the collective psychosis, is that we’re going to war with each other based on whose rainbow is actually true, when there is no true rainbow. We all have our own private universe.
The observer, time, and the nature of reality
Rick: Yeah, I want to come back to that point and to the whole point about whether the moon exists if nobody’s looking at it, and the question of if the universe requires observers in order to exist, how did it develop to the point where there were observers? Because it obviously started out as a rather inhospitable place.
But before I do that, I want to interject a couple of questions that have come in that are more of a personal nature, in terms of people’s personal experience. So this will be a little bit of an intermission here, and then we’ll come back to these points.
Here’s one from Scott in Half Moon Bay, California. He 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: Yeah, I would say that’s the beginning and the end. That sounds great. How can anyone argue with that?
The thing I want to say is that for a lot of us, it’s traumatizing to see, “Oh my God, I’ve been living in illusion. What I’ve been thinking was real was actually not what’s happening.” That can be kind of traumatizing.
For a lot of people, there’s a counter-incentive to look at that and realize, “Well, I’ve been fooling myself and out of my mind.” So it’s really to Scott’s credit that he has the strength to see how he’s been fooling himself and not just dissociate from that, but really integrate that realization into the heart. That’s really to his credit.
Rick: Good, yeah. I kind of like to think that the word “disillusionment” has a positive connotation, 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. There’s some value to realizing he isn’t.
Paul: Right, and the thing is, you see, that’s one person’s experience. But imagine collectively, in the consensus reality, there’s such an agreement that certain things are true, like, “Oh, this world objectively exists.” That’s not even necessarily a conscious agreement, but it’s like a thought form or filter that pervades the collective unconscious. When so many other people are all holding a particular viewpoint, that creates an inertia that maybe makes it a little bit hard for somebody to step out of it. When seven and a half billion people all agree in a certain way, it takes incredible courage and strength.
One of the ways I discuss this in the Quantum Physics book is that they discovered a disease in physics, and the disease is wetiko. I actually have a chapter on this. One way they articulate this illness in quantum physics is that we just assumed and took for granted that what our ancestors were saying was true. An example would be, “Oh, this world objectively exists.” That’s just an assumption, an unexamined assumption, that we’ve assumed is correct because we have all the evidence that seemingly proves it.
In quantum physics, they said, “Oh, we found a solution to the disease.” The solution is not to take anybody else’s idea for reality as being true, but to actually be an empiricist: do the experiment yourself and see what the nature of your experience is.
Of course, that’s exactly what the Buddha said. When he was giving his teachings, he didn’t say, “Oh, just have faith in me. Just believe me.” He said, “No, no, no. Don’t take my word for it at all. Do the experiment yourself. Look within your own mind and see if what I’m saying is true.” That’s exactly what quantum physics is saying.
Rick: Yeah, important point. I always say, you know, somebody might recommend a restaurant and say, “It’s a really great restaurant.” Believing them doesn’t nourish you. You’ve got to go and actually eat the food and get some benefit from it.
Paul: Totally. So here’s another question. This is from Marie, someplace in the USA. She asks:
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, et cetera. Can you please comment?
Yeah, I fully agree. When I was having my awakening, I shared the one experience with a blind woman, but I had many, many experiences that were way more out of the ordinary. Actually, some of them were impossible. The blind-woman experience, at least, was in the realm of possibility; it was an auspicious coincidence of factors.
I would share these experiences with my teachers. Then I met these great Tibetan lamas and other teachers, and I would share with them these amazing experiences. They would just be very unimpressed. They would say, “Well, that’s just phenomena. Just don’t focus on that. Just try to cultivate more compassion.”
That was really interesting to me. So, yeah, I fully agree with what she says. As I more stabilize my awakening, it’s the natural state. It’s just who we are, but we don’t have the recognition of it.
Spacious Awareness Beneath Thought Forms
When we have a thought form, a thought form is like a dream. We absorb it, identify with it, and react against it. Then we’re caught without recognizing the context in which all the content, all the thought forms, arise. The context is the spaciousness. That’s always there, always pure, and always accessible. It’s just a question of whether we recognize it or not.
When you recognize it, you more and more develop the habit of just abiding in and as that. Then, all of a sudden, as any thoughts arise, you don’t even have to do anything. They just spontaneously self-liberate.
In both quantum physics and Buddhism, they’ll talk about our clinging to each moment. I’ve seen this in myself so profoundly over the years. To the extent that I’m not embracing and recognizing just that natural, spacious awareness that is my nature, I’m clinging to whatever thought form, feeling, body sensation, or whatever arises.
That clinging can take the form of identifying with something, pushing it away, or whatever, but that clinging itself is the root of samsara. With each and every moment, we have the opportunity either to recognize our nature and relax in and as that, or not recognize it. Not recognizing it is the clinging that creates the seeming problem.
One final thing: what the Buddha realized—because he was a physician who really cured his disease of clinging, which is the source of suffering—was that our situation is not problematic. We create our circumstances to appear as if they’re problematic, and then we try to solve the very problem whose source is our own mind. That becomes samsara; that is psychic existence.
He saw through that whole process and realized, “Oh, our situation is not problematic.” When you stabilize that, then you can, in a way, just be who you are in a happy, joyful way.
So, to Marie’s question, I would say that there are potential states of experience—either specific experiences or abiding states of realization—that, if you were to transition into them suddenly, as I did, could be quite unnerving and overwhelming. You wouldn’t be able to function normally. But through integration, which takes time, such states can become normal. You can be running a business, raising a family, and doing everything else, living from a perspective that the average person would find extraordinary, but to you it’s just normal because it’s been integrated and stabilized.
Then it’s like you’re just an instrument. With the quantum physics book, I’ll look at it now and go, “Wow, this is really good. I wonder who the author is?”
Rick: Or, “Where did that come from?”
Paul: Yeah, because in a way, I wrote the book, but it was like I was just an instrument for something to come through. That’s what I was meaning before about how the real healing has to do with connecting with the creative spirit.
It doesn’t make a difference what medium you use. You just actually connect with that part of ourselves that interfaces with the transpersonal or archetypal dimension in such a way that we become a conduit for something to express through us. For us to express our experience, that’s the very healing.
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 we can become sick.
Rick: I get that with this interview, too. People say, “Oh, it’s so incredible what you’re doing,” and I think, “Am I doing anything? This thing is just kind of happening.”
Paul: Right, right. Totally, totally.
Rick: 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 who had an argument about whether or not the moon exists if no one’s looking at it, and perhaps others have had that argument.
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. Otherwise, the world would be complete anarchy and chaos.
Let’s say a stop sign. We see a stop sign, we know what it means, and we stop at it. Other people see the same stop sign. A bird sees a stop sign and maybe sees it as a place to land, and 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.
But that same stop sign is there for all those different forms of life. If we all go to sleep at night and nobody’s looking at the stop sign, we wake up in the morning and it’s still there.
Let’s say that a million years ago, before there were sentient beings, there weren’t stop signs. But a couple of million, or a hundred million, years ago, there were just dinosaurs or whatever. Those dinosaurs perceived 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 were growing had the same cellular structure that ferns now have and performed photosynthesis. There were all sorts of laws of nature that were operative that nobody understood because there wasn’t anybody around to understand them. Yet the whole thing unfolded and got us to the point where we are now, where there are people who have enough sophisticated understanding, 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 seems like the universe 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: Right. Well, there are a couple of things that come up with what I think is your question. One of the things that quantum physics really puts into question is: What is the nature of this thing we call—
Rick: Time?
Paul: Time. Time. I think of John Wheeler, who says, “Time is in trouble today.” This whole idea of time—you see, quantum physics is pointing out that enfolded within the present moment are 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 that the potential futures are actually extending themselves backward in time through the present moment, and they’re influencing the present moment too. So both the past and the future are enfolded within the present moment of time.
Not only that, but in this present moment, when we think about the past, the past doesn’t exist, according to quantum theory, in this concretized, objective way. 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, here’s the universe, which was given birth to in however that happened—whether it was the Big Bang or whether it’s eternal. Who knows? I certainly don’t. But the idea is that here we are, these billions of years later, as observers who are observing this universe. We’re observing backward in time as we even think about the past, and somehow it’s like completing the circle and giving, in a way, a tangible reality to what happened then.
Even though we’ve come in linear time after whatever happened happened, by observing it or thinking about it, we’re in a sense helping to create it to have a certain manifest past.
So, one final thing: quantum physics is saying that in this moment, when we think of the past, unlike classical physics, which had one particular past that led up to this moment, quantum physics is saying, “No, it’s polyhistoric. There are multiple pasts that could have formed and created this very moment, and the act of observing in this moment actually conjures up the particular past. It’s a function of our observation in this very moment.”
The idea is that the past and future—because quantum physics is a timeless theory—don’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. So it really re-visions the whole idea of what this thing we call time actually is.
Rick: Okay, but still, to my mind, it seems to me that there’s a deeper template or reality that is not incumbent upon anyone’s perception in order for it to exist, or that there’s a sort of an intersubjective agreement about so-called outer reality.
Let’s say there are probably millions of civilizations that are able to perceive the Andromeda Galaxy throughout our galaxy, and perhaps other nearby galaxies. They all see it there, and they have no way of communicating with each other or anything else, but there’s this sort of intersubjective agreement that there’s the Andromeda Galaxy, that it’s exerting a certain gravitational pull on the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies, and so on.
It just seems to me that I can’t totally wrap my head around the notion that subjective experience or perception is entirely responsible for bringing the universe into manifestation.
Paul: No, no, but it’s not entirely responsible. There’s sort of this interfacing or this cooperation. There’s something out there, seemingly outside of us. 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. There’s some sort of interfacing that we’re doing, and it’s not just entirely dependent on us. We’re part of the equation.
In the same way, people who think, “Oh, well, if I think this, it means a certain thing, so 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 the questions you ask, how you’re interpreting, or the meaning. That’s only part of the equation. There’s this collaboration between the outside, seemingly nature, and the inside of our own mind.
Another idea that comes up with your question is that quantum physics is showing that this universe, every moment, is actually refreshing itself, every moment, in and out of the void, in and out of the implicate order. It looks like it’s a continuous world because it has a seeming continuity, but quantum physics is saying, “No, no, no. Each moment it’s simulating itself with the slightest little change, but we don’t notice that.” Every moment is like a new, refreshed universe.
Even your struggle—which I go through my own version of, Rick—the idea of how you wrap your mind around there not being an objective universe and our perception influencing it, that’s an expression of how deeply pervasive the classical point of view is. It’s really insinuated itself so deeply into the collective unconscious because it’s the lens through which we view everything.
What quantum physics is saying is that, through the creative power of the mind, when we view things in a certain way, that’s actually going to influence whatever we’re observing to manifest that way, which proves to us our point of view. As I was describing, it’s a feedback loop that’s self-perpetuating, whose source is our own mind.
All I’m saying is that this is happening twenty-four seven, every moment, with everyone. Most of us are doing it unconsciously in a way that is resulting in the incredible destruction we’re seeing in the world. What if we just become awake to what we’re all doing, what our nature actually is, and what our creative power is—something we’re using twenty-four seven anyway? What if we actually do it consciously? That’s, in a sense, the whole point of my book.
All I’m saying is that this is happening twenty-four seven, every moment, with everyone. Most of us are doing it unconsciously in a way that is resulting in the incredible destruction we’re seeing in the world. What if we just become awake to what we’re all doing, what our nature actually is, and what our creative power is—something we’re using twenty-four seven anyway? What if we actually do it consciously? That’s, in a sense, the whole point of my book.
Rick: Okay, well, let me throw a couple more at you. There may have been a time when everybody thought the world was flat. That didn’t make the world flat; it didn’t matter what people thought.
Or this one: 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 are still tides. The tides are happening, so the moon is doing something even though nobody is perceiving it or looking at it. How do you respond to those kinds of objections?
Paul: Yeah, no, and I appreciate those objections. In a way, I’m an empiricist in my own life. As I was saying before, I don’t take people’s words for it. All I know is that if I look at the moon and look away, and then look at the moon again, it appears to me as if it’s been there the whole time, even when I wasn’t looking.
That’s the data: it certainly seems as if it’s really there. I’m not just assuming as an element of faith, going, “Oh no, it’s really not there.” I’m still deepening my inquiry into it.
I guess I’m not even sure how to answer your question, but I appreciate it. You’re giving voice to a profound inquiry into really taking seriously what quantum physics is saying and trying to ask, “Well, what about this, and what about that?” I’m just not at the point of being able to help you in that way, but I’m right there with you, doing my own inquiry into it.
That’s the point: to really, with intelligence, inquire into and try to understand what this is showing us. I’m still a work in progress. I’m not saying, “Oh, I have any answers.” As a matter of fact, one of the most interesting things in my study of quantum physics is that all these physicists are saying that what’s way more important than finding the right answer is asking the right question. That’s really interesting to me.
Rick: Yeah, I think one thing that might help to resolve it a little bit is that, when we get right down to it, there’s only just one thing, so to speak. It’s not a thing, but it’s all one substance, as it were: consciousness.
We are that, the moon is that. As the Upanishads say, “That thou art. I am that, thou art that, all this is that,” all that kind of statement. So it’s sort of erroneous to think of individual perspectives, because ultimately we’re all just lenses through which the same light is shining—apertures of light.
Paul: Right. If I could just say something, because that ties into the wetiko idea, one of the things about wetiko is that it’s this psychic blindness, a virus of the mind that influences our perceptions and how we place meaning on reality.
Wetiko, Otherizing, and Separation
One of the things it feeds off of—or the primary thing it feeds off of—is fear, polarization, and separation. As an example, if I see some politician and think, “Oh, they’re really evil or bad,” or, “Oh, they have wetiko,” and if I think that they have wetiko and I don’t, then that perspective is an expression of my having fallen under the spell of wetiko by otherizing them.
The idea is that, to the extent that we see otherness and separation, that is feeding wetiko. That will just elaborate itself over all the dimensions of our experience into the evil that’s playing out in our world.
Going back to what you were saying, the point is to see that singularity, to see that oneness. Quantum physics is saying, “Yeah, there’s no such thing as discrete, independent, intrinsically existent objects or things.” There’s actually no thing, there’s nothing. That’s the emptiness out of which everything is emerging.
The emptiness and the forms, like the Heart Sutra says in Buddhism—form is emptiness, emptiness is form—they’re inseparable. To see that is to really have the attitude of the coincidence of opposites that I was talking about in alchemy before. That’s actually to dissolve wetiko and to begin to see that oneness, that interconnectedness.
That oneness embraces multiplicity. It’s not just like, “Oh, there’s no room for multiplicity.” No, it’s such an all-embracing oneness that it embraces the fact that, on one level, there is seeming separation. But don’t get entranced by the separation and think that it’s the objective reality, because that’s falling under the spell of your own mind.
Rick: Yeah, one metaphor that came to mind as you were speaking is that the heart cell might say, “I hate those liver cells. They’re such jerks, and 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 separating in its own mind.
Paul: And that’s what’s happening in the body politic with people—the one percent, or whoever the people are, the multibillionaires. They’re wanting to be like that heart cell. Just imagine if that heart cell said, “I want all of the body’s nutrients just for myself. I’m more important.”
Rick: Yeah, it’ll die.
Paul: Yeah, the whole organism will die, and that’s actually what we’re playing out. Wetiko is a form of psychic cancer in that it’ll metastasize. It will actually 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 pathogen, to the wetiko pathogen, in such a way that we can appear to be normal, but we’re actually feeding the disease.
One way of thinking about it is like a tapeworm, a psychic tapeworm, like a parasite that gets into our system. When you have a tapeworm, it will secrete chemicals so that you’ll crave food that will feed the tapeworm. The tapeworm grows bigger and bigger 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.
That’s another way of describing wetiko, and I’m pointing out that wetiko is informing science. That’s where, in a way, you see, “Okay, I’m glad I remembered this.” Quantum physics is a spiritual treasure. That’s one of the things I point at.
In Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a lineage where they have this idea of a spiritual treasure. It’s called terma. Terma is actually not just a woo-woo fairy-tale thing; it’s actually studied by scholars. The great enlightened energy would actually plant in the universe these hidden treasures, or these teachings or objects that had blessing power, and this enlightened energy would discover the people who were destined to bring forth and discover the terma, 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. The person would discover the hidden treasure, and that would help people to remember, to get back in balance, and to wake up.
I’m pointing out that I have no authorization to say, “Oh, this is a terma; 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 terma that our species has literally dreamed up into manifestation through the medium of science, to help us get more in balance and to awaken the incredible creative power that we have in us, of which we’ve been unconscious.
Rick: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. That kind of jumped out at me when I was reading your book: the idea that there are—I guess you could say—ideas or facets of knowledge that are inherent in the fundamental nature of the universe, just awaiting the emergence of someone who is capable of appreciating, understanding, and expressing them.
I think that happens in so many different fields. So many great composers have said that they didn’t feel like they composed anything; they just almost took notation of some beautiful symphony that came through. Or people like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas—some of these guys—there was something larger than their individual intelligence in the movies they created and the impact that had on the collective consciousness.
It was like an idea that needed to be propagated in collective consciousness, such as the Force. This great creation would become larger than just the capabilities of any one man to dream up because of the oversized influence or impact it has on the whole world.
Einstein and what he came up with in terms of relativity theory, and now quantum mechanics—we could go on and on all day citing examples of ideas whose time had come, but which already existed in a latent form, awaiting the opportunity to sprout, just like a seed does in the springtime.
Paul: Yeah, totally. Okay, so I’m back, and I actually have a response to what you just said, if I may.
Rick: Yeah. Before you say that, I mean, just to tell you one quick thing: there’s a verse in the Rig Veda, which I won’t bother with in Sanskrit. I don’t even know if I can remember all the Sanskrit, but the gist of it is that the impulses of intelligence which structure creation reside in the transcendental akasha—the richo akshare—and that those who know that field, those impulses of intelligence support them, but those who don’t know that field, they can’t do anything for that individual.
Anyway, I’ve loosely translated it, but that’s the same concept we’re talking about here. For me, what that brings up, going back to when I was hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals, is that from the psychiatric point of view, it would have been a successful treatment if I had subscribed to their viewpoint.
Just think about the madness of this. The viewpoint 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.” That would have completely aborted everything. I never would have found my voice or my work. I wouldn’t have written my books and all that.
But I knew, “No, wait a second. Something deeper, something beyond myself, is coming through me.” Of course, there’s a danger of being inflated and megalomaniacal and thinking, “Oh, I’m something special,” but I wasn’t feeling that. I was actually just having the recognition of what you were just pointing out: that there was some sort of deeper, nonlocal field of intelligence that we’re all potential instruments for.
When we get out of our own way and let our light shine, we all have a contribution to make. It has to do with: What is our vocation? What is our mission? Who are we? What are we here to do?
Interestingly, that has to do with a word, daimon. The daimon is the guided spirit or the inner voice. It has to do with finding the genius, finding your calling, hearing the voice and your angel, and all those things.
The point is that if you don’t get into relationship with that daimon, which is a higher-dimensional energy that can literally take you over, then you can become possessed by it. If you don’t honor it and get into a conscious relationship with it, it becomes a demon.
The idea is that we all have a daimon, and the daimon has to do with the calling. The calling has to do with a shaman. A shaman—somebody never in a million years would, if they were in their right mind, decide to become a shaman. “Oh, I’m going to shaman graduate school or take a weekend workshop and get certified as a shaman.” It doesn’t work that way.
You get called by the spirit, by some higher dimension, some higher-dimensional energy. If you don’t assent, agree, and cooperate, that’s when you can get sick and die.
One way of understanding my experience, and a lot of our experience, is that some sort of daimonic energy—this spirit—called me through my suffering. 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. Our abuse, trauma, and wounding catalyze the awakening.
The point is to more and more identify with the healthy part and then let the pathological part naturally fall away. The idea is that when that daimon, which is the calling of the shaman, the healer, or the creative artist, calls you, you need to really honor that and, in a way, offer yourself to be an instrument for it.
That’s what I keep talking about when I talk about being creative: letting 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 to other people.
Rick: Yeah, and I think you have to make efforts to make yourself a fit instrument. It’s not just going to happen necessarily. Everybody says, “I want to know what my purpose is,” and all this stuff, but Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added unto thee.” Lord Krishna in the Gita says, “First transcend the relative field; then, established in Being, perform action.”
There’s always this principle of pulling the arrow back on the bow before trying to shoot it.
Paul: Yeah, and the idea of—I mean, in Tibetan Buddhist practice, you’re continually purifying yourself to be an appropriate container and vessel for the teachings, for the realization to come through.
But the interesting thing about that verse you just quoted—”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.” The idea is that it’s the seeking itself, the turning of our intention toward prioritizing the spiritual point of view of “Who are we?” That itself, in a sense, becomes not just a means to an end, but the end itself. That’s very interesting.
Rick: Yeah, and there’s something in my original question which I don’t think we’ve quite addressed yet. When I was referencing various scientists, musicians, movie makers, and so on who have been conduits for some deeper knowledge to come into the world, it’s just the point that there’s a kind of treasure trove of possibilities residing in whatever deep level of creation they reside.
Speaking in terms of our current situation, I’m quite sure that there are solutions to every problem which faces humanity—in the environment, health, economics, and every other field you could consider. But how do we access those things, and how do we become conduits for those solutions?
Paul: Right.
One of the things—and there are a lot of answers or perspectives to get into the answer for that—but what came up in me is that quantum physics is pointing out consciousness’s primary role in the universe, in the manifestation and creation of the universe.
One other way of saying that is that the opposites—here’s matter, here’s the physical world, here’s matter and here’s mind—you begin to realize, “Oh, wow.” It’s similar to when you have a dream and you have lucidity in a dream. When you have that lucid moment, you realize you’re inside of your psyche, that this world is, in a sense, psyche. This world, in a sense, is a reflection of what’s going on inside of us.
That’s to connect with the deeper, synchronistic matrix that’s always informing things, and that’s to realize the dreamlike nature. When you realize the dreamlike nature, that’s also to see the nonlocal field, to see the interconnectedness and the interdependence. All of a sudden, that’s where the compassion comes in.
That is, in a way, the one answer for all of those crises, because of the sense that we’re not separate, that we actually depend on each other for our survival, and that we can actually help each other. To the extent that we’re entranced and thinking we exist separately, and that we just want to get me and mine and all that stuff, that whole narcissistic, self-centered point of view—which is a self-propagating idea—is to be under the sway of the wetiko idea.
The whole sense of actually seeing the true nature of the situation is 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 the fundamental solution, because out of that, everything changes.
It’s kind of like this. Say you have a big mess, and you’re typing on your computer and everything’s coming out wrong. If your fingers are one finger to the right, yeah, it’s going to look like an unbelievable disaster. “Oh my God, the 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 magically resolves.
It’s similar for us: We have actually been entrained to have this mistaken idea of who we are. That’s, in a sense, what my work with wetiko and my work with quantum physics are helping to unlock.
Rick: Yeah, one thing I liked in your book is the references, I guess, from Wheeler and others that fundamentally nature is very simple, and the deeper you go, the simpler it gets. If that is true, then ultimately the solutions to all the problems are not going to be complex. The ultimate core to all solutions is going to be simple. Latch onto that, and the complexities will fall into place, like you said with the keyboard shift thing. That which seemed impossibly complex, insoluble, and intractable will all of a sudden seem like, “Oh, this makes sense. We can do this.”
Paul: And you see, the thing is, if there’s any one person who does that, who integrates sufficiently to the point where they connect with their nature of mind, or ordinary mind, or whatever word you put on it, and they really embody that and have stabilized that realization—and then hang out with other people who also have that same experience—it’s contagious.
In the same way that wetiko is contagious, when you have these insights, it creates a contagious field that gets really potentiated for more synchronistic phenomena to happen, for more of this realization, and for more healing to happen.
A perfect image to express that would be this: Say you’re in a dream at night, and say 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 dream characters in the dream also have that realization: “Oh, wow, we’re having a mass shared dream.” You come together and hang out and contemplate, “Oh, wow, what are we discovering?”
I would imagine you would say something like, “Wow, we’re discovering that this dream world we’re in, this universe, is actually nothing other than our dreaming it up moment by moment into materialization, to manifest the way it is.” As we more and more deepen our understanding of that, we can get in phase with each other and change the way 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 consciously call forth and create reality in a way that’s more in alignment with who we are, and connect with other people, we can activate the collective genius where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In a real way, we can change the world.
Quantum physics is saying that’s within the realm of the possible. 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, pessimism, and depression. Then we’re unwittingly feeding the very darkness that we’re experiencing out there.
When I think about different changes that have taken place in society, such as the ending of slavery, women’s right to vote, gay marriage, or any number of things, it’s sort of like it wasn’t top-down, really, that these things happened. Sure, laws were enacted and the 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.
And you see, that shift in collective consciousness started with the individual. When you get really down to it, 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 person.
That’s really, I think, an important point, because it’s pointing to each and every one of us and the profound importance of doing our own inner work, both psychologically and from the spiritual point of view. Our doing that is nonlocally having an effect on the whole field.
Expecting the government to do something that’s going to change the whole society is kind of like expecting to make a forest green by spray-painting it, by flying airplanes over it with green paint. Really, each individual tree has to become healthy, and then, boom, you have a green forest.
Yeah, no, that’s absolutely true. That’s where, for example, the wetiko idea or the quantum physics idea is really pointing to the profound importance of any one of us—however you say it—owning our shadow or seeing the dreamlike nature.
I want to point out that wetiko is a Native American term, but every spiritual tradition has something like that. That’s what makes them wisdom traditions: They have a symbol system pointing at wetiko.
Wetiko works through the blind spot, through the unconscious, so it can only operate via the shadow—in other words, as long as it’s not seen. Just like a vampire, when the light comes up, the vampire has no power. The same thing happens when you see wetiko, how it operates out in the world, through the nonlocal field, through our reactions to the evil we’re seeing out there, and through our own mind.
When you actually add consciousness to how wetiko works, not only does it take away any power it has over us, but we then empower ourselves.
I’ve had this recurring dream that I’ll be on the lookout for a vampire with a number of people. There was one dream on the morning that two of my teachers were coming to visit from Tibet. I guess I was all excited, and I got woken up by this incredible dream where we’re searching for this vampire that’s amidst us.
I see him and recognize him, and I think I start saying, “Oh, yeah, no, I think we’re all chanting, ‘Bela Lugosi, Bela Lugosi,'” the guy who played Dracula. Robert Pattinson, for that matter.
I see the vampire and try pointing him out to other people in the dream, but no one else can see him. In a way, I was realizing—and that dream was about 20 years ago—that the dream is very alive in my psyche and unfolding more and more.
As I gain fluency and become more articulate, or more able to articulate this stuff, I’m more and more able to turn people on to that vampire that I’m seeing. That vampire is wetiko, and how it’s operating in each one of us.
I’m not writing as if, “Oh, there’s this wetiko disease, and I’m like a healer and I’m free of it.” No, I’ve been infected with wetiko in every molecule of my body. Yet somehow I’ve had whatever it is—the strength or something—not only not to be killed by it, but to more and more transmute it into something positive. That’s what enabled me to write my books.
That’s the deeper archetypal template for any of us. Part of the archetype of the shaman is this: What does the shaman do? They get in and take on the illness of the community or the client. They literally fall ill themselves, but if they’re an accomplished shaman, they’re able to gradually metabolize, assimilate, integrate, and transmute that illness into healing. Then, nonlocally, the person, the client, or the community gets healed through the shaman doing that.
The point is, we’re all shamans in training, every single one of us. That helps us to recontextualize our subjective experience and take it out of the realm of pathology and understand, “Oh, yeah, there’s a deeper spiritual process that we’re all…” The shaman is the wounded healer. I just want to make that clear.
Rick: Okay, cool. A rather long question came in, and Irene spent some time editing it down. She feels like it’s a good one. I haven’t read it yet, but here I go. I’m going to 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 experience that the only way to change the personal dream is to transcend desires. Without desires and losses, we live 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? 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 a better dream. What do you do?
Paul: Right, yeah, no, I really appreciate that question, and what it brings up for me is my own experience. When I’ll have these lucid dreams, and there are all these sort of degrees of lucidity, there are some dreams where I’ll have some lucidity and still think there’s evil, negative energies, and then I’ll have to deal with that or transmute that in the lucid dream.
But then there are these lucid dreams I’ll have where it’ll be kind of full lucidity. It was the very first of the lucid dreams I had 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, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” the mantra of compassion.
Now, it’s interesting. It was so long ago—this was, I think, over 35 years ago—that it was before I had even started doing any sort of mantra practices in Tibetan Buddhism, so I didn’t even really have experience with that mantra. Now, that mantra is the mantra of compassion.
In Buddhism they say that if it’s real awakening, it’s always the combination of two factors: emptiness and compassion. Emptiness—that’s the lucidity. That’s recognizing there’s nothing objective, intrinsically, independently existing, separate from our own mind. That’s the lucidity. And compassion—well, “Om Mani Padme Hum” is the mantra of compassion.
In Buddhism they’ll talk about—and this is also interesting, and this ties in with the compassion piece—that whenever any student starts doing practice, they always cultivate what’s called Bodhicitta, the heart of awakening. This is the good, altruistic heart of compassion, and that’s the start of when a beginning person starts to do practice. You have to cultivate the Bodhicitta.
Then they say when you become fully, totally, and utterly enlightened, what you get is Bodhicitta. So it’s the same thing at the beginning and the end: the Bodhicitta. The Bodhicitta is that heart of compassion.
The point being that, yeah, if you have this genuine sort of awakening, this lucidity in the night dream, in the waking dream, and you’re not sure—“Yeah, what do I do? What do I whatever?”—well, the idea is that the energetic expression of that realization, if it’s genuine lucidity, is compassion. It’s the Bodhicitta.
And then how do you express that? How does that inform your behavior? That’s up to you. That’s where you need to get creative. But the whole question—I really appreciate it—I was flooded with, “Oh, that has to do with Bodhicitta and compassion.” Then I imagine, at least in my imagination, that will inform what there is to do in each and every moment.
Rick: Yeah, I just want to add, in case Florence finds it useful, that in my experience 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 is much more than an individual, and something else is predominantly in control.
There’s a Vedic phrase, “Brahman is the charioteer,” so going from “I am the charioteer” to “Brahman is the charioteer,” Brahman being cosmic intelligence or universal intelligence.
This transition doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen with a snap of your fingers. It takes time, and as it progresses there can be vacillation and sort of swinging from the ease of having Brahman be the charioteer to the difficulty of holding the reins yourself. One 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 fluidity or effortlessness to life. There’s still going to be individual little things cropping up here and there, but they become much more in the back seat, and the cosmic flow of things becomes much more characteristic or predominant in your life.
So it’s a matter of culturing this through whatever practice you find effective, having patience, and just kind of keeping on keeping on.
Paul: Can I say something?
Rick: Yes, please.
Paul: What you said, Rick, was so great. I just loved it. It made me think of an association, because I have so many people who say, “Oh, I have these lucid dreams, and then I can control the dream.” Right away I think, “Oh, they’re not really having lucidity if they’re controlling the dream, because who’s the you who’s controlling the dream?”
When it’s really lucid, that’s what you see through: the “you” with whom you’ve been having an identification. That’s just a model for who you are; that’s not who you are.
So what I would point out to them is, “Yeah, it’s not that you’re able to control the dream. What you’re able to control is yourself.”
Rick: Yeah, and I would say that if you, the individual, are controlling the dream—whether a night dream or the daydream that we’re all having—then you’re in trouble, because the intelligence of the you 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 along for the ride, not isolated from that.
Paul: Totally, and that was why, when I was saying before, with the quantum physics book, when I would look at it I would be like, “Wow, who was the author of this?” It literally felt like some sort of intelligence that was way smarter than me was coming through, and I was, in a way, offering myself as a vessel for this information to come through.
Coinciding with that, I also had a strange feeling a lot. The feeling was that I could imagine the people who, in the future, would get to be the readers of the book. I was feeling—and whether this was a total hallucination, I’m willing to own that—that I was imagining they were literally dreaming me up in the present moment I was in, to find the words to write into the book that they would want to read ten years down the road. So that was just an interesting experience that I was having.
Rick: Yeah, you know, I kind of got that feeling as I was reading the book. I’m not finished reading it, but I want to. I thought, “I could never write a book like this, and I don’t know Paul very well, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to write a book like this either.”
It’s like you kind of got inspired and something came through.
Paul: Right, no, that’s exactly what I’ll say. I’ll say stuff like this to people, because I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I say, “Yeah, something came through this book. You should look at it.”
Rick: 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 revelation is mind-blowing.”
Paul: Yeah, so I’ve known Sting for maybe 12 or 13 years or something like that, and he contacted me. One day, I’ll never forget, I woke up and there was an email in my inbox from Sting saying, “Hey, I love your work.” He was backstage somewhere overseas giving a concert.
I remember that my girlfriend at the time thought, “How do you know it’s really Sting?” We began corresponding, and then I’ve met him 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. Everything that I write, he’ll read and all that.
I just feel really, really fortunate, because I think so highly of him. He’s a super-amazing, beautiful, very intelligent guy. Really, about Bodhicitta, I just feel like he’s really, in whatever way he can, here to serve. I think when he connects with somebody who’s doing work that he thinks is helpful, he’ll do anything he can to support that. So I just feel really fortunate.
Rick: Yeah, and you also have a foreword from Jean Houston, whom I’ll be interviewing in a few weeks, so that’s cool. It’s a beautiful foreword, too.
Anyway, I really sound like I’m a big fan of yours here, and I am. I really appreciate what you’ve written here and have appreciated this conversation. You know, I’m not here to sell people’s books, but it’s a good read if you’re into this kind of thing, which I am—or at least I try to be, like you, a layperson who’s not really a scientist but who finds this topic fascinating.
Paul: Yeah, and the thing I just want to say, too, is that as a layperson, I’m not a physicist. If I pick up a physics book and there are equations and math and all that stuff, that’s not my thing.
I have one mathematical equation in the book, and it’s three plus one equals four. That’s the one equation, and it’s an alchemical maxim that I talk about, so it’s totally for the layperson.
I have a bunch of friends who are not scientists at all, and they’re getting so psycho-activated, because in a way the book is like a psychedelic. I openly talk about this in the sense that, if you’re open to this sort of thing, it can really, by psycho-activating, activate the psyche. It really can, like when you take a medicine, expand your awareness. I think, at least I hope, that’s what comes through the book.
Rick: 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.” 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.
Paul: Totally. I just appreciate that.
Rick: Yeah, and I think we probably covered a lot of the things we would have covered if I’d read those things point by point.
Paul: For sure. Totally.
Rick: So I hope we’ve given people a taste. Buddha at the Gas Pump is kind of a smorgasbord, and each week a new dish is brought out. Maybe not all dishes appeal to all people, but what I usually find is that 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 some things that are germane to all of us and are possibly critically important to the survival of our species.
Paul: And I just really appreciate, Rick, you giving me the invitation to come on and talk with me, so thank you.
Rick: Yeah, it’s great fun. So thanks, Paul. 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. There 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. I think there are 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. 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 a woman who has written a book called The Spiritual Life of Animals, which is kind of a different topic from anything I have covered in any previous interview. A lot of people are animal lovers—we are, and so are a lot of people who listen to this.
A good friend of mine who always watches BatGap hands her book out like candy. He actually is a horse whisperer; he trained with the guy about whom that movie was made. 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, and thanks for listening or watching. See you next time.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
