Paul Morgan-Somers Interview

Summary

Paul Morgan Somers describes a spontaneous awakening at age fifteen that brought intense energetic, sensory, and nonlocal experiences. He also discusses how awakening changes identity, how unusual experiences can be understood without clinging to them, and the challenges of integrating profound shifts into ordinary life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What can happen when spiritual awakening occurs suddenly and without preparation?
• How can someone understand intense energetic or paranormal experiences without becoming attached to them?
• Can awakening make it difficult to maintain work, family life, and ordinary responsibilities?
• How can profound spiritual experiences be integrated into everyday human life?

Key takeaways

• Awakening can begin unexpectedly and may initially bring intense physical and energetic changes.
• Extraordinary experiences may arise naturally, but they do not need to become the focus of spiritual life.
• Awakening can disrupt identity, ambitions, relationships, work, and family responsibilities.
• The deepest shift is from someone experiencing reality to reality recognizing itself as undivided.
• Ordinary activities can express the same freedom and vitality as extraordinary spiritual states.
• A supportive spiritual environment can help the nervous system and personality adjust to profound change.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 430 of them by now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to the Past Interviews menu on batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and you’ll see all the previous ones there.

If this is not new to you, then you’re probably tired of hearing me say that, but I say it every week for the sake of new people. This whole project is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, and if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. We really appreciate those who have been supporting it.

My guest today is Paul Morgan Somers. He’s over in the UK. He doesn’t have an extensive bio that he’s sent me, but from what I gathered from what he sent, he likes drinking tea, playing football, which we call soccer, and talking about the ocean. Does that pretty well sum it up, Paul?

Paul: Yeah, although I have moved on to coffee recently.

Rick: Oh, you’re getting Americanized, I see. Yeah, it happens.

And the reason that soccer—or football, I should say—is significant here, aside from the fact that he really does love playing it, is that he was playing once when he was about 15, Paul?

Paul: Yes.

A Sudden Experience of Unboundedness

Rick: You’re quite young, and all of a sudden he popped into an experience of what he likes to call the ocean, and I’m sure everyone will get the metaphor: a sense of unboundedness. So, let’s start there, Paul. Was this completely unprecedented in your life? Did you have any sort of prior interest in or knowledge of any such thing, or were you just an ordinary kid and this came out of the blue?

Paul: Yeah, just an ordinary kid who loved playing football or soccer. I was just training outside the back of my parents’ house because I’d been given an opportunity to go and play football professionally. I was just training most days, and one day after training out the back, I had an impulse to go and sit down. I sat on some steps behind Mum and Dad’s house, and then, well, I suppose everything changed.

There was a sense of a… Though I didn’t have any of these words then, it was just what happened. It was a full-on experience with no thought process, but it was something that was new to my body. I’d never experienced anything like that before, but now I can use words like rapture. It was a sense of, physically, a very energetic shock to my body.

Rick: Was it frightening at all, or was it enjoyable?

Paul: It was like being hit by—I use that word ocean afterward—but it was like being hit by a wave, and it was in complete control of what happened. There was no time to be frightened. It was just a full-on rush, as it were. Just like that.

Rick: Yeah, like a sneeze, a cosmic sneeze.

Paul: Yeah, it was a cosmic sneeze. It’s just like that, and then from that point, every time I sat, something else happened. It just started a whole period of experiences, really.

✨ An awakening in adolescence

Rick: That’s interesting. The reason I asked whether it was frightening was that one time when I was a kid, probably younger than 10, I had a high fever and I had this experience of huge vastness, you know. Sometimes it would seem to be both vast and infinitesimally small at the same time, and also infinitely heavy and infinitely light. I just sat there with my fever experiencing this thing. It was awesome, but it was a little scary too because it was so big, you know.

Paul: Yeah, there were many other experiences that had more of an element of fear to them, or an element of basically my brain swearing to itself, thinking, “Can my body cope with this?” It was uncertain about it.

Rick: So you’re saying that from the age of 15, when this first happened, it became an ongoing thing—different phases, different experiences?

Paul: Yes, different experiences for about, I don’t know, 16 to 18 months. Just different experiences, like on a daily basis, really.

Rick: Did it make it difficult to function and go to school and things like that?

Paul: Well, I wasn’t that interested in school. All I wanted to be was a football player, and for chasing a little round football around the field, it wasn’t that complicated. There was such a passion in me. I just loved playing football, and over that time, that love of chasing after a football never went. It’s still with me now.

Rick: Sure, even though your knee doesn’t cooperate.

Paul: Yeah, the right knee. But slowly, the sense of identity was changing—who I thought I was and what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a professional football player, make lots of money, be famous, and have girls chasing me. All that seemed to lose its meaning, really.

Rick: I have this image of you chasing a ball and girls chasing you, kind of going down the field.

Paul: Yeah, at that time, at 15, I’d probably have been more interested in the football. There were just loads of experiences that changed the whole concept of who I was.

Rick: We have plenty of time, so tell us a few that you feel were significant. I mean, maybe in retrospect now you don’t think they were significant; they were just phenomena that happened. But people might find it interesting to hear a little bit of what you went through.

Paul: I think it is. I was always reticent to speak about them because people got quite hooked into them, and there’s a feeling that they were just something specific to my physiology, my character.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: The people I’ve met over the years who I would say have been “whacked”—it’s quite a different story for each of them, really. So I have a sense that if there are a thousand people who’ve been whacked, it will be a different story for each of them.

Rick: It’s true, but there are some commonalities, you know.

Paul: Yes.

Rick: Sometimes, if this kind of thing happens to people out of the blue and they have no context for it, or anything to compare it with or anyone to talk to, they think there’s something wrong with them. They go running to doctors, you know. They think they’re crazy or whatever, and so it can be reassuring.

In fact, just this morning I got a message on Facebook from somebody who had been having all kinds of spiritual things going on and hadn’t known what to do or what it was. Then she discovered this interview show and breathed a sigh of relief to see that there were so many other people having things like this and that it was happening all over the world. So it can help people to know what others are going through.

Paul: For me, it happened quite a long time ago. Yes, it’s true. To be honest, I forget a lot of it until somebody mentions something, and then my brain remembers it.

I can remember times of thinking, “Should I speak to my mum and dad?” But again, I didn’t have words for it. I didn’t know how to frame it or put it into words. I also had that—although there was often a fear of what was going on—such a sense of wonderment underlying it that was stronger than the fear.

So the fear never took over strongly enough to make me go and speak to Mum and Dad, you know, and try to explain or put into words what I was having immense difficulty finding words for.

Rick: Did you have any friends that you could speak to, or did you just pretty much keep it to yourself?

Paul: It was just myself, and there was no internet back then—no Google or whatever. So I think that sense of wonderment just carried me through all those experiences, because a lot of them felt very energetic within the body.

Later on, I read books about this term called kundalini, and everything then seemed to make sense. The sense of—there were all energetic experiences, visual and auditory. Some of the most beautiful were that there were often just beautiful scents everywhere, going about through life. That was one of the most beautiful things, funnily enough. The scents were extraordinary.

Rick: Scents, you mean smells?

Paul: Yes, literally smells.

Rick: Okay. Yeah. What kind of smells? Would your normal sense of smell be more acute? Like, you’d walk by some roses and they were ever so much more aromatic? Or was it more like you were picking up on things that maybe only dogs would ordinarily smell?

Paul: Yes, I didn’t recognize them. There were scents, and they would flood my body. So although they were nasal, they seemed to flood the whole body.

Rick: Interesting.

Paul: All these things, whether they were visual or whatever, seemed to have an energetic element to them. Perhaps the brain processed some of them visually, some more auditorily, trying to make sense of an energetic movement in the body.

Slowly, the sense of there being an edge to this body was diminishing as well, and the sense of identity felt more extended through time and space. So it was seeing things before they happened and things like that, and being able to move without being located in the body for a while.

Rick: What’s that? You mean some kind of out-of-body thing?

Paul: Well, yeah, but it wasn’t a sense of something moving out of another something called a body. There was no… It began to become a sense of movement but nothing moving, so there was no journey in it. Most things I’m going to say sound very contradictory. I do apologize.

Rick: No, I totally understand what you’re saying. I think most people listening will understand also. This stuff is paradoxical by nature, you know.

Paul: Yeah, the very nature of it conceptually is enough to be paradoxical, and yet simultaneously it is so simple that I can’t find words for it, which can be frustrating sometimes. But that’s the way it is.

I sometimes just feel like a drunken character: when he gets poked, I just sing drunken songs and chat drunken words, and they’re all paradoxical and contradictory. But there’s such a wonderment for this character, loving them, and I can’t help it.

Rick: Yeah. Well, if the rest of us are comparably intoxicated, then I think we’ll all be on the same wavelength and understand what you’re saying.

The very nature of it conceptually is enough to be paradoxical, and yet simultaneously it is so simple that I can’t find words for it.

Incidentally, this thing about the subtle scents—S-C-E-N-T-S—and knowing things at a distance and all that stuff, the spiritual literature is full of that kind of thing. It’s often brushed off in contemporary nondual circles as being irrelevant or illusory or a distraction, but I think personally that refined capabilities and capacities are part and parcel of an overall spiritual unfoldment or development.

They shouldn’t be overemphasized, but at the same time they shouldn’t be dismissed. They should just be understood for what they are, taken in stride, and we move along, you know. That kind of thing is bound to happen to people, and so it needs to be put in the proper context, I think.

Paul: Yeah, for sure. It’s just what happens. Yeah, it happens.

Rick: It’s normal.

Paul: It’s part of life.

Rick: Yeah, it’s unusual, but theoretically there could be a society in which that kind of thing was commonplace and nobody would think twice about it.

But again, there’s such a gorgeous juice in those things, and simultaneously that same juice is in having a cup of tea. It’s not that they have to be significant or not. I drink a cup of tea; it’s so free. It doesn’t need to have a significance.

Paul: But again, there’s such a gorgeous juice in those things, and simultaneously that same juice is in having a cup of tea. It’s not that they have to be significant or not. I drink a cup of tea; it’s so free. It doesn’t need to have a significance.

Those experiences can be stunningly beautiful, but they don’t need to have a significance. It’s just freedom expressing itself that way, really. So there’s no need to reject them or accept them. They are just what they are.

Rick: Yeah.

Right, well, that’s kind of an acceptance. I mean, I guess maybe I use the word “significance,” and I didn’t mean to imply that they’re more significant than having a cup of tea, but they’re not irrelevant either. They’re just part of human experience when some sort of opening like this happens, and so we don’t make too much of a fuss about them, nor do we reject them. They’re just like, “Oh, this is nice.”

It’s like there’s a term in Louisiana called a “lagniappe,” and if you buy something in the store, they throw a little something extra in the package as a little gift, and that’s called a lagniappe. So this is like a lagniappe.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I’ve never heard that. It has that sort of feel.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: That’s the surprise, that wonderment about them. In one way, it’s just very childlike and very simple.

From dramatic experiences to ordinary life

Rick: Well, we’re going to fill in a lot more in your timeline, but did that stuff stop, or does that still go on and you just take it in stride?

Paul: Some of them have carried on. Most of the major, strong energetic things all stopped when, for want of a better word, over that time, that ocean—this character became aware that there was this energy, which I called energy at the time, which was everything. It was the football I was chasing, it was my mum walking into the room, the people I was competing against, it was the goalpost, it was everything.

But there was still a sense of a Paul experiencing that ocean, that luminosity. Then, although this sounds like a time thing, it’s not a time thing, that luminosity was just self-evidently self-luminous, and there wasn’t a separate something experiencing the ocean. There was just ocean and that luminosity, so that never went.

But those dramatic experiences in the body all calmed down, mostly speaking. Still, things happen on a daily basis which are visual and energetic, but they’re just matter-of-fact. Sometimes people ask me about them, but I forget. Honestly, I don’t think about them until I get prodded.

Rick: In my understanding, what happens is that this is lived through a body. I mean, you mentioned that it’s the luminosity sort of living itself, but it’s living itself by virtue of there being a nervous system that can be a conduit or an instrument for that living. That nervous system has a lot of adjustment to undergo when a big energetic opening like this happens, and it can take years for the adjustment to pretty much complete itself.

You can go through all kinds of stuff that seems intense as it’s doing so, but then, when that adjustment has largely been made, the intensity and the contrast and the drama seem to really diminish, right? It just becomes more normal and matter-of-fact and so on. But you’re still living it through a nervous system, and that nervous system is still subject to change and adjustment and whatnot. It’s still a sensing instrument, so you’re still going to be having experiences.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, and it’s a constantly changing experience.

Rick: Exactly, yeah. So there’s a constantly changing experience of something which doesn’t change.

Paul: Yeah, it’s constantly juicy. Right. So it’s freedom, so it can appear in whichever blinking way it wants, and that could be dramatic or it could be quite calm. It could be quite constructive or quite destructive in certain ways.

Rick: How would it be destructive? In the sense, when I’ve met characters over the years, it’s been a little bit much for their nervous system, like a bomb going off, and that it’s caused a lot of—at least for a period of time, especially living the sort of lives they were living, running a business, having a family.

Paul: Yeah.

It’s been problematic for the characters to assimilate and adjust.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: For some characters, it seems to be a lot smoother, but for a reasonable number of characters, it’s problematic and can be quite messy. So in that sense, it’s destructive from the status quo of how life was.

Rick: Yeah, I run into that a lot. I mean, I hear from people who have had to stop working. In fact, there’s one guy who—you know, he was a carpenter; he is, maybe still is, I don’t know—but he might be listening to this interview. He liked nothing better than sitting on the couch watching football, American football, having a beer, you know, and he wasn’t interested in spirituality. Then this big, huge awakening happened, and it really kind of knocked him, threw him for a loop. He hadn’t ever been able to function the same after that.

Paul: Yeah, and not just for the character but for his family, for his nearest and dearest, for his business colleagues or whatever, it can be problematic. In that sense, it can be—sometimes I feel like unless the itch is really strong in the character when they come and chat with me, I tend to steer them away from it a little bit.

Rick: If they have a choice, you know. Sometimes it just takes over, and they couldn’t steer it away if they wanted to.

Paul: Yeah, for sure, but it’s—

Rick: Like you—

Paul: It’s a dance that happens when they come. Yeah, sometimes you push your way and see whether they still want to come forward. I think I remember speaking to an old monk years and years ago, and he said, “Well, that’s why they used to suggest that people go into a monastery. It is easier to handle the side effects in a monastery than for a householder.”

Rick: It is. It can be, at least if you’re cut out for that. But, you know, in this day and age, there seems to be a kind of wave of awakenings taking place in the world, primarily among householders—people who don’t want to live in monasteries.

Embodiment, Integration, and Human Responsibilities

There’s been a lot of talk over recent years about embodiment and integration. People want this experience, and sometimes they have no choice but to have this experience, but they also want to live human lives. So there’s been a lot of discussion in spiritual circles about how do we integrate this, how do we hold down a job and support a family and all this, in the midst of this whole thing, which can actually be quite powerful.

Paul: For my character, they’re not different things. People use these words, form and the formless, but again, they’re not two things. It’s about juice, it’s about living, it’s about drinking a cup of tea, it’s about hugging, it’s about chasing a football, it’s about everything. There’s nothing excluded.

Rick: So for you, there was no difficulty in acclimating to this, or was there? I mean, you actually went into a monastery for five years.

Paul: Yeah, there was. I think for my body there was a difficulty to begin with, physiologically.

Rick: Adjustment.

Paul: An adjustment. And then I was very lucky I found this monastery.

Finding context in the monastery

Rick: Tell the story of that. So you were like a kid and you’re up there in wherever you lived, and you didn’t know what the heck this was. Then somebody told you there was this big bookstore in London, and you thought, “I’ll go down there and see if there’s anything in that bookstore about this.”

Paul: And I’m still so fond of it. There’s a bookstore called Foyles, and I was told it’s the biggest bookstore in the world. I think it was at one time.

Rick: Yeah, now it’s Amazon.

Paul: Yeah, now Amazon, taking over the world. So I jumped on a train and went to London because I lived in a very quiet rural place back then, so there were no bookshops locally or anything. By that time, my character had fallen in love with this ocean, for want of better words. So I just went and walked into Foyles bookshop and asked, “Do you have any books on the ocean?” I was mad.

Rick: They said, “Yeah, Jacques Cousteau has written some.”

Paul: Yeah. So I can’t remember, but I was there for a while looking through books. Then somebody said to me there was a bookshop quite local to it called Watkins Bookshop. Watkins has been there since 1895 or something, and it’s full of esoteric books and world religions books.

I went there and picked up some books called the Upanishads. I was reading, and there were some words in there that seemed to echo this ocean. There was a sticker in the back of the book supplied by the Vedanta Centre, with the address just outside London. So I went home and shortly went back up to visit this place.

I was taken to see the head abbot, and he just said, “Something very natural has happened to you, but it would be a good idea, if you want, to come and live here for a while.” I thought, “Great.” So I left the football, and I put a little note on my kitchen table to Mum and Dad: “I’ve just gone off to this place. Don’t worry, everything’s fine.” Obviously, they freaked out a little bit.

Rick: What were you like, sixteen?

A Teenager’s Five Years in a Monastery

Paul: Yeah, late sixteen or something. Because all they knew was this football boy, and suddenly he was going to—because they weren’t religious. They were businesspeople, so God only knows what they thought. But I jumped on the train and went to this monastery and was there for about five years in total.

It was gorgeous for me because, living in such a rural area, I hadn’t met people from other cultures or whatever. The only foreign people I’d met were English people, because I come from Wales.

Rick: Oh, so people from Wales consider the English to be foreigners, do they?

Paul: Oh yeah, for sure.

Rick: Okay.

Paul: The English occupy our country.

Rick: Yeah, that and Scotland.

Paul: Yeah, when we play them in sport, it’s serious. It becomes religious for the Welsh. We have to beat the English.

Rick: Okay.

Paul: But anyway, the gentleman in charge was a medical doctor before he became a monk. When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet as a youngster, he was sent by the Indian government to go and receive him, or find him and receive him, because he was a monk and a medical doctor.

So he took two boxes to go and check him out and make sure everything was okay, with all the politics involved. He moved in those sorts of circles. He used to organize—I don’t know if it still happens—what they called interreligious dialogue between world religious delegations.

Rick: There’s a lot of that still happening. I don’t know about the Vedanta Society, but there’s a Parliament of the World’s Religions that attracts over 10,000 people when they hold it.

Paul: So in this monastery, all these delegations—Buddhist and Islamic and all sorts—used to come, as did Christian delegations. I was able to meet people from all around the world with all different truths, as it were, and hear them discussing and arguing.

Some of the characters were just beautiful; some of them were just crazy, like life. These are no different. You get the mad ones, the neurotic ones, the sweet ones—no difference.

So I was able to meet people. It felt like traveling the world, but I didn’t leave the monastery. I was fortunate enough to speak to the Dalai Lama and bishops and archbishops.

Rick: Maybe you can set up an interview for me with the Dalai Lama. Hey, so you are a bit of a child prodigy or something, would that be the word? I mean, here you were only sixteen or seventeen years old with this level of experience that a lot of old monks would die for.

Were you very vocal about what you were experiencing and living? Did they make a fuss about you, or was there some envy? Or did you kind of keep it quiet and just do your thing and wash the dishes?

Paul: Yeah, when I arrived, the old monk said, “Something very natural has happened to you. It would be good for you to come here, but don’t talk about it.” Okay, good. And I didn’t. He was kind enough to let me come, so I followed his rules.

Sometimes, if I got really prodded, it would pop out. There is an instance—I often tell this story—when there was an interreligious meeting on mysticism. The Vatican sent a delegation, and one of them was a hermit. It was the first time he’d come out of his hermitage in about 30 years, but he was ordered by his seniors to come to this meeting between different religious traditions to talk about mysticism.

He was Italian. His English was okay but not brilliant, and I was looking after him because there were about six of us lads in the monastery, and we looked after these various delegations. I chatted to him about the ocean, but he didn’t say much. I thought it was because of his poor English, but on the last evening before he left, he said, “Paul.”

I was bringing him some tea in his room because he had a history of Christ appearing to him, and he just said to me, “One day, Christ appeared to me when I was praying. He walked into my body, and we both disappeared. So I know what you’re talking about, but please don’t tell anybody.”

He said it in such a sweet, childlike way. He was just happy to go back to his hermitage and be there, basically. He didn’t mind any trouble from his superiors or whatever, but it was such a familiar, gorgeous moment when he said it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s sweet. Speaking of Christ, Christ said, “Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” but then again, we don’t like spiritual braggarts who are always spouting off about what they’re experiencing. There’s some kind of balance to be found there.

Paul: Yeah, and still, the West doesn’t have a particularly good reputation for encouraging people to speak freely about religious topics, especially going back through history.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, all the mystics got killed or persecuted or given a hard time by administrative types who weren’t having those experiences.

Paul: So it’s not a good incentive to speak.

Rick: Yeah, good point.

Paul: And still, it happens now, really. I was invited to go over to Egypt to chat, and then some people I know who have been there just phoned me and said, “Well, possibly it’s better not to go.” It hadn’t occurred to me, because you can still upset people quite easily.

Rick: Yeah, you know, that was one of my motivations for starting this show. I live in a town where a lot of people have been meditating for decades, and people were having awakenings. I would hear from them. They’d say, “Well, I had this really profound shift, and I started telling my friends about it, and they all gave me a hard time. They said, ‘Oh, you’re just Joe Schmo. You couldn’t possibly be having something like this.’”

So I thought, “Well, I want to start interviewing these people so that their peers can see that it’s happening to people just like them.” Maybe then they won’t give them a hard time, and maybe they will have more confidence that it could happen to them, too. That was one of the reasons this thing got going.

It’s not special; it’s natural.

Paul: Yeah, and it feels like a very natural luminosity. It’s not special.

Rick: Right. It’s something everyone should enjoy.

Paul: It’s very natural. Yes. Yeah. It’s the juice of time and space.

Rick: Right.

Paul: It’s the juice of it all.

Rick: I mean, if we went back to the 1800s, think about how people would react if we pulled out a cell phone, took off in a helicopter, or did any of those types of things. They’d be completely freaked out, but now we all just take it for granted. I think the same thing can happen with what you’re talking about over time, and maybe we’re moving in that direction.

Paul: It feels, for my character, a bit like that. The old central structures of authority, whether they’re political, financial, religious, or so-called spiritual, are all being shaken quite strongly at the moment. There seems to be a decentralization of those central authorities, and possibly the sort of thing we’re chatting about has a huge decentralizing effect because it removes the middle person with authority, in a sense, or makes them a lot less significant or less critical.

Rick: I think you’re right. I mean, there was a time—and maybe it’s still true—when, in the Catholic Church, priests were officially considered the intermediaries between ordinary people and God. There was a big fuss when Gutenberg came out with the Bible because it was getting to the point where others could read it, too, and you didn’t need priests to intervene. That was a big shake-up.

I think we’ve obviously come quite a way since then, but I think it’s getting even more decentralized, as you were just saying, and more democratized. People are gaining the confidence to recognize that they—I mean, the title of the show, Buddha at the Gas Pump: people in ordinary circumstances having the sort of experiences that were once considered super-special and rare.

Awakening as Natural Rather Than Special

Yeah, it’s not special; it’s natural. Again, over—I don’t know—40 years of chatting to characters, all the characters I’ve met have got whacked. Some of them have been—you know, it makes a great little story—but for a lot of them, it was simply almost like waking up in the morning, but with no sense of there being a separate something waking up. It was such a non-event, in a sense. I think you have to be careful when you link it to being something special, because that can be problematic.

Paul: Yeah, it’s not special; it’s natural. Again, over—I don’t know—40 years of chatting to characters, all the characters I’ve met have got whacked. Some of them have been—you know, it makes a great little story—but for a lot of them, it was simply almost like waking up in the morning, but with no sense of there being a separate something waking up. It was such a non-event, in a sense. I think you have to be careful when you link it to being something special, because that can be problematic.

Rick: Yeah, and on the other hand, just to play devil’s advocate, I sometimes hear people saying that they dumb it down too much. They say things like, “Yeah, you could be a drunkard, and you could be an abusive SOB, and you could be creepy and all this stuff, and yet you’re awakened.”

I don’t know. I don’t like to take it that far. I think that if awakening is really genuine, and you’ve developed the sort of awareness and sensitivity to which you have been alluding, your behavior is not going to be really out of line like that—at least in my idealistic sense of it. I just don’t like the attitude that anything goes, and you can be an enlightened ax murderer or something. There’s got to be some kind of clearer definition of it, I think.

Paul: Well, I’ve never met any character who was an enlightened ax murderer, so I don’t know. Actually, one of the avatars of Vishnu was an ax murderer, so there you go. He went around chopping off all the Kshatriyas’ heads.

Makes a sweet story. Hollywood.

Rick: Okay, now feel free to always chime in if there’s a pause and I’m not asking a question. If something has been on your mind, just pop in there. I want to pick up on your use of the word “character.” You frequently refer to characters who get whacked, or “my character,” and so on. When you say that, I get the implication that you’re saying what you essentially are is not this Paul fellow that we see on screen; that’s just a character, like a character in a play or a puppet or something, and that it does an injustice to the reality of that ocean to squeeze it down into the drop of an individual. So you try to remind people of that by using the word “character.” Am I right?

Paul: But no, not really.

Rick: Okay, why do you say that all the time?

Paul: Well, it doesn’t—I don’t know why I say most things—but because the character is it.

Rick: What do you mean?

Paul: It’s not like the character is less important. When you go to the dentist with a toothache, you don’t say to the dentist, “Hey, my character has a toothache,” because the dentist will probably say, “Okay, bring him in; we’ll take a look.” You would just say, “I have a toothache.”

I just say there’s lots of pain.

Rick: You could say it that way.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t know.

Rick: The reason I’m bugging you about that is that some people play word games with regard to pronouns. They don’t want to just say, “Please pass me the salt,” or some simple thing like that. They start trying to phrase their words in such a way as to constantly remind people that they are not the body, they are not the personality, and so on. It sometimes sounds a little unnatural.

Paul: No, I’m very much my character.

Rick: You’re also Paul, I guess.

Paul: Yeah, well, different words for the same thing. The same thing. So I’ll perhaps say “character,” or “me,” or “time and space.” They’re all words for the same thing.

Rick: Yeah, and even if you say “my character,” it’s like, are there two of you? There’s a character, and then there’s the “me” who owns it.

Paul: I mean, yeah, the whole structure of words is problematic.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: In a sense, we are having a drunken conversation.

Rick: Right. Cheers.

Paul: Because, in a sense, all these words come out of time and space, and they’re full of the alcohol of time and space.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: But what they’re singing about, or what they’re in love with, hasn’t got a measurement. All these words are measurements. But it’s not that the measurement is right or wrong, because the measurement is it as well, and isn’t it simultaneously, so to speak.

We’re inherently using a spade to try to dig a hole in the ocean, and it’s not a very suitable instrument. If you’re using words to build a house, it would be more useful, but in this context of this drunken conversation, the spade of words we’re using isn’t a brilliant instrument.

We’re inherently using a spade to try to dig a hole in the ocean, and it’s not a very suitable instrument.

Rick: But it’s better than just staring knowingly into each other’s eyes for two hours. That would get a bit boring. So it’s good to try to do something with words.

Paul: It depends whether you were blonde and more beautiful.

Rick: Sorry, next lifetime maybe.

Paul: No, but it can be in the silence as well as the words. It’s not one better than the other.

Rick: Sure.

Paul: It’s just everything.

Rick: I’m sure we all experience that very often. We’ll have a conversation with somebody, and the words form a small percentage of the actual communication that’s taking place. You use the words in order to sort of keep it going, but there are so many other strata of communication happening.

Paul: And it’s very much that way, because you can listen to words and play with words for hours and hours and hours. But people can also hear the same words again, and suddenly something different is heard, so to speak.

Rick: Very true. Something else goes on there that’s more like a sense of something here in itself, and that can have a different physiological response in the body than just an intellectual process, which could be fun and could help create clarity with certain ideas and whatever. But when this wetness slaps you, it tends to go below the neck. The whole body gets hugged or slapped, whichever way. Whether you want to be romantic or something else happens.

Or slapstick.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, that’s nice. Very often, people talk that way. They talk about levels of awakening in the head, heart, and gut, and so on, the way Adyashanti talks. It’s obviously not just an intellectual thing or a mind thing; it’s on all levels and very visceral.

Paul: Yeah, because in that sense, it’s got nothing to do with being clever or not clever.

Rick: No.

Paul: It’s more immediate than that. It’s more immediate than any movement of measurement, any movement of time and space, or any movement of a concept. In one sense, anything that can be measured or conceptualized into a sort of knowing, into a box as it were, tends to be problematic with regard to this freedom.

Rick: Yeah. You know that old Buddhist saying about the finger pointing at the moon, and then people get all hung up on the finger instead of looking at the moon. All these words and all this talk and so on—it’s that finger.

Paul: Yeah, literally. I remember listening to all these delegations talking and arguing, sometimes quite heatedly. It is the utter simplicity of this luminosity, and yet quite naturally the brain will try to create a knowing of it, in a sense, to create a map of it. For me, anyway, it felt like all these delegations were arguing over their maps.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: But none of the maps were it, in a sense, anyway. It was almost like arguing in completely the wrong place. They weren’t even in the same room as this luminosity, as it were.

Rick: Well, you know—

Paul: People want days and weeks of these arguments, and months and years and thousands of years.

Rick: Millennia. I mean, hundreds of millions of people have been killed over disputes about maps which actually refer to the same territory. But the adherents of the maps are attached to their version, and they can’t see the—yeah.

Paul: You can see that the map is simultaneously the person’s identity, and people will fight strongly over their sense of identity. If their map gets threatened, as it were, their identity gets threatened, and then they can become quite feisty.

Rick: It’s an interesting point. The point you’re making is that fundamentalism is symptomatic of an insecurity in one’s identity. To me, that insecurity lies in not having the actual experience to which one’s belief refers. So you can listen to the words of Jesus, for instance, but you’re not experiencing what Jesus experienced or what he was alluding to. You feel an insecurity, and you get really fanatical about his words and your interpretation of his words versus somebody else’s interpretation, who perhaps also isn’t having that experience. The two of you can be at loggerheads over something which you should both be hugging each other about if you had the experience.

Paul: Yeah, for sure. I live by the beach, and so often you’d see kids playing on the beach—complete strangers, kids who just look at each other across the sandcastle and often just walk up to each other and hug each other.

Rick: Oh, nice.

Paul: From all cultures and whatever. To me, that’s the naturalness of aliveness. That’s the juiciness of it.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: But on top of that, as we get older, our brains become a lot more sophisticated in building maps and building identities. When a map becomes something we believe in, and if enough people believe in their map, it becomes a reality, as it were. Then they’ll fight over their map to the death.

One Ocean and the Illusion of Separate Conflict

Rick: It’s a really sweet point you’re making. With all the trouble in the world—all the political, economic, and national divides and conflicts and strife, currently and going back throughout history—we’re really all just one being, one ocean. It’s absurd that apparent fragments of the ocean are at war with one another. How can the ocean be at war with itself? Obviously, it’s a situation of extreme delusion that all this strife exists. If people were able to settle into what they really are, there’d be complete unity and harmony.

Paul: But the possibility is that the very movement of time and space, of “me,” is a bit of a contradiction, in the sense that there can be a movement but not a mover. In a sense, the identity is dealing with—that’s why, as you said earlier, it’s always uncertain of itself—because it’s all based on a lie. It’s based on an energetic lie that it’s separate from life, that it’s separate from the other person or whatever.

In some way, the energetic movement of “me” tends to be inherently quite destructive to itself and to others as part and process of that movement. It’s like the very movement has to be creative and destructive simultaneously to create the movement. It seems to arise out of the polarity of this appearance of two things, of two poles. It’s both attracted and repulsed by both poles. So it’s attracted and repulsed by the unknown, and it’s attracted and repulsed by the known.

But, again paradoxically, without that appearance of two, there can be no appearance of a movement. It’s the appearance of two that creates that energetic, almost constantly energetic imbalance which creates the appearance of movement, of time and space. But without the two, you can’t have time and space, and vice versa. You can’t have movement; you can’t have time.

To have that, the price you pay is for that. It’s a bit like walking. To walk, there has to be a constant imbalance to create that movement. We’re always moving in a constant imbalance, and hopefully not too imbalanced—we’re not too drunk, in which case it can be problematic. But the other problem is that if it becomes too balanced, the movement stops. If things become too known, it kills, in a sense, and if it becomes too unknown, there’s a sense that it kills.

The whole movement of “me” is a contradictory paradox, and it can only be like that. So, in a very neutral way, I often say the very movement of “me” is born out of violence, and it’s part and parcel of the movement of time and space. It can never be divorced from it because it’s part and parcel of its energetic nature.

Again, on the beach, you see the kids building sandcastles. They spend all day building sometimes stunning sandcastles, even with the apparent adult who is then a kid building sandcastles for their children as well. But towards the end of the day, when you see the faces of those children smashing their sandcastles, there’s actually so much joy in their faces as they’re smashing them.

Again, we have in our characters this beautiful wonderment of creating but also, paradoxically, of destroying as well. It’s part and parcel of this movement called time and space, or called “me,” but it’s simultaneously creative and destructive.

Rick: Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the Tibetan sand paintings that they do. They create these beautiful things, and then they just wipe them away.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: It also reminds me of the whole Vedic tradition. I’m sure this is true of other traditions, where you have Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—the creator, the maintainer, and the destroyer—and all three are considered necessary for there to be a creation. There’s a balance and reciprocity between them that makes the whole thing happen.

Even from the physics perspective, there’s something called spontaneous sequential symmetry breaking. There’s a sort of fundamental symmetry at the most primordial level of the universe, and it’s broken by degrees, sequentially. As it’s broken, more and more force and matter fields, diversity, elements, and the whole thing arise. In their arising, obviously, there are going to be conflicts and clashes and interactions, and the whole thing gets very, very mixed up. But if it didn’t go through that process, you wouldn’t have a creation.

Paul: Or destruction.

Rick: Or destruction, yeah. So it’s like the course of creative intelligence, we could call it, is from here to here, from I to I. It’s like that T. S. Eliot line: “The end of all our seeking will be to arrive back at the place from which we started and to know it for the first time.”

Paul: Very much, yeah. You often hear that from people. An old monk contacted me—a Benedictine monk, a few months ago—and it’s quite funny because he was swearing quite a lot on the phone, which often happens with spiritual characters. He was saying, “Paul, what I was looking for was there the first day I walked into the monastery, like 40 years ago. I went in there and sat to pray. What I was looking for was there when I walked in on the first day.”

So it’s very much, again, as I often say, an apparent movement but with no mover.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: So it is literally a journeyless journey.

It is literally a journeyless journey.

Rick: Yeah, a pathless path. If it wasn’t there on the first day, then it must not have been something abiding or permanent. It would be a transitory thing, and that’s not what he was looking for. He was looking for—you know, there’s that verse in the Gita: “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.”

Paul: It’s everything.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: It never wasn’t the case. I often hear people say this word “unconditional,” and literally this ocean is unconditional because it already is the case. It doesn’t have to be a condition for it because it already is everything.

Rick: Yeah. Now, that is not to say that it’s sufficient to just say something like that, or accept someone saying something like that, and say to yourself, “Okay, I’m done. It’s all already the case, and what I’m looking for is already here,” because it may not be your experience. If it’s not your experience, then you’ve got to go through whatever you have to go through until it becomes your experience. You can’t necessarily do it at the snap of a finger, in my experience.

Paul: Again, there don’t seem to be any rules to this. You’d have to do some sort of scientific research and analyze all these different characters. But I can only speak from the characters I’ve met over the years, because in a way this ocean doesn’t have anything. It’s not in a relationship with anything, so it doesn’t sing, it doesn’t say, “Do this,” or “Don’t do it.”

Rick: It’s a relationship with itself.

Paul: Yeah. So if the character loves to meditate, that’s gorgeous—meditate. But I had a good friend in the monastery for whom sitting to meditate was utter violence. He used to hate it; he used to suffer and suffer and suffer.

Rick: It kind of depends on how you’re going about it, but anyway, go on.

Paul: Yeah, but he’d work all day helping people and feeding people and whatever.

Rick: Oh, that’s great.

Paul: I remember one day somebody gave the monastery a clock to put in the meditation room. It was a lovely clock, but it went, as clocks do, tick-tock, tick-tock. That was the final straw for my friend.

At that time, my character would just sit there for hours and days or whatever. I came sitting and came to, and my friend had his hands around my neck and was shaking me like this. He was saying, “Paul, Paul, it’s not fair! How can you sit there?” For him, it was murder.

So, for that character, telling him to go and sit didn’t seem to be the pertinent thing to do. It’s not like one size fits all; it’s very individual to the person.

Rick: I totally agree, and that’s why there are different paths. Traditionally, there’s the bhakti path, devotion; the service path, seva; the knowledge path, jnana; and the action path, karma, and so on. Different people are acclimated or constituted to be more suitable to one approach or another.

Paul: And it doesn’t matter, because they’re all just flavors of the same thing anyway.

Rick: Yeah, so you have to do what’s right for you.

Paul: Well, it’s just like common sense.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: Again, this is not about being clever. It doesn’t seem to be about being clever; it’s more about naturalness and common sense.

Rick: Yeah, but one point I heard you make in some of your talks that I might take exception to—and perhaps you didn’t mean it this way—is that you’re saying it makes no difference whether you sit and meditate or hang out in the pub. I would say it does make a difference.

To take it to a greater extreme, you could say it makes no difference whether you meditate regularly or do a bunch of methamphetamine every day. One is actually going to help your brain develop new neuroplasticity; the other is going to destroy your brain, and that’s going to make a difference in how you experience life. So you have to be a little careful when you make statements like that. What we do actually does matter, wouldn’t you say?

Paul: In a natural, practical way, for sure. Big time.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: I can’t remember the context of what you referred to.

Rick: Something like that that you said in the talk.

Paul: But again, the flavor of this ocean is more like an “and” ocean. It’s not like a “but” ocean—”But you said this,” or “But he said that,” or “But the book said that.” It has more of a flavor of “and, and, and.” In other words, it contains everything.

Rick: Sure. It contains the Holocaust, and it contains some beautiful things. Everything is contained within this great wholeness, this ocean. Is that what you’re saying?

Paul: Yeah. There’s nothing to exclude, as it were. But for sure, there are practical ramifications.

Again, we were speaking earlier about the side effects sometimes when people are going through a change in which the map of their identity is being shaken, as it were. They can often then find it difficult to engage in what they were engaged in before, and part of that process is earning money and things like that. But they have very practical consequences, not just for the person but for their family and everything like that.

So the so-called spiritual thing doesn’t negate earning money, being practical, and putting food on the table. Again, it’s very earthy and muddy and down to earth in many ways, getting on with what needs to be done. But there’s no suggestion that one thing can be more conducive or more of an obstacle, as it were, for that character, because there’s nothing that can get closer to everything. There’s just everything.

Rick: Yeah, well, I’m going to—

Paul: But that doesn’t negate what you’re about to say.

Rick: Right, which is that I was going to give you a little bit of a hard time on that point.

Paul: What you’re going to say also is that, in the big picture, it appears to be a “but,” but possibly it’s an “and.”

Rick: I mean, in five billion years from now, this planet is going to melt because the sun is going to expand. Long before that, everybody who is alive now will have died. Obviously, it’s not going to be too rosy on Earth. I don’t know, maybe that’s not the best example, but I could use it.

From the perspective of the totality, the ocean of the universe or whatever, that’s all in a day’s work. It’s natural; this kind of thing happens every day. Some asteroid probably crashes into an inhabited planet and kills everything.

On the other hand, taking it down to the individual level, it’s important. There was a Buddhist sage who lived maybe a thousand years ago named Padmasambhava, and there’s a quote from him:

Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.

What he meant by that, I think, is that the ocean—one’s oceanhood, the unboundedness of it all—doesn’t negate or render insignificant all the various individual values, responsibilities, consequences of our behavior, and the choices we make. Both are true. They may be paradoxical, but they don’t conflict with one another.

Paul: For sure, definitely. Because people often—I’ve got two boys, you know—people often ask me, “What about your boys?” and ask about being responsible for them and things like that.

That thing called responsibility is the ocean. It’s responsibility full-on, in that sense. For my younger son, that sense that there was a separate something collapsed in him when he was about twelve or whatever.

It’s quite funny because he does a lot of freerunning; he does lots of parkour.

Rick: I know what that means. You’re jumping on these obstacles, and it’s kind of dangerous, flipping over things.

Paul: Yeah. I turned around in the garden while he was training, and he was in tears. I thought he had fallen off something. I thought, “Oh, here we go to the A&E again.”

He just walked up to me and said, “There is nobody here, is there, Dad?” I said, “No.” Physiologically, often tears are quite common, as are swearing or laughter. There seems to be a physiological response when this sort of slap comes, this wetness.

There is no father or son as such, but there doesn’t need to be a separate father and son, paradoxically, for there to be beautiful responsibility and all the practical consequences of dealing with things. The whole authority structure for him fell away, so there was no authority figure called Mum or Dad, or indeed school.

He wrote a resignation letter—a twenty-two-page document—in which he said, “School is an inefficient use of my time. I’m resigning.” And he resigned.

Rick: Can you leave school at that age? In the U.S., I don’t think you could.

Paul: In this country, you have a legal responsibility to educate your child, but not to send them to school.

Rick: Oh yeah, homeschooling, that kind of thing.

Paul: Yeah. So I took him into the headmistress, and he handed his notice in. She read it and just said, “Oh, okay,” and that was it.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting that both you and your son had an awakening in a way. I don’t know if it was as a result of sport, but it happened while playing it or just after.

Paul: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that.

Rick: It kind of runs in the genes or something.

Paul: So perhaps sport is the key.

Rick: It is. Everyone should go out and—

Paul: Look after your knees.

Rick: Yeah, exactly, and wear a helmet maybe if you’re doing parkour.

Paul: Yeah, or American football.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: I heard you tell your story about your son. It was fascinating, and now he’s doing some kind of—he’s talking about there being a new industrial revolution, and he’s doing some kind of business that would take advantage of the change he sees coming in society or something like that.

Paul: Yeah. After that experience, his character changed dramatically. For me, I often say he started moving in the realm of ideas, in the sense that he was creating maps and creating identities, and also destroying them—like creating sandcastles on the beach very quickly. He was, or has been, burning through maps.

Rick: So you mean different personality phases?

Paul: Yeah. You can see it’s almost like life has sped up for his character. He’s creating realities and destroying them very quickly.

It’s fascinating to watch. He started his own business, and he started trading. He’s doing really well.

Rick: Trading stocks or something?

Paul: Well, he discovered something called the blockchain, which is a decentralized way of exchanging anything of value, with no middle person.

It’s a little bit like we’ve been having this conversation about the orthodox religious traditions. He feels that this emerging technology of robotics, AI, and blockchain will create the equivalent of a new industrial revolution, in which power will be decentralized from central authorities into a more decentralized landscape.

He’s very passionate about using the system, being practical as it is, to change itself.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: He’s very inspired by people like Elon Musk and things like that.

Rick: Oh yeah. I think he’s right. How old is he now?

Paul: He’s just fifteen now.

Rick: Wow, that’s so cool that he’s doing all that stuff at such a young age. I mean, what we’re doing is an example of what he was saying. I used to say, “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one,” and now everyone owns one, in the sense that you can broadcast and put things out there. It’s so decentralized.

Paul: Exactly what you’re doing. You’re decentralizing information and apparent authority from how it was structured into a very different sort of landscape. In that, the actual conversation is changing, and the possibilities are changing.

Rick: Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s an exciting time to be alive. Let’s stay alive as long as we can, knees notwithstanding.

Paul: Yeah. He sees lots of things imminently happening. He says, “The future is here now, but it’s not spread out, Dad.” That’s brilliant.

Rick: Wow, I was such a nincompoop when I was fifteen. It’s really inspiring to hear someone that age being so wise.

Paul: It is weird. He was invited by the Bank of England, which is our central bank, to a dinner meeting to give them input about the future disruption of these technologies.

Rick: Amazing.

Paul: He took a photo and sat there with his baseball hat on, with people like—well, “posh people,” as he said.

Rick: Right, all kinds of people.

Paul: He came back and said, “Dad, that was my first experience of power,” because he said the way they treated him was something he had never experienced before. He said, “I’ve realized how power can be so intoxicating for people.”

We’ve talked about spiritual and religious things, and the whole construct that society has made, and how possibly they are not as authoritative as we presume them to be, nor as all-knowing as we presume them to be.

Rick: It’s the emperor’s new clothes.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. He can see, in his first experience, why people fall in love with power and why they hold on to it.

We see that—I’m sure you’ve seen it in the spiritual circle, just as in the economic or political circle. Again, it’s human nature. It’s those kids on the beach.

🕊️ Power, authority, and spiritual responsibility

Rick: Yeah, there’s that saying, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I don’t know who said that, but it definitely can be intoxicating and go to one’s head.

Paul: It is. Within the context of our conversation, after over forty years of chatting to people, you hear so many stories from people who have, in one way or another, been abused by people in religious or spiritual authority.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: In a sense, I made a New Year’s resolution to become more grumpy. I wanted to become more grumpy with that sort of stuff.

Rick: As long as you don’t become abusive in the process.

Paul: Yeah, I’m less patient with all that sort of thing, when people use power to abuse other people.

Rick: Yeah, you know, that’s another meme that is kind of emerging in the collective consciousness. I gave a talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference in October about the ethics of enlightenment, and a bunch of people came up afterward—teachers and non-teachers—and just said, “We’ve all been talking about this and thinking about this. The time has come to not tolerate this kind of stuff anymore.” And look what’s happening now. I don’t know about in the UK, but over here, all these movie stars and politicians are getting busted for sexual abuse and using their power to take advantage of people. In the collective consciousness, there’s an impatience with that, a lack of tolerance for it anymore.

Paul: Yes, so I think in people’s characters, one then needs to have, at least in a sense, a street awareness when you’re around people with power, to be careful. And that equally goes for so-called spiritual teachers and gurus and whatever. I often say, regard them as secondhand car salesmen until they prove otherwise. It’s possibly a good starting point, because power is so appealing to characters.

Rick: It is, and it’s tricky not only for the students of such people but for the people themselves. I mean, they get hit harder than anyone. You know, there’s that saying, “Pride goeth before a fall.” There are so many instances of people just letting it go to their heads, and the whole thing gets out of control. Then they end up crashing and burning. So there’s a kind of maturity, I think, that’s necessary in order to assume the role of a spiritual teacher, and often people try to assume it prematurely.

Paul: Again, in the old monastic traditions, they used to say, “Stay quiet for 20 years.”

Rick: Yeah, and possibly there’s some common sense in that, really.

Now the times are such that we need people to get out there and talk and teach. I mean, there seems to be this, again, democratization idea, where it’s not just one guru with thousands of followers, but hundreds and hundreds of people with small gatherings that are helpful to those people. But the same dynamic is there: there has to be a readiness and a maturity in order to assume that role. Otherwise, you’re not going to be helping anyone, including yourself.

Paul: My son was telling me he’s reading a book called Stealing Fire, I think it’s called, and it goes into transcendence, or moving to a different state. They were analyzing Navy SEALs. It’s written by scientists, I think, and when they’re looking for a Navy SEAL, they’re looking for a character who, when in extreme circumstances, doesn’t become like a superhero, like you see in the movies—a super-individual. He actually can become one with the group.

Rick: Yeah, has the group in mind.

Paul: Then there’s no leader. There’s no leader in a Navy SEAL group. Whoever’s in the best position becomes the natural leader at that moment in time. So, like in a conversation, is there a teacher? Is there a student? The teacher and the student, if you want to use those words, appear all over the place—in a word, in a mannerism—from every character in a conversation. It’s not located inside that certain character or physiology. It’s in that sense that, if you could say there was a teacher, it’s nonlocal, in a sense.

Rick: Yeah, people become more like catalysts, in a way. They can serve to facilitate something in the group, but it’s not like they’re—I know people who are really uncomfortable even just sitting on some kind of stage. They would rather get down on the floor and have everybody in a circle, just to make it more clear that there’s a commonality and not a hierarchical arrangement.

Paul: Because, as you said earlier, so much of communication isn’t in the words. And, as we said, words are problematic anyway, because they’re not a particularly great instrument for singing about this. But also, when you build a structure, like you raise somebody onto a platform, as it were, that already is communicating something in our conditioning. So, like you said, we can’t help but use words in some situations, but you just have to be careful with them, not to get caught up in them, not to believe in them.

Rick: Right, or in yourself too much, in terms of any individual importance.

Paul: Well, yeah, to believe in any measurement. A measurement is real, but it’s a measurement of something which has no measurement. So simultaneously, it’s unreal, as it were.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a quote from Amma, whom you see over my shoulder here. She always says, “It’s always good to have the attitude of a beginner.” I think what she means by that is humility—recognition that one doesn’t know everything or have some kind of super-duper status or anything. If you just have that attitude, and almost the attitude of a servant—which some of the great saints that we admire throughout history have had—just the humility and sense of servitude, it’s a safeguard for yourself and also makes you more helpful, perhaps, to others.

Paul: But in many ways, Rick, it’s more simple than that. It’s so close, as it were, that in a sense it’s brand new. In that brand-newness, there’s no knowing, because there’s not even knowing that it’s brand new, but it’s immaculate, in a sense. And perhaps that’s the story of the immaculate conception. Literally, literally, time and space is immaculate. And in that timeless seamlessness, there is no need of knowing, and yet it can appear as knowing. It can appear as a measurement.

Rick: It’s interesting you should say all that in response to what I just said. I’m trying to get the segue, how we got to that, but it’s interesting what you’re saying. Maybe just the brand-new part.

Paul: Literally. In other words, ever fresh, moment to moment. Are you kind of saying that there’s a…

It’s not even more imminent than that.

Rick: It’s closer than one’s jugular vein, as they say.

Paul: It’s like you push the brain toward it, as it were, and suddenly the brain and the words go… They just stop, because there’s no measurement for it, because it’s not—in that sense, it’s not a time-and-space thing.

Rick: It precedes time and space.

Paul: In a sense, but it is time and space. Yes, the form is the formless. They only appear in language to be two things, and language is a two-edged sword. It can create as much separation as clarity, as it were. And it’ll do both unavoidably, because that’s the nature of the tool.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t even know. Well, maybe language is to blame, but we still use it. I think it kind of depends on our orientation to it: if we keep it in its proper place and recognize its limitations, then it can be a useful tool. If we think that it’s capable of encapsulating the whole reality, and that the words themselves are so important, then the whole thing gets top-heavy, and misinterpretation and confusion emerge.

Paul: Yeah, we just fight over words. We fight over measurements.

Rick: Like we were saying earlier. Yeah, we’ll loop back to some stuff in your personal life, which I think is kind of fascinating. Well, firstly, let me ask: what was your motivation for leaving the monastery after five years?

Paul: The same playfulness that took me there.

Rick: Yeah, just something moved you to leave.

Paul: Yeah, it just moved me, and I lived like a hermit for a while on my parents’ farm.

Rick: And then you must have been in your early twenties by that time, if you went in when you were 17 or so.

Paul: Yeah, 22 or whatever.

Rick: And how old were you when you got married?

Paul: I can’t remember.

Rick: Roughly.

Paul: Later twenties.

Rick: Okay. And you had this interesting story about that, where your wife—you’d never met the woman—and this name popped into your head, and you thought, “I’m going to marry this person.” You didn’t even know if such a person existed, or, if she did, where she was or anything else. But, boom: “I’m going to marry this person.” What do you make of that? I mean, how did that happen?

Paul: I don’t know. It’s just what happened. It sounds a bit weird.

Rick: One of those mystical kind of things.

Paul: Yeah, just sitting quietly, I heard the name, and I just knew I’d marry her.

Rick: And so then you overheard some women in a store or something talking about this person?

Paul: In the local village, I heard the name again. So I inquired. I said, “Who is this person?” I also asked how old she was.

Rick: She’s 70.

Paul: And I got hold of her telephone number and just phoned her up out of the blue and said, “My name’s Paul. Would you like to go out for dinner?” She said no.

Rick: Unless your name is McCartney, I don’t think so.

Paul: Yeah, so I remember putting the phone down and thinking, “Well, we’re getting married. Why did you say no?” And then, months later, she phoned me.

Rick: Right, she was snowed in someplace, right? And she phoned you and asked if you had a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Paul: Yeah, my mum and dad had an old little Suzuki four-by-four. So I managed to get down. It was a long farm lane, full of snow. It was very beautiful, and the gates had iced up. It was a bit like a film, really.

Rick: You were like Prince Charming coming to save her.

Paul: Yeah, I rescued her and took her for dinner.

Rick: Killed a dragon or two on the way.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: So you took her for dinner, and then one thing led to the next.

Paul: Yeah, we just kept in communication and then eventually married and had two boys.

Rick: And you didn’t stay—how long were you married? I keep asking you all these numbers.

Interesting. What did she make of your whole orientation to life? I mean, did she kind of get this ocean business?

Paul: Because my character will just speak about it when it gets prodded. Was she interested in that whole thing? In a sense, she had a sense that, when she met me, it felt like coming home. That’s the only way that she verbalized it, really. So it’s funny. I was speaking to my son yesterday, and often people ask me, “What do you say to your children about this?” I often don’t understand the question. It takes my brain a little while to create that sort of map, because the question doesn’t make much sense. Everything’s the ocean, so there’s nothing that needs to be spoken about as such, because the kids just grew up in the ocean. It’s just always what is.

So they didn’t have to have some sort of proper conversation about it, because there isn’t a something which is the ocean. There isn’t a something over there or behind there which is the ocean. It’s not a something in that sense. So to make it into something, it just becomes another measurement, which isn’t it.

Rick: And so all this, what you’re saying now, arose from my asking about whether your wife was interested in this stuff. I guess what you’re saying is that it was so natural to you that you don’t make a deal out of it. If she’s interested, she’s interested; if she’s not, she’s not. It wasn’t really relevant as a topic of discussion or something.

Paul: But making a living was the ocean.

Rick: Yeah, something you needed to do. Building a business, making profits, and…

And you have some kind of art studio or something, don’t you?

Paul: Yeah, and deciding which school for your children to go to, what books to read, what stories to tell them, and things like that.

Rick: Those are all currents within the ocean.

Paul: Well, although this sounds a bit paradoxical, they’re not even currents. The whole ocean is in it.

Rick: No, I get that. Yeah, because “current” sounds isolated, but what you’re saying is that the whole ocean is in every drop. Is it?

Paul: Yeah, it’s in changing the baby’s nappy, it’s in the hug, it’s in cooking breakfast, it’s in reading the book, it’s in trying to make a business deal, to make money, to pay the mortgage.

Rick: Right.

Paul: It’s all of that. That’s all the juice.

Rick: Yeah. What was it William Blake said, “Infinity in a wildflower, eternity in an hour”? It’s sort of the totality is in the part.

Paul: Literally. That thing we call the part, which we think we know—we know the measurement, but we don’t know what’s being measured. But the paradoxical thing is that that measurement is measuring something which has no measurement, which is immeasurable. So that thing we call a cup of tea, for instance, is everything.

Rick: Yeah. See, now words aren’t so bad. I mean, it’s beautiful what you’re saying. [Laughter] You know, it’s poetic, but there are people who have a way with words, Rumi and various others, or even the Upanishads, which you referred to earlier, where the words somehow magically give one an intuitive sense of the reality to which they point. So they really do have their function.

Paul: It’s a bit like that. It’s a bit like a love affair.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: In the sense that when you’re speaking about your lover, something comes through the words that isn’t simply the words.

Rick: Yes, yes. A feeling is conveyed. Or you talked about smells earlier—there’s an aroma that is stimulated by the words.

Paul: Yeah. So this conversation is literally everything.

Rick: So it’s probably too personal to ask, but maybe you could answer in a general way in terms of the types of things you’ve been saying. You said after 20 or 25 years that relationship ended, and I guess you would just say that that’s the way the ocean flowed or something.

Paul: Yeah. Two different characters at that point wanted different things.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: Because I would say living with a character that might not have the same map as yours, or have different priorities, for instance, just has practical implications. For me, in a sense, the two boys and what was going on there became the priority for my character.

Rick: Well, it wasn’t for your wife? Usually mothers are very, you know…

Paul: Yeah, the boys love their mom and the mom loves the boys, but there was a difference in the dance that was happening.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, I think that’s clear. I won’t press you for anything more in that area. And so now you run this art gallery in Wales, I guess.

Paul: Well, I’m more of a silent partner there now.

Rick: Okay.

Paul: I don’t have time, really.

Rick: Oh, really? So you’re just busy talking about the ocean and drinking tea?

Paul: Yeah, lots of tea and the boys. People came before our conversation, and people will come after our conversation.

Rick: What kind of people? You mean people with whom you sit as a mentor?

Paul: We just drink tea and chat.

Rick: Buddies with your boys, that kind of people?

Paul: No, we just drink tea and chat about the ocean and whatever else.

Rick: So you have a little open house and people come around and sit and chat, and that keeps you pretty busy?

Paul: Yes, although I don’t like the house being too open.

Rick: Yeah, I know what you mean. I suppose every now and then you rent a hall.

Paul: Yeah, and there’s so much going on in the boys’ lives at the moment. Especially Angelo, my youngest.

Rick: Yeah, it sounds exciting.

Paul: I have my resources and my energies needed there as well.

✨ Meeting people and post-awakening support

Rick: Yeah, a kid could support you in your old age. It sounds like that’s the direction he’s going. That’s the plan, huh? And do you—I mean, people are right now, let’s see, there are probably people all over the world, and after we’ve done this, people may want to get in touch with you. Do you do Skype conversations with people and stuff like that from here?

Paul: Yeah. I always didn’t like it, but in the last year or so I’ve started because there are so many people from different places. I always used to love traveling about, having cups of tea and meeting people.

Rick: And coffee.

Paul: Yeah, coffee now, cappuccinos. But now it’s impossible because people are from different countries and they’re all over. So Skype is becoming much more, for me, the easiest way of doing it.

Rick: Sure. I mean, sometimes people ask me why I don’t travel to see the people. If I did that, it would be like England today, Tennessee last week, and California the week before. I’d be on the road constantly. Skype is much easier.

Paul: So the last few years I’ve experienced that, basically, and I can’t do that anymore.

Rick: Yeah. Do you charge a certain amount for your time when you do Skype conversations?

Paul: No, I don’t charge, but sometimes people give money. Sometimes.

Rick: Yeah, sometimes you may need to, or else you’re going to have to turn people away because it’s going to get so busy, you know.

Paul: Well, for 40 years I’ve just chatted to people.

Rick: That’s nice.

Paul: My boys tell me off sometimes.

Rick: For spending so much time chatting with people?

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: That’s probably why you and your wife aren’t together anymore. Would you get off the phone?

Paul: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: I figured it out. I can relate. Do you ever do any residential things, like little retreats and things?

Paul: Yeah, I’ve done them in my home, basically, because I like them quite a lot. Like what you outlined previously about sitting in front of an audience, I’ve always been reticent of that.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: Again, I just felt like meeting people across the table, having a cup of tea. Yeah, I like to keep it informal. It happens—it does happen more again because, practically, it’s easy to meet a lot of people in one go nowadays.

Rick: Sure.

Paul: And individually. You know what a lot of people do, Paul? They use this thing called Zoom. Have you ever used Zoom? It enables you to have these little webinars. It’s better than Skype for that kind of thing, for multiple people. It’s participatory, you know.

Yeah, this last year is the first time people have contacted me and organized Zooms, and you see lots of different faces.

Rick: Right.

Paul: I find it a bit weird, to be honest.

Rick: Yeah, but it’s sort of a handy tool.

Paul: Yeah, so that’s beginning to happen as well.

Rick: Okay, good. And in your experience with all these chats and cups of tea and so on, have you noticed that there’s a sort of contagion? I mean, when you’re talking to people, does it enliven something in them? Have people that you’ve been interacting with for some time had awakenings? Has it stimulated that in them? I mean, what are people getting out of all these chats and all this tea?

Paul: Lots of people come because they’ve had, for want of a better word, awakenings. And lots of times, that’s been problematic. So you help them kind of come to terms with it. Some of the conversation can revolve around that.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.

Paul: But it’s just a drunken conversation about love, really.

Rick: Sure.

Paul: And all the practical things that go around that.

Rick: But that’s a real valuable service. I think there’s definitely a need for sort of post-awakening, a little bit of post-awakening hand-holding, you know, and helping people to get comfortable with what’s happening to them.

Paul: Well, it’s again, it’s different for different characters, but for some characters it can, as you said, be very unsettling. And also there can often be quite a bit of fear, because it’s very common that in the experience there’s almost a sense that they were going to die, or whatever.

Rick: Yeah, something is going to die.

Paul: Yeah, something that never was. I remember listening to this old monk, and somebody in the garden was telling him about this experience. In the experience, they were going to commit suicide, but this was in a dream. He was digging up the root vegetables and things, and he turned around to the man and said, “Did you succeed?” And the man said, “No.” And he looked at him and said, “Oh, pity,” and carried on gardening again.

Rick: Succeed in committing suicide?

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Were they saying that literally, or more like a…

Paul: No, in the dream, in the sense that he was going to die.

Rick: Right.

Paul: So the old monk, in the context of our conversation, said, “Oh, you should have jumped.”

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: And it would have been the end of something that never was.

Rick: Right. And just to cover our bases here, we’re not implying any kind of literal suicide. We’re talking about the death of the ego or the false sense of self.

Paul: We’re talking about the juice of aliveness.

Rick: Right.

Paul: Yeah, which can’t be measured, which in that sense was never born, which never began. So the whole concept of death, or the end of something, just collapses. The whole of what we’re talking about, really, I often say, is like meditation. Meditation, in a way, was designed to break time and space. It’s designed to break something which isn’t what it appears to be. It’s designed to break an energetic lie that there is one thing separate from another thing.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: So what we’re talking about is just a crazy, drunken love affair that breaks time and space.

What we’re talking about is just a crazy, drunken love affair that breaks time and space.

Rick: It’s funny you use the word drunken, because I interviewed a Sufi gentleman last week, and Rumi and Kabir and those guys often use that drunkenness as a metaphor for this sort of divine intoxication.

Paul: For sure. I have a funny thing, which is a bit weird. Some people don’t know me. When I go to sleep—from those experiences as a teenager, something always happens—and then there’s just no body, basically. There’s no sense of an edge to the body; the body can’t be found, and there’s a lot of energetic stuff that goes on. Then, in the night, the body will wake up and it’ll dance.

Rick: Now wait a minute. Let me make sure what you’re talking about here. Are you talking about some subtle thing, or are you saying that if somebody were sitting in the room, they would see Paul get out of bed and start dancing around?

Paul: Oh yeah, I’d be up out of bed dancing.

Rick: This actually happens every night?

Paul: No, the experience—

Rick: No wonder your wife left you.

Paul: An energetic experience. It’s not very good on a first date if it happens.

Rick: So, like dancing around the bedroom?

Paul: And it’s literally like a drunkenness. It’s like… It just overflows in the body, basically—

Rick: With energy.

Paul: And makes the body dance.

Rick: Interesting. And you’ll dance for, what, five or ten minutes or something, go take a pee, and go back to bed?

Paul: I don’t really know.

Rick: You don’t really know. It’s just something that happens.

Paul: I don’t think it goes on for a long, long time.

Rick: Yeah. What kind of dancing is it? I mean, is it wild and crazy, or is it more like this subtle tai chi kind of thing, or what?

Paul: It’s not crazy heavy metal stuff.

Rick: No, okay. More flowing kind of?

Paul: Yeah, it’s… I don’t know. I’ve never thought about what kind of dancing.

Rick: It’s just making you think about all kinds of things you haven’t thought about.

Paul: Yeah, I don’t really know, really. It’s just…

Rick: You should set up a camera and tape it sometime. Have it ready to go.

Paul: And I don’t know why it happens; it’s just the same. When I go to bed, it’s always the same. It was an experience when I was 16, and I’d have this sense to go and sit quietly. Then I just learned to follow it, basically, whenever I had that sense. So if I was in the house, I’d just go up to my bedroom and sit on my bed.

And this one time I went up and sat on my bed, and there was just this violet—what I called a cloud—that came into the room. It went above the body, and then I knew I had to lie down. I don’t know how I knew; I just lay down, and it rained down onto the body. It was very energetically strong.

Then it was the first time that I had experienced that the edge of the body wasn’t the edge that I thought it was; that the edge was also edgeless. There was no sense of a separate body, separate from the wall over there, or from the carpet or the bed. That happens every night, basically, since then.

Rick: Does it happen with the violet thing every night?

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Oh, really?

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: That’s so interesting.

Paul: I don’t know what—I don’t know. Yeah, it’s just what the physiology does.

Rick: I mean, I’ve had a couple of experiences in my life that were somewhat like that, and I attributed them—maybe it was just my interpretation—to some kind of celestial being or something.

One time I was giving a talk in a room, and there were only two people in the room. They were kind of on either side, and I was looking at one person and talking, then listening to the other person, looking at that person and talking. All of a sudden, this ball of light came into the room. It was right in the middle, and it gave me the sense of being very conscious, as much as those people, if not more so.

I kind of looked at it and acknowledged it, and then there was sort of reciprocity. I went on talking, but I felt like there was some kind of interest or intervention or curiosity from whatever that was—perhaps it was checking out what I was doing, or giving me more energy or wisdom in what I was doing.

When you told that story just now, I got that feeling. Maybe—I mean, I have friends who routinely see subtle beings, like guardian angels or something, around people, tending to them in ways that my friend doesn’t even understand. But they’re there.

So I just wonder sometimes if we have something like that in our lives that associates with us and serves as some inspirational or influential kind of guide. Irene says, “Geez, spit it out,” but hey, it took me a while to say that. I was trying to find the words. I suppose that would all be speculative and hypothetical for you, and you don’t really know. Is that right?

Paul: Well, in a sense, the brain always likes to know, so it’ll always try to—

Rick: Cook up stories.

Paul: Yeah. But again, whether I describe a violet light or say this body, it’s the same ocean. That’s the love affair. So for me, I don’t care whether it’s a blinking violet light or a cup of tea—

Rick: Or the Archangel Gabriel or something.

Paul: Yeah, it’s all… I met and chatted with the same—for want of a better word—the same being, the same ocean, earlier today. Yeah, it’s the same lover.

Rick: That’s good. I want to ask you another question about your sleep. When you go to sleep at night—pardon my phraseology, because the words are limited—but when Paul lies down in bed and the body goes to rest, there’s some kind of inner awareness. Does the ocean remain awake to itself when the body begins to snore, or are you totally blotto? You’re gone?

Paul: That luminosity is irrespective of waking, dreaming, or sleep.

Rick: Good.

Paul: But that luminosity has nothing to do with the way I understand awareness, in the sense of one thing being aware of a different thing. It’s more evident; it’s more… it’s before that sort of apparent movement happens, and yet it is that movement of time and space simultaneously. Literally, the form and the formless are not two things.

Rick: Would it be accurate to say that when your body goes to sleep, the senses are shut down, because that’s what sleep is? Therefore, there’s not going to be an active experience of a thing of any sort through any sensory apparatus, but that luminosity, without experiencing things, continues on as it always does?

Paul: Yeah, but in the sense that there’s no sense of anything continuing.

Rick: Because for there to be a sense, you’d have to be functioning mentally, cognizant of it, which would be an activity. You’re saying that everything has really resolved back into its primordial—

Paul: Well, even in a sense prior to that, because although this sounds a bit crazy, it’s also evident that nothing began.

Rick: It doesn’t sound crazy at all.

Paul: But literally, Rick, literally nothing has ever begun. Nothing has ever been born, and yet that doesn’t negate those measurements called birth and movement and time and space and Paul and sons and everything. It’s freedom. It’s unconditional.

Literally nothing has ever begun. Nothing has ever been born, and yet that doesn’t negate those measurements called birth and movement and time and space and Paul and sons and everything.

Rick: Yeah, and you’re certainly not the first person to say something like that. Ramana said that sort of thing, and many others. You can say that nothing ever began, nothing ever happened, and then in the same breath you can say, yes, but then there’s all this. Both are paradoxically and simultaneously true.

Paul: And it’s infinite.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: There’s no edge to it. There are no measurements. Then we just get back—I think the Indians have an analogy about it. Is it a salt doll going to test how deep the ocean is?

Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard that one.

Paul: When it walks into the ocean, it dissolves.

Rick: It just dissolves, right.

Paul: So the brain is a bit like that. You push it, as it were—this is all a bit of a story now—towards the ocean, and it just dissolves. Then suddenly, it begins to happen, and there’s just what can’t be measured, which paradoxically is simultaneously all measurements: the whole of time and space.

Rick: Yeah, I love that, and I love the way you’re presenting it in a balanced way. There are some people who just say the first part of it. They say there’s only this and nothing ever happened, and then they don’t complete the thing to say, but then there’s also everything happening.

It seems lopsided, and people scratch their heads and say, “Yeah, but what about my job? What about this and that?” It’s like the ocean can contain the whole panoply of diversity, apparent diversity, without overflowing, because it’s infinite.

Paul: Of course. Otherwise it wouldn’t be free.

Rick: Yeah. Do you ever feel any restriction or constriction or lack of freedom, even momentarily, or does nothing disrupt that?

Paul: There’s always luminosity. There’s always this ocean, which can appear to be anything. It can appear as pain, or “I need to pay the bills,” or anger.

Rick: Does the pain or anything else ever get so intense that the oceanhood is momentarily forgotten?

Paul: Well, because it’s not a memory. I had a kidney stone a couple of years ago, and that was—

Rick: It hurt like hell.

Paul: That was real pain. That was good pain. I couldn’t stand up; I couldn’t get onto my feet.

Rick: Right.

Paul: But that is it. It’s everything, Rick.

Rick: Those who are listening to the audio version of this and not seeing the video, Paul’s making all sorts of interesting gestures, like playing with his lips and putting his hand over his face. But I think you’re conveying it beautifully. It’s delightful having this virtual cup of tea with you and going on about this.

There’s a beautiful way in which you dance around the whole topic and use words to say that which can’t be said. You’re doing a good job of it, I’d say.

Paul: But because, literally, it does feel like a dance.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: It’s a gorgeous dance with nothing moving.

Rick: Yeah. Another question has just come to mind. As time has gone on and you’ve been at this for decades now, is there still a sense of growth and unfoldment in some respect?

Within the infinite freedom of the ocean, do you feel that certain capacities have become richer and richer, such as love, for instance, or some kind of sensory refinement? Do you feel that you’re still a work in progress in some respect?

Paul: I’ve got more grumpy.

Rick: Oh, yeah? Okay, so you’re regressing.

Paul: The answer, in a sense, is yes and no, because that freedom, that ocean, is what it is.

Rick: Yeah, it’s full.

Paul: Yeah. Even words like “complete” don’t touch it, I guess. Sorry. And in that freedom, anything—such as the senses—can change. The sensitivities can change; the physiology can change.

Rick: Was there direction to that change? I mean, would you define it as developmental in some way?

Paul: Okay, the answer is yes and no. I do apologize.

Rick: No, that’s okay. I understand.

Paul: But in a sense, you can create a map in your brain, and it can appear that there’s something developing. It is true and untrue simultaneously—that sort of measurement.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: What we’re talking about is an utter paradox, an utter conceptual paradox.

Rick: Yeah, but when you talk about paradox, you can say that if you’re doing side B of the paradox, there’s sort of change, and the development seems to have a direction or trajectory. Things are getting better in this or that respect, or something. Whereas on side A of the paradox, it’s all just perfect, and nothing ever changes, nothing ever happened, and so on. You can say that.

Paul: In that sense, in freedom, there’s nothing excluded.

Rick: Right.

Paul: In that sense, it’s and, and, and, and—

Rick: Yeah. And what?

Paul: Everything. The dance can appear in any way it wants to. It can be a quiet dance, or it could be a more sophisticated dance, or a simpler dance. But the juice of the dance is also the same in however it expresses itself. So it’s different and not different simultaneously.

Rick: Yeah.

Again, it’s this sense that the form and the formless are not two things; that movement and nonmovement are not two things. Change and unchange are not two things. They’re just measurements, apparent measurements, of something which can’t be measured.

Paul: Again, it’s this sense that the form and the formless are not two things; that movement and nonmovement are not two things. Change and unchange are not two things. They’re just measurements, apparent measurements, of something which can’t be measured.

Rick: You’re a walking, talking Zen koan. A tea-drinking Zen koan.

Paul: Coffee now. I think I’m more sophisticated. I’ve been told.

Rick: Yeah. Well, great. This has been delightful. I don’t know if we’re going to cover any fresh ground, or even if we have, because it’s all the same ground.

Paul: It is and it isn’t.

Rick: Yes, you’re right. But it’s lovely spending a couple of hours with you, carrying on like this. It’s been a delightful experience.

Paul: Okay, thank you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: Thank you, Irene.

Rick: Oh, Irene, Paul says thank you.

She says, “You’re welcome, Paul.” No, she didn’t; she just said, “You’re welcome, Paul.” So I just want to make a couple of wrap-up points.

Okay, so you don’t really have a functioning website at this point, I’ve noticed. You gave me a link to one, but it doesn’t work, so maybe you’ll get that fixed. But you do have a Facebook page, and I’ll be linking to that. You haven’t written any books, I don’t believe, but I guess people can contact you through your Facebook page if they want to have a Skype chat or something like that, right?

Paul: Yeah, or through the email that you used. Do you want me to put your email on your website page?

Yeah. Okay. I tend not to be very good with social media.

Rick: Okay.

Paul: I do tend to check the emails.

Rick: Alrighty, so I’ll put your email address on your BatGap page.

Paul: Yes. And people can get in touch that way if they like. I’m not always the quickest in replying.

Rick: Right. Okay. We noticed that, but we did get a hold of you.

Paul: I apologize.

Rick: Get ready for a bit of a deluge. You’ll probably have a lot of people contacting you, so good luck with that.

And then, in general, just to those who are listening or watching, this is an ongoing series, and there are several things you could do if you’d like to stay in touch. One is to subscribe to the YouTube channel you’re watching, if you’re watching this on YouTube, and then YouTube will notify you when new interviews are posted.

Another is to subscribe to my little email thing, so that you’ll get an email from us whenever a new interview is posted. And there’s also the audio podcast, if you like to listen to things rather than sit and watch. If you subscribe to the podcast, then every time you open iTunes or whatever you’re using to listen to podcasts, you’ll get each new episode as it becomes available.

So there are those options, and then there are some other things if you check out the various menus on BatGap.com. So please do that, and we’ll see you next week.

Next week, I’ll be speaking with a gentleman who is in his 90s, who originally got in touch with us saying, “I’m in my 90s, I’ve had both my feet amputated, and I’ve never been happier in my life.” He was the designer of some of the original cars, like the Thunderbird and GTO and some of those powerful cars in Detroit. He’s also done all sorts of fascinating things in his life, but then he ended up having this profound spiritual awakening. He’s sharp as a tack and full of energy.

His name is John Sampson. I’ll be interviewing him next week. So stay tuned, and thanks for listening or watching. And thank you, Paul. It’s been a joy, and we’ll be in touch.

Paul: Thank you.

Rick: You’re welcome.