Paul Morgan-Somers Transcript

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Paul Morgan-Somers Interview

Rick Archer: 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 Bat gap, 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. And we really appreciate those who have been supporting it. My guest today is Paul Morgan summers. He’s over in the UK. He doesn’t have an extensive bio that he 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. That pretty much sum it up Paul?

Paul Morgan-Somers: yeah, they have I have moved on to coffee recently.

Rick Archer: Oh, you’re getting Americanized. I see.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Uh, yeah, it happens.

Rick Archer: And the reason that suck one of the reasons aside from the fact that he really does love playing soccer, that soccer is significant here, or football, I should say, is that he was playing at once when he was what about 15? Paul?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yes,

Rick Archer: You were quite young. And all sudden, he popped into an experience of what he likes to call the ocean. And I’m sure everyone will get the metaphor, you know, 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 Morgan-Somers: Yeah, just an ordinary kid love playing football or soccer. So no, just training outside the back of my parents house. Because I been given an opportunity to go and play football professionally. So I was just training most days. And one day after training out the back, I just had an impulse to go and sit down. And I sat on some steps behind mom and dad’s house. And then while I suppose everything changed, it was a sense of I didn’t have any of these words. And it was just what happened. It was just 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 it is now I can use the words like a rapture like a sense of it felt you know physically. A very energetic shock to my body.

Rick Archer: Was it frightening at all? Or was it enjoyable?

Paul Morgan-Somers: It just so it’s like being hit by, again, I use that word OSHA NAFTA, but it was like being hit by a wave. And it was in complete control of what happened. There’s no time to be frightened. It was just a full on rush as it were. Just like that.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Like, like a sneeze. Yeah, just a cosmic sneeze. Just like that. I had that point. Every time I sat, something else happened. It just started a whole period of experiences really? Essentially, the reason I asked whether it was frightening was that one time when I was a kid, probably I was younger than 10. I had a high fever. And I had this experience of huge vastness you know, and sometimes it would, it would seem to be both vast And infinitesimally small at the same time, and also infinitely heavy and infinitely light. Just kind of sat there and my favorite experiencing this thing, it was awesome. But it’s a little scary too, because it was so, so big, you know?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, there were many other experiences work, which had more of an element of fear to them or an element of, you know, basically my brain swearing to itself thinking, Can my body cope with this? It was uncertain about it.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: for about, I don’t know. 1618 months, it’s different experiences. Like on a daily basis, really?

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Well, I wasn’t that interested in school all I wanted to be was football player. And for chasing a little round football around the field, it wasn’t that complicated. So it was such a passion into me, I just love playing football. And but over that time, that love of chasing after football never went and it’s still with me now. Sure.

Rick Archer: Even though it doesn’t cooperate.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, the, the right knee. But slowly, this wild, a sense of identity was changing who I thought I was, and what I wanted to be to be a professional football player. And to make lots of money and be famous and have girls chasing me, or that seem to lose its meaning literally,

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, I’d probably been at that time. It’s 50 more interested in the football? Yeah, it was. It’s yeah, there’s just loads of experiences, which changed my whole concept of who I was,

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: I think it is, I can I never, I was always reticent to speak about them, because people got quite locked into them. And there’s this feeling that it was just something that was just specific to my physiology, my character. Yeah. Because the characters I’ve met over the years, who I say have got wet, it’s, it’s a quite a different story to to them all, rarely. So I have a sense that if there’s 1000 characters that have got wet will be a different story for each of them

Rick Archer: through but there are some commonalities, you know, I mean, yes. And sometimes people if they’re, if this kind of thing happens in them out of the blue, and they have no context for it, or anything to compare it with 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 reached, in fact, that just this morning, I got a message on Facebook from somebody that had been having all kinds of spiritual things going on and, and hadn’t known what to do or what it was. And then she discovered this interview, show and breathe a sigh of relief to see that there’s so many other people were having things like this, and that it was happening all over the world. So it can help help people to know you know, what others are going through.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s, it’s for my, for me, it has happened quite a long time ago. So I forget, like to be honest, I forget a lot of it until somebody mentioned something and then my brain remembers it. But I can remember times of thinking that 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, how to put it into words. And I also had that, although there was a often a fear of what was going on, there was such a sense of wonderment and the lie in it. But that that was stronger than the fear. Yeah, so the fear never took over strong 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 to find words for.

Rick Archer: Did you have any friends that you could speak to or just pretty much kept to yourself?

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s just myself and it was there was no Internet back then or Google whatever. So it was I think that sense of wonderment just carried my characters to all those experiences. Because a lot of them are very felt very energetic within the body. And later on, I learned, I’ve read books about this term called Kundalini and everything. Yeah. Which all and seem to make sense. The sense of they’re all energetic experiences visually and auditory and some of the most beautiful whether there was a often just beautiful sense everywhere. Going about through life. And that was one of the most beautiful, funnily enough, the sense were extraordinary. scents and smells. Yes, literally smell okay. Yeah. And the sense

Rick Archer: of kind of smells, I mean, smells like would your normal sense of smell be more cute, like it walked 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 Morgan-Somers: Yes, I didn’t recognize there were sex, and they were they would flood my body. So although they were like nasal, it seemed to flood the whole body. Interesting. And they all all these things, whether they were visual, or whatever, all seem to have an energetic element, to the more perhaps brain process, it’s some of them, you know, visually, some more auditory, trying to make sense of an energetic movement. In the body, or so slowly, the sense of there being an edge to this body was just diminishing as well. And the sense of identity felt more extended through time and space. So just having seeing things before they happened and, and things like that I’ve been able to, to move or not located to the body for a while.

Rick Archer: Was immune some kind of out of body thing?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Well, yeah, but it wasn’t a sense of a something moving out of another something called the body, right? There was no that the candidate became a sense of a like a movement, but nothing moving. So there was no journey in it. Most things I’m gonna say a sound very contradictory. I do apologize.

Rick Archer: No, I totally understand what you’re saying. I think most people listen, I will understand also, I mean, this stuff is paradoxical by nature, you know?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. The very nature of it, conceptually is enough to power dogs. Yeah. And yet, simultaneously, it is so simple. Yeah. That, that I can’t find words for it. Which is, which is can be frustrating sometimes. But that’s the way it is. Yeah, I started just be like a drunken character. But when he gets poked by just seeing drunken songs, and chat drunken words, and they’re all paradoxical, and contradictory. But there’s such a one dimensional for this character loving them, but I can’t help it.

Rick Archer: 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. And that’s exactly the thing about the subtle sense of C, E, and Ts, and, you know, and knowing things at a distance, and all that stuff, the spiritual literature is full of that kind of thing. And it’s often brushed off in contemporary non dual circles as being irrelevant or illusory, or a distraction or, or things like that. But, you know, I think personally, I think that refined capabilities and capacities are part and parcel of an overall spiritual unfoldment or development, and they shouldn’t be over emphasized. But at the same time, they shouldn’t be dismissed. It’s just they should be understood for what they are and just taken in stride, and we move along, you know, but that kind of thing is bound to happen to people and so it needs to be put in the proper context, I think.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, for sure. It’s just what happens.

Rick Archer: Yes, it happens. It’s normal.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, it’s it’s part of life.

Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s, 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.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But then on the way to kind of sit there’s such a gorgeous juice in those things, but also simultaneously, that same juices in having a cup of tea. Yeah. It’s it’s not that they have to be significant though or not, but like drinking a cup of tea. It’s so Free doesn’t need to have a significance. And so those experiences can be stunningly beautiful. But they also they don’t need to have a significance. It’s just freedom expressing itself. That way, rarely. Yeah. So there’s no need to reject them all, except that they are just what they are.

Rick Archer: 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. There is just part of human experience when when some sort of opening like this happens. And so we don’t make too much of a fuss about them, nor nor do we reject them. They’re just like, oh, this is nice. It’s like, it’s, it’s like there’s this term in Louisiana called a land Yap. And if you buy something in the store, they throw something little something extra in the package as a little gift. And that’s called the land. Yep. So this is like land. Yep.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. I’ve never heard that. Yeah, it has that sort of feel. Yeah, that’s, that’s surprised that wonderment about them. It’s, in one way, it’s just very childlike, very simple.

Rick Archer: 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 Morgan-Somers: some of them kind of carried on most of them, the the major like strong energetic things all stop. When, for want of a better word, that ocean. Over that time, this character became aware that there was this energy, 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 goal of post, it was everything. But there was still a sense of a of a poor experience in that ocean that luminosity. And then, though, this sounds like a time thing, it’s it’s not a time saying that luminosity was just self evidently self luminous. And there wasn’t a separate something. experience in the ocean, there was just ocean. And that luminosity, so like that never went, but those dramatic expose experiences in the body all come down, mostly speaking. Yeah. But still, still things happen on a daily basis, which are visual and energetic. But they just matter of fact, you know, is nothing. Sometimes people ask me about them, but I forget, honestly, I don’t think about them until I get product.

Rick Archer: In my understanding, what happens is that I mean, this is lived through a body, I mean, you mentioned that it’s the luminosity sort of living itself, but it’s, it’s living itself, by virtue of there being a nervous system that can, you know, be a conduit or an instrument for that living, you know, and, and 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, to pretty much complete itself. And 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 seemed to really diminish, right, and it just becomes more normal and matter of fact, and, and so on, but you’re still living with your nervous system. And that nervous system is still subject to change and adjustment and whatnot. So and it’s still it’s still a sensing instrument. So you’re still going to be having experiences do resonate with.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, yeah. And it’s a constantly changing experience.

Rick Archer: Exactly. Yeah.

Paul Morgan-Somers: So there’s

Rick Archer: constantly changing experience of something which doesn’t change.

Yeah. It’s constantly juicey,

Rick Archer: right.

Paul Morgan-Somers:  So it’s freedom. So it can appear in whichever blinkin way it once and that could be dramatic, or it could be quite calm. It could be quite constructive or quite destructive in certain ways.

Rick Archer: How would it be destructive?

Paul Morgan-Somers: In the sense, when I’ve met characters over the years it’s been a little bit for their nervous system like a bit like a bomb going off. In that it’s it’s, it’s caused a lot of for at least a period of time. Especially living the sorts of lives running a business in the family. Yeah, it’s called, it’s been problematic for the characters to assimilate and adjust. Yeah, for some characters, it seems to be a lot smoother. But for, for a reasonable amount of characters, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s problematic and can be quite messy. So in that sense, from from there, the status quo of how life was?

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. And not just for the character, but for his family for his, you know, newest and give us for his business colleagues or whatever. Yeah. problematic. Yeah. It’s, in that sense, it can be. Sometimes I feel like but unless the itch is really strong in the character, when they come and chat with me, it’s I tend to steer them away from it a little bit.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, for sure. But it’s like you said that it’s a dance that happens when they come? Yeah, sometimes push it, you push it away and see whether they still want to come forward. And 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, and it is it is easier to handle the side effects in a monastery. And for a householder,

Rick Archer: it is QAnon. At least if you’re cut out for that. But um, yeah, you know, in this day and age, there seems to be a kind of a wave of awakening is taking place in the world, primarily among householders, people who don’t want to live in monasteries. And there’s been a lot of talk over the recent years about embodiment and integration. And you know, people want this experience, and sometimes they have no choice but to have this experience, but they also want to live human lives. And so there’s been a lot of discussion in spiritual circles about, you know, how do we integrate this? How do we hold down a job and, you know, support a family and all this in the midst of this, this whole thing, which can actually be quite powerful.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Make out to be not different things. In other people use these words form in the form less again, they’re not two things. Yeah. You know, it’s about us. It’s about living, it’s about drinking a cup of tea. It’s about high gain. It’s about chasing a football. It’s about everything. There’s nothing excluded.

Rick Archer: So for you, there was no difficulty in acclimating to this. Or what, you actually went into a monastery for five

Paul Morgan-Somers: years. Yeah, there was, there was, I think, for my body, there was a difficulty to begin with this physiological adjustment, an adjustment. And then I was very lucky, I found this, this monastery,

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: And I’m still so find a bookstore called files, and I was telling us the biggest bookstore in the world. And I think it was at one time now. Yeah, now Amazon Yeah, taking over the world. So I jumped on a train and went to London because I live in a very quiet, rural place back then. So there was no book shops locally or anything. So I jumped and by that time, my character fallen in love with this ocean for want of better words. So I just went and just walked into five book shops and asked her Do you have any books on the ocean? I was mad to say,

Rick Archer: Yeah, Jacques Cousteau has written some.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, so I can’t remember but I, I was there for a while looking through books. And then somebody said to me there was a bookshop quite local to it, called Watkins, bookshop. And Watkins has been there since 1895, or something. And it’s full of esoteric books and world religions books. And I went there and I picked up some books called the Upanishads. And in there, I read those reading and I, there was some words in there, it seemed to echo this ocean. And there was a sticker in the back of the book supplied by the Vedanta center. And, and the address just outside London. So I went, I went home and shortly went back to then visit this place. And I was taken to see that the head Abbot, and he just had something very natural has happened to you. But it would be a good idea if you want to, to come and live here for a while. And I thought, great. So I left the football. And I put a little note on my kitchen table to mum and dads, and I’m just going off to this place. Don’t worry, everything’s fine. Obviously, they freaked out a little bit

Rick Archer: What were you, like 17 years old or something of that playing.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, late 16. Because all they knew was this football boy. Suddenly, he was going to because they weren’t religious, or, you know, they were business people. So God, God only knows what they thought. But I jumped on the train, I went and I went to this monastery and was there for about five years in total. But 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 Archer: Oh, so the people from the Welsh consider the English to be foreigners, do they? Oh, yeah, for sure. Okay. English, that in Scotland?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, and are allowed to be played. When we play them in sport. It’s serious. It becomes religious for the Welsh, okay, it’d be hard to beat the English. But anyway, the gentleman in charge was a medical doctor before he became a monk. So 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 you take two boxes to go and check him out and make sure everything’s okay. And all the politics involved. So he moved in, in those sorts of circles. So he used to organize. I don’t know if it still happens, what they called inter religious dialogue between world religious delegations.

Rick Archer: So there’s a lot of that still happening. I don’t know about Vedanta society, but there’s a parliament of world religions that you know, attracts over 10,000 people and they hold it.

Paul Morgan-Somers: So in this in this monastery, all these delegations used to in a Buddhist and Islamic and also all sorts used to come. And Christiane sighs was able to meet people from all around the world with all different truths, as it were, and hear them discussion and arguing. And lots of the characters, some of the characters were just beautiful. Some of them were just crazy. Like life is no different. You get the mad ones, the neurotic ones, the sweet ones, no different. And so but I was able to meet people, it’s like traveling the world it felt, but I didn’t leave the monastery. So I was fortunate enough to speak, speak to like the Dalai Lama and bishops and Archbishop’s and

Rick Archer: maybe we can set up an interview with me for the Dalai Lama. Hey, so you are a bit of a child prodigy or something? Would that be the word? You know? I mean, here you were only 1716 years old with this level of experience that a lot of old monks would die for. And were you very vocal about what you were experiencing and living and was theirs? Did they make a fuss about you or was there some envy or did you kind of keep it quiet and just kind of do your thing and wash the dishes?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, when I arrived, the old monk said something very natural has happened to you. It’d be good for you to come here but don’t talk about it. And I didn’t You know, he was kind enough to let me come. So I followed these rules. Yeah. So, sometimes if I got really product it would pop out. And there is an instance I often tell the story, but there was a an inter religious meeting on mysticism. So the the Vatican sent a delegation of, and one of them in the delegation was a hermit. And they had been the first time he’d come out of his Hermitage and about 30 years, but he was ordered by the, by his teen years to come to this meeting between different religious traditions to talk about mysticism. And he was Italian, his English was okay, but not brilliant. But I was looking after him. Because there was about six of us lads in the monastery. And we looked after these various delegations. And I chatted to him about the ocean. And on and he didn’t say much, and I thought it was it, his poor Italian. But on the on the last evening, before he left, he said, he said, Paul, I was bringing him some tea in his room. And because he had a history of Christ appear into him. And he’s, and he just said to me, one day, he said, Christ appeared to me when I was praying, and he, and he walked into my body, and we both disappeared. So I know what you’re talking about. But please don’t tell anybody. And he started in such a sweet way, just a childlike way. He was just happy to go back to his Hermitage, and be there basically, he didn’t want any trouble from his superiors, or whatever. But it was such a familiar gorgeous moment when he said,

Rick Archer: that sweet speaking of Christ, I mean, Christ said, Don’t hide your light under a bushel. But then again, we don’t like spiritual braggarts, you know, who are always spouting off about what they’re experiencing? There’s some kind of balance to be found there.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, and it’s still, you know, the West doesn’t have a particular good rap for encouraging people to, to speak up to speak freely about religious topics, especially going back to history.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: So it’s not a good incentive to speak. Good point. Until it happens, it happens now, rarely, it’s, I was invited to go over to Egypt to chat. And then some people that I know, who have been there to stay phoned me and said, well, possibly is better not to go. And it hadn’t occurred to me, because you can still upset people quite easily.

Rick Archer: Yeah. You know, that was one of my motivations for starting this show was I live in a town where a lot of people have been meditating for decades, and people were having, you know, awakenings and, and they would 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, you know, you’re just Joe Schmo, you couldn’t possibly be having something like this, you know, so I thought, well, you know, I want to start interviewing these people, so that their peers can see that it’s happening to people just like them, and then maybe they won’t give them a hard time. And also, maybe they will, you know, have more confidence that it could happen to them, too. And so that was one of the reasons that this thing got going.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, and it feels like it feels like a very natural. Yeah, luminosity, it’s not as it’s not special,

Rick Archer: right? It’s something everyone should feel natural. Yes, yeah.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Juice is producer of time and space. Right. It used to have it all.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: It feels, you know, to Mike Hamburg, it feels a bit like that, like the old central structures of authority, whether they’re political or financial, or religious or so called spiritual. They’re all being shaken really, quite strongly at the moment. And there seems to be like a decentralization of those central authorities. And possibly the sort of thing we’re chatting about this hugely has a decentralization of effect, because it removes the middle person with authority sent on makes them a lot less significant or less critical.

Rick Archer: I think you’re right. I mean, there was a time and maybe it’s still true that like in the Catholic Church, you know, priests were officially considered the intermediaries between the ordinary people and God. And I mean, there was a big fuss when Gutenberg came out with the Bible, because it was getting to the point where others could read it also, and you didn’t need, you know, priests to intervene. And, you know, and so that was a big shake up. But I think we’ve we’ve obviously come quite a way since then. But I think it’s even getting more decentralized, as you were just saying more democratized. And, you know, 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, you know?

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

Rick Archer: Yeah. And on the other hand, just to play devil’s advocate, I sometimes hear people saying, they dumb it down too much. Sometimes they say things like, yeah, you know, you could be a drunkard, and you can be, you know, abusive sob and you can be creepy and all this stuff. And yet you’re, you’re awakened. I don’t know, I don’t like to take it that far. I think that they’re, that if, if awakening is really genuine, and you’ve developed the sort of awareness and sensitivity to which you have been eluding, your behavior is not going to really be out of line like that. It at least in my idealistic sense of it. So I just don’t like the attitude that anything goes and you can be, you know, an enlightened axe murderer or something. It’s just, there’s got to be some kind of clear definition of it. I think.

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’ve Well, I’ve never met any character who’s an Axe Murderer and enlightened. So I don’t know,

Rick Archer: actually, one of the avatars in Vishnu was an Axe Murderer. So there you go. He went around, chopping off all the shot through his heads.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It makes a sweet story. Hollywood.

Rick Archer: Okay, feel free to just always chime in if if there’s a pause, and I’m not asking you a question, if something has been on your mind, just pop it in there. I just want to pick up on your use of the word character, you frequently first two characters that get whacked or my character and all. And when you say that I get the implication that you’re saying that, you know, what you essentially are is not what is not this Paul fellow that we see on screen, that that’s just a character like a character in a play or 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’ve tried to remind people of that by using the word character, am I right? But

no, not really. Well, it doesn’t. I don’t know why I say most things, but because the character is it. What do you mean? It’s not like it’s not like the characters less important?

Rick Archer: Okay. Why did you go to the dentist with a toothpick toothache? You don’t say the dentist? Hey, my character has a toothache, you know, because the dentists will probably say okay, we’ll bring them in. We’ll take a look. You know, I mean, you would just say I have a toothache.

Paul Morgan-Somers: I just say there’s lots of pain.

Rick Archer: You could say it that way.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, I don’t know.

Rick Archer: Whatever is bugging you about that, as some people play word games, you know, with regard to pronouns, you know, they don’t want to just say, you know, please pass me the salt that you know, are 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. And so Sometimes sounds a little unnatural.

Paul Morgan-Somers: No, I’m very much my character.

Rick Archer: Okay? And you’re also Paul, I guess.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, we’re different words for the same thing, same thing. And so I’ll pop say character of me or time and space. They’re all words for the same thing.

Rick Archer: 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. I mean,

Paul Morgan-Somers: that whole structure of words is problematic, in the sense that we are having a drunken conversation,

Rick Archer: right? Cheers.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Because it can’t. Because, in a sense, all of these words come out of time and space, and they’re full of the, the alcohol of time and space. Yeah. So what what they they’re singing about, or they’re in love with? hasn’t got a measurement. And but all these words are measurements. But it’s not that the measurement is right or wrong, because the measurement is it as well. And, and isn’t it simultaneous lease so to speak. So we’re inherently, really like using the space to try to dig a hole in the ocean. And it’s, it’s not a very suitable instrument. If you’re using words to build a house, it’d be more useful. But in this context of this drunken conversation, the spate of words we’re using isn’t a brilliant instrument.

Rick Archer: 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 something with words,

Paul Morgan-Somers: whether you were blonde, and more beautiful.

Rick Archer: next lifetime, maybe.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Not that it can be you know, it’s in the silence as well as the words, it’s not one better than the other. Sure. It’s just, it’s, it’s everything,

Rick Archer: I’m sure we all experienced that very often, we’ll have a conversation with somebody. And the words just form a small percentage of the actual communication that’s taking place, you know, you use the words in order to sort of keep it going. But there’s so many other strata of communication that are happening.

Paul Morgan-Somers: And it’s Yeah, very much because you can listen to words and you can play with words for hours and hours and hours. But also, people can hear the same words again, and suddenly something different is heard, so to speak, very true. And something else goes on there, that’s more like. It’s almost 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 can be fun and, and it can help them create clarity and in which certain ideas and whatever. But when when this wetness slaps you, it tends to go below the neck. So the whole body gets, gets held slap, which whichever way, but whether you want to be romantic or something else happen or slapstick?

Rick Archer: Yeah. That’s nice. And very often, people talk that way, you know, they talk about levels of awakening on head, heart and gut. And so I’m the way I just Shanti talks and you know, that it’s not just an it’ll obviously, not just an intellectual thing, or a mind thing. It’s, you know, it’s on all levels. very visceral.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, because in that sense, it’s got nothing to do with being clever or not clever. It’s, it’s more in the sense more immediate than that. It’s more immediate than any any movement of measuring any movement of time and space. So 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 Archer: Yeah. You know, that old Buddha saying of the finger pointing at the moon you know, And then people are getting all hung up on the finger of instead of looking at the moon. So I mean, all these words and all this talk and so

Paul Morgan-Somers: yeah, it’s that. Yeah, literally, I remember listening to all these delegations talking, and arguing and sometimes quite heated. And it is the utter simplicity of this luminosity. And yet, quite naturally, the, the brain will try to create a knowing of it in the sense of quite a map of it. And then for my, for me, anyway, it’s felt like, all these delegations were arguing over their maps. Yeah. But none of the maps were at it, in a sense, anyway. And it was almost like argued in in in completely the wrong place. They weren’t even in the same room as this luminosity, as it were,

Rick Archer: you know,

Paul Morgan-Somers: days and weeks, this arguments, and months and years and, and 1000s of years

Rick Archer: earlier, I mean, hundreds of millions of people have been killed over disputes over maps, which actually refer to the same territory. But, you know, the adherence of the maps are attached to their version. And, you know,

Paul Morgan-Somers: we can see the light, you can see that the map is simultaneously the person’s identity. And people will fight strongly over their sense of identity. Yeah. Because if their map gets threatened as it were, their identity gets threatened. And then they take they can become quite feisty.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, for sure. Like, if you had no yacht, I live by the beach. And so often you’d see kids playing on the beach, and complete strangers, you know, kids and just look at the, the, across the sandcastle, and often just walk up to each other and hug each other on nice, you know, for, for all ineffable cultures and, and whatever there’s, that’s, to me, that’s in a sense, the naturalness of aliveness. That’s the juiciness of it. But on top of that, as we get older, and our brains become a lot more sophisticated, and building maps, and building identities, and and when a map becomes we believe in our maps, and if enough people believe in their map, it becomes a reality as it were, and then they’ll, they’ll fight over them to death.

Rick Archer: It’s a really sweet point you’re making, you know, because with all the trouble in the world, and all the political and economic and nationals divides, and conflicts and strife, and, you know, currently and going back throughout history, you know, we’re really all just one being one one ocean. And it’s it’s sort of absurd that apparent fragments of the ocean are at war with one another, how can the ocean be at war with itself? So obviously, it’s a situation of extreme delusion, that all this strife exists. And if people were able to settle into what they really are, there would be complete unity and harmony.

Paul Morgan-Somers: That the possibility is that the very movement of time and space off of me is a bit of a contradiction in the sense that there can be a movement but not a mover. So in a sense, the identity is dealing with. That’s why it’s what you said earlier, it’s always uncertain of itself. Because in a way, it’s all based on a lie. It’s based on it on an energetic lie that it’s separate from life and But it’s separate from the other person or whatever. So in, 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. And it, it seems to arise out of the polarity of this appearance of two things have to own it, it’s both attracted and repulsed by both poles. So it’s, it’s been attracted and repulsed by the unknown, and it’s attracted and repulsed by the known. But, again, paradoxically, it needs without that appearance of two, there can be no move appearance of a movement, it’s the appearance of two that creates an energetic, almost like a constantly energetic imbalance, which creates the appearance of movement of time and space. But without the tools, you can’t have time and space and vice versa, right, you can’t have movement, you can’t have time. 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. And we’re always moving in a constant imbalance, and hopefully not too imbalanced, but not too drunk in which can be problematic. But the other problem is if it becomes too balanced, the movement stops. And if things become too known, it becomes what in a sense, it kills. And if it becomes too unknown, there’s a sense of kills, kill. It’s the whole movement of me it is it 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 and it’s part and parcel of movement of time and space. So it can never be divorced from it, because it’s part and parcel of its of its energetic nature. And also, again, on the beach, you see the kids building sand castles, and they spend all day building sometimes stunning sand castles, even with the with the with the apartment adults, 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 and this match in their sand, sand castle. Again, we have in our characters, this beautiful wonderment of creating, but also in, paradoxically and destroying as well. So it’s part and parcel of this movement called time and space on call me that it’s simultaneous, be creative and destructive.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Kind of reminds me of the Tibetan sand paintings that they do, you know, they do these beautiful things, and then they just wipe them away. Yeah. And it also reminds me of the sort of the whole Vedic tradition, I’m sure this is true of other traditions where, you know, you have, you know, the Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, the creator, the maintainer, and the destroyer, and all three are considered necessary for there to be a creation, you know, there’s a balance and reciprocity between them, that makes the whole thing happen. And even from the physics perspective, I mean, there’s something called spontaneous sequential, symmetry breaking, where there’s a sort of a fundamental symmetry, at the most primordial level of the universe, and that it’s broken by degrees sequentially. And as it’s broken, then more more and more force and matter fields and diversity and elements in the whole thing arise. And, and in their arising, obviously, there’s going to be sort of conflicts and clashes and you know, interactions and the whole thing gets very, very kind of mixed up. But if it didn’t go through that process, you wouldn’t have a creation

Paul Morgan-Somers: or destruction

Rick Archer: or destruction. Yeah. And so, it’s like the, it’s like the course of, of the of the creative intelligence we could call it is from here to here. You know, from eye to eye. It’s like, we know that TS Eliot line that we The the end of our seeking will be to arrive back at the place from which we started to know it for the first time.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Very much. Yeah. And you often hear that from people it’s, they’ll often say, I speak an old monk contacted me a Benedictine monk a little while a few months ago. And it’s quite funny because he was he was swearing quite a lot on the phone, which often happens with spiritual characters, El Valle, because he was saying, Paul, what I was looking for was there the first day, I walked into the monastery like 40 years ago. And I went into the and sat to pray. What I was looking for was, was there when I when I walked in on the first day, so it’s very much. Again, I often say it’s an apparent movement, but with no mover. Yeah. So it is it is literally a journey, this journey,

Rick Archer: yeah, pathless path. And if it wasn’t there on the first day, then it must, it must not have been something abiding or permanent, you know, it wouldn’t be a transitory thing. And that’s not what he was looking for. He was looking. Now, you know, there’s that verse in The Gita, the unreal, has no being the real never ceases to be.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s everything. Yeah. Never wasn’t the case. And that’s, I often feel I often hear people say this word, unconditional. And literally this ocean is because it already is the case. It doesn’t have to be a condition for it. Because if it already is, everything.

Rick Archer: 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 you know, it’s all already the case. And what I’m looking for is already here, because that may not be your experience. And if it’s not your experience, then you got to go through whatever you got to go through until it becomes your experience. And you can’t just necessarily do it at the snap of a finger, you know?

Paul Morgan-Somers: And like, no, no. Again, it doesn’t seem to be any rules to this. But that in our you’d have to do some sort of scientific research and analyze all these different characters and, but only from the characters I’ve met over the years. Because anyway, this ocean doesn’t have anything because it is not in a relationship with any things so it doesn’t sing it doesn’t say do this or not do it.

Rick Archer: The relationship with itself.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, it’s so if the character loves to meditate, that’s cool Jessen meditate. But if I had a current a friend, a good friend in the monastery, and for his character sitting to meditate was at a violence used to hate there used to used to suffer and suffer and suffer

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, but he’d work all day helping people or feeding people and whatever, or that’s good. And I remember one day some somebody gave to the monastery or a clock to put in, in the meditation room. Unless it was a lovely clock, pretty went as clocks do it went to tick, tick tock. And that was the final straw for my friends. I will, because at that time, my character would just set and you could just sit there for hours and days or whatever. And I came, I sit down and I came to visit my friends. And his his hands were around my neck. And you’re shaking me like this. And you’re saying, Paul, Paul is not fair. How can you sit there and I’m for him it was murder. So for that character to tell him to go and sit in seem to be the person and thing to do. So it’s not like one size fits all. It’s, it’s very individual to the to the person.

Rick Archer: I totally agree. And that’s why there are different paths, you know, I mean, traditionally, there’s, you know, the, the bhakti path devotion, there’s the service path Seva and there’s the knowledge path Jana and there’s the, you know, action path, karma and so on. And different people are acclimated or constituted to be more suitable to one approach or another and it doesn’t

Paul Morgan-Somers: matter because they’ve all just flavors of the same thing anyway. Yeah,

Rick Archer: you have to do what’s right for you.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It was just it’s just been. It’s like common sense. Yeah. Again, this is not about it doesn’t seem to be about being clever. It’s more about natural and common sense.

Rick Archer: Yeah. But one 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 know, you’re saying, it makes no difference whether you sit and meditate or hang out in the pub. And you know, and I would say, it does make a difference. That, I mean, to take it to a greater extreme, you can say, it makes no difference whether you, you know, meditate regularly or do a bunch of methamphetamine every day. Yeah, well, the 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, that what we do actually does matter. Would you say?

Paul Morgan-Somers: In a natural, practical way, for sure. Big time? Yeah. Yeah. I can’t remember the context and what?

Rick Archer: Something like that that you said.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But again, again, the flavor of this ocean is it’s more like a It’s not like a bust, ocean, or whatever. But like, but you said this or but oh, you said that. Book said that. It has more of a flavor of and, and,

Rick Archer: and that. So in other words, it contains everything.

Paul Morgan-Somers: And I’m sure

Rick Archer: it contains the Holocaust. And it contains, you know, some beautiful things. And it’s like everything is contained within this. This greater wholeness is this ocean.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Right? Yeah, there’s nothing next X. There’s nothing to exclude. Yeah, as it will. But for sure, there’s there’s practical ramifications. Yeah, so many gamers speaking earlier about the side effects sometimes when, when people are going through with a change in which the map of their identity has been shaken, as it were, they can often then find it difficult to engage in what they were getting engaged in before. And part of that process is earning money and things like that. But they have very practical consequences for not just the person but their family and everything like that. So the the so called spiritual thing doesn’t negate earning money and being practical and putting food on the table. Again, it’s very earthy and muddy and down to earth in many ways, in getting on with what needs to be done. And if there’s no suggestion… the sense of one thing can be more conducive, or more of an obstacle as it were, for that character. In the sense of good, because there’s nothing that can get closer to everything. There’s just everything. Yeah, well, I’m gonna just, but that doesn’t negate what you’re just gonna say. Right?

Rick Archer: Which is gonna give you a little bit of a hard time on that point.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. What you’re gonna say, also, is it?

Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the big picture,

Paul Morgan-Somers: it appears to be a threat, but possibly, it’s an an

Rick Archer: Yeah. I mean, in 5 billion years from now, this planet is going to melt because the sun is going to expand. And you know, long before that, everybody, well, everyone is alive now we’ll have died. But obviously, it’s it’s not gonna be too rosy on on Earth. And well, I don’t know, maybe that’s not the best example. But it was, yeah, could use it. So you know, from the perspective of the totality, you know, of the ocean of the universe or whatever. That’s all in a day’s work. I mean, it’s natural. This kind of thing happens at every, you know, probably every day some asteroid crashes into an inhabited planet and kills everything. But on the other hand, taking it down to the individual level. It’s, it’s important. There was a Buddhist, sage who lived maybe 1000 years ago named Padma Sun bhava. And there’s a quote from him, he said, although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour. And what he meant by that, I think, is that the, the ocean once ocean hood, the the unboundedness of it all, doesn’t negate or render insignificant all All the various individual values and responsibilities and, and consequences of, of our behavior and the choices we make, and so on. So both are true, you know, and they don’t they may be paradoxical, but they don’t conflict with one another.

Paul Morgan-Somers: For sure, yeah. Natalie. And it’s because people often because I’ve got two bodies that, you know, people often ask me, Well, what about your boys and being responsible for them and things like that. And but that thing called responsibility is the ocean. Yeah. And, and it’s so it’s responsibility full on. Yeah, in that sense. So, like, for my youngest son, he that sense that there was a separate something, like, collapsed in him when he was about 12, or whatever. So it is quite funny, because he does a lot of he’s a free runner. He does lots of parkour. I don’t know what

Rick Archer: that means. Like you’re jumping on these obstacles and kind of dangerous and you’re flipping over things. Yeah.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. So I turned around in the guard, and he was training and he was in tears. And I thought he’d fallen off something and I thought, oh, here we go to the a&e again. And he just walked up to me. And he said, there is nobody here it was their dad. And I said, No. And it just physiologically often tears is is quite common. Or swearing or laughter. There seems to be a physiological response, when there’s sort of slap comes this wetness. And but yeah, there’s 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, because then the whole authority structure for him fell away. So there was no authority figure called number dad, or indeed school. So he, he wrote a resignation letter and a 20, a 22 page document. When he was 12 or 13, saying school isn’t an efficient use of my time I resigning, and he resigned.

Rick Archer: Can you leave school at that age in the US? I don’t think it could.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, in this country, you have a legal responsibility to educate your child, but not to send them to school? Oh, yeah, homeschooling kind of thing. Yeah. So he, I took him into the headmistress and they handed his notice in, and she read it and said, Oh, okay. And that was it.

Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s interesting that both you and your son had this had an awakening, in a way. I don’t know, as a result of sport, but kind of well playing it or just Yeah, yeah.

Paul Morgan-Somers: I hadn’t thought about that.

Yeah. Kind of runs in the genes or something. It’s a prop sport is the key. It is everyone should go out and

Paul Morgan-Somers: look up your knees. Yeah,

Rick Archer: exactly. And wear a helmet. Maybe if you’re doing parkour? Yeah.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. All American football.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Yeah, 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, and he’s doing some kind of business, which would take advantage of the change that he sees coming in society or something like that.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. Well, after that experience, his character changed dramatically. And for me, you, I often say start is you started moving in the realm of ideas in the sense that he was creating maps, creating identities, and also destroying them, like creating sand castles on the beach very quickly. And he was like, has been, like burned into Maps.

Rick Archer: So different personality phases. You mean?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, you can see it’s almost like the life has speeded up for his character. And so he’s creating realities and destroying them very quickly. Interesting. Yeah, it’s fascinating watching. And so yeah, he started his own business up, he started trading. He’s doing really well

Rick Archer: drilling like stocks or something.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Well, he discovered something called the blockchain, which is like a decentralized way of exchanging anything of value was no middle person. So it’s a little bit like we’ve been having this conversation about the Orthodox, spiritual and religious traditions. So he feels that this emerging technology of of robotics and AI and blockchain will create the equivalent of a new industrial revolution. in which power will be decentralized from central authorities more into a decentralized landscape? And he’s very passionate to use the system being practical, as he said, as it is, but using it to change itself. Yeah. So he’s very inspired by that. I suppose people like Elon Musk and things.

Rick Archer: I think he’s right holders, you know,

Paul Morgan-Somers: he’s just 15. Now,  wow, that’s so cool that he’s doing all that such a young age. What you’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, you know, you can sort of broadcast and put things out there. And, you know, it’s so decentralized, so Well, yeah, it’s like exactly what you’re doing. Yeah, exactly. You’re decentralizing information and apparent authority from from how it was structured. Yeah, into a very different sort of landscape and communication. And in that, the actual conversation is changing. And the possibilities are changing.

Rick Archer: And it’s exciting. It’s an exciting time to be alive. But let’s stay alive as long as we can. Nice notwithstanding.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. But yeah, he know, he sees, you know, lots of things imminently happening. He says, The future is here now. But it’s not spread out bad.

Rick Archer: Brilliant. Wow. I was such a nincompoop, when I was 15. It’s really inspiring to hear someone that is just being so wise.

Paul Morgan-Somers: 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. Amazing. And he took his he took a photo and he sat there with his baseball hat on it, people were like, oh, you know, posh people, as he said, wrote all kinds of and it came back. He said, Dad, that was my first experience of power. Because he said the way we were treated by everybody. He said he’d never experienced that before. So he said, I’ve realized how power can be so intoxicating for people. And yeah, and you know, we’ve talked about obviously spiritual and religious things and the whole constructs that society has made. And that possibly they’re not as authoritative as, as we presumed them to be. Not as all knowing as we presume them to be the Emperor. Yeah. But he can see in is his first experience of why people fall in love with power, and why they hold on to it. And we see that well, I’m sure you’ve seen it in the spiritual circular, as in the economic circle, or the political circle, again, it’s human nature. It says kids on the beach.

Rick Archer: 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, go to one’s head.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It is within the context of our conversation in over 40 years of chatting to people. Now, you hear so many stories from people that have in one way or another have been abused by people in religious or spiritual authority. Yeah. And in a sense, my I made a New Year’s resolution to become more grumpy. So I’m going to be wanting to become more grumpy with that sort of stuff.

Rick Archer: As long as you use it in the process. Yeah,

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’m, I’m less patients of all that sort of it. When people use power to abuse other people,

Rick Archer: yeah, you know, that’s another meme that is kind of emerging in the collective consciousness. I gave a talk at the science and non duality conference in October about the ethics of Enlightenment and a bunch of people came up afterwards teachers and non teachers and just said, we’ve all been talking about this and thinking about this where 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 and all are getting busted for you know, sexual abuse and, you know, let it using their power to take advantage of people and in the collective consciousness, there’s a impatience with that and a lack of tolerance of it anymore.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yes, so I think in people’s characters, that one there needs to be like, at least like in the sense of reach awareness when you’re around people with power to be careful. And that basically goes to so called spiritual teachers and gurus and whatever. Yeah, it’s like I have to say regarding a second hand car salesman until they prove otherwise, it’s possibly a good start off point. Yeah. Because power power is such it is it’s so appealing to characters.

Rick Archer: It is. And it’s, it’s tricky, not only for the students of such people, but for the people themselves. I mean, they get hit harder than any of them if, you know, there’s that saying, Pride goeth before a fall, there are so many instances of people just getting, letting it go to their heads, and you know, the whole thing gets out of control, and then they end up crashing and burning. So there’s kind of a 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 Morgan-Somers: Again, in monastic traditions, they used to say stay quiet for 20 years. Yeah. And philosophy, there’s a, there’s a common sense in that really.

Rick Archer: Now, the times that we need people to, you know, get out there and talk and teach. I mean, there seems to be this, again, the democratization idea where it’s not just sort of one girl with 1000s of followers, but hundreds and hundreds of people with small gatherings that are helpful to those people. But the same dynamic is there where 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 Morgan-Somers: My son, my son was telling me he’s reading a book called stealing fire, I think it’s called, and it goes into about transcendence or move into a different state. They were analyzing Navy SEALs is written by scientists, I think. And when they’re looking for a Navy Seal, they’re looking for a character that when in extreme circumstances, doesn’t become like a superhero, like you see in the movies, like a super individual, he actually can become one with the group, yeah, has the group. And then there’s no leader, there’s no leader and a group in a Navy SEAL group, whoever’s in the best position becomes not the natural leader at that moment in time. So like, in a conversation, you know, is there a teacher? Or is there a student, the teacher and the student difficult, if you want to use those words appear all over the place? In a word in a mannerism from every character in the conversation, it’s not located, it’s not located inside that certain character or physiology. It’s in that sense that if you could say there was a teacher, or it’s non local, in a sense,

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Because it’s, it’s, 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 particularly great instrument for singing about this. But also when you build as a structure like any you raise somebody onto a platform as it were, that already is communicating something in our conditioning so but there’s like you said, we can’t but use word so sometimes those situations, but you just have to be careful with them. Yeah. Not to get not to believe in them.

Rick Archer: Or in yourself too much. In terms of Yeah, individual importance.

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

Rick Archer: here’s a quote from Alma, whom you see over my shoulder here, she always says, it’s always good to have the attitude of a beginner. And I think what she means by that is just that humility, you know, just recognition that one doesn’t know everything, or have some kind of superduper status or anything, that if you just have that attitude, and almost like the attitude of a servant, which, you know, some of the great saints that we admire throughout history have had just hump humility and serve a sense of servitude, that it’s a safeguard for yourself, and also makes you more helpful, perhaps to others.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But in many ways, Rex is more simple than that. It’s so close as it were. That in a sense, it’s all it’s, it’s, it’s brand new. And in that brand newness, there’s no knowing it, because there’s no even knowing that it’s brand new, but it is it’s immaculate in a sense. And prompts us the story of the Immaculate Conception. It’s literally literally time and space is immaculate. Yeah. And in that, in that and in that timeless seamlessness, there is no need of knowing. And yet it can appear as as knowing. It can appear as a measurement.

Rick Archer: Essentially, it’s just saying that in response to what I just said, I’m kind of get the segue how we got to that, but it’s interesting what you’re saying. Maybe just the brand new part.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Literally,

Rick Archer: yeah. In other words, ever fresh moment to moment, are you kind of saying that there’s,

Paul Morgan-Somers: it’s not easy, more imminent than that? It’s not there’s no

Rick Archer: one’s jugular vein as they say.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s it’s like you push the brain towards it, as it were. And suddenly the brain and the words of God, they just stop it because there’s no measurement for it. Because it’s not. In that sense, it’s not a time and space thing.

Rick Archer: It proceeds time and space, with

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

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, and we just fight over words. Over measurements like we

Rick Archer: were saying earlier. Yeah. Yeah. No, look back to some stuff in your personal life, which I think it’s kind of fascinating. Though. Firstly, let me ask what was your motivation for leaving the monastery after five years?

Paul Morgan-Somers: The same impulse playful playfulness that took me there.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Something moved you to leave.

Yeah, it just moved and I lived like a hermit for a while. On my on my parents farm. Yeah.

Rick Archer: And then so you must have been about early 20s By that time. So if you went in when you were certainly

Paul Morgan-Somers: 20 or 22, or whatever.

Rick Archer: How old were you when you got married?

I can’t remember

Rick Archer: Roughly

Paul Morgan-Somers: would like to 20

Rick Archer: later 20s Okay. And you had this interesting story about that, where you’re, your wife’s, whom you’ve never met the woman, and his name popped into your head, and you thought, I’m gonna 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 gonna marry this person. What do you make of that? I mean, how did that happen?

I? I don’t know. It’s just what happened? Yeah, it’s a bit sounds a bit weird. One of those mystical kind of things. Yeah, just sitting quietly, and I heard the word, the name. And I just knew like mommy home.

Rick Archer: And then. So then you overheard some women in a store or something, talking about this person

in the local village. I heard the name and I cried. So I, I inquired, I said, Who is this person? I also asked how old they

Rick Archer: are. She’s 70.

And I got ahold of her telephone number. And I, I just phoned her up out of the blue and said, you know, my name is pearl. Would you like to go out for dinner? She said, No.

Rick Archer: Unless your name is McCartney? I don’t think so. Yeah.

Yeah. So I remember putting the phone down. And I’m thinking, well, we’re getting married. Why did you say no? And then months later, she found me.

Rick Archer: She was snowed in someplace. Right. And she absolutely had a four wheel drive vehicle. And

yeah, my mum and dad had to know the zookeeper for four by fours. So I managed to get down. It was a long Farm Lane. It is. Yeah, follow us now. It is very beautiful. And the gates that I stopped when there’s a bit like a cell really?

Rick Archer: You were like, anyway, charming coming to save her

and I rescued took you for dinner. Kill the dragon

Rick Archer: or two on the way. And yeah. So you took her for dinner? And then? And then Hmm. So one thing led to the next.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, we just kept in communication. And then yeah, eventually married and had two boys.

Rick Archer: And you didn’t stay? How long? Were you married? I keep asking you all these number things?

Paul Morgan-Somers: I don’t 25 years.

Rick Archer: What did she make of your whole orientation to life? I mean, that she can get this ocean business and

Paul Morgan-Somers: because my character will just speak about it when it gets prodded.

Rick Archer: Yeah, so did what she had done that whole thing.

Paul Morgan-Somers: She had a sense of when she said when she met me it felt like coming home. That’s the only way. She verbalize that, really. So it’s funny as I speaking to my son, yesterday, and after people asked me, or what do you say to your children? You know about this? And I often don’t understand questions, it takes my brain a little while to like, create that sort of map because the question doesn’t make much sense. Yeah. Because Because everything’s the ocean. So there’s nothing that needs to be spoken about as such, because the kids as it were, just grew up in the ocean. And so it was just, it’s just always what is. So they didn’t have to be like some sort of proper conversation about because there isn’t a something which is the ocean there is something over there or behind there, which is the ocean. It’s not a something in that sense, right. So to make it into something, it just becomes another another measurement, which isn’t it?

Rick Archer: Yeah. And so this all this, what you’re saying now arose from my asking about whether your wife was interested in this stuff. And so I guess what you’re saying is, it was it’s 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 but it’s like it wasn’t relevant, really, as topic was the ocean or something.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But making a living is the was the ocean. Yeah. Something you’re building a business. Yeah. making profits and, and, and, and you have some kind of which, yeah, deciding which school for your children to go to and what books to read and what stories to tell them and things like that,

Rick Archer: as are all currents within the ocean.

Paul Morgan-Somers: What Although this sounds a bit paradoxical, they’re not even current. It’s the whole ocean, isn’t it? No, I get that. Yeah.

Rick Archer: So because the current sounds isolated, but what you’re saying is that the whole ocean is in every drop of it.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. Changing the baby’s nappy is in the HUD gets 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. Right? It’s, it’s all of that that’s, that’s all the juice

Rick Archer: was. William Blake said infinity in a wildflower eternity in an hour, it’s sort of the Holika Tality is in the part.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Literally, that thing we call the path which we think we know, we know the measurement, but we don’t know what’s being measured. 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. Yeah.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s a bit like that. It’s a bit like a love affair. In a sense, when you’re speaking about your lover. Something comes through the words. That isn’t simply the words.

Rick Archer: Yes. Yes. The feeling is conveyed or you talked about smells are there there’s, there’s an aroma that that is stimulated by the words.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. So this, this, this conversation is literally.

Rick Archer: So it’s probably too personal ask that maybe you could answer in a general way. In terms of the types of things you’ve been saying. But you said after 2025 years, that relationship ended and I guess you would just say that that’s the way the ocean flowed or something.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, two different two different characters with at that point, wanting different things. Yeah. Because I would say living with a character that might not have the same map as yours. Or have different like, priorities for instance. Yeah. You know, just has practical implications. And for me, the, in a sense the two boys and what was going on there became but the priority for my character.

Rick Archer: Well, it wasn’t for your wife. I mean, usually mothers are very

Paul Morgan-Somers: like your dad. Yeah, the boys loved their mother and the mother loves the boys but, but there was a difference in in the dance that was happening.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’m more of a silent partner there now. Okay. I don’t have time rarely

Rick Archer: say you’re just busy talking about the ocean and drinking tea.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, lots of tea Hands, hands boys. So people came like before our conversation and people will come after our conversation

Rick Archer: with people you mean people with whom you sit as a mentor? I know in chat buddies with your boys that kind of people

Paul Morgan-Somers: now we just drink tea and chat about the ocean and whatever else

Rick Archer: so you have a little open house and people come around and sit and chat and that keeps you pretty busy.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yes so like I don’t like the house been to Oprah

Rick Archer: I suppose yeah. Every now and then you read a whole

Paul Morgan-Somers: yeah there’s so much going on in the boys lives at the moment. Sure. Especially Angelo my youngest sounds excited. I have a my my resources and my energies needed there as well.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Could get a support you in your old age. It sounds like the red he’s going on. That’s the plan. And, and do you do I mean, any? I mean, people are right now let’s see, there’s about 130 people watching this, and they’re probably all over the world. And after we’ve done this, you know, people may want to get in touch with you do do Skype conversations with people and stuff like that. From Yeah, I

Paul Morgan-Somers: always, I always get like it. But the last year or so I started because there’s so many people from I always used to love traveling about having cups of tea and meeting people. And coffee. And a coffee now Yeah, cappuccinos. But now it’s impossible because people are from different countries and there. So Skype is becoming much more the eat for me the easiest way of doing it.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: So the last few years, I’ve experienced that, basically. And I can’t do that anymore. Yeah.

Rick Archer: Do you charge a certain amount for your time when you do Skype counseling? Conversations?

Paul Morgan-Somers: No. So I don’t charge but sometimes people give money sometimes.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Well, I vote for two years, I’ve just chatted to people. My body’s telling me off sometimes

Rick Archer: for spending so much time chatting with people. Yeah, that’s probably why you and your wife aren’t together anymore. For to get off the phone.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Thank you, Rick.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, I do that I’ve done that in my home, basically, because I like them quite. Like what you outlined previously about, you know, sitting in front of an audience, I’ve always been reticent of that. Yeah. Again, it just felt like meeting people across the table or having a cup of tea.

Rick Archer: Yeah, to keep it. And

Paul Morgan-Somers: so but it, it happens. It does happen more again, because I can’t in one way, practically, it’s easy to meet a lot of people in one go nowadays. Sure. And individually.

Rick Archer: You know, what a lot of people do, Paul, is they use this thing called Zoom. Have you ever used zoom? And it enables you to have these sort of little webinars with 20 people or whatever at a time. And it’s very, 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. Yeah. And you see lots of different faces. I find a bit weird, to be honest.

Rick Archer: But it’s sort of a handy tool.

Yeah. But it’s something that’s beginning to happen as well.

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

And all this tea, lots of lots of people can because they’ve had for want of a better word awakening. And a lot of times, you know, that’s, it is being or has been problematic.

Rick Archer: Help them kind of come to terms with it.

So some of the conversation can revolve around that. Yeah, that’s good. But it’s. But it’s just a drunken conversation about love really? Sure. And all the practical things that go around that.

Rick Archer: 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, handholding, you know, and helping people to get comfortable with what’s happening to them.

Well, it’s again, it’s different for different characters, but for some characteristic, as you said, can be very unsettling. Yeah. And also they can be often quite a bit of fear, because you know, it’s very cold. When the experience is almost like, a sense that they were going to die or whatever,

Rick Archer: yeah, something is gonna die.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. That never was robust. The next event, though, just need to, to this old monk and somebody in the garden was telling him about this experience. And then and our experiences they were they were going to commit suicide, but this isn’t a dream. And he was he was taking it up, grew 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 the guy

Rick Archer: succeeded in committing suicide. Yeah, were they saying that literally are more like a no in

Paul Morgan-Somers: the dream, in the sense he was going to die. Right? So so the, the old monk, in the context of our conversation, said, or you should have jumped? Yeah. And it would have been the end of something that never was.

Rick Archer: Right. And just to be 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 Morgan-Somers: you’re talking about the juice of aliveness. which can’t be measured. Which, which, in that sense, was never born, which never began. So the whole concept of death, or the end of a something just collapses. The whole of what we’re talking about really. I often say it’s the break it is. It’s 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 are there is one thing separate from another thing. Yeah. So what we’re talking about is just a crazy drunken love affair that brakes time and space.

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

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

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’d be up after Pattinson.

Rick Archer: This actually happens every night.

Paul Morgan-Somers: No, the experience of your wife energetic experience. It’s not very good on the first day it happens.

Rick Archer: So in the morning, you’ll be up dancing around the bedroom.

Paul Morgan-Somers: And it’s literally like a drunkenness. It’s just it’s like it just overflows in the body basically with energy and makes it and makes the body dance

Rick Archer: interesting. And you’ll dance throughout 510 minutes or something and go take a pee and go back to bed.

Paul Morgan-Somers: I don’t really know. Did I really know something? I don’t think I don’t think it goes on for a long, long time.

Rick Archer: What kind of dancing is it? I mean, is it wild and crazy? Or is it more like a subtle Tai Chi kind of thing or what?

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s not crazy heavy metal stuff.

Rick Archer: No. Okay.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s

Rick Archer: more flowing kind of.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, it’s it’s. I don’t know. I’ve never thought that what kind of dancing

Rick Archer: just making you think about all kinds of things you hadn’t thought about?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, I don’t really know where I live. It’s just Have

Rick Archer: you set up a camera and tape it sometime? Have it ready to go.

Paul Morgan-Somers: And I don’t know why it happens, it’s just the same, you know, when I go to bed is always the same. This was an experience when I was 16. I had this sense to go and sit quietly. And then I just learned to follow it basically, whenever that had that sense. So if I was in the house, I just go up to my bedroom, and sit on my bed. And this one time, I went to the south of my beds, and there’s just this violet, what I call the cloud, came into the room, went above the body. And then I knew I had to lay down, I don’t know how I do, I just lay down, and it just rained down onto the body. And it was it was very energetically strong. And then the first time that I’d experienced that the edge of the body wasn’t the edge that I thought it was that the edge was also agilus. And then there was no sense of a separate body as a separate Doer to the wall over there or to the carpet to the bed. And that happens every night. Since basically,

Rick Archer: does it happen with the violet thing every night? Or? Oh, really? Yeah, so interesting.

Paul Morgan-Somers: So I don’t know what I don’t know. It’s just, it’s just what the physiology does.

Rick Archer: I mean, I’ve had a couple of experiences in my life that were somewhat like that. And I attributed them, maybe it’s just my interpretation, but I attributed them to some kind of Celestial Being or something, I mean, one time I was giving a talk in a room, and there were only two people in the room. And they were on kind of on either side. And I was looking into this person talking and then listening to that looking at that person and talking. And then all sudden, this ball of light came into the room, and it was right in the middle. And it was it gave me the sense of being very conscious as much as those people if not more so. And we I kind of looked at it and acknowledged and and then there was sort of reciprocity. And then I went on talking but I sort of felt like there was some kind of interest or intervention or curiosity or something from whatever that was that was checking out what I was doing, perhaps giving me more energy or wisdom or whatever in what I was doing. And I want when you told that story, just now I got I got that feeling like maybe, I mean, I have friends who routinely see sort of subtle beings like guardian angels or something around people tending to them in ways which my friend doesn’t even understand. But they’re there. So I just wonder sometimes if we have some something like that in our lives that associates with us and and serves as a some inspirational or influence, influential kind of guide, you know, I mean, since g spit it out, but it took me a while to say that, but find the words, you know, I suppose that was the all speculative and hypothetical for you. And you don’t really know is that right?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Well, in a sense, the brain always likes to know. So it’ll always it’ll try to rub stories. Yeah. But again, you know, whether I call describe a violet light, or I say this body it’s the same motion. Yeah. And that’s, and that’s, that’s the love affair, so it doesn’t kick in. For me. I don’t care whether it’s a blinking violet light, or.

Rick Archer: Yeah, or the Archangel Gabriel or something.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah. It’s all of somebody I met earlier today. And chatted to is the same one to prophetic word the same being the same motion. Yeah. The same as the same lover.

Rick Archer: That’s good. I want to ask you another question about your sleep. And that is that when when you go to sleep at night, when well, pardon my phraseology, because the words are limited but when when Paul lays down bed, but but he goes to rest, the some kind of inner awareness does the ocean remain awake to itself when the body begins to snore? Are you totally Blotto? You’ve gone?

Paul Morgan-Somers: luminosity is is is it? respective of waking, dreaming or sleep. Good. But but that luminosity has nothing to do with it. The way I understand the awareness, in the sense of one thing, being aware of a different thing, right? It’s more evident, it’s more, it’s before that sort of apparent movement happens. Yeah. And yet, and yet is that movement of time and space simulataneously? Literally, the form, and the formulas are not two things.

Rick Archer: Would it be accurate to say that when you, when your body goes to sleep, the senses are shut down, because that’s what sleep is. And so therefore, there’s not going to be, you know, 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 Morgan-Somers: Yeah, but in the sense of, there’s no sense of anything continuing.

Rick Archer: Because for there to be a sense, you’d have to be sort of functioning mentally like, you know, cognizant of it, which would be an activity and you’re saying that everything is really resolved back into its primordial?

Paul Morgan-Somers: Well, even in a sense prior to that, because although this sounds a bit crazy, there’s also itself evident that nothing was nothing began.

Rick Archer: Doesn’t sound crazy at all. Yeah,

Paul Morgan-Somers: but literally, wreck literally nothing. Nothing has ever began, nothing has ever been born. And yet, it doesn’t negate that measurement called birth and movement and time and space. And Paul and sons and everything. Everything. Yeah, it’s freedom. That it’s it’s unconditional.

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

Yeah. And and and this incident,

Rick Archer: yeah.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s it’s, there’s, there’s no edges to it. There’s no measurements. And then we just get back. I think the Indians have an analogy, but is it a a salt, a salt doll, going to test how deep the ocean is?

Rick Archer: Yeah, I’ve heard that one.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, but what it will do the ocean dissolves, just dissolves, right? So the brain is a bit like that. You push it, as it were, this is all a bit of a story. Now you put you push it towards the ocean, and it just dissolves. And then suddenly, and this begins to happen. And then this, what can be measured? Which, which paradoxically, is simultaneous ly all measurements, the whole of time and space.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I love that. And I love the way you’re, you’re presenting it in a balanced way. Because there’s some people who just say the first part of it, you know, they say, there’s only this and nothing ever happened. And then they don’t kind of complete the thing to say, but there’s also everything happening. And so it just seems kind of lopsided, and people kind of scratch their heads and say, Yeah, but what about my job? And what about this and that? So it’s kind of like the ocean can contain, you know, the whole panoply of diversity, apparent diversity without overflowing because it’s infinite.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Of course, otherwise, it wouldn’t be free. Yeah.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: There’s always luminosity there’s always this ocean, which can appear to be anything you know, whether it’s pain or need to pay the bills. Or it can appear as anything. Anger,

Rick Archer: does the pain or anything else ever gets so intense that the the ocean hood is momentarily forgotten.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But because it no because it’s not a memory, right? I had kidney stones, kidney stone or they can be variable of years ago. And that was hurt like hell, that was real time. That was was good time. And I couldn’t I couldn’t stand up I couldn’t get onto my feet right but that is it it’s just

Rick Archer: those who are listening to the audio version of this not seeing the video Paul’s making all sorts of interesting gestures, like playing with his lips and putting his hand over his face and stuff like that. But I think you can they convey it beautifully. And, you know, it’s just delightful. You know, having this virtual cup of tea with you and and going on about this. I mean, there’s there’s a there’s a beautiful way in which you kind of dance around the whole topic and you know, use words to say that which can’t be said that you’re doing a good job of it, I’d say.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But because literally it it does feel like a dance.

Rick Archer: Yeah, exactly.

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s a gorgeous dance was nothing moving?

Rick Archer: Yeah. No question has just come to mind. And that is that 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? I mean, within the the infinite freedom of the ocean? Do you feel like certain capacities have become more and more rich, such as love, for instance? Or kind of sensory refinement or anything? I mean, do you feel like there’s you’re still a work in progress in some respect?

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’ve got more grumpy?

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: It’s yes. The answer, in a sense is yes or no. Because that Lumina, that freedom that ocean is is what it is.

Rick Archer: Yes, it’s full.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Yeah, even words like complete, don’t even I guess, sorry. And in that freedom, anything, like senses can change. The sensitivities can change, the physiology can change.

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

Paul Morgan-Somers: Again, the answer is yes and no. I do apologize.

Rick Archer: That’s okay. I understand.

Paul Morgan-Somers: But in the sense, you can create a map in your brain and it can appear to be that there’s something developing and it is it’s true, and untrue simultaneously, that sort of measurement. Yeah. What we’re, what we’re talking about is an utter paradox. It’s at a concert conceptual paradox.

Rick Archer: Yeah, but when you talk about paradox, you can say, you know, that, I mean, you can if you’re doing side B of the paradox, you can say yes, and this the beside, there is sort of changing the development seems to have a direction or trajectory or, you know, things are getting better in this or that respect or something. Whereas, Side A of the paradox, it’s all just perfect and nothing ever changes and nothing ever happened and so on. So, I mean, you can say,

Paul Morgan-Somers: in that sense, in freedom, there’s nothing excluded right. So in that sense, is and and, and, and, yeah. And,

Rick Archer: and what

Paul Morgan-Somers: everything but danske can be can appear as in any way it wants to write. And it can be a quiet or it could be a more sophisticated dance, or more simple dance. But the the, the the juice of the damn system is also the same. In however it expresses itself. So it’s Different than not different simulataneously? Yeah. It’s again, it’s this sense of the form and the formless are not two things. That movement and non movement are not two things. change and change are not two things. They’re just measurements, apparent measurements of something, which can be measured.

Rick Archer: You’re walking, talking Zen Cohen. tea drinking.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Coffee, coffee. Yes. I think that’s most sophisticated. I’ve been told.

Rick Archer: Well, great. Well, 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 by continuing. Yes, you’re right. But it’s lovely. Spending a couple hours with you just, you know, carrying on like this. It’s been a delightful experience.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Okay, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Irene.,

Rick Archer: Irene, Paul says, Thank you. Welcome. She says, You’re welcome. No, she didn’t, she just said, You’re welcome, Paul. So I just want to just 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 we’ll get that fixed. But if you do have a Facebook page, and I’ll be linking to that, and you haven’t written any books, I don’t believe but can people I guess people can contact you through your Facebook page if they want to have a Skype chat or something like that.

Paul Morgan-Somers: Right. Yeah. Also the email that you used to

Rick Archer: do want me to put your email on your website? Yeah. Okay. That’s,

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’ve tend not to be very good with social media. Okay. I do tend to check the emails.

Rick Archer: Alright, so I’ll put your email address on your BatGap page. Yes. And people can get in touch that way. If they like.

Paul Morgan-Somers: I’m not always the quickest in replying, right? Okay,

Rick Archer: we noticed that, but we did get hold of you. Get ready for a bit of a deluge, you’ll probably have a lot of people contacting you. So good luck with that. And, and then in general, just to those who are listening or watching, this is an ongoing series. And if there’s several things you could do, if you’d like to stay in touch one is to subscribe to the YouTube channel that you’re watching if you’re watching this on YouTube, and then YouTube will notify you when new interviews are posted. And others do subscribe to my little email things so that you’ll get an email from us whenever a new interview is posted. And there’s also the audio podcast if you’d like to listen to things rather than sit and watch. And if you subscribe to the podcast, then every time you open iTunes, your or whatever you’re using to listen to podcasts, you’ll get each new episode as it becomes available. So there’s those and then there’s 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’m not I’ve never been happier in my life. And he was the designer of some of the original cars like the Thunderbird GTO and some of those power cars in Detroit. And he’s also done all sorts of fascinating things in his life. But then he ended up having this profound spiritual awakening and he’s, you know, sharp his attack and full of energy. So 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 Morgan-Somers: Thank you.

Rick Archer: You’re welcome.