Peter Cutler Interview

Summary

The conversation explores awakening through love, relationships, vulnerability, and direct experience beyond spiritual concepts. It also examines how childhood suffering, sensitivity, and moments of connection can become part of a path toward peace and freedom.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the deeper meaning of falling in love?
• How can heartbreak reveal a lasting source of love within oneself?
• How can painful childhood experiences contribute to spiritual awakening?
• Why is vulnerability important on the path to awakening?

Key takeaways

• Love is not created by another person; relationships can reveal the love already within us.
• Falling in love can briefly reveal awakened consciousness and a sense of non-separation.
• Spiritual realization is found through direct experience, not concepts about God or love.
• Vulnerability and innocence are not weaknesses but expressions of deep spiritual strength.
• Awakening releases energy previously spent defending a fixed sense of self.
• Peace and connection can arise even amid painful life circumstances.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I think Peter Cutler, my guest today, is number 390. If you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones organized and categorized in various ways.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page of the site, as well as a donate page that explains everything in a little more detail.

My guest today is Peter Cutler. Peter calls himself a spiritual midwife, evolutionary healer, author, and artist. He lives down in Sedona, Arizona, where pretty much everyone in town describes themselves that way, right?

Peter had a profound awakening experience at the tender age of 22, which we’ll talk about. Ten days after it began, he promptly fell back into the dream state most of us consider our lives, not having a clue what had happened.

He began a spiritual search that took him through many spiritual teachers, practices, and traditions, finally flowering as this great light of profound peace, unconditional love, freedom, and contentment.

As he first discovered at age 22, the radiance of this awake being seemed to have a profound effect on people, often leading to remarkable healings. This made it crystal clear that we don’t awaken for ourselves alone.

As a spiritual midwife for those who are ready, Peter assists in the birth of the awakened nature that lies within each of us. He offers weekly teachings, healing and Living Awake groups, retreats, and private sessions at his spiritual center in Sedona, the Sedona Zendo of the Awakened Heart, or online.

His first book is The Zen of Love: Discover Your Own Awakened Heart. It’s available on Amazon, and there’s a free digital download of the book, which I’ll be linking to on his page on BatGap.

Peter says about the book, “This book will improve your relationships miraculously if you honestly follow its suggestions. If you’re not in a relationship, it will teach you the secret of irresistible magnetic attraction.”

So what does irresistible magnetic attraction have to do with awakening, for starters?

Peter: Well, the book itself was kind of like a bridge, right? I found that when I was teaching, a transmission would kind of happen, so people could really experience this awakened nature—maybe not even from anything that I said, just from being in the room with me.

But then it would fade after a few days. If the thing was on Saturday, then by Tuesday or Wednesday they would already start coming back into a life with problems and suffering and things like that.

So I wanted to find a bridge that would allow them to stay like this and not have to keep coming to me, basically, because this is something in them that’s awakened; it’s not me. The transmission is just awakening something that’s already in them, right? But they keep forgetting this.

In order to find this, I went on a seven-month silent retreat. It was only supposed to be three months, but once I was in it, I didn’t want to come out of it. It was so beautiful.

About five months in, this realization of how I had awakened came to me that was totally unlike everything that I thought it was. I had been doing Zen practice for 30 years or so, as well as many other different practices. Those all helped, but it was really life itself, and particularly experiences of love and relationships, that had actually brought this to be.

Rick: So when you say a realization of how you awakened, what you realized was that your relationships were, for you, a powerful catalyst for your awakening? Is that what you mean?

Peter: Well, yes, yes, but really all of life was. From the moment I was born, everything that had happened to me was guiding me to this.

Relationships were a very, very powerful part of it. To find love—what I found was that people don’t really understand what love is, the way I’m speaking about love: this unconditional love that’s always here, that never changes, the sort of essence and foundation of all existence, right?

They don’t experience this; they don’t feel this. But in every relationship, every feeling of love, no matter whether it’s for another person, a pet, or a child, it doesn’t matter what it is, there’s a seed of this. That’s what I discovered there. There was a seed of this for everyone, so that was the bridge that I could show people.

I’ve done this before with people. Sometimes someone will leave them and a relationship will break up, and they just feel despondent. They feel like they’ve lost love; they’ve lost a piece of themselves. It can go on for years like this. They can be suicidal. A lot of suffering comes from this.

So I started working with a few friends and could introduce them to this experience: that the love they felt at the very highest level with that person was already in them before they even met them, during the relationship, and after it was over, it was still there.

That would give them enormous relief because they would feel that this was true, right? They could still feel the sense of love. It isn’t coming from outside, from a person; it’s something that’s in us always. It’s basically the foundation of what we are.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, there’s that saying, “God is love,” and Muktananda used to say, “God dwells within you as you.” So if God is love and God is dwelling within you as you, then you are love.

What you’re saying is that when you have a relationship and love sort of bubbles up and becomes much more vivid in your experience, you’re getting a kind of glimpse into who and what you really—and everything else, ultimately—are.

Peter: Yeah, especially the falling-in-love part. The falling-in-love part is actually an introduction to awakened nature, to awakened consciousness, if it’s intense enough. Then, after a while, it sort of fades, and we feel like we start noticing problems with people or whatever happens. It’s like the honeymoon phase is over.

We kind of think of the honeymoon phase as something that’s illusional. It’s like, “Oh, well, eventually you’ll come back to life. You’re glowing now, but eventually you’ll come back to the real world, where you won’t have this.” But the real world is the dream world. Falling in love is when you’re starting to open to what you truly are.

My experience is that it’s springtime—maybe that’s part of it now—but basically, always, I feel the falling in love. That most intense falling in love is just my nature, and it’s wonderful.

Falling in love is when you’re starting to open to what you truly are.

There’s a certain glow that happens from that, and people pick up on it. They can sense this when someone falls in love and they’re in that relationship, in that heightened falling-in-love phase. Everybody knows it. They don’t have to say anything; they just walk down the street, and people feel happier just being around them, right?

Because that’s in them, too, and all of a sudden they have a recognition. It’s a transmission. Everybody who’s in that falling-in-love phase is transmitting to other people, just the same way a guru does or anything. It’s exactly the same thing. They’re showing people what they are, and what they are recognizes it and sort of comes to the surface for a moment.

Rick: Yeah, of course, there’s usually a lot of other crazy stuff going on—a lot of hormonal things.

Peter: Yeah, there’s all kinds of crazy stuff. There are all kinds of filters because of our conditioned thoughts. We think that it’s the other person who’s doing it, that the other person is somehow giving me this feeling. But it isn’t that at all. They’re just reminding you what you are.

Yet we put all our focus on the other person instead of looking within and saying, “Where is this feeling coming from? Besides all the hormonal stuff, what is deeper than that? What’s deeper than that?”

Rick: Yeah, I remember hearing—I don’t know if this is true—that certain Native American tribes considered falling in love to be a form of insanity, and they’d kind of lock the people up in separate teepees until they got over it.

Peter: I think all of conditioned society thinks that.

Rick: Yeah, and people do all kinds of crazy things in the state of so-called falling in love. There seems to be a spectrum in terms of how sublime or ridiculous it can be.

Robin Williams famously said that God gave man both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time. So I don’t know. It’s one of these euphemistic phrases that almost seems a bit overused because there’s so much craziness associated with it, and in many cases, if not most, it doesn’t seem to bear a heck of a lot of resemblance to what we would understand enlightenment to be.

But I understand your point, and I think on an esoteric level there are energies being enlivened that are very central to the whole process of enlightenment. It’s just a matter of what we do with those energies.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, but I think it’s best to take away all the concepts about it. We have so many concepts of love. We need to take away that word “love” and feel what’s beyond concepts, because love is beyond concepts, and God is beyond concepts.

If people have concepts about God, those concepts stand in the way of their direct realization of God. If they have concepts about love, those concepts stand in the way of their direct realization of love—the love that I’m speaking about, which is no different from God and no different from life.

Basically, the simple way of saying it is that it means no separation. It’s just the realization, the direct experience, of no separation. It’s a very powerful thing.

When people have that falling-in-love phase, what happens? They don’t feel a separation, at least between themselves and the person they’re loving. Somehow, that falls away, and it feels amazingly good.

They walk down the street and really don’t feel that separate from anything that’s happening around them, so the other people pick up on that. They just feel the oneness.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. We’ll talk about this a lot more, and I want to get into your story a little bit more so people have a better sense of who you are and how you got to be where you are.

I thought an interesting place to start might be your story of Ginny when you were five years old.

Peter: You read my book.

Rick: I read your book. I remember when I was five years old being in love with a snake. I had this pet snake in the backyard, and I can distinctly remember just feeling this tremendous love for this snake that I had in a little box or something.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: But Ginny was more than that.

Peter: Well, Ginny was my neighbor, and my childhood was not the most pleasant childhood. There was a great deal of suffering. Both my parents were alcoholics, and there was a lot of violence in the house. So I often stayed by myself and went out in the woods. We were surrounded by woods; my house was right there, so it was beautiful. I could escape and be out there, and there I felt very at one.

Ginny was my neighbor, and I felt very connected to her. I loved her. I mean, this was, I think, the first child that I had met other than all these crazy adults. Her family life wasn’t quite as crazy as mine, but we really bonded together. She was a year younger than me, so I started school, and she came when I was in first grade. She was in kindergarten, and she came into the school.

Rick: I’ll just cut you off here for a second to say that in your book, you elaborate a bit on just how totally sweet and innocent and full of love your relationship was with her. There was an incredible bond between the two of you. But go ahead.

Peter: Meanwhile, I’d been in school for a year and was with different boys in the school, wanting to have friends and trying to fit in. These boys hated girls for whatever reason. I don’t know why; they just thought they didn’t want to associate with girls.

Rick: They had cooties.

Peter: Cooties, exactly. So I played along with that in order to fit in. During the first day of school in the second year, when I was in first grade, Ginny came to school. She was so excited because she was going to go to school with me, and she was looking forward to this. She was looking all over the school for me, and I was the only person that she knew.

When she found me, she went running up to me and hugged me. My friends were there, and they were looking at me like, “What the hell are you doing? What’s going on here?” So I pretended I didn’t know her. I kind of pushed her away and pretended I didn’t know her, and said, “You can’t come up to me in school.” It totally destroyed her. She was this young, sweet girl, and it just destroyed her.

She didn’t actually come to school for the next week, and her parents didn’t want me to associate with her. I really hurt her, and it destroyed me. It felt so terrible to do that. It was my first betrayal, not only of her but of myself, because I did love her. I didn’t really know these boys; I was just trying to fit in with them. I didn’t even know them, and here was someone that I really knew in a very close, intimate way.

It was my first betrayal, not only of her but of myself, because I did love her.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: It was sad. I don’t think much about my past, my life. I mean, I write about it in a book when it’s appropriate, when it comes up and it’s useful to teach somebody or help somebody. But the way that I sense my path and feel about my past is that it’s a dream. It feels like a dream. When it’s time to remember it, if it serves some purpose, it just comes right up, along with the feelings and everything. But I don’t have an identification with it as me, or even as something that actually happened, in a way. It’s like, “This is a dream that happened.”

But I learned from it. Everything that happened—all these dream episodes in my past—was part of awakening to this, to the truth. Everything, including that.

Rick: Yeah, I just found the story poignant. The shattering of the childhood innocence and purity that you were experiencing there was a real lesson.

Peter: Yeah, and heartbreaking.

Rick: If we could all be as innocent as you were before that betrayal, what a world it would be.

Peter: Yes. Well, we come back to that, too, because the state now is purely innocent. It’s absolutely pure and innocent. It’s the same as a child, and even more innocent than that child now—entirely vulnerable.

It takes some… I guess one of the reasons that we don’t want to stay here is because of this complete vulnerability, nakedness, and openness. This is what kind of scares us back into the conditioned life. But at some point, we see that this is all-powerful. The vulnerability and the innocence are unlimited in what they are. This is the true power.

Being a person that you can say is some solid person—”This is who I am”—is not power. It’s totally vulnerable. It’s got so many chinks in it, and we’re always trying to protect it.

Rick: It takes a lot of energy and effort to protect it.

Peter: Yeah, it does. So when you let go of it, you have this enormous energy because you’re not doing that anymore. You’re not living in a thought world.

The real world—your body—is naturally filled with energy, extraordinary energy. You couldn’t be alive without it. Your cells, everything, need this energy. So when you let go of using it for things that are not productive, all of a sudden you find this. That’s why, when you wake up, you have these experiences of bliss where your whole body is like an electric charge running through it.

Love, too. None of it is separate: bliss, love, peace. It’s all the same thing. There is no separation. It just depends on what we want to call it, and when we call it something, it has a different kind of feeling.

Rick: Yeah, it’s sort of like different flavors of the same food. Maybe there’s some food and it’s kind of sweet, but it’s tangy and it’s a little bit something else. Different qualities are all mixed in, but they’re all reflective of the same fundamental reality.

Peter: It’s all the same thing, yeah. It’s all the same.

Rick: Well, let’s learn a little bit more about the “you” that you’re not, in terms of how you progressed along. People like a little bit of the personal story, even though I get your disclaimer, because they can relate better: “Okay, he went through this, that, and the other thing. Oh, so did I.”

Peter: Yes, exactly. I wrote that in the book. That’s one reason it’s very helpful: people can put something they can understand onto something they can’t.

Rick: Right.

Peter: Because there is no understanding what this is. I have no idea what I am.

Rick: It also humanizes it. If people think, “That guy’s just as much of a turkey as I am. He’s been through all this, made similar mistakes, and he seems to be doing okay, so maybe there’s hope for me.”

Peter: Yes, that’s a very important part of it.

As I said, I grew up in a family with two alcoholic parents and a mother who didn’t want children. I was the firstborn, so all the way back to the womb I felt this not wanting to be there, this kind of rejection and abandonment. There was a lot of violence—unpredictable, drunken violence.

As a young child, it was very frightening to be in the house. One of the things that—

Rick: It’s amazing, because you said your father was incredibly handsome, and he stayed incredibly handsome even into his later years, weather-beaten given the lifestyle.

Peter: He was tough. He worked outside all the time, and when he wasn’t working outside, he was doing sports and stuff. He was an athlete. He spent a lot of time doing that, and that allowed him to be drunk.

My mother—they started drinking in the morning, and then she would just go all day until she passed out at night.

What happened was, I needed to have this kind of empathic experience because I needed to know if it was safe to be in the house without going in there. Otherwise, I was kind of stuck if they were angry or wanted to do something to me. I had to know what was going on inside before I even entered the house.

So I developed this very open perception of people’s feelings and thoughts, which was difficult as a child. But when I was alone in the woods that surrounded the house, I often felt totally filled with peace. It was filled with love. I wondered, “Where was this coming from?” I felt completely connected with the surroundings out there.

I knew every little cave that was there, and I felt connected with all the animals and birds—just no separation. It felt so wonderful, and it was probably what allowed me to survive my childhood. I had this one part where I wasn’t totally terrified, because when I was in the house, I was terrified.

In the Westerns, they talk about sleeping with one eye open. When they discover gold, a partner might come and kill them while they’re asleep. I slept with one eye open. I was always ready to get up and try to get away if something dangerous was going to happen.

I had a lock on my door. I never knew what was going to happen, and every morning I would wake up feeling like I had survived. But I lived in terror, basically. I lived afraid of everything.

So I had this feeling of a presence of light and love when I was alone. When I first heard the word “God,” I called it the presence of God. That’s just what I felt. Actually, I was pretty accurate about it, too.

I suppose that around age eleven or twelve, I started being really interested in girls and in being a rock-and-roll star or whatever, so I forgot about that. I put that part way into the background and wasn’t paying attention to it anymore.

It was a big part of my life up until around eleven or so. I read about Saint Francis of Assisi, and I just completely connected with him. We were supposed to write book reports, and everybody was doing someone like Lou Gehrig. I saw this, and I didn’t write a book report on it because I didn’t want anybody to know that I was totally fascinated with this guy’s life and this monk’s life.

I just felt that it was so much like mine. I don’t know if his family was as dysfunctional—they were fairly wealthy and well-off—but he took on this poverty, and I felt somehow very, very close to that. He’d also had that experience that I had when I was alone, this feeling filled with light.

But at age twelve or so, that stopped. It just sort of faded into the background, and I became really interested in girls. Basically, that was it. Everything started revolving around that, and so that just went on until I was around twenty-two.

✨ The awakening at age twenty-two

Peter: I went to a—my mother was in a rehab center. When she would get so drunk that her life was endangered, she would be in a hospital, and they would send her to a rehab center afterward. So she was in a rehab center.

Rick: By this time, you were married with a couple of kids.

Peter: I was, yeah, around 22. I was married. So what happens when you’re interested in sex that much? A shotgun marriage. But the kids were amazing, though. They probably saved my life, really.

They invited family members to come down over the last week that she was there to help her reacclimate and maybe not be an alcoholic anymore. My brother and I agreed to go down there. It was in Florida, and we were in the north, so we had a chance to go down for a week in warm weather. Probably that was at least part of our reason to go, and maybe something could help, maybe something could happen. Nothing had before.

So we went down there, and as people were telling these stories, it was like an AA meeting, right? In AA meetings, people tell stories like, “This is what I did. These are all the terrible things that happened when I was a drunk.”

People were telling these stories, and I was listening to this. I’d never been to an AA meeting, and I felt so angry hearing these stories. It was bad enough that my mother had ruined the lives of her kids, but this one guy in particular was the head of surgery at a very well-known New York hospital. He talked about how he would come in from alcohol and pills, and his hand would be shaking so much that a lot of people died on the operating table when he would do this.

The staff would cover up for it because he was the head of surgery. They couldn’t say anything about it, I guess, or didn’t. He felt terrible about this because he knew it was because of that, but he couldn’t stop. He was pouring his heart out, but I was furious. It made me so angry. I thought, “This guy is murdering people.” I just wasn’t feeling warm toward these people telling these stories. I thought they were terrible and inexcusable.

After listening to that for the second day, I told my brother, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m going home. I’m going to start attacking them or something. I can’t take this.”

So I packed my bag, and that night I went to sleep, totally ready to leave the next day. I woke up, and when I woke up, there was no more of that person who had been angry for so long. It was gone completely. There was no self-identity at all.

I just felt love. I felt like I was love. I was filled with light and love, just like when I was a young child in the woods, but much more intense. When I was a young child and experienced that, I was still a person experiencing it. At this point, there was no person to experience it. It just was that. That was all.

There was no self-identity at all. I just felt love. I felt like I was love.

Rick: Had you already been doing a bunch of spiritual practice at this point, or did this come out of the blue?

Peter: This came really out of the blue. As a hippie and a rock-and-roll drummer, I did acid.

Rick: I was a drummer, too.

Peter: Yeah? Oh, were you? Cool. I’d had some experiences doing that, and then when my kids were born, at some point people from the band came over. They were smoking pot around them, and I thought, “My God, these are just little innocent babies. I can’t do this anymore.”

So I said, “No one can smoke in my house,” and I stopped. I thought, “How am I going to stop?” I just started getting interested in yoga and meditation because I knew other people who had done that.

I got a book by Swami Satchidananda on yoga, so I was doing some yoga practices. I also had another book on Raja Yoga, which involved meditation, focusing on a candle, and doing that. I’d been doing that for about a year, but I knew nothing about spiritual things other than the acid trips, really.

I had a book by Yogananda called How to Know God, and I’d read that, but it was really no preparation at all. I understood the word “God,” basically. What I thought was that I was the second coming of Jesus Christ. That’s all I could know. I didn’t know what to say.

I thought maybe that happened because I was healing people in this rehab center. These people would come to me and were just drawn to me. They would come and sob, and I would hold them. This hadn’t happened before, but all of a sudden, all these people were coming to me, drawn to me, and I was somehow healing them because I had this radiance. It was literally a glowing radiance.

I felt that was happening, but people actually saw it. So, yeah, it came totally out of the blue. That’s why I said that about ten days later, it faded.

After I left the place, it was still happening. When I was on the plane, a stewardess came and said, “Can I sit with you?” I didn’t know what was happening. She had to move the guy sitting next to me to another seat. She moved him up to first class, and she sat with me.

She told me about a relationship she was in, a traumatic relationship with her boyfriend that was really bothering her. She was sobbing, and I held her the same way I had held the other people. I just loved everyone. I saw everyone.

It was as if I could see their entire life, from the time they were infants up to that point, and everything that had happened, but it happened all at once. I didn’t separate things out, but I could feel them, and all I could feel was love.

The doctor was the same. He came, and I hugged him, and I felt nothing but love for him. It was exactly the opposite of what I had felt before. For everybody, I felt this. It was amazing. It showed me something: love is not what we think it is at all. It has the power to totally heal people. It’s incredible.

It has way more power than we have any idea or concept of. I didn’t know anything about it. When I got home, my wife was scared because she saw me and thought, “Who is this guy?” It frightened her because I was so totally different.

I completely loved her, though. I had a lot of problems with her. We had a shotgun marriage, and I was actually in love with somebody else when we met. Then she got pregnant, and there were all these problems. But there, I just felt enormous love for everybody.

My neighbor was this disgruntled guy who was really angry with me all the time. I totally loved him, too. But afterward, I felt this desire for people to have me come back to where I was, to somebody they could see instead of this saint, I suppose. It just happened, I guess. I don’t really know why or how.

I think it happened because I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to embody this for the rest of my life. So what I had was a glimpse of what life could be like, of what reality is, and that was enough for me to go on a path to try to find out what it was and get it back again.

Rick: Yeah. More often than not, that’s the way it goes. People have some profound glimpse, and then it fades over some time. Then they think, “All right, I’ve got to figure out what that was and make it permanent.”

Peter: Exactly. What the hell was that about?

Rick: God gives us a taste.

Peter: Yeah. So I got really interested in looking and finding out what this was, doing meditation practices, and studying. There were times when I wasn’t totally focused on that, but it was always in the background because it was so much. I didn’t see the world the same way ever again.

I didn’t totally believe everything I was seeing because I knew there was something much more real and much more beautiful than this.

Rick: Yeah. I know words don’t do justice to it, but let’s talk a little bit about what love is. That brings up Forrest Gump: “I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.”

Peter: He was filled with love, yeah. That’s why he was so successful in everything he did.

Rick: Yeah, true.

Peter: Because he didn’t know he couldn’t be.

Rick: Yeah, there was this innocence about him.

Peter: Yeah. We understand our unlimited nature. We don’t put these concepts on ourselves about how limited we are. We just let them go. It’s not like we say, “I am unlimited.” We just let the limited go, and what’s left is the unlimited.

We let go of what isn’t love, and then there’s just love, because love is something that’s here, right? This is what I teach people who are going through all kinds of different suffering: to embrace it.

Instead of trying to escape, which is our natural response to painful feelings, we totally open to them. We go the other way. We totally open to them. These painful feelings always turn out to be illusions, and when we open to them, it reveals that they’re an illusion. Then we’re free. They’re let go.

But when we open to love and say, “Let go of that,” we can’t. It just grows deeper. The same is true with peace. These are not emotions. Love is not an emotion. It’s a fundamental essence of what we are. It’s a very different thing.

It’s not something that we feel; it’s something that we are. We really are this. On the deepest, deepest level, this is what we are. The bodies come and go, but this stays. This is something that doesn’t leave.

It’s beyond the physical world, but it’s in the physical world and it’s in bodies. It’s not like God is separate from anything, form or formless.

It’s not something that we feel; it’s something that we are.

Rick: Yeah, well, that right there is a good definition of what love is. It’s not an emotion. It’s not merely something we feel; it’s what we are.

Peter: Yeah, and you do feel it, though. It is like the experience of falling in love, when you feel this blissful feeling and you’re connected to everything. It is like that.

People who are falling in love are experiencing truth. That’s like my opening on a lesser level compared to my opening when I was 22, when I felt that that’s all I was at that point. It was like going into the sun. It just burned up everything else somehow.

For quite a while, I felt I was channeling. I would ask a question, and what I called God would answer. I would ask a question, and I would get an answer every time, instantly. The most puzzling things in my life would just instantly be answered in the most obvious way.

I would always feel, “How did I miss that?” Because I missed everything. It was amazing. It really was humbling, and it also caused me to lose trust in my mind because I was 100 percent wrong.

How are you 100 percent wrong about everything that happens in your life? But I was excellent at being completely wrong. I would have an A while missing every single thing. Then, when I asked, the right answer was given to me. It was so obvious, not mystical. It was really just much more obvious.

Regarding that experience I had at 22, I would ask about it, and the answer was simply, “Of course. It was just what you needed. You were going in the wrong direction, and you needed that experience to put you back on the path again.”

Rick: Yeah, and I don’t think we—I mean, it could be some kind of channeling thing where there’s some guardian angel or something that’s feeding us answers. But it could also just be—and maybe this is probably what you think, right?—your own innate, deeper intelligence that you’re tapping into more clearly.

Peter: Yeah, because your own innate intelligence is not separate from God, from any formless beings, from any of that. You are all of that.

So, of course, it could come into you because you are that. You just let go of what’s an obstacle to that. Channeling is interesting. In Sedona, a lot of people do channel, right? So the channeling is coming from them, but they have a certain name for it. For years, I said, “This is coming from God. This channeling is coming from God.”

I wouldn’t accept that there was no separation between me and God. It was me and God, and I had a relationship like Mooji calls it, being held in the lap of God. So, for years, I was held in the lap of God. I was guided to do things, things were given to me, and events would just spontaneously come up that were exactly what I needed. I just surrendered. I kept surrendering and surrendering, but I was surrendering to God.

At some point, the “I” just wasn’t of any use anymore, really. It sort of got smaller and smaller until it just faded away, and all that’s left is life.

Rick: And do you still get answers and support from nature, we could call it, or something like that?

Peter: In every way. I ask now. At one point, I thought, “Well, I’m not going to ask a really unimportant question, like what should I have to eat tonight, or what color should this graphic be on a website?” But now I do that with everything.

I don’t trust my mind for anything. I don’t say, “Oh, I think this would be a good color.” I don’t care what I think. I don’t care what my opinions are. They’re meaningless, because there’s something else that knows everything. So I don’t feel bad about asking about everything.

Rick: So you’re pretty much totally running on intuition with everything, every little thing? You go into a restaurant and feel like there’s some kind of guidance as to what to choose on the menu or whatever?

Peter: And which restaurant, and why I went into that restaurant, and who I’m going to meet, and everything. I just surrender to life, and it takes care of me. That’s the thing: when you surrender to it, you see that it takes care of you.

Do you know who Peace Pilgrim is?

Rick: Oh, yeah. I love Peace Pilgrim. Peace Pilgrim totally surrendered to the point where she would walk with no money back and forth across the country. She would sleep on the side of the road, and she wouldn’t eat until someone invited her in or met her. She was taken care of for years like that, and the more she did it, the clearer it was that she was being taken care of.

This is what Zen monks do when they go on a pilgrimage, right? They have no money, they’ve got a begging bowl, and they just walk a great distance, maybe back and forth across the country, like she did.

You find when you do it that life is taking care of you, but it always has been, from the time you were born. You cannot take care of yourself. You don’t have control of what’s going on in this body—your liver, your kidneys. You’re not consciously saying, “Get to work here. Do this.” It would be way too much work. Talk about the stress of just trying to be a person if you tried to control your body. All this stuff is being taken care of, all of it.

There’s this infinite intelligence here. It’s springtime where you are, right? Spring has just started here, so the buds are just starting to come up on the trees. You look at that, and the tree didn’t say, “It’s time to make the buds.” There’s an infinite intelligence that’s doing all of this.

We can see this in nature and accept it easily in nature, but not so much with ourselves, because we want to have some control. We believe that if we didn’t have control, everything would fall apart. It doesn’t. In fact, it just becomes miraculous.

The things that you need come to you before you even know that you need them. At the same moment you get them, you go, “Oh, I needed that. Thank you.” But you’re not even thinking that you need it. You’re not manifesting it by thinking, “I need this.” You don’t even think about it until it comes, and then you have it.

It’s everything. There’s a perfection in life that we don’t understand and don’t see. At this point, my feeling is that everything that happens is absolutely perfect and absolutely for my highest benefit. It could be cancer; it could be losing my house and becoming homeless. But I know that whatever happens is perfect. There’s just this inner trust and knowing of this, because it’s happened so often.

Something that I thought would be bad turns out to be exactly what I needed. Once I realize that and realize what the lesson is, the thing just resolves by itself.

Rick: Do you agree, though, that not everyone could just instantly snap into that way of functioning? I mean, you couldn’t take any old person anywhere and say, “Okay, start functioning the way Peace Pilgrim did,” wandering around the country with just the shirt on her back.

Peter: It wasn’t an instantaneous thing like that. She worked her way up to it. Then, at one point, she was sitting somewhere—I think out on a rock—and the peace came to her. She had a very profound inner, enlightened condition, and it enabled her to function that way.

But for everybody, this is happening from the moment we’re born. Everything is guiding us to this point. Most of us don’t accept it. There’s enormous resistance. When we work with students, what we do is try to let the resistance go, try to let the resistance go.

Love is a beautiful way of doing it, because people are used to saying, “Oh, love is good. I don’t need to resist this.” It’s as scary as—what about emptiness? I could resist that. It doesn’t sound that good, right? Because we don’t know what emptiness is. When we experience it, then we like it, but everybody likes love.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: Everybody likes love. So when we do that, when we sit in a room with people and allow them to experience love, often I feel like something is coming down through the crown chakra and filling your body with this light. I can even see it happening.

When I healed people, that’s all I did. I would describe what was happening and ask them to let go, saying, “This knows what it’s doing. It’s totally for your benefit.” They could do that, so they would stop resisting. Then the resistance in their body would loosen up, and what needed to be healed would be healed because they weren’t resisting it anymore.

When they say, “I have this terrible problem,” that’s filled with resistance. They’re calling it a problem instead of a message or a benefit. They’re feeling pain and all these other things because of this resistance.

When the resistance goes, the natural healing ability of the body just happens, because it’s always trying to heal itself. It has messages when we’re not doing it: “Stop resisting. Stop resisting. Life is here. Life has got your back.”

Rick: Yeah. I guess that’s just a little doubt in the back of my mind: in my understanding and experience, this is sort of a progressive thing. It’s not like somebody can hear this message for the first time and realistically expect to snap into the state of functioning you’re describing.

Peter: No.

Rick: And if we assume everyone can, then most people are going to be disappointed.

Peter: That’s right.

Rick: Pardon?

Peter: It’s a gradual thing, and it was for me, too. It took many, many, many years for this to happen. I was in a Zen practice for a very long time, which has its own traditions, rituals, and things that go along with it. That’s lovely and a good way of opening to this.

But when I really opened to it, there was healing and channeling. There’s nothing in Zen about this, right? I had to just go, “I don’t know what this is, but it’s happening.” Then I surrendered more and more, just surrendering all attachments.

It was definitely a progression. It’s a progression now; the progression never ends. But there’s this enormous trust here now, and the trust had to be earned with me because I’m skeptical. I grew up very skeptical. I didn’t trust anything.

It was very hard to accept my first teacher. I saw many teachers and rejected all of them. I thought, “No, that person had a cold. He can’t be perfect.” That was Sri Chinmoy. A sort of disciple brought me to him, and he had a cold. That was it for me: “No, he’s got a cold. He can’t be good enough.”

There was a lot of resistance and skepticism about everything, so it had to be proven in the real, practical, material world for me. Over and over and over again, things that we would call miracles, things we just can’t explain, would happen. Things that were simply unexplainable happened, and that got me to think, “I don’t understand the world at all.”

I’m surrendering to not understanding it, because these things are happening and they don’t logically make any sense. The healing itself was a miracle. It didn’t make any sense to me. Why would I be healing people? I knew nothing about this. Jesus was a carpenter. He didn’t study healing. He didn’t go to school for healing. He didn’t think about it; it just happened.

Then what are you going to do if this happens? You feel compelled. We feel compelled to teach when we have an awakening. It’s not our decision. We weren’t thinking, “I want to be a teacher. That would be a cool thing to do.” Maybe some people do, but most don’t. It just comes upon them.

This inner thing is acting like channeling. Something is taking you over, and you realize, “Okay, this is better than us. It’s better than this frightened person who’s scared of their own shadow.” It’s better.

Rick: Yeah, some people do think, “Hey, it would be cool to be a teacher,” and I think sometimes they’re premature in that assumption. Another thing I just wanted to add is that I wouldn’t discount Zen as having been very influential in what you’re now experiencing, even though Zen didn’t talk about that stuff.

It’s the same thing with Adyashanti. He’s talking about and experiencing a lot of things these days that really weren’t part of his Zen training. Everything we do along the way, I think, contributes to what eventually unfolds.

Peter: Absolutely. Zen was amazing. Thich Nhat Hanh, that particular teacher, was just very loving. When I first encountered Thich Nhat Hanh, he was the first teacher that I accepted. I listened to an audio tape of his and heard his voice, and I realized, “Wow, this guy is like the mother and the father both.”

I didn’t really have the experience of a mother and father. Later I did with my father, but in the beginning, no, and never really with my mother. So here was this loving mother and father right here. I said, “Okay, that’s it. I can go for that.”

Rick: And he didn’t have a cold, either.

Peter: He didn’t have a cold. No, I’d never seen him with a cold, but he has a stroke now, so he’s not the same.

But since I moved to Sedona, people said, “Oh, you’re going to leave the Sangha. Is there a Sangha there? You’re going to leave the Sangha.” So everything—there’s an addiction and attachment to the Sangha, which was beautiful. I mean, it’s beautiful and it’s easy to get attached to that. I don’t know, but I was compelled to come to Sedona, so I had to come, and everything was new here. I knew nobody.

I got involved with Mooji and Ramana. I didn’t know about Ramana before, or Papaji.

Rick: Not in person, but reading books and looking at videos and all that stuff.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. Advaita. I was very much into Advaita, and I very much identified with Mooji when I saw him. What happened is, I’d seen a couple of things and I said, “Awesome, a Jamaican guy with this cool accent. This is great. I’m really happy to see a spiritual teacher from Jamaica. How rare is that?”

Then one day I picked up a book and realized that he was an artist and that he was painting sort of like I do—these Zen paintings. So I just felt like that was me. Here was not me, but there Mooji was, me. I went to my friend, who had an ashram across the street, and I took this picture of Mooji. I said, “Would you like to see a picture of me?” He said, “Sure,” and I showed him the picture of Mooji. He said, “That’s not you.”

But it was, though, because Mooji was speaking from that place in me, and I wasn’t quite at that place yet. It was in me. Over time, I did these retreats with Mooji, actually. Mooji would have a retreat, and I would invite people in and we would watch videos. His satsangs are two or three hours long, right? He would do it day and night.

We would have a silent retreat and just watch these videos six hours a day. When I would watch, I would only hear the first couple of words, and then I would just go into this space of bliss the whole time. Only if someone laughed or something happened would my attention go back to the video. The rest of the time, I was just sitting in bliss.

I did that every day. I always did it with the intention of watching the video, but it never happened. I just fell into this space, and that was good enough. Mooji is open and very loving, and he had the experience of sitting in the lap of God, which is the same thing that I experienced. So I felt, yeah, there was something really beautiful about that.

Rick: There seems to be a tremendously devotional scene around Mooji these days. People are really feeling devotional, throwing flowers in his path and stuff like that.

Peter: Yeah.

Rick: As far as I can tell, he’s handling it okay. He’s allowing that to happen.

That’s love, right? I mean, I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t think that should be stifled. People do have a phase where they become very devotional, and there needs to be a legitimate outlet for that. I think it’s important that a teacher have the maturity to be able to allow that to happen without it going to their heads.

Peter: Without it going to their heads, yeah. No, it’s a guru tradition, and it has backfired and created problems for gurus and followers, too, but probably not as often as we think, because those things get blown up and we really hear about them.

Many times there is no problem with it, because we’re surrendering to ourself and we’re giving it over to the guru, like Ram Dass did for his guru. That’s a step, right? That’s a progressive step. The guru eventually will point it back to you and say, “There’s your guru. It’s in you. All is in you.”

At first, you can’t accept that, and then eventually you can. That was my experience with God. This being held in the lap of God—for a long time I couldn’t accept that that was me. There wasn’t any separation.

At one point, I was with a teacher in Mexico, Sahaja Nada, at a yoga place there. He’s a beautiful, awakened guy. I told him about this thing that other people had said: “It’s you who’s answering these questions. It’s you who’s doing this. It’s not a God outside of you.”

I sort of intellectually understood it, but I couldn’t accept it because I thought my ego would go, “I’m God,” you know? I didn’t want that to happen. I knew my ego was very powerful, and I told him about that.

He said that Rumi said, “The most humble thing any man can say is, ‘I am God, and there is no you.'” It just was the right time for him to say that to me. When he said that, it was the beginning of my acceptance that there wasn’t any separation.

I figured the ego—one thing the ego is not is humble. It says it’s the most humble person in the world, but it’s never actually humble. The word “humble”—the ego doesn’t like that. So I figured that was safe.

Rick: Yeah, well, it’s very true if understood properly. If it’s more like, “I, me, this individual, is God,” then you get into trouble. But the deeper truth is, you are, we are. That’s all it is.

If God is omnipresent, then show me a place which is not God. Show me something which is not God. The scientific evidence, in my perspective, is that God is omnipresent, because you look at anything closely enough and you see this miracle of intelligence functioning.

Peter: Yes, exactly. Spring is a beautiful time to see this, partly because we’re not resisting as much. We love spring: “Oh, look, the flowers came up.” We’re not resisting at that moment.

Anything that we really appreciate, anything that we love, we’re not resisting at that moment. We’re not resisting love. We see something really beautiful, and it just sort of takes our breath away. At that moment, all that’s happening is that we’re not resisting, because everything is like this.

Every single thing in life is like this. There are no problems. Everything is only this expression of God everywhere.

Rick: Here’s a question that came in that will switch us to a slightly different topic—not that there’s anything wrong with this topic, but I think we’ve pretty well covered it. This is a fellow named Joshua from Portland, Oregon, who asks, and this is what your book is all about:

How can one use a relationship as a spiritual practice or to progress on the path of awakening? Is it valuable to have a partner who is also using the relationship for spiritual growth?

I guess the add-on to that question would be, what if you’re in a relationship with somebody who’s not into spirituality?

Peter: It doesn’t matter. It’s your love, right? Love is what you are, and so you’re expressing love. It doesn’t matter what you express love to. You could express love to someone who thinks they hate you, but you have this privilege.

There’s a beautiful movie called Adaptation in which Nicolas Cage plays two brothers. One brother is very fancy-free and hasn’t really buckled down to create a success for himself, while the other brother is a famous screenwriter, so he doesn’t respect his twin brother at all.

At one point, someone’s trying to kill them. They’re being shot at, hiding behind something, and they think they’re not going to live through the night. The brother who’s a screenwriter looks at his twin brother and says, “You know, when I started not respecting you? It’s like we were in junior high school, and there was this girl that you had such a crush on. You just loved her so much, and you went up and talked to her. When you left, she was laughing with her friends and saying what a loser you were, right? You didn’t hear it. You were oblivious to it.”

The brother said, “I heard every word, but there’s nothing she can do, because it’s my love. She can’t take away my love. I can love whoever I want.”

The screenwriter brother realized, “Oh, my God, this guy’s wiser—really wiser—than I am. He understood it, because my life is miserable. I’m having all these miserable relationships and trying to get things.”

So it’s our love, right? We can love anyone, and if we do enough, if we’re open enough, it will heal and transform them in the ways that they need.

I’m not in a relationship now, and often I go for these long periods of silent retreat, where initially I thought, “It’s just me and God.” That relationship is incredible, right? Now it’s just being in love—not with any object of love, just love itself.

Everything I see is an object of love. It doesn’t matter what it is. You are, this screen is, all the people listening are. If I want to express love that way, it’s beautiful to express it.

When I’ve been in relationships after this awakening, it’s just because this love is unlimited. If someone doesn’t give love back to you, it makes no difference at all. You just pour it out.

I had a relationship with a woman who was quite narcissistic. She was kind of an endless black hole for attention. There was no limit to it. She could accept all the attention you could give, and she could accept all the love you could give. That’s kind of rare—to find someone who can accept that much. Some people may go, “Okay, whoa, that’s a bit much,” but she accepted all of it. It just poured through me, and I felt wonderful being able to do that.

I didn’t need anything from her. It was just an opportunity to express love and focus it on one person rather than everywhere at once, which is just good.

That’s the high level of a relationship. What he’s asking is, how can you use a relationship to get to that space, to get to that place? Recognize where love is coming from. It’s not from another person.

Every time we feel this love, recognize that, too. You’re focusing on the other person, and that’s beautiful, but recognize where love is coming from. You’re having that feeling; the feeling is in you. Allow yourself to see that this feeling is not only here now, but always here.

I had that revelation when I was 16 years old. It was amazing; it just came to me. I was in love with this girl I had a crush on in high school, and at some point I found out that her friend had come up to me and said, “Rachel wants to know why you’re not talking to her or asking her out. She has a big crush on you, and she thinks you’re cute.”

I thought, “Oh, wow.” I was shy, so I hadn’t talked to her. I was really happy. I went up and talked to her, and afterward we went back to her parents’ house. They weren’t home; they were working. We had a good time, and when I was leaving, I walked back to my place. It was about a three-hour walk. We lived on opposite ends of town.

As I was walking, it was springtime, like now, and the birds were chirping and everything. I was walking on clouds. I still had this enormous love, and not only that, people who were driving by were smiling at me and waving—adults, right?

I was kind of a scruffy juvenile delinquent. Adults wanted to keep their kids and everybody away from me, and here these adults were smiling at me and laughing. I had a black leather jacket and everything. It amazed me. This had never happened before. What was going on? I was feeling this love, and somehow it was affecting the people around me.

I realized, where is this coming from? I hadn’t been with her for at least two hours, and yet I was still feeling it. I realized that she had triggered this feeling in me that had always been there, but I was completely unaware of it. It was covered over by fear and anger, and yet it had always been there.

It didn’t last for long, but for at least the time I was walking home, I experienced something that was very true. This is what we can see in any relationship: where this love is coming from. We can say, “This is an opportunity for love. This person is giving me an opportunity to love.”

It doesn’t matter if she’s yelling at me. It doesn’t matter if she’s sleeping with my best friend. I just found this out. It’s always an opportunity to love, and that’s always the answer in the end. It’s always the answer, right?

We can be very angry if she cheats on us with her best friend or something. We can be crushed and angry, but that’s also an opportunity to love. If we can love, then something amazing has happened to us and to the person that we love.

Rick: Yeah, I thought of some things while you were talking—not that I wasn’t listening, but you’re triggering some memories.

A couple of things from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: once he wrote a poem called “Love,” and there’s a line in it in which he said, “Individual love is concentrated universal love.” I kind of like that. Something you said reminded me of it.

If you remember, when you were a kid, you could get a magnifying glass and start burning things with sunlight—concentrating the sunlight. It plays into what we’re talking about here: the universal field of love, with individual love as a focus or concentration of that.

Peter: Yeah, it is. It’s like focusing down to one person. That’s the beauty of a relationship: it allows you to love in that way. It has nothing really to do with the person, or with getting anything back or giving anything. You’re just focusing this ray of what you are.

I see love and light as related. Light is sort of a physical way of seeing what this is. You can actually see love as a form of light, so you could direct that ray down to this very point. It feels wonderful to do that, especially if someone can take it. It’s very healing to them.

Actually, all my healing was, in the end, just about love. I didn’t understand what it was, but it was just having love do this and allowing this freedom.

I remember a friend of mine I’d worked with who was also a healer. I started with this thing: “Let the love come through, flow through, and watch this happen.” He ended up rolling around on the floor, convulsing, trying, I guess, to resist this.

Finally—

Rick: You rolled around for a few hours?

Peter: I don’t know how long, but he did it for quite a while. It was quite violent, really. I was just watching. I’d already done this. Love was—well, it was his love. I wasn’t doing anything. I was just observing what was happening, kind of amazed.

After a few hours, he stood up and said, “Who would I be without my suffering?” He wanted to hold on to the suffering. The love was washing—it was like cleaning, washing everything out.

Later, he told other people and me at times, “It was just like a flood of love, literally like water flooding through me. I couldn’t stop it; I couldn’t control it. But I wanted to stop it. I wanted to put the brakes on. It was too much. I couldn’t take that much.”

We often think that. I don’t know if you’ve had an awakening experience where the bliss is so intense that you don’t think your body will be able to take it, and maybe it will kill you. I’ve had that.

Rick: I’ve never had that. It’s been pretty enjoyable when I’ve had bliss—profound bliss.

I have had a thing or two, a long time ago, when I’d only been meditating for a couple of years. I had this experience where I became so unbounded that it was scary. There was no up, no down, no near, no far. It was just omnipresence, and it was like, “Whoa, this is too much.”

Peter: Yeah, that’s like samadhi: this feeling that everything falls away. You’ve gone beyond, and what is there? There are no concepts at all. Sometimes the physical experience of that can be intense.

Even love can be so intense that you think, “Oh, my God, the body can’t stand it.” I’ve gone through this many times.

What happens is that the body adjusts to it. You basically go to sleep, and the next day you can take all of that. The body has actually transformed in a way to hold that much more energy.

This has happened maybe a dozen times for me—these times when I think it’s going to kill me. At this point, I know it’s not, because it hasn’t. It can feel like that, but the body adjusts in a different way, and you find that the body is healthier afterward. It’s like something has transformed it, cleaned it, purified it in some way, so it can take more.

The energy is unlimited, right? The body isn’t going to take the full unlimited amount of energy, because it couldn’t take that. But it’s going to take incremental amounts—more and more and more—so you get closer to that. That’s how the transmissions happen.

As this energy got really strong, it transmitted to people. Somehow, people feel like you’re just totally in love, and everybody walks into the room and all of a sudden they’re happy, because somehow you’re transmitting this. This is like that, but more so.

Rick: Yeah, there’s an important point you just made about the body adjusting or adapting. Ayurveda says that spiritual evolution that’s too rapid can actually damage the body.

I’ve been in touch with a woman in Spain who’s been going through a severe kundalini crisis for quite some time, to the point where she’s virtually paralyzed and can’t do anything. It’s as if her body just can’t adjust to the huge, volcanic energy coursing through it. So there’s something to be said.

Peter: I think it’s resistance that she’s going through. Could be. Maybe I’ll put you in touch with her.

Because of the healing and stuff that I’ve done, I’ve just been taught to surrender. All you can do is surrender. In every single circumstance, surrendering is always the best thing to do, and when you do that, it changes.

When you start awakening, really, you don’t have a subconscious anymore, right? Not all at once, but the subconscious just starts filtering up, and all the things you’ve repressed in your life, all of a sudden, you’re re-experiencing them. You’re actually experiencing them for the first time. If it’s something from when you were a child or an infant, you’re just raw emotion, so you’re experiencing that raw emotion of an infant.

It’s very, very difficult. It’s very painful and very challenging. But as that happens, if you resist it and try to repress it again, it’s going to be really painful. If you just let it go, it’ll come up and be released, come up and be released. You have to experience all of it, but it will come up.

It’s like a broken heart, right? A broken heart means that you have a wall in your heart and that wall breaks. It’s not your heart that breaks, and it’s not the love that breaks. It’s like you’ve tried to close something in, and it breaks. So what happens when your heart really breaks, and you let it break and open to that broken heart? You feel freedom. You feel the expansion, right?

It’s always about surrendering. It’s always about letting go of attachments, because we are life, we are God. When we let go, that’s what we are. We are what we truly are without all this resistance. The ego is just made of attachments and resistance. It has so much, and things are stuck in our body, and surrender releases it.

Rick: It brings up a couple of thoughts. One, it kind of reminded me of the old acid days, where if you started fighting it and freaking out, thinking, “Oh, this is scary,” then it would get worse. But if you just surrendered to it, it would be pretty good.

Peter: Yeah. It’s resistance, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: This is why, with any suffering or any physical illness that we have, as long as we’re resisting it, as long as we’re calling it cancer, or some disease or illness, or calling it the flu, we’re saying, “Oh, I got the flu. It’s so bad. I have the flu. It’s terrible.” This is a resistance to what’s really happening.

The flu is not this bad thing. The flu is a cleansing process to get rid of stuff that you’ve put in your body that you shouldn’t have in there, right? It’s just being unhealthy, not exercising enough, or whatever you’re doing to make it harder for your body to do its natural healing job. This is releasing that, and the symptoms are a sore throat, headaches, fever, and so on. But it’s a cleansing, healing crisis, they call it.

So if we allow it to be the healing crisis and say, “This is a benefit that’s helping me,” it doesn’t really feel bad. You still have a headache and all that, but our attitude toward it is totally different. You could have terrible pain, and if our attitude is different, it’s not a problem.

You see these ads on television for flu remedies where people pop the flu remedy and then go out bowling or working on an oil rig or something like that. Instead of allowing the illness to run its course, they’ve suppressed the symptoms.

Peter: Yeah, because what do you want to do? You want to go to bed, rest, and sleep for twelve hours. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. That’s how your body heals. You can’t go out running and expect it to heal. It’s using its energy for healing, and it’s showing you exactly what you need to do.

Rick: Yeah. Although I did see a story in the news the other night about a woman who got stage-four breast cancer at the age of twenty-seven, for some reason, and was going through chemotherapy. She managed to deal with the fatigue by exercising. She would go out jogging, and the doctors were saying that they were finding this was actually helping her heal. I don’t know if anyone could do this.

Peter: Oh, yes, that does help in that way. But the flu is only asking you to sleep for one day. You just feel really exhausted, so you rest.

Our society is so screwed up in that way. You work in a company, and when you’re tired, you just get more coffee. You don’t take a nap. No one’s allowed to take a nap. If you’re sleeping at your desk, you could get fired, but that’s what you’re supposed to do. Your body is clearly saying, “You need to take a nap now.”

Rick: Yeah. Google actually provides nap rooms.

Peter: Yeah, that’s sensible. That’s going along with the truth of life.

Because we live in a dream world, in our own dream world, our whole society is based on our individual dream worlds. Society is a dream world. It’s not dealing with truth the way it is.

❤️ Learning through relationships

Rick: Yeah. Let’s talk a bit more about relationships. That’s always a popular topic with people.

I was reading your book, and there was one point that made me a little skeptical. Let’s see how you address this. Basically, you were saying that you go from relationship to relationship because you need to learn different lessons, and if you’ve learned the lessons you need to learn in one relationship, then it’s time for a new one. Unless you’re a real slow learner or have a lot of lessons to learn in one relationship, you might stay with a person for a lifetime or something.

I take exception to that a little bit. That would imply that Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor were real quick learners and went through all these marriages, whereas George and Barbara Bush were slow learners or something. There perhaps are lessons to be learned in terms of perseverance, loyalty, and dedication. Maybe you go deeper in certain ways if you weather the storms and hang in there than if you just bail when things seem to go flat. It’s a mix of metaphors.

Peter: I’m not saying that. It’s about learning, and most people in relationships don’t learn. They just repeat the same lesson over and over and over again, maybe their entire life, and never learn anything about what they’re supposed to learn.

But each relationship gives you that learning. It’s not just the purpose of relationships; it’s the purpose of everything in life itself. Everything is giving you something. You get a traffic ticket, you get a flat tire—all of this is teaching you. There’s nothing that happens in life that is not teaching you, and relationships are that way too. There’s something they teach you.

They can teach you some very powerful inner lessons if you’re willing to look at them, because people are mirrors, right? If we see the person as a mirror, we’re not saying, “You’re so lazy,” or “You’re so flirtatious,” or “You’re so grouchy,” or whatever it is we’re saying about the person. We just put it back and say, “I’m so lazy. I’m so flirtatious. I’m so grouchy.”

Rick: Sounds like Byron Katie. Byron Katie is definitely on the right track, particularly with puncturing your concepts, saying that everything you think is not true.

I know with my students it’s very hard for them to totally take that full, absolute step and say, “Every thought that I ever have had and ever will have cannot be true.” They’re hoping that one will be true, or they’re thinking, “Well, this one was.” But they never are, because thoughts are concepts. Thoughts are abstractions of reality.

But I get the impression from your book that you’ve been through a lot of relationships.

Peter: I’m not a serious philanderer or someone who uses people. It’s always been love. It’s always been about love.

My last marriage was twenty-two years. It was amazingly beautiful, and I learned a huge amount. It was beautiful. I lucked out to be with a woman who is an extraordinary person. Maybe she was the one, or one of the most perfect people for me, but that ended. It ended because something else had to happen.

She wasn’t going to follow me into a monk’s life, and she wasn’t going to follow me into the way my spiritual path was going.

It’s funny, because when I moved to Sedona, she said, “My youngest daughter, Lindsey, and I are worried about you. We think you’re going crazy with this healing and stuff.”

I said, “All I know is that I’m happy, and if that’s crazy, then I’ll take it.” That calmed her. She felt like, “Okay, we don’t have a problem anymore. She’s happy,” because she could tell I was happy.

Rick: Yeah. It reminds me of something my father said to me one time. I had done the monk thing for a while, and then, at a certain point, I said, “Hey, Dad, I’ve got a girlfriend. You’ll be happy to know I have a girlfriend.”

He said, “I don’t care whether you have girlfriends or not. I’m miserable, and you seem to be a pretty happy guy, so whatever you’re doing, you know better than I do.”

Peter: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s what you thought.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: I mean, not that she’s miserable.

Rick: Right. So maybe we can dig into this a little bit more. What would you say with regard to enduring relationships that might last many decades or a lifetime, versus moving from one to the other? Like you just said, a lot of people keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

I think the statistics show that second marriages end in divorce even more often than first ones do. First marriages end in divorce about half the time in this country, and perhaps it gets even worse with the third and fourth marriages.

What would you recommend in terms of hanging in there and working through things versus bailing and trying something new? This can all be related back to the whole theme of awakening and spirituality.

Peter: Well, it’s about the lessons. Bailing and staying are not what it’s about; it’s about the lessons, right? Are you learning something here? You don’t have to think about that. You kind of know, right?

If a marriage becomes really flat—just flat, like, “Yeah, we’re kind of roommates,” and not even that—you barely really want to talk to her, and you have no interest in her anymore, it’s time to go at that point, right? If you have no interest in being married, why be in the marriage anymore? There’s no interest.

But if you’re having conflicts and fighting, there’s a lesson there to be learned. You’re not learning it. In that case, you want to get to the point not where there’s flatness, but where there’s love, right?

If you’re hating each other, there’s still a lesson there, right? You’re probably going to leave that relationship, if you do, and go into another one that’s just like that, right? Why is that going on?

Peter: I was shown this through one relationship I had with a woman, Lily, who was an awakened person, and I wasn’t. I had this relationship with her, and my ego was still there. I thought, “Oh, I’m a great meditator and I’m teaching meditation. She can learn a lot from me. She’s just a yoga teacher,” or whatever. But she was awake, and I wasn’t. She was very humble; she would never say anything about it like that. It was afterward that I realized this.

When it was over, it was also really interesting how it came to be. I think I feel this too: when relationships come to be, they’re not what we think they are. It’s not that we think, “Oh, that’s the person for me.” Something else is going on. This infinite intelligence, like all of life, is guiding you to this person and guiding this person to you for specific purposes that the mind doesn’t understand and maybe never will. A lot of it the mind will never understand, and that’s perfectly okay.

With Lily, I just felt this connection with her so thoroughly and so quickly. There was no getting to know each other; it was just totally bonding, totally in love, and both of us felt that. I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting.” I usually try to suss things out and go step by step in how much I’m going to open my heart, but it was just bang, there, full out.

Not only that, there was this radiance pouring out of her, and because I was with her, it was also pouring out of me. At some point, she wanted me to move in with her and move to another place. I was dragging my feet. I said, “Oh, I don’t know if I could do that yet. I’m a little bit—this is happening so quickly, like in three months or something.”

At some point, she just decided, “Okay, well, that’s fine. If you’re not going to come up here, that’s over. Good to know you,” or, “We learned our lessons, and that’s it,” basically, is what she said.

At some point, I thought, “Oh, crap, I made a huge mistake. This is my soulmate, my twin flame,” or words like that—these concepts that I had. “Now I blew it because there’s just one, and this is destined through eternity,” or whatever. These were very dramatic feelings. Did I totally blow it?

So I asked God. I said, “Is that my twin flame? Is that my soulmate? Is that the one shot that I have at that? Did I totally blow it? Should I go back and try to repair things?” That’s when I heard, “No. None of it is that. There is no such thing as these things. It’s all for lessons. It’s all for your learning, to be what you truly are. She was the one person in the world that you needed to be with at that time to learn what you needed to learn.”

It was amazing. I had my first past-life experience with her. I’ve had many since then, but that was the first one, and she’d had many before. It was like old hat to her.

Rick: Were you trying to have it, or did it just—

Peter: No, it just happened. Believe me, I wouldn’t want this one. It was very traumatic—a great deal of suffering, a great deal of suffering. It prompted me to move to Sedona and a lot of other things, to try and figure out why that happened.

The way I experience a past-life experience is a strange thing. It’s not like anything else. It’s literally like simultaneously being in two places at the same time. You’re here, right? At this point, we were in bed, and then you’re in this totally other place at a completely other time, in a different body. But it’s literally happening. It’s not like a memory. You can feel the sun on your skin, you can smell things—all your senses are active at the same time. You’re literally in that place and in this place at exactly the same time.

It’s just that you can’t see your face. You’re in that body, and you can see your body, but you can’t see your face unless there’s a mirror. At this point, this was a Native American shaman. Basically, the reason I had this was because I was asking the question, “How do we know each other? Maybe we were together in a past life,” just the things you say.

All of a sudden, she said, “Oh, I have something. I want to do something.” She put on music of Native American chanting, and then she lay down and watched me. All of a sudden, this whole thing came back to me.

It was like these Union soldiers, blue-coated soldiers, came into the village. I was an old man, about a hundred years old or so. Every day they would take me and prop me up by this tree in the shade, because there was no shade around there—just this one tree, and the rest of it was open sun.

The soldiers came in and burned the village to the ground. My granddaughter—I loved my granddaughter above everyone else because she was going to be the shaman. She was a natural healer; she was born to be a healer. This would be the first female healer that the village had ever had, and I was so proud of her. I was dying, you know—not in the dying part, but soon. I was so happy that she was going to come into that role.

The soldiers came in, burned the village down, and killed every single person there. Every single person. But they left me, and I could see that they had killed my granddaughter.

Rick: Did you ever do historical research and find out whether this really happened?

Peter: I don’t know how I would do that.

Rick: There might be some record of it, you know.

Peter: They did destroy a number of Native American villages. This was a small village, so I think it was during the time—maybe it was in Sedona or not. Either that was all the village he had, or it was a traveling one. They could travel with them. Maybe it was coming to Sedona to do the sacred worship or whatever, and then go back to the other place.

I realized that Lily, my girlfriend, was the granddaughter. She knew that, because she’d already had that same experience before. She knew all about everything that I described, and it was traumatic. I sobbed for hours, and then it came back to me many times after that, just as traumatic an experience.

It was so traumatic. I hated those soldiers so much, and I died slowly, starving to death up there, dying of thirst and starvation with my heart completely hating white people. Then my next life: white person. Perfect, right?

Rick: Is this your next life, or was there an inter—

Peter: This is my next life. Yes, about maybe 300 years or something like that.

Rick: You hung out for a while before this one.

Peter: Yeah, well, no, I hung out, and I also remember the hanging-out part. I remember the hanging-out part, and that was amazing because I had spirit guides. There were people, you know. It’s like, okay, there’s the overall everything—God, whatever you want to call it—and then, filtering through an expression of God, it comes all the way down to humans.

But before that, there are beings in other realms—or not other realms, I don’t know what they are—just not in form. They’re not in the form that we can see, that’s all. So there’s that, and then down lower, eventually into physical form. But it’s all still just an expression of God.

So I still just called it God, but it was clearly coming through different kinds of formless beings according to what I needed at any point. One of them happened to be this past life called Little Rock, this Native American who appeared to me. I could see him in a younger version, when he was a brave before he was a shaman, not as an old man.

Now I lost track of where that was, where I was going.

Rick: You’re just talking about the life between lives.

Peter: Yeah, life between lives. Oh, so I remembered because I had these spirit guides. I was a spirit guide. I was in that formless dimension helping people in the form dimension, and that’s an amazing life, you know.

Rick: That was during the 300-year hiatus.

Peter: Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, it was so beautiful because without the physical body, there aren’t these restrictions of the physical body. Plus, we’re conditioned with emotions like fear, anger, envy, and despair. None of that exists there. It’s only the essence feeling of love, peace, and bliss—always, and just full out.

The challenge, and why I chose to come—and at one point, when I had that experience, I just wanted to leave and go back there. I didn’t want to be in a physical body. I desperately wanted to be back there and not in a physical body. That had a lot to do with my awakening, finally, and the next time.

It was the reason that I came down, or into this form, which I discovered was because when you’re in that formless state, communicating with people in form is very difficult. Their energy, their vibration, has to be open enough so that you can match it enough to even get that feeling, the intuition, or the words from that. Then they have to pay attention, so you can be open in that, but they could just go, “Yeah, yeah,” turn on the television, and find another distraction.

We’re distracted like crazy in this life, so you can just ignore it, like I did for so long. They were with me my whole life, but I mostly ignored them until I stopped, until I was shown, “Just don’t ever ignore it again.” You live like that, and I realized that what I was before I came into form, I’m still the same. Nothing has changed. I just have a form, so this form is no problem.

That was shown to me, too, because I had cancer maybe 12 years ago or so. I had been doing Buddhist practice for a while, and I felt like I’d sort of reached a spiritual plateau, which I was quite happy with. It was like, “I would like to go further, but this is good.” I had equanimity and was not suffering.

So I had the cancer, and I asked the doctor, “How long would it be? What would happen if I didn’t have surgery?” He said, “Well, it would probably progress, and you’d probably be dead in five years if you did nothing about it throughout the whole time.”

I thought, “That’s okay. I’m ready for that.” My career had done really well. I couldn’t really get much further with that. My kids were starting to work things out pretty well for themselves. I felt the family was doing pretty well, so I felt done. I thought, “Okay, I’ll come back again, and then I could wake up, right? I’ve sort of reached a plateau. Next time, I’ll start from here, and then I’ll be able to do it, because I’m probably not going to do it in the rest of this life.”

That was okay. I was ready to go. Also, I had five years to make peace with everybody, to make sure everybody was comfortable with it. We could talk about it so they wouldn’t have any regrets that they hadn’t said something to me. I talked to my kids about it, but nobody that I knew wanted to go along with that. Everybody said, “Just go to the doctor. You’re a baby. You never go to doctors. You’re just afraid of doctors. Don’t do this.”

Then I talked to my friends in the sangha, and they said the same thing: “I had surgery five years ago. We all have surgery. Just go. Don’t be afraid of that. Just go and have the surgery.”

At the same time, this still, silent voice came across like a megaphone: “Do not have the surgery. This is what’s supposed to happen. This is destined to happen. If you do this, this is like a huge sacrilege to God. This is planned. This is what’s supposed to happen, so just die.” At that point, it was like, “You’re supposed to. That’s it. Don’t rock the boat. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”

What I figured was, “Well, in a democracy, there are like a hundred people who want me to have the surgery, and there’s just God who doesn’t want me to have it. I guess that loses, a hundred to one. Maybe I’ll give him ten because he’s more than people.” That was my thinking. How bad could it be? They convinced me to do it, and I knew they loved me. I didn’t want to hurt them, so I thought, “How bad can it be?”

I went and had the surgery, and I spent the next three years living in hell. It was all the spiritual work that I’d done, and it had just been ripped out of me. I was like this empty shell. There was sort of just the outside body, and there was nothing inside—not in a good way, not in a real emptiness way. This was like just a living dead person.

Rick: Do you mind my asking what kind of cancer it was, and what kind of surgery?

Peter: Bladder cancer.

Rick: Okay, so you had the surgery. What did that entail?

Peter: It entailed putting this thing—I don’t know how big it was—up your penis, right into your bladder, and then burning the cancer out. Then they took pictures and pulled stuff out for a biopsy, and all this stuff like that.

Rick: And you’re in hell because?

Peter: I was in hell because I didn’t listen to this inner voice.

Rick: What was your actual experience? Were you in pain, or did you lose any sense of the spiritual progress you had made?

Peter: Oh God, I lost all of it. It felt like I was flattened and dull. That had never happened in the last 30 years. I’d never experienced anything like that.

Rick: Why do you suppose the surgery had that effect on you?

Peter: Because I went against this inner voice, and this inner voice was really important to listen to. This was the truth, and I was listening to everything that was out of the dream. It wasn’t true. It was to teach me that I should listen. So I went through three years in hell. Literally, it was just indescribable how bad it was.

Rick: But now it’s 12 years later, you’re still alive, and you’ve had an awakening.

Peter: Because of that. Because I went against it and saw how bad it would be and suffered through that, I said, “Never again will I ever not listen to this inner voice.” So I made that commitment.

Five years after the surgery, on the anniversary of when I was going to die, one thing happened. My daughter was having trouble with alcohol and drugs, so we had her in therapy. Once a week, the parents would go to the therapy, and we would have family therapy.

When we went there, the therapist would often ask everybody what they would like as an outcome, or what they wanted in their life. Then he asked me, “What do you want in your life?”

I said, “I want Lindsay to be happy.”

He said, “No, you. What do you want for you?”

I said, “I want Lindsay and Judith to be happy.”

He said, “No, you. You—what do you want?”

I had no idea. I hadn’t a clue. So I said, “I want to be happy.” I just made it up. I had no idea what I wanted. I just thought, “I want him to stop asking me, because I don’t know what I want.”

Then I went to a workshop about organization or something. It had nothing to do with spirituality, really, but they asked that same question: “What do you want in your life? How do you want your business to be run? What do you want?”

I didn’t know. I was talking to the teacher afterward, and she said, “If you don’t know what you want in your life, you’re not fully human. No one can relate to you if you don’t really know what you want.”

That stuck in my mind. Then, on the fifth anniversary, it struck me what I wanted. I had that feeling of what it was like to be before I manifested—the in-between time from the last life. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be in human form anymore, and there was nothing else that I wanted but that.

In other words, I guess I wanted to die, but I wasn’t depressed. I just didn’t want to be in human form anymore. I really didn’t want to be in form, but I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t commit suicide. We’d already had a suicide in the family—my son-in-law—and it devastated all of us, including me. I couldn’t do that to my family at all.

I was thinking, “What could I do? How could I die without them knowing that I killed myself?” I thought, “Maybe I could join the military and go to the front line.” But they knew I was a pacifist and against war, so they never would have believed that.

Rick: A little old for that.

Peter: Yeah, a little old, too. Then I thought, “Maybe if there’s a fire, I’ll rush into the fire to save someone and burn up or something.” But there were no fires. Somerville, where I was living, had fires all the time, and there were no fires while I was away.

I said, “I don’t know what to do.” So I did the only thing that I’d learned to do when I was really at a hard place: pray to God and ask, “What can I do? Please.”

This time, I was asking for something—not just information. I wanted God to do something. I wanted to die in my sleep, so no one would think I had committed suicide—of natural causes or something. If God granted me that, I would give up everything that I loved, everything that I was proud of, my talent, everything that I ever wanted or was proud of in life.

It’s easy to give up what you don’t want, but I said, “I’m giving up everything that I care about, that I feel proud of, everything that I like—my creativity, my relationships, my family, everything. I’ll give all of that to you if you just take my life.” I was really desperate.

What happened was that I realized that I don’t care—the body is no problem. It’s no problem at all. It’s your ego that’s the problem. The body is no problem. The ego, this self-centered thinking, is the problem.

The body is no problem. The ego, this self-centered thinking, is the problem.

Rick: That’s the thing you really wanted to have die.

Peter: Yeah, I didn’t know that. God said, “In the five years, that was going to die anyway. You weren’t physically going to die at all.” Actually, the cancer was in remission. It was healing itself when they found it.

Rick: On its own?

Peter: On its own. Well, I’d been on a macrobiotic diet, and I was exercising, like—yeah.

Rick: So even if you hadn’t had the surgery, it probably would have healed?

Peter: Yeah, but in five years the ego would go. Yeah, I see. So it wasn’t physical death; it was the ego death, right? All of it was perfect because I resisted this, and so a lot of the ego didn’t just go at that point, but a chunk of it sort of left. I had the realization that nothing had changed with the body. I was still exactly this free spiritual being, the same as I was before. Not only that, I was the whole thing—you know, God—but I didn’t get to that point yet. I just realized I was the spirit being at that other level, that higher level, in a physical body.

The reason why I was in a physical body was that I could use this for teaching people. It was then that the healing began, and even a stronger connection to God. God just worked through me to heal people, and I would surrender. If I ever didn’t surrender, if I thought, “I’ve got an idea how to help you,” or, “I had this experience,” it would just die. It would just kill the whole healing process.

So I learned to just shut up, and whatever comes out of your mouth will not be you. Whatever is supposed to come out will come out, and you just sit there listening to it. It was so beautiful. I would hear my voice and think, “I wish I had a voice like that,” even though it was coming out of my mouth. It just sounded beautiful, so loving and so perfect. Even the tone of it sounded beautiful.

It taught me, bit by bit, to just totally let go and totally surrender. Then, when I started teaching, it was the same. My friend said I was teaching. He went on a trip and told me to take over his group. I said, “I don’t know what to do. What am I going to do?” He said, “Well, that’s perfect. Just go and hold the space. You know how to go into the space. Just go there and hold the space.”

So I did, and words came out of my mouth, and everything was perfect for each person there. I thought, “Wow, how effortless this is. You don’t do anything at all. You just surrender, and then everything that you need—whatever is supposed to happen—comes out perfectly.”

I learned that, and then at some point I said, “Why don’t I live like this all the time? That’s what I want, because I want to have this perfect voice. I want to be this thing. I want to just live my whole life like this. What I eat, going into a store, talking to someone—I want them to be healed just because I walked into the store and bought something. I want this radiance always to be expressed.”

Then I started doing these long retreats, month-long silent retreats, just to saturate in this. Like Mooji says, “Zip yourself up in the sleeping bag.” Every year I do that. I just sort of drop into these places. I tell my students I’m not going to see them, and no one comes to the zendo for a period of time. I’m in Sedona, so they accept that now. All my friends accept that I’m not going to see them until that happens. Girlfriends maybe have a little harder time with it.

I don’t know if I ever will have another relationship like that again, because this part is very important. It’s very natural. It’s like a tree: all the leaves fall off a tree in the winter, right? This is when I feel called to go into it. The leaves fall off the tree and the sap goes in, but there’s a lot of stuff happening there. A lot of transformation is happening for the tree and for me.

I don’t know what it is. It’s just happening. I don’t have a concept about it, but it’s changing and transforming. Often there are states of enormous bliss, and then the body adjusts to it. More light is able to come through the physical body, and the radiance increases.

Then, come springtime, the buds are coming out on the tree, and I’m flowering too. All this loving energy that was percolating and building is now expressing out into the world, into people and everything that I see. This radiance is coming out, and every year it’s the same thing. It just becomes more; it comes more all the time, simply from not talking to anybody for a few months.

Rick: That’s a nice routine.

Peter: Yeah. I don’t know what a marriage would be like with this. It’s a little more intense going into this, but it’s also showing me that this love is here, so there is no need of anything. There is no need of anything at all. Everything that’s needed is God, and this is whole.

I love my ex-wife, Judith. She is an amazing person, and I feel very sad when she’s suffering. I feel her suffering. I’m so connected with her, but I am connected with her. I don’t have to live with her, because she cannot be separate from me, nor can anybody else.

I can go for seven months without talking to a single person and never, for a moment, feel any loneliness—not even for a second. It’s just absolute completion. If anything, I’m more connected then than I am when I’m with a person, because I’m connected with everything and with all people too, all individual people.

I think I’ve explained this to them, and I think they know it and feel it. They think, “I’m not going to see him for this period of time, for these months, but he’s not separate from me. He’s thinking of me, and I’m one with him. Then, when I do see him, somehow it’s going to be wonderful. There’s going to be some radiance, and I’m going to have an experience.”

✨ Awakening is gradual and unique

Rick: Here’s a question that came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California: It seems like the opposite of love, if there is one, is not hatred, as is generally held, but something closer to fear, or maybe the lack of presence. Can you share your insights on this?

Peter: The opposite of love?

Rick: Yeah. He’s saying it seems like the opposite of love is not hatred, but something closer to fear or lack of presence.

Peter: Yeah, I don’t think hatred probably has some element of love in it, actually. If you really hate someone, you’re super-emotional about them, right? You’re connected to them. “I just can’t stand Donald Trump every time I see him.” There’s some connection there, some learning.

Rick: Yeah. There are stories in the Vedic literature where someone would really hate Krishna. They’d be focused on him like a laser beam all the time, hating him, trying to kill him and all that stuff. Then they’d end up getting enlightened because they were so focused on him.

Peter: Yeah, just like love—just like the magnifying glass of love. Fear is, yeah, because fear is resistance, right? With fear, we’re always resisting. We go, “Okay, life, you stay there. Just not too close to me.” That’s kind of what the ego is doing, right?

The physical posture of the ego is like, “Don’t come too close until I figure out if it’s okay, if you’re safe, or if you can do something for me or to me. I don’t want you to do something to me.” We’re resisting.

Fear is resistance, and that is the opposite, because love is no resistance. There’s no separation, so what is there to resist? Who is resisting? It’s just gone. You’re so open.

The beauty of it is that we all experience this. Every time we see something beautiful or experience love, we have that lack of resistance, lack of fear, and lack of separation. We’re never going to look at a beautiful flower and say, “Oh, I love this, but I’m kind of afraid.” If you’re afraid, you’re not really loving it enough. There’s still a little bit of resistance to it.

When we totally open and go, “Oh, it just took my breath away,” we’re experiencing what it’s like not to resist. Attachment and resistance are the only things that keep us away from this bliss of awakening consciousness.

It’s very simple, really. Rocket science, right? Whatever we’re attached to is going to prevent us from opening to that, from even having it or even seeing it. Whatever we’re resisting is the same.

One form of meditation is simply not to resist life, to just accept everything that’s happening in this moment. It’s beautiful. Just for a moment, let everything that’s happening in this moment be exactly as it is. If you’re feeling fear in that moment, allow that to be exactly as it is. Don’t wish it away. Just experience it.

That’s how we heal fear, right? We totally open to it, and then it just sort of fades away. But we can’t resist it. If we go, “No fear. I don’t want to feel any more fear,” we’re just going to keep it as long as we keep doing that.

It’s so funny. It’s the opposite of what we learn, isn’t it? It’s the opposite of how we’ve been conditioned. The truth of life is the opposite of our conditioned world.

Rick: I have a question for you. You’re talking about—I forget the woman’s name who you thought might be your soulmate, and she triggered—

Peter: Lily.

Rick: That past-life experience—and at that point you said, “Well, she was awake and I wasn’t,” and you made comments like that several times during the interview, which kind of indicates a black-and-white, on-off understanding of what awakening is. Is that the way you see it? I mean, is there some kind of threshold which one crosses, and after that one can definitively say, “Well, now I’m awake and I wasn’t,” or is it more a matter of gradations and many degrees of awakening?

Peter: No, I think there are many degrees of awakening. Yeah, it’s all a process; it’s all progress.

Rick: So you were awake then, just not to the same degree?

Peter: Yes, exactly. She was much more awake than I was. I thought I was awake—not awake, but I thought I was pretty highly spiritually developed. I mean, all my life I’ve had certain things, like the sensitivity that comes from empathy, where I can feel people’s feelings and their thoughts and things like that. That was a survival mechanism for me that I never learned how to shut down.

I realized that everyone has this, but everybody’s learned to shut it down because it’s really hard to be in the world and just go to school when you’re feeling everybody’s thoughts and feelings. It’s challenging, to say the least.

Rick: Okay. I just wanted to ask that because when I hear people talk that way, it puzzles me a bit because it doesn’t jibe with my own experience, which is that I could say I’m a heck of a lot more awake than I used to be, and at the rate things are going, I’m probably not as awake as I will be. But I never—and there have been some significant milestones.

Peter: I would say the same. I was using language we’re doing to be quick about it. “Awake” or “not awake” is easier than saying, “Her progression of awakeness was higher than mine was at that point.” Then we miss the story by trying to figure out what level that was.

Rick: But it’s good to clarify, because otherwise people scratch their heads and think, “Well, geez, I guess I’m not awake because I haven’t had some big aha moment.” Many people do have big aha moments, but for many people it’s just this gradual, incremental thing. If you could snap back to where you were 30 years ago, it would be catastrophically different, but it’s just grown like the way your body grows or something. You don’t notice it from day to day so much.

Peter: Absolutely, absolutely. Actually, that’s a good point, too, Rick, because one of the things that I say in the book, before I tell the story of my awakening, is that I spend at least two or three pages saying, “This is not your awakening. Your awakening is happening for you, so don’t think you have to have any single one of these things in my experience, or look at your experience or anybody else’s experience that you hear here.”

Our own awakening is going to be very unique because how we were conditioned to be asleep is very unique for every one of us, so it’s going to be different. The thing to pay attention to is that you can use inspiration from listening to Ramana’s, Eckhart Tolle’s, or my story, or anybody’s. But the thing to pay attention to is yours—what’s happening in you in every moment—because that’s the awakening that matters. My awakening doesn’t matter.

Your own awakening is going to be very unique, so pay attention to what’s happening in you in every moment.

Rick: Yeah, and even here the terminology is tricky because it’s not like awakening is something that a “you” gets. It’s lived through the vehicle of an apparent you, but it’s obviously something more impersonal than that.

Peter: It’s freedom from that you. It’s the freedom from that you. If the you dissolves, then there’s just life. There’s still a body and everything, but is this body not life? Is this different from a tree or a bud or a flower? It’s different in some ways, but it’s life. It’s not different in the sense that this is not life and the tree is life. It’s all life.

When you surrender the you, that’s what happens. You feel this non-separation. Even oneness is a word that gets conceptualized. It’s better to say what it’s not.

Suffering as a catalyst

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a good question that just came in from Susan in New York. You mentioned you had a pretty rough childhood, and so did I, although my childhood was absolutely rosy compared to what some people go through. I didn’t grow up in Syria or something like that. Here’s her question: “I’d like to know what he would say about children who were abused by their families. What is the purpose of that in terms of our development and awakening?”

Peter: Yeah, well, I was abused. My father was very violent and knocked me out at times. Not being conscious, I was terrified of being killed. My mother was quite violent, too.

Rick: So do you look back and see an evolutionary value in that?

Peter: Yeah. In Buddhism, they talk about the lotus growing out of the mud. The lotus blossoms because of the mud. This is a common thing in Buddhism: the suffering that you have flowers into this awakening.

Now, it doesn’t happen for everyone. It’s funny because I’ve seen this so often. I met somebody whose life just seemed really perfect from the time she was born. She’s a Christian Scientist, and everything she said was like, “I’m so lucky. Everything just flowed, and I was so supported by everybody I knew.” She’s wonderful; she really is in this wonderful state as far as the progression of awakening—not as much as I am, but really close. Her feeling of the joy of life and love is very close to that.

She’s one person I met like that, and I was really curious because I was very excited to meet someone who had a life like that. I hadn’t met anybody like that before. But I think for most people, the suffering from abuse and things like that can very much flower.

Look at Eckhart Tolle. He’s a perfect example. He lived a hellish life. He probably wanted to commit suicide every day of it until he woke up when he was in his thirties. It was hellish, and that night he was going to kill himself.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: It sounds absolutely restricted, ego-horrible, but people can feel that. Suffering can come for anybody. You can be living in a palace and be carried around, and you can live like a prince or princess and be given everything. If your mind is set—if your ego-mind is set—to suffering, then you’ll suffer just as badly as somebody in Sri Lanka or dying of starvation, even more, depending on where their mind is at and how restrictive they are with this ego.

The ego creates the suffering. If you’re starving to death, you’re starving to death, right? Without an ego, you’re just hungry, and you’re in pain, and you’re dying.

Rick: I’m trying to think of the name of a woman I interviewed a while back. Maybe Irene will remember. She lives up in Oregon and had a horrific childhood. She was raped by her father and stuff like that, so it speaks to Susan’s question.

Peter: Yeah.

Rick: I can’t remember her name at the moment. There are a number of people I’ve interviewed who have gone through really bad suffering, and they see it as catalytic to their awakening. Shruti was another one.

Peter: Yeah, I think so, because if your life is really, really perfect, it’s going to be harder for you to say, “Okay, I’m going to surrender this.” You don’t want to surrender it; it’s awesome, right?

But from a very young age, I was questioning everything because I couldn’t trust what adults said. The adults were crazy. One minute they—you know, alcoholics are funny because everything is unpredictable. As a teenager, I was a kind of wild kid. I stole cars and was in gangs. I was like, “Well, that’s how I grew up.” You never knew what they would do.

I could steal a car, and they’d say, “Hey, that’s the chip off the old block. You’re really—” That actually happened to me.

Rick: Your parents said that?

Peter: Yeah. My father was like, “Yeah, he’s a rascal. Look what he did.” Then you could just walk in the house for no reason, without a smile on your face or something, and he could beat the hell out of you. You didn’t know what it was. You could come home with a good report card, and then they could hate you because of that. You could do something else, but it depended. Sometimes you’d do something that society wouldn’t like, and they would approve.

It was totally unpredictable, always, so you just never knew what was going to happen. That created a lot of fear because you never knew what was going to happen—those explosions that would just come from nowhere.

It gives you a sense of not trusting what you’re seeing as real. In order to survive, I don’t know if this happens to other people who are abused, but having that experience of being filled with light and love when I was alone, as a relief from being in a place where I was in terror all the time, was a huge help and a huge catalyst.

I do feel that everything that happens to us is perfect, so it must be all part of this process, all part of this progress. You can ignore it, right? You can go away from it and just become a criminal or become an alcoholic yourself and never progress. But the lessons are there. No one’s holding your head down and forcing you to learn the lesson, but the lessons are presented, and if you’re open enough, you’ll see the lesson.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: That’s why the ego is so bad, because it has its own ideas and opinions about what the lesson should be, right? They’re not right. You have to be open, and then you see the lesson. If you think you know what the lesson is, you pretty much don’t, because it comes through thinking.

✨ Evolution and the future of consciousness

Rick: A few points here. First, Irene looked up the woman I was just trying to remember. Shelly Ray was her name, so Susan or others might want to watch that interview.

Second, I remembered another quote from Maharishi as you were speaking. He used to say it’s really hard for the angels in heaven to even be interested in enlightenment because they don’t want to close their eyes; it’s so glorious where they’re living. Here, it’s much easier because we’re beset by so many things that we really want to find an escape or a solution.

And a third point is just on this point you made about everything being a lesson. I think it bears reiterating what it implies, or what it leads to: that there is a sort of evolutionary motivation or trajectory to the universe.

There’s a term, evolutionary panentheism, which suggests that everything is imbued with intelligence and that there’s an evolutionary momentum or purpose to the whole shebang—the whole show.

If we keep in mind that God is, if we understand God to be omnipresent intelligence, then how could anything happen capriciously, randomly, accidentally, or anything else? And if we further accept, understand, or believe that there really is this—look at the order that has come out of complete disorder.

There’s the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. Everything crumbles down if left to itself. But life is this force that’s the opposite of entropy, emerging from disorder. There’s this evolutionary drive that’s the force behind life. Anyway, I guess I’ve made the point: things are not accidental. Nature wants to evolve more and more sophisticated forms through which it can know itself.

Peter: And the important thing of all of that, too—I totally agree with all that—is this beautiful understanding of life: to realize that we don’t need to understand it. We just need to surrender to it because it totally is taking care of everything—not just us, but everything, everything in nature.

When we look at nature, I think we love looking at nature because it shows us this. We don’t necessarily know what we’re seeing, but it’s showing us this evolution. In humans, now what’s evolving is our consciousness, which is extraordinary. I mean, you are a testament to this. You’ve interviewed something like 400 people, right? Where else in history, in human history, has this happened? Human consciousness itself is evolving into this state, and it’s an amazing evolution.

I mean, I think it’s really similar to the Neanderthal-to-human transition. It’s a big thing. When you think about people in this process of awakening, these things that happen—the ability to heal, the ability to know, to psychically communicate with people without words, the ability to move to other places without the body moving there and see things that are there—I mean, these are all the siddhis, we call them, right?

But these are not uncommon things that happen. Maybe not to everybody, and it’s not a good idea to be attached to them. They arise when they need to arise, and there’s no reason to try and make them better or more.

Rick: But they’re human potentials.

Peter: Yes, they’re human potentials, and this is what humans are evolving into. It’s a species that we’re not even going to recognize from here.

For me, the big part of this awakening push that happened, has been happening, and is still happening now is that it feels like I’m riding on a tidal wave. There’s the power of a tidal wave, and I’m surfing on it and saying, “Okay, I’m going with it.”

People who are fighting it—it’s going to be harder and harder to fight against this and resist it because this is enormously powerful. The more people who are awakening, the more power this has. It’s just human consciousness.

You can tell there are people dragging their feet a lot. A lot of times, people in great power want to hold on to that power and not just let go of everything, which is what is being asked. If we’re going to go into a new species, we have to let go of the old species. We have to let go of everything, and then we’ll be shown by this inner guidance system.

When we let go, it’s like, “Awesome. Wow, this is amazing.” Whatever it is, when we totally let go to it, we just feel so good. If we resist it, life has a lot of problems—worse than it has ever had. We’re going to see that people who are dragging and trying to hold on and resisting this evolutionary process are going to suffer a lot, even if they can live through it.

We are so lucky to have chosen to be in the physical body at this time, to go through this evolution.

Rick: It’s very well put.

Peter: It’s wonderful. We’re living in a time in this physical body. We are so lucky to have chosen to be in the physical body at this time, to go through this evolution, because I think this is way better than the Neanderthal-to-human transition. I don’t think they—I mean, maybe they experienced a lot of bliss when that happened, too, with the first people who were up and about.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve been reading this wonderful book called Reason and Wonder: A Copernican Revolution in Science and Spirit by Dave Pruitt. He traces the whole history of human knowledge and all the various scientific breakthroughs, such as Copernicus and others, and then brings it up to consciousness and the breakthrough that’s happening there, and how that will be as earth-shaking and world-transforming as any previous scientific discovery has been.

Peter: Oh, way more.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: Because this knows everything. We feel the way to access it is to not know anything—to realize that we don’t know anything. Just cancel, cancel all knowing. Take any concept we have and put the opposite with it until they just dissolve and are gone. Then this infinite knowing is just here. It’s totally available to us. Whatever needs to come is just accessible to us—not even just our own memories, but the memories of all humans of all time, whatever we need. It’s amazing. It’s unlimited.

To try to find out how it’s unlimited is just chasing our tails. We’re making more concepts, but it’s enough to just surrender to it and let it do what it does.

And again, it’s no different than a tree. We’re having this consciousness that can do these amazing things. I can’t speak for a tree and what it’s doing, but it’s not that different from a tree. The tree is also evolving. Spiders and insects—they’re evolving. Everything is evolving to be the best it can be, to be of the highest benefit for whatever it is. In us, it happens to be consciousness, which is really pretty cool.

Well, we were the first ones to be aware—I think self-aware. Maybe not; dolphins are probably far advanced from us. But as far as we know, we’re the first self-aware beings, which is a form of consciousness. It just got us into this attachment to ego, which for a long time created a lot of problems.

🩺 Healing what has been repressed

Rick: We better wrap it up because we’ve been going pretty long, but I just want to read you one more question that came in because it’s a nice question. Pretend you’re on NPR, and I’m going to cut you off at a certain point if you answer too long.

Peter: I’m sorry.

Rick: No, it’s okay. You’ve been saying great things, and it’ll satisfy the people who tell me to talk less during interviews because I just let you run with it most of the time. But let me just ask this woman’s question, give a fairly brief answer, and then we’ll wrap it up.

This is Flory from Germantown, New York, who asks:

I have had an experience in meditation several times. For example, in meditation today, a thought came into my field of awareness about an experience with someone who, until then, I was not aware had hurt me. Suddenly, I was extremely clear about the situation, healed, and at peace. I felt I put it into words, but in fact I just knew instantly, without words. Does this experience sound familiar, and if it does, would you discuss it?

Peter: Well, the awareness that someone hurt me, when I wasn’t aware they hurt me—I don’t know about that.

Rick: It sounds like a repressed thing was resolved during meditation. I think that’s what it was. There’s something that she hadn’t even been aware of, and it bubbled up, got healed, and boom, gone.

Peter: Well, I think the feeling of freedom and release from something repressed coming up, yes, is very common. I mean, as far as I know, it’s the only true way for healing—for real healing, for cures of things.

Putting a Band-Aid on things or cutting things out is just a very temporary fix. Whatever you do that with, there’s a message in there, and if you cut it out, it’s just going to come back somewhere else. It’s the whole thing about cancer treatment.

Internally, what we do when we repress things is store them in our body, and they can make us physically sick if we don’t let them come up. But when they come up, when we open to them and let them come up, they reveal everything about themselves. One of the things they reveal is that they’re not true, right?

You look at it and say, “Oh, I had that thought when I was two years old.” Okay, that’s a two-year-old thought. It feels all this stuff, but you see it and it just dissolves. The whole thing dissolves.

And one other thing that happens when we do this kind of healing—which is a form of meditation in itself—is that, if we’re feeling fear or anger or whatever, these things that aren’t our essential nature, they’re energy, right?

The more we can strip off words—say we have a feeling of fear, we’re terrified of something—we can just ask ourselves, “Is it necessary to use that word fear?” What if we took that word fear away? Then what’s there?

So then we have sort of anxiety. Is that necessary? You could take that away, and then maybe we have a sensation. “Oh, there’s a big sensation in my stomach. There are really sensations there.” It’s a sensation; it’s not fear, so you don’t have a negative connotation. It’s just, “Wow, there’s a sensation there.”

And we say, “Is the word sensation even necessary?” Then that dissolves, and pretty soon that energy doesn’t stay in one place. We realize it’s moving throughout our whole body. It is throughout our whole body, and it’s only because we called it fear that it felt bad.

It’s actually the energy of a living body, which we can celebrate and say, “Whoa, I’m alive. I’m really alive,” right?

Most of us are not aware of the energy in our body, aware of what it is like to be in a living body where we can feel every molecule in our body—everything from our toe to the top of our head. We can feel all of that intensely, like a little child does, and it really feels wonderful.

We could even call that the feeling of bliss: just being aware of being in a living body at any age. It doesn’t change, either. We can be 90 years old and still feel all that energy. It’s not the energy that sort of goes away. Only after the body dies is it gone. It’s there the entire time. It’s no different from when we’re really young, this energy.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: So that’s a huge, wonderful feeling to have come up—to just release things in that way, simply by being open to them, by being wide open to everything that is. We let all the things that aren’t true show us that. We’re totally willing for them to show us that they’re true; we’re totally open to that. It just happens that they’re not, and then they dissolve.

It’s like we’re loving even these negative feelings that are causing us suffering—even the suffering, all of it. We’re just opening to it, and it resolves itself simply by doing that. It heals itself amazingly. Things that were stuck in the body, the thoughts come up, we see them, we let them go, and the energy is released. It’s not stuck in one place—not in the stomach, not in the shoulder, or wherever we have it. It’s throughout the whole body, and it’s this wonderful feeling of relaxation and intense aliveness.

We are alive, just like the trees in nature. We look at them and say, “Oh, that’s alive,” but we’re not aware that we’re alive. We’re in this amazing living thing. These bodies are incredible. I mean, I don’t identify with my body as me. I think of it more as a car, a vehicle that I use, but it’s an amazing vehicle. It’s an incredible, self-healing, amazing vehicle, and it itself is an expression of God.

So I don’t identify with it as me, but I am aware that it’s an expression of God, and I totally love it. I take care of it. Bodies are funny. They’re like—if we were told, when we were going to get our first car, by a wise salesman who sold us our first brand-new car, “This is the only car that you can have for the rest of your life in this life. You can get another car in the next life, but you can have only one car in this life. So take care of it.”

Then he says, “Let’s go for a little drive. I’m going to take you to a place,” and he takes you to a junkyard, showing you all the other cars that weren’t taken care of very well. They’re rusting there. He says, “Take care of this car, and it’ll last you for your whole life. You can have fun with it. You can take it off-road, as long as you get the right wheels for it and stuff. But take care of it. It’s beautiful.”

At some point, you may even identify with it because you’ve had it for about 50 years, but you don’t have to. It’s just a vehicle.

Rick: That’s the realization I had when I was 18. I kind of realized, “You’re stuck in this body, and if you damage it, you’re going to be stuck in a damaged body all your life.” So that kind of turned me around, and I’ve been taking care of it ever since.

What you put in it, you know—and fasting is like an oil change, right? Washing it is like going to the car wash. You just take care of it and love it, but you don’t identify with it. You don’t have to think, “This is me.”

Because you don’t identify with your car, if someone says, “Hey, that’s a nice-looking car,” you go, “Yeah, that’s cool. You like my car.” But it’s not you. If someone says, “I don’t like that car,” you say, “You don’t like the car.”

Well, on that note, we should probably wrap it up.

Peter: This is good. I wanted to interview you.

Rick: Maybe someday.

Peter: Because I was so interested in the fact that you’ve interviewed almost 400 people. I mean, this is amazing. You’re like a vehicle and a conduit for the evolution of consciousness. You are. You have a very important position in this evolution of consciousness, which is amazing.

When we had that little trouble with the technical thing, with the lagging, I went to look at a lot of the things to see if other people were doing that, too. It was so beautiful that we had that. This is how things are perfect. We had this trouble with this, but it sent me to look at many, many of your things.

So I looked at all of it and said, “Oh, this is great. There’s so much here.” There was the interview with J.P. Sears. I think he’s hilarious. What a great interview that was. You were trying to be funny, and he was hilarious with everything.

Rick: He’s really good. Some people didn’t realize that was a joke until about 20 minutes in. They thought I’d really flipped my lid.

Peter: It’s beautiful, though. I mean, there’s such a treasure trove of things here, and it helps all of us awaken, just to see what people are going through. So many people who are in the process of coming into this now are benefited from this.

All of us are helping this awakened consciousness grow, even when we’re not aware of it. As we start awakening, we become aware that this is kind of what our job is. Life is evolving, so if we’re open to life, that’s where we are helping the evolution.

Rick: And as you know, when you put yourself in the service of this, you get a lot of support, and your own evolution is accelerated.

Peter: Yeah. Well, thank you.

Rick: Thank you, Peter.

Peter: It’s wonderful. It’s a privilege to be with you.

Rick: Yeah, likewise.

Let me make a few general wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Peter Cutler, and I’ll have a page on Batgap where I link to his websites, his YouTube page, and his chat. He has a nice Facebook site where he writes a lot of things, and some good discussion goes on there as well.

If you’re watching this on YouTube and you want to know about those things, go to Batgap.com and find Peter Cutler’s page. I’ll have a link to it right there in the YouTube description, and then you can go from there to all those things.

This is an ongoing series, as most of you are aware. If you go to Batgap.com and then go to the “At a Glance” menu, you’ll see all the various things we offer on the site, including being notified by email of new interviews, subscribing to the audio podcast, and so on. Go and check that out, and that’s about it.

Peter: Oh, one other thing: The book is free on the website.

Rick: Yeah, I’m providing a link to that.

Peter: Okay.

Rick: Yeah, so people can just download it.

Peter: So they can get a PDF of it for free.

Rick: Yeah, good. So thanks again, Peter, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. We’ll see you next week.

Peter: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah.

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