Peter Cutler Transcript

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Peter Cutler Interview

Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people. I think Peter Cutler, my guest today is number 390. So if you haven’t watched any of these before, and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com Bat gap, 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. And so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a Donate button on every page of the site and a donate page that explains all that in a little bit more detail. So 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, but we’re going to even talk about things part of that before we get to that 10 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 seems 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, 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 that tab. And Peter says about the book, this book will improve your relationships miraculously. So if you’re on it, if you honestly follow it, suggestions, if you’re not in a relationship, it will teach you the secret of irresistible magnetic attraction.

Peter Cutler: Okay, so um,

Rick Archer: what does irresistible magnetic attraction have to do with awakening? For starters?

Peter Cutler: Well, the book itself was kind of like a bridge, right? Because I found that when I was teaching, transmission would kind of happen. So people could really experience this awakened nature, maybe not even from anything that I said, just sort of being in the room with me. And but then it would fade after, you know, a few days. So if the thing was on, you know, Saturday, then by Tuesday or Wednesday, that already started coming back into life with problems and suffering and things like that. So I wanted to find a bridge that would, you know, that would allow them to stay like this and not have to keep coming to me, basically, because this is something in them. It’s awakened. It’s not me. And the transmission is just awakening something that’s already in them. Right. But they keep forgetting this. So in order to find this, I went on a set a seven month Silent Retreat, it was only supposed to be three months, but it just kept, I didn’t want to come out of it once I was in and it was so beautiful. And about five months in this, a realization of how I had awakened came to me that was totally unlike everything that I thought it was, I mean, been doing, like Zen practice for 30 years or so. And many other different practices in it. Those all helped, but it was really life itself, and particularly experiences of love and relationships that had actually brought this to be

Rick Archer: so when you say a realization of how you awaken what what you realized was that your relationships were for you a powerful catalyst for your awakening. That would have been

Peter Cutler: 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, you know, to find, what I found was there, there’s, people don’t understand really what love is the way I’m speaking about love this unconditional love, it’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, every relationship, every feeling of love, no matter whether it’s for another person, or pat the child, it doesn’t matter what it is. There’s a seed of this. And that’s what I discovered there, there was a seed of this for everyone. So that was the bridge, that I could show people this, and I’ve done this before with people, sometimes people will, someone who will leave them in a relationship will break up and they just feel despondent, they feel like they’ve lost love, they’ve lost a piece of themselves. And it can go on for years like this, they can be suicidal, it’s very, very, a lot of suffering comes from this. So I started working with a few friends of this and and could introduce them to this experience that the love that they felt at the very most highest level with that person was already in them before they even met them during the time. And after it’s over. It’s still there now. So that would give them enormous relief, because they would feel that this was true. Right? They could feel this still sense of love. It’s not coming from outside from a person. It’s it’s something that’s in us always, it’s basically the foundation of what we are.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, there’s that saying, you know, God is love. And yeah, Muktananda used to say God dwells within you as you so that if God is love, and God is dwelling within you as you then you are love. And so what you’re saying is 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 a glimpse into who and what you really, and everything else, how committed they are.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, especially the falling in love part that the falling in love part is actually an introducing an introduction to awakened nature to awake consciousness if it’s intense enough, and then after a while, it sort of fades. And we feel like you know, start noticing problems with people or whatever happens. It’s like the honeymoon phase is over. And we kind of think of the honeymoon phase as something that’s illusional. It’s not like oh, well, eventually, you’ll come back to life, you’re like glowing now. But eventually, you’ll come back to the real world won’t have this. But the real world is the dream world. It’s the falling in love, where you’re starting to open to what you truly are. Because my experience is it’s springtime, maybe that’s part of it now. But But basically, always, I feel the falling in love, you know, that most intense falling in love. It’s just my nature. And it’s wonderful. I mean, there’s a certain glow that happens from that and people pick up on it. You know, they can, they can sense this when someone falls in love, and they’re in relationship. And they’re just 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? Yeah, because that’s in them too. And all of a sudden, they have a recognition, it’s a transmission. So everybody that’s in that falling in love. Bass 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 they’re recognizing it, what it what they are, recognizes it and sort of comes to the surface for a moment.

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

Peter Cutler: yeah, there’s all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah, there’s all kinds of filters, because our conditioned thoughts. So we think like, one, it’s the other person that’s doing it. The other person is somehow giving me this feeling. But it isn’t that at all. They’re just reminding you what you are. And yet we put all our focus on the other person instead of looking in and saying, Where is this feeling coming from? And besides all the hormonal stuff, what is deeper than that? What’s deeper than that?

Rick Archer: Yeah, I remember hearing I don’t know if this is true, but I remember hearing 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 Cutler: I think I think all conditions society thinks that

Rick Archer: Yeah. And you know, and people do all kinds of crazy things. In the so in the state of so called Falling in love, and there seems to be a spectrum and 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, you know, it’s like it’s one of these euphemistic phrases that’s almost seems a bit overused, because there’s so much craziness associated with it. And it doesn’t like seem to, 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’s sort of 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 Cutler: Yeah, yeah. But I think it’s best to take away all the concepts about it, you know, because 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. God is beyond concepts. So the word God, if people have concepts about God, it stands in the way of their direct realization of God. If they have concepts about love, it stands in the way of their direct realization of love. Of the love that I’m speaking about that doesn’t, and is no different than God, it is no different than life. It’s basically the simple way of saying it is it means no separation. It’s just the realization, the direct experience of no separation. It’s a very powerful thing. And so when people have that falling in love phase, what happens, they don’t feel a separation, at least between the person that loving somehow that falls away, and that feels amazingly good. Now, they walk down the street, and they really don’t feel that separate from anything that’s happening around them. So the other people pick up on that, you know, they just feel the oneness.

Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s good. Well, 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. And I thought, an interesting place to start might be your story of Ginni, when you were five years old.

Peter Cutler: You read my book,

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

Peter Cutler: Yeah, yeah.

Rick Archer: But Jenny was more than that.

Peter Cutler: Well, Jenny was my neighbor. And I had, 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. And so I often stayed by myself, you know, went out in the woods, were surrounded by Woods, my house, so it was beautiful. I could escape and be out there. And there, I felt very, at one but Ginny was my neighbor. And I felt very connected to her. You know, I loved her. I mean, this was like, I think this might have been the first child that I had met, other than around these crazy adults. And her life wasn’t her family life wasn’t quite as crazy as mine. But you know, we like just really bonded together. And then she was a year younger than me. So I started school. And she came when I was in first grade, she was in kindergarten, she came into the school.

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

Peter Cutler: So she, meanwhile, I’ve been in school for a year. And, you know, it was with different, like, boys in school and wanted to have friends and how to fit in trying to fit in and everything and, and these boys hated girls, for whatever reason. I don’t know why they just thought they didn’t want to associate with girls. They had Cooties. Cooties. Exactly, yeah. So whatever they were, and so, you know, I played along with that in order to fit in. And during the first day of school in the second year, when I was in first grade, Ginni was in came to school, and she was so excited because she was going to go to school with me, you know, and she was looking forward to this and she was looking all over the school for me, and I was the only person that she knew. And so when she found me, she went running up to me and hugged me. And I, you know, my friends were there and they were like, looking at me with like, What the hell are you doing? You know what’s going on here? So I pretended I didn’t know her. I just like kind of pushed her away and pretended that I didn’t know her and said, you know, you can’t come up to me in school and it totally, it just destroyed her, you know, she just this, you know, 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, and I really hurt her. And it was it destroyed me. I mean, it felt so terrible to do that. It was like my, my first betrayal, not only of her, but of myself. Because I did love her, you know, and I didn’t really know these I just trying to fit in with these guys. I didn’t even know them, you know. And here was someone that I really knew. In a very close, intimate way. Yeah. Yeah, was sad. I don’t think much about my past my life. I mean, I write it in a book when it’s appropriate, and it comes up. And it’s useful to teach somebody or help somebody, it comes. But the way that I sense my path and feel about my past is that it’s a dream. You know, it feels like a dream. And when it’s time to remember it, if it serves some purpose, it just comes right up and along with the feelings and everything. But I don’t have an identification with it as me, or any actually even happened, in a way. It’s like, this is a dream that happened, you know, but I learned from it, though. Sure. I mean, everything that happened, all these dream episodes in my past, were part of, of awakening to this to the truth. Everything that too.

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

Peter Cutler: Yeah. And heartbreaking. Yeah. Heartbreaking. And,

Rick Archer: and if we could all be as innocent as you were before that betrayal. You know, what a world it would be?

Peter Cutler: Yes, well, we come back to that, too, because the state now is purely innocent. It’s just absolutely pure and innocent, it’s the same as a child, it’s even more innocent than that child. Now, entirely vulnerable, you know, so it takes some, I guess one of the reasons that we don’t want to stay here is because of this complete vulnerability and nakedness and an openness, this is what kind of scares us back into the conditioned life, you know, but at some point, we see that this is like, all powerful the vulnerability the innocence is, it’s unlimited in what it is, this is the true power, being like, you know, like a person that you can, some solid person that you can say, This is who I am, is not power. Yeah. It’s totally vulnerable. It’s got so many chinks in it, we’re always trying to protect it.

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

Peter Cutler: 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 your body is naturally filled with with energy, extraordinary energy. I mean, you couldn’t be alive without it, your cells everything is needs this energy. So when you let go of what’s using it for things that are not productive, all of a sudden, you find that that’s why when you wake up, you have these, these experiences of bliss, where your whole body is like, like, like an electric charge is running through it, you know, and Love To is none of it is separate bliss, love peace, it’s all the same thing. There is no separation, it just depends what we want to call it. And when we call it something, then it has a different kind of feeling. Yeah,

Rick Archer: it’s sort of like different flavors of the same food, you know, maybe there’s some food and it’s kind of sweet, but It’s tangy. And it’s a little bit you know, something else, you know, different qualities all mixed in, but they’re all reflective of the same fundamental reality.

Peter Cutler: So same thing. Yeah, it’s all the same.

Rick Archer: Well, let’s learn a little bit more about the you that you not that you’re not in terms of how you kind of progressed along you know, people like a little bit of the personal story even though I you know, I get your disclaimer, but it’s like, because I can relate better. Okay, he went through this that the other thing you know, so did I

Peter Cutler: Yes, No, exactly. I wrote that in the book. Yeah. Reason to it’s very helpful because people can put a is something that they can understand on something that they can’t write, because there is no understanding what this is. I have no idea what I am. I don’t

Rick Archer: know humanizes it. I mean, if people sort of think right, that guy’s just as much of a turkey as I am. He’s been through here. has made similar mistakes and this and that, and he seems to be doing okay, so maybe there’s hope for me?

Peter Cutler: Yes. Oh, that’s a very important part of it. Yeah. So as I said, I grew up in a family with two alcoholic parents and, and a mother that was didn’t want children. You know, I was the firstborn. So all the way back to the womb, I felt this like not wanting to be there, this kind of rejection abandonment. And, and there was a lot of violence, you know, just unpredictable drunk and violence. And so as a young child, it was very frightening to be in, in the house. And one of the things that amazing

Rick Archer: because you said your father was incredibly handsome, and he stayed incredibly handsome even into his 80s, you think you did? Well, it looked a little weatherbeaten given the lifestyle.

Peter Cutler: He was tough. Oh, well, he worked outside all the time. And when he wasn’t working outside, he was doing sports and stuff, he was an athlete. So he spent a lot of time doing that. And that allowed him to drunk. My mother, you know, they started in the morning drinking, you know, and she would just go all day, and then until she like, passed out at night. So what happened was, I needed to one have this kind of empathic experience, because I needed to know if it was safe to be in the house, you know, what was going without going in there? Because then I was kind of stuck, if they were angry, or whatever, wanted to do something to me. You know, where were you? I had to know what was going on inside before I even entered the house. So I developed this kind of 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 like totally filled with peace. And it was like, filled with love. You know, like, Where was this coming from? I didn’t know 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 on it, it was probably what allowed me to survive my childhood, you know, to have this one part where I wasn’t totally terrified. Because when I was in the house, I was terrified. You know, I would, you know, in the West, they talked about in westerns, sleeping with one eye open, you know, they discovered gold and the partner may come and kill them in sleep or something. And so I slept with when I open, it was like, I was always ready to get up and try and 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 survived, you know. But I lived in terror, basically. So I lived in afraid of everything. So I had this, this, this feeling of this presence of light and love when I was alone. And when I first heard the word, God, I called it the presence of God, you know, that’s just what I fell in. Actually, I was pretty active to it too. But I suppose at around age 11 or 12, I started being really interested in girls, and you know, being a rock and roll star, whatever, you know, so I forgot about that. I kind of let that part go, just put it away into the background. And you know, wasn’t paying attention to it anymore. It was a big part of my life up until around 11 or 12. I found this children’s book about St. Francis of Assisi. And I just completely connected with it. Were supposed to write book reports and, and everybody was doing like Lou Gehrig or something like that, right. And 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 life, and I, I just felt like it’s so much like mine, right? He has this spirit. I don’t know if his family was dysfunctional, but they were fairly wealthy and well off. And he took this poverty thing. And I felt somehow very, very close to that, you know, because he’d also had that experience that I had when I was alone, this field with light and so, but at age 12 or so that stopped it just sort of faded into the background. And I became really interested in girls. Basically, that was it. Everything was sort of going around that and so that just went on until I was around 22. I went to a my mother was in a rehab center. She when she would get so drunk that her life was in danger, and she would no hospital had sent her to a rehab center afterwards. So she was in a rehab center.

Rick Archer: And by this time you were married with a couple of kids.

Peter Cutler: I was Yeah, I was around 22 Yeah, I was married. Yes. What happens when you’re interested in sex as a shotgun marriage, and but the kids were amazing. probably saved my life really. And so I went, so they invited family members to come down over the last week that she was there to help her, you know, sort of re acclimate, and maybe not be an alcoholic anymore. So my brother and I agreed to go down there, it was in Florida, and we were in north, so we had a chance to go down for a week in warm weather. And 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. You know, it was like an AAA meeting, right? So in a meetings, people tell the stories of like, this is what I did. This is all the terrible things that I did that happened when I was a drunk. So people were telling these stories, and I was listening to this I’d never been to in a meeting. So it just, I felt so angry, you know, like hearing these stories. I mean, it was bad enough that my mother had like, ruin the lives of her kids. But, you know, this one guy in particular, he was the head of surgery at a New York Hospital, a very well known New York Hospital, and he was the head of surgery. And he talked about how he would come in, you know, from like, an 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, and that 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. And, and he felt terrible about this, because he knew it was because of that, but he couldn’t stop. And it was, I mean, he was pouring his heart out. But I just was furious. It just made me so angry. I said, this guy’s murdering people, you know, I just wasn’t feeling warm. To these people telling these stories I thought they were it was terrible and inexcusable. So after listening to that for like, for the second day, I told my brother I said, I can’t take this anymore. I’m going home, you know, I’m so I’m gonna just like, let him in and start like attacking them or something. It’s like, I can’t take this. So I went, I was I packed my bag. And that night, I went to sleep that night, totally ready to leave the next day. And I just I woke up and I woke up. Right when I woke up, there was no more of that person that was angry, that 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. Like when I was a young child and I experienced that I was still the person experiencing it. At this point. There was no person to experience it. It just was that that was all. And it was you already

Rick Archer: been doing a bunch of spiritual practice of this planet of this come out of

Peter Cutler: this came really out of the blue, you know, as a hippie and a rock and roll drummer. I did acid and so

Rick Archer: I was a drummer too. Yeah, where are you?

Peter Cutler: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I’d had some experiences doing that. And then when my kids were born, at some point, you know, the people came over in the band, and they were smoking, people were smoking pot and 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 and said, How am I going to stop? I just started getting interested in yoga and meditation because I knew other people who had done that. So I did that. So I in You know that I was just I got a book by Swami satchidananda on yoga, right? So I was doing some yoga things. And I had another book on Raja Yoga, which is a form which is meditation, like, focusing on a candle and doing that, so I didn’t doing that for about a year. But I knew nothing about other than the acid trip spiritual stuff. Really? Oh, I had a book by Yogananda called how to know God. And so I’d read that, but it was really no preparation at all. I mean, I understood the word God. Basically, what I thought is, I was the second coming of Jesus Christ. That’s all I could know. I mean, it’s, you know, I didn’t know what to say. So I said, maybe that happened, because I was healing people in this, this, you know, rehab center, these people would come to me, and were just drawn to me, and they would come and like, you know, be sobbing, and I would hold them like, you know, this didn’t happen before. But all of a sudden, all these people were coming to me, drawn to me, and I somehow was healing them, you know, because I had this radiance. It was literally glowing radiance. I mean, I felt that was happening, but people actually saw it. And so yeah, that was it came totally out of the blue and that’s why I said you know, like, 10 days later, it faded after I left the place. It was still half When I when I was on the plane, the stewardess came and said, Can I sit with you, I don’t have this. And she sat with me, she had to move, the guy sitting next to me to another seat, she moved him up to first class, you know, and she sat with me, and she was telling me about this. I didn’t, I was just there, just this hippie, you know. And she said, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. And she told me about this, this relationship, she was in this traumatic relationship with a boyfriend, and it was really bothering and she was sobbing, and I held her the same way I did. The other ones. I just, I loved everyone. And I saw everyone is like, I could see their entire life, from the time were an infant up to that point in everything that had happened, but it happened all at once. So I didn’t like separate things out. But I could feel them. And all I could feel was love, like the guy who is the doctor, he did the same, he came and I hugged them, and I felt nothing but love for him, it was exactly the opposite of what I had felt before. For everybody, I felt this, you know, and there was, that was amazing. I mean, it showed me something that love is, it’s not what we think it is at all. I mean, it has the power to totally to heal people. It’s incredible. You know, this is it has way more power than then we have any idea any concept of what it is. And so I didn’t know anything about it. And when I got home, my wife was scared, you know, because she saw like, Who is this guy, you know, like it just right there, because I was so totally different, you know, but I completely loved her, you know, I had a lot of problems with her, we had a shotgun marriage. And, you know, I was actually in love with somebody else when we met and she got pregnant. And that’s unwanted too, you know, and I had a lot of problems with her. But there I just felt enormous love for everybody. You know, my neighbor who kind of was this kind of disgruntled like Guy and was really angry with me all the time. I just totally loved him too. But after I felt this desire for people to have me come back to where I was, you know, to somebody that they could see, instead of this saint, I suppose, you know, and it just happened, I guess, I don’t really know why or how I think it happened because I wasn’t ready. You know, 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, you know, of what reality is. And that was enough for me to go on a path to try and find out what it was to get it back again, you know? Yeah. More often

Rick Archer: than not, that’s the way it goes, you know, people have some profound glimpse, and then it fades over some time. And then they think, Alright, I’ve got to figure out what that was. And yeah, make it permanent. You know,

Peter Cutler: exactly what the hell was that? God gives us a taste? Yeah. So I got really interested in looking and finding what was this and doing meditation practices and studying, you know, it just, I mean, there were times when I wasn’t totally focused on that. But it was always in the background. Because it was so much and, and I didn’t see the world the same way ever again. You know, I mean, I didn’t totally believe everything I was seeing because I knew there was something much more and much more real, and much more beautiful than that than this. Yeah.

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

Peter Cutler: He was filled with love. Yeah. That’s why everybody was so successful in everything he did. Yeah, true. Because he didn’t know he couldn’t be. Yeah. Yeah, we understand our unlimited nature. We don’t put these these concepts about how limited we are. We just let them go. It’s not like we say I am unlimited. It’s just we let the Unlimited, we let the limited go. And what’s left is the unlimited. You know, we put what isn’t love, we let that go. And then there’s just love because love is something that’s here, right? This is what we I teach people these practices who are going through all kinds of different suffering to embrace them. It’s not uncommon, right? You’ve talked to so many people doing this is instead of trying to escape, which is our natural way from painful feelings, we totally open to them, we go the other way, we totally open to them. But these painful feelings always turn out to be illusions. And when we open to them, it reveals that it’s an illusion, and then we’re free. It’s let go. But when we open to love, and we say well let go of that, like we can’t, it just grows deeper and the same with peace. You know, 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. And we really are this. So it’s 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. It’s beyond bodies, but it’s in the physical world, and it’s in bodies. It’s not like God, it’s not separate from anything. form or formless.

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

Peter Cutler: Yeah, I need to feel it, though. I mean, it is like the, the experience of falling in love when you feel just this blissful feeling, and you’re like, connected to everything. It is like that, you know, so people who, when they’re falling in love, that’s why I say that that’s an experience of truth. That’s like my opening on a lesser level to my opening when I was 22, where I thought, where I felt that that’s all I was at that point. It’s like, it’s like being, you know, going into the sun. It just burned up everything else somehow. And the reason it happened, at one point I was, well, for quite a while I felt that I was channeling right, I would ask a question. And this what I call God would answer right, I would ask a question, I would get an answer. Every time, you know, instantly, the most puzzling things in my life would just instantly be answered in the most obvious way. You know, and I would always feel like, oh, you know, duh, how did I miss that? Right? Because I missed everything. It was amazing. It really was humbling, and also had me lose trust in my mind, because I was 100% Wrong. I mean, how are you 100% wrong with everything that happens in your life, but I was, you know, excellent at being completely wrong. I was like, you know, I would have an A and having missing every single thing. But then when it was when I asked it was the right answer was given to me, you know, and it was so obvious, not mystical, it was really just much more obvious bit about that experience that I had at 22. It simply said, Of course, I would ask about that. It’s just what you needed. You know, you were going in the wrong direction. And you needed that experience to put you back on the path again.

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

Peter Cutler: Yeah. Yes. Because Because your own innate intelligence is not separate from God, from any formless beings from any of that you are all of that. Yeah. So of course, it could come into you because you are that you just you let go of what’s an obstacle to that. And channeling is interesting. Well, you know, in Sedona, a lot of people do channel Right, right. So the channeling is coming from them, but they have a certain name for it. And I did for years, I said, this is coming from God, you know, this channeling is coming from God. And I wouldn’t accept that, that there was no separation between me and God, it was me. And God, and I had this a relationship like, 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 events, which just spontaneously come up, which was exactly what I needed. And I just surrendered. I just kept surrendering and surrendering. But I was surrendering, I was surrendering to God. And at some point, the I just, it just wasn’t of any use anymore. Really? Yeah, it just sort of like got smaller and smaller until it just faded away. And, and all that’s left is is life.

Rick Archer: And do you still get answers and stuff like, you know, support supportive nature, we could call it or, you know,

Peter Cutler: in every way I asked 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, you know, what color should this graphic be in a website or something? But now I do that, everything. I don’t trust my mind for anything. You know, I don’t say like, Oh, I think this would be a good call. I don’t care what I say. 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 everything. You know. So I have

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

Peter Cutler: And which restaurant and why went into that and who women to meet and everything and, you know, I just surrendered to life and it’s taken care of me, you know, and that’s the thing when You surrender to it. You see that it takes care of you. Do you know Peace Pilgrim is? Oh, yeah, I love peace, right Peace Pilgrim. So Peace Pilgrim totally surrendered to the point where she would walk with no money back and forth across the country. And you know, and she would sleep on the side of the road, right? Or she would, you know, and she wouldn’t eat until someone invited her, you know, met her. And she was taken care of for years like that. And the more she did it, it was clear she’s 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, they just walk a great distance, like maybe back and forth across the country like she did. And 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 you, 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, you know, all of it. There’s this infinite intelligence here, like when it’s springtime, where you are right, so, so spring has just started here. So the bugs are just starting to come up on the trees. So you look at that the tree didn’t say it’s time to make the beds. There’s an infinite intelligence that’s doing all of this. And so we can see this in nature. And we can accept this easily in nature, but not so much with ourself. Because we want to have some control, we believe if we didn’t have control, everything would fall apart. Yeah. And, and it doesn’t, you know, the fact is, it just becomes miraculous. The things that you need come to you before you even know that you need them. You know, at the same moment, you get it, you go, Oh, I just I needed that. Oh, thank you, you know, but you’re not even thinking you need it. You’re not manifesting, like, I think 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 that we don’t see, you know, it’s like at this point, my feeling is that everything that happens is absolutely perfect. And absolutely for my highest benefit, whatever it is, it could be cancer, it could be, you know, losing my house 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 like this, something that I thought would be bad, turns out to be exactly what I needed. And then once I realized that and realize what the lesson is, then the thing just resolves by itself.

Rick Archer: Do you agree, though, that not everyone could sort of just instantly snap into that way of functioning? I mean, we couldn’t, you couldn’t take any old person anywhere and say, Okay, start functioning the way Peace Pilgrim did and was wandering around the country with just a shirt on your back. I mean, if you read peace pilgrims book,

Peter Cutler: it wasn’t an instantaneous thing like that. She worked her way up to it. And then at one point, she was sitting somewhere, I think out in Iraq, and, and the peace came to her. Yes,

Rick Archer: he had a very profound inner enlightened condition. And it enabled her to function that way.

Peter Cutler: Everybody, this is happening from the moment we’re born, everything is guiding us to this point. You know, whether we, most of us don’t accept it. It’s like, there’s enormous resistance. And you know, when we work with students, it’s like, what we do is try and let the resistance go try and let the resistance go. And love is a beautiful way of doing it. Because people are used to saying like, Oh, love is good. I don’t need to resist this. Right? It’s as scary as What about how about emptiness? Yeah, I could resist that. Doesn’t sound that good. Right? Because we don’t know what emptiness is, right? When we experience that, then we, we like it, but love everybody likes you likes love. So when we have to do that, to sit in a room with people and allow them to experience love, often I feel it is. It’s like something is coming down through the crown chakra and filling your body this light, you know, I can’t even see it happening. And when I healed people, that’s all I did. I would just describe what was happening and ask them to let go and say this knows what it’s doing. It’s totally for your benefit. And they could do that. So they would stop resisting. And then their body, the resistance in their body would loosen up and what needed to be healed would be healed, because they’re not resisting it anymore. When they say Oh, I have this terrible problem that’s filled with resistance. It’s one they’re talking to calling it a problem, instead of a message or a benefit. And, and they’re feeling pain and they’re feeling all these 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. You know, but it has messages when we’re not doing it in the messages stop resisting, stop resisting. Life is here life has got your back.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I guess there’s just a little doubt in the back of my mind is that just this 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. No. And if we assume everyone can, then a lot, most people are going to be disappointed.

Peter Cutler: Pardon. It’s a gradual thing. And it was easy to I mean, it took many, many, many years for this to happen. I was in Zen practice for a very long time, which has its own traditions and rituals and things that go along, which is lovely, and a good way of opening to this. But when I really open to it, there was the healing, there was a channeling there’s nothing in Zen about this, right, I had to just go like, I don’t know what this is, this is like, but it’s happening. And then I just surrendered more and more just surrendering all attachments, you know, it was it was definitely a progression. It’s a progression. Now, the progression never ends. But there’s this enormous trust. So that’s here now, right? And the trust had to be kind of earned with me, because I’m skeptical. I grew up very skeptical. You know, I don’t trust anything. You know, it was very hard to accept my first teacher, I saw many teachers, and I rejected all of them. It’s like, no, that person had a cold now that he can’t be cept, that, that was Shri Shem. I sort of disciple and he brought me to him at a cold and that was it for me. No, he’s got a cold, he can’t be good enough, you know. So there was a lot of resistance, a lot of skepticism about everything. So it had to be proven in real practical material world for me, it just over and over and over and over again, things that we would call miracles, right? That we just can’t explain. We’d have, you know, things that are just they’re unexplainable. And that got me to think like, 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. You know, like Jesus was a carpenter. You didn’t study healing. He didn’t like go to school for revealing he didn’t think about it just happened. Yeah. Yeah. And then what are you going to do if this happens, you feel compelled, like we feel compelled to teach. When we have an awakening, it’s like, 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 do. But most don’t, you know, it just comes upon them. It’s this inner thing is, is acting like channeling, right, something is taking you over, and you realize it’s okay. This is better, better than it’s better than this frightened, you know, person that scared of its own shadow. And like that, you know that this is it’s better.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And 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 just count Zen as having been very influential in what you’re now experiencing, even though Zen didn’t talk about that stuff. Same thing with Adi Shanti. I mean, he’s sort of talking about and experiencing a lot of things these days. It really weren’t part of his Zen training. But, you know, everything we do along the way, I think contributes to what eventually unfolds.

Peter Cutler: Absolutely. Oh noes and was amazing and tick, not Han, that particular teacher was just a very loving, you know, when I first encountered him, 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, he’s he’s the mother and the father both and I didn’t really have the experience of a mother and father, you know, later I did with my father, but in the beginning, no, and never really with my mother. And so here was this loving mother and father right here. So I said, Okay, that’s it. I can go for that, you know, cuz he didn’t

Rick Archer: have a cold either.

Peter Cutler: He didn’t have a cold. Not No, I never seen him with a cold. But he has a stroke now. So he’s not in that same as Yeah, but since I moved to Sedona people said, Oh, you’re gonna leave the sun is there a sangha there? You’re gonna leave the Sangha. So everything, there’s an addiction, an attachment to the Sangha, which was beautiful. I mean, it’s beautiful. It’s easy to get attached to that. And I don’t know, but I was compelled to come to Sedona so I had to come and and there wasn’t, you know, everything was new here. I knew nobody. And it was, you know, I got involved with Mooji and Ramana. I didn’t know about Ramana but Before and Papaji and not just not

Rick Archer: in person, but reading books and looking at videos and all that stuff. Yeah,

Peter Cutler: exactly, yeah, Advaita, you know very much into Advaita and Mooji, I very much, very much identified with Mooji when I saw him, I mean, what happened is I’d seen a couple of things. And I said, Awesome, the Jamaican guy with this cool accent, this is great. I’m really happy to have a spiritual see a spiritual teacher from Jamaica, how rare is that? And, you know, just that. And then one day, I picked up a book, and I realized that he was an artist, and he was painting, sort of like I do, you know, the Zen paintings. So I just felt, I felt like that was me, you know, like, here was not me. But there Mooji was me. And I went to my friend who had an ashram across the street. And I took this picture of MUJI and I said, Would you like to see a picture of me? And he said, Sure. A picture of Mooji. He said, That’s not you. But it was though, because Mooji was speaking from that place in me, you know, and I wasn’t quite at that place yet. You know, that was in me. But over time I did, I did these retreats with Mooji, actually, where I would Mooji would have a retreat, and I would invite people in and we would watch videos, I mean, the Satsang are like two or three hours long, right? And he would do it day and night. So we would have a silent retreat and just watch these videos six hours a day. And when I would watch, I would only hear like the first couple of words. And then I would just go into this space of bliss the whole time. And only if someone laughed, or something happened with my attention, go back to the video. And the rest of the time, I was just sitting in bliss. But I did that every day. I was I mean, 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. You know? That was good. Yeah. Yeah. They’re 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, yeah, there was something really beautiful about that.

Rick Archer: That seems to be a tremendously devotional scene around Mooji. These days, you know, people just really feeling devotional, throwing flowers in his path and stuff like that. As far as I can tell, he’s handling it. Okay.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, he’s allowing that to happen. Yeah. That’s love. Right. I mean,

Rick Archer: I don’t have a problem with I don’t think that should be stifled. It’s like people do have. It’s definitely a phase where you, you become very devotional, and there needs to be a legitimate outlet for that. And I think it’s important that a teacher have the maturity to be able to allow that to happen without it going into their heads, you know,

Peter Cutler: without going into 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 that so many times, there is no problem with it. Because we’re, we’re surrendering human to ourself, and we’re giving it over to the guru like rom das did for his guru, you know, so we’re, that’s a step, right? That’s the progressive step. And 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. And that was my experience with with God, you know, that’s being held in the lap of God for a long time. I couldn’t accept that. That was me. You know, that wasn’t any separation. And at one point, I was with a teacher in Mexico Sahaja Jnana, at a yoga place there. He’s a beautiful awakened guy. And 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. That I, I sort of intellectually understood it, but I couldn’t accept it because I thought my ego would go, I’m gonna go. Go there. Right. So I didn’t want that to happen. I do. My ego is very powerful. So and I told him about that. And he said that Rumi said that the most humble thing any man can say is I am God. Because there is no you. And it just wasn’t the right time for him to say that to me, you know, so when he said that, that was the beginning of my acceptance that there wasn’t because I figured the ego one thing the ego is not is humble, right? Or he’s the most humble person in the world, but he’s never actually humble and just the word humble. ego doesn’t like that. So I figured that was safe.

Rick Archer: Yeah, well, it’s very true if understood properly. If it’s more like, Alright me this individual is God then you get in trouble but you know, but The deeper truth is you are, we are all it is. I mean, if God is omnipresent, then show me a place where which is not God, show me something, something which is not God. And the scientific evidence in my perspective is that God is omnipresent. I mean, because you look at anything closely enough. And you see this miracle of intelligence functioning.

Peter Cutler: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, it’s spring is a beautiful time to see this. You know, when things come up, because partly because we’re not resisting as much. You know, we love Spring, oh, look, the flowers came up. And we’re not resisting, at that moment. Anything that we really appreciate that anything that we love, we’re not resisting at that moment, right? We’re not resisting love, you know, we see something really beautiful. And it just sort of takes our breath away. And at that moment, all that’s happening is we’re not resisting. Because everything is like this. Every single thing in life is like this. There is no problems. Everything is only this expression of God everywhere, right?

Rick Archer: Here’s the question that came in, that’ll switch us to a slightly different topic. Not there’s anything wrong with this topic, but I think we’ve pretty well covered it. This is a fella 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 that 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, you know, then

Peter Cutler: it doesn’t matter. You know, it’s your love. It’s your love. Right? This is Love is 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 it’s your it’s you have this privilege. There’s a beautiful movie called adaptation that Nicolas Cage plays two brothers. And one brother is very kind of antsy free and hasn’t really buckled down to create a success from self. And the other brother is a famous screenwriter. So he doesn’t respect his twin brother at all. And at one point there being some, someone’s trying to kill them, shoot them, and they’re hiding behind this thing and think they’re not going to, you know, live through the night. And the brother that’s a screenwriter looks at his his other brothers twin brother and says, you know, when I started not respecting you, you know, 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 you were talking to her. And when you left, she was laughing with her friends and saying, What a loser you were. Right. And you didn’t hear you were oblivious to it, you didn’t hear it at all. And 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. And the you know, the screenwriter brother realize, 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, it’s our love, right? And we can love anyone. And and if we do enough, it will, if we’re open enough, it will heal them and transform them in the ways that they need. But it’s yeah, it’s, I mean, I’m not in relationship now. And often I’d go for these long periods of Silent Retreat, you know, where it’s just, I mean, initially, I thought it’s just me and God, you know, and that relationship is incredible. Right? So now it’s just being in love, right? Not with any, any object of love, just love itself. So everything I see is an object of love. Right? It doesn’t matter what it is, you are this screen is all the people listening are all you know, if I want to express love that way, and it’s beautiful to express it when I’ve been in relationships after this awakening. It’s just because this love is unlimited. Right? You know, if someone doesn’t give love back to you, it makes no difference at all. We just a pouring out I had a relationship with with a woman that was quite narcissistic. Right. And so she was kind of an endless, you know, like a black hole for attention right there with oh, you know, she could accept all the attention you could give. She could accept all the love you could give. And that’s kind of rare to find someone that can accept that much. Some people may go okay, whoa, that’s a bit much. But she accepted all of it. So it was just poured through me, you know, and I felt wonderful being able to do that. I didn’t need anything from her. You know, it was just an app. opportunity to express love and focus it on one person rather than everywhere at once. Which is just as good. You know, but that’s kind of it. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s at the high level of a relationship. And so what he’s asking is, how can you use a relationship to get to that space to get to that place, right. And that is, is recognize where love is coming from, that it’s not from another person. And so every time we feel this love, recognize that to you know, you’re focusing on the other person that’s beautiful, but recognize where love is coming from, that this feeling, you’re having that feeling, the feeling is in you. And allow yourself to see if that feeling is not always here. Always here. You know, before you I had that revelation when I was 16 years old, it was amazing. It just came to me. I was in love with this. This girl I had a crush on in high school. And I found out at some point or friend came up to me and said, like, you know, Rachel wants to know why you’re not talking to her asking her out. She has a big crush on you. And you’re cute guys. Oh, wow. I was trying. So I didn’t talk to her. So I was really happy. I went up and talk to her. And afterwards, we went back to her, her house, her parents house and they weren’t home, they were working. So you know, we had a good time. And when I was leaving, I was walking back to my place. And it was it was about a three hour walk for me to get back to my place. We lived in two opposite ends of town. And as I was walking, you know, I just it was springtime, like now right? And the birds were chirping and stuff. But I was just like walking on clouds, you know, I still had this enormous love. And not only that people were driving who are driving by were like smiling at me and waving adults, right. And I just kind of aschroft these sort of a juvenile delinquent. Adults wanted to stay keep their kids and everybody you know, away from me, you know. And here these adults were like smiling at me laughing I had a black leather jacket and all that and it’s, you know, would amaze me, this has never happened before. What’s going on here? You know what’s happening here, I’m feeling this love. And somehow it’s affecting these people around me. And I realized then that, Where’s this coming from? I haven’t been with her for at least two hours. And yet I’m still feeling this. And I realized that she triggered this feeling in me that had always been here. But I was completely unaware of it just covered over by fear, you know, and anger. And yet it always been here, you know, I mean, it didn’t last for long. But for at least that time when I was walking home, I experienced something. It’s very true. Yeah, it’s this place. And so this is what we can see in in any relationship, to see where this love is coming from and say, this is an opportunity for love. This person is giving me an opportunity to love. It doesn’t matter if she’s laughing at me. It doesn’t matter what it doesn’t matter if she’s sleeping with my best friend, I just find 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’s if she cheats on us with our best friend or something, you know, and crushed and angry. But that’s also an opportunity to love if we can love then something amazing, you know, has happened to us and to the end to the person that we love.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I thought of some things while you were talking. Not that I wasn’t listening, but you’re you’re triggering some memories. What a couple things from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when was 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 it says something you said reminded me of that. So you can remember if you ever when you’re a kid, you get a magnifying glass and, and start and burn things with the sunlight, constant concentrating the sun. So it plays into what we’re talking about here the sort of universal field of love and individual of his own is the focal focus of that concentration of that absolute.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, it is like focusing down to one person. That’s the beauty of a relationship is that it allows you to love in that way. It has nothing to do really with the person or getting anything back or giving anything you’re just focusing this array of what you are i see love and light, you know as as light is sort of a physical way of seeing what this is. You can see it you can actually see love as a as a form of light. So you could direct that rate down to this very point and it feels wonderful to do that. Especially if someone can can take it it’s very healing to them. I mean, I actually do All my healing was just really in the end was just about love. You know, I didn’t understand what it was, but it was just having love, you know, do this and allowing this freedom what one person I remember a friend of mine that I’d worked with, who’s also a healer and I, you know, started with this thing, let the love come through flow through and watch this happen. And he ended up like, rolling around in the floor like convulsing, you know, like just like trying to, I guess, resist this. Finally after and I was just watching, right I’d already done this love was he was his love, you know, I wasn’t doing anything. I was just observing what was happening kind of amazed. And after a few hours, he he stood up and he said,

Rick Archer: rolled around for a few hours.

Peter Cutler: Pretty I don’t know how long. But he did it for quite a while. And it’s quite violent, really. And when he got up, he said, Who would I be without my suffering? Right? Because he wanted to hold on to the suffering and the love was washing was like cleaning. It was like watching everything out. And he’s told other people and me at times, you know, later he said it was just like a flood of love, like literally like water just flooding through me. And I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t control it. But I wanted to stop it. You know, I wanted to put the brakes on it’s too much. I can’t take that much. And we often think that I mean, you know, I don’t know, if you’ve had 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. You know, I don’t know, I’ve had

Rick Archer: never had that it’s been pretty enjoyable. When I’ve had bliss, profound bliss. I have had a thing or two, you know, some long time ago, when I was only been meditating a couple of years, I had this thing where I became so unbounded, that it was scary. It was like, there was no up no down. No, no, near no far it was just omnipresence. And it was like, Whoa, this is too much.

Peter Cutler: That’s like somebody, yeah, this feeling of everything falls away, you’ve gone. And what is there, and there’s no concepts at all. And it’s sometimes the physical experience of that can be intense, even love, love can be so intense. You think like, Oh, my God, the body can’t stand it. I’ve gone through this many times. What happens is, is the body adjusts to it. Yeah, you know, you basically go to sleep, and the next day, you can take all of that. And the body has actually transformed in a way to hold that much more energy. So this is going on, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times for me these times where I think it’s going to kill me. So at this point, I know it’s not because it hasn’t. But yeah, it can feel like that. But the body adjust in a different way. And you find that the body is is healthier after that. It’s like something has like, has transformed it has like cleaned it, purify it in some way. So it can take this, you know more and it because the energy is unlimited, right? It’s not going to take the actual 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. And that’s how the transmissions happen. As this energy got really strong, it transmits to people, you know, people, like you’re just totally in love, you know, and everybody walks into the room, all of a sudden, they’re happy, right? Because somehow you’re transmitting this, and this is like that, but more so

Rick Archer: yeah, there’s important point you just made really, that about the body adjusting or adapting. I Aveda says that, you know, if you spiritual evolution that’s too rapid can actually damage the body. And, and I I’ve been in touch with a woman in Spain who’s going through a severe Kundalini crisis has been for quite some time to the point where she’s virtually paralyzed and can’t do anything. And it’s like, her body just can’t adjust to the volcanic huge energy that it’s coursing through it. So there’s something to

Peter Cutler: be said for distance pardon. I think it’s resistance that she’s going through could

Rick Archer: be maybe I’ll put you in touch with her

Peter Cutler: distance, because I mean, because of the healing and stuff that I’ve done, I’ve just been taught, you know, to just surrender that 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. I mean, you know, like, well, 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 now you’re re experiencing them. You’re actually experiencing for the first time. And if it’s something 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, very challenging. But as that happens, if you resist it and try and repress it again, it’s going to be not, 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 and it’s like a broken heart, right, you have a broken a broken heart means that you have a wall in your heart and that wall breaks. It’s not your heart that breaks, it’s not the love that breaks, it’s like you’ve tried to close something in and it breaks. So when happens when your heart really breaks and you let it break, and you open to that broken heart. You feel freedom, you feel the expansion, right? So always about surrendering. It’s always about letting go of attachments because we are life. No, we are God, when we let go. That’s what we are, we are what we truly are. Without all these resistance. The ego is just native attachments and resistance it has so much and it’s things are stuck in our body and you know, yeah, releases

Rick Archer: brings up a couple of thoughts. One, it kind of reminded me the old you know, acid days where if you if you started fighting it, you know, freaking out and like, Oh, this is scary, then then it would get worse, but just surrender to it. That would be pretty good.

Peter Cutler: Yeah. But you resist persists, right? Yeah. Just this is why any suffering any physical illness that we have, as long as we’re resisting it, as long as we’re calling it cancer, we’re calling it like, you know, some disease or, or illness or calling it the flu, right? 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. Because the flu is not this bad thing The flu is a is a cleansing process to get rid of stuff that you’ve put in your body that you shouldn’t have in there, right? This just being unhealthy, not exercising enough, whatever you’re doing to make it harder for your body to do its natural healing job. This is like releasing that and it’s the symptoms are you know, a sore throat headaches, fever, you know, but it’s it’s a cleansing healing crisis. They call it Yeah. 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, still a headache still that but our attitude towards it is totally different. You could have terrible pain. And if our attitude is different, it’s not a problem.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, you see these ads on television for flu remedies where you know, people pop the filth flu remedy, and then they go bowling or working on an oil rig or something. Instead of allowing the the the basically what they’ve done is they suppress the symptoms.

Peter Cutler: Yeah.

Rick Archer: Because of allowing it to.

Peter Cutler: you want to do you want to go to bed, you want rest, you went to sleep for 12 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, you know, it’s using its energy for healing. And it’s showing you exactly what you need to do. Yeah,

Rick Archer: although I did see a story in the news the other night where this woman who got stage four breast cancer at the age of 27, for some reason, and it was going through chemo, you know, father managed to deal with the fatigue by getting into exercise, she’d go out jogging, and the doctors were saying, Yeah, they were finding this is actually, I don’t know if anyone could do this, but it was actually helping her heal. But oh,

Peter Cutler: yes. No, that does it does in that way. But the flu is only asking you to sleep for one day. Yeah. You know, it’s just you feel really exhausted. You rest. I mean, 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. It’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. Yeah,

Rick Archer: Google actually provides nap rooms.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, that’s sensible. You know, that’s like going along with the truth of life. Because we live in a dream world in our own dream world, that our whole society is based on our individual dream worlds. The society is a dream world. It’s not dealing with truth the way it is.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Let’s talk a bit more about relationships. That’s always a popular topic with people. What so I was reading your book, and there was one point that you made that made me a little skeptical and see how you addressed this. Basically, you were saying that, you know, well, you know, you go from relationship to relationship because you need to learn different lessons. And if you’ve learned the lessons you need in one relationship, then, you know, time for the new one. And unless you’re like a real slow learner or you have a lot of lessons to learn in one relationship, then then you might stay with a person for a lifetime or something. And I take exception to that a little bit. I mean, it You know, it’s, I mean, that would imply that, you know, Joshua Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor were real quick learners and went through all these marriages. Whereas George and Barbara Bush, you know, are slow learners, there’s something there, perhaps there are lessons to be learned in terms of perseverance and loyalty and dedication, and, and maybe you go deeper in certain ways. If you kind of weather the storms and hang in there, then you do if you just sort of bail when things seem to go flat, to mix metaphors,

Peter Cutler: but I’m not I’m not saying that. But it’s, 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 entire life and never learn anything about what they’re supposed to learn. But each relationship gives you that learning, it’s the, it’s not just the purpose of relationships, it’s the purpose of everything in life itself. Everything is giving you this, you know, 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 too. There’s something that teaches you they can teach you some very powerful inner lessons if you’re willing to look at it, because people are mirrors, right? If we see the person as a mirror, and we’re not saying like, you’re so you know, lazy or so like, you know, flirtatious or so whatever, you know, so grouchy, whatever it is, we’re saying about the person, and we just put it back and say, I am so lazy. I’m so this you

Rick Archer: know, I’m Byron Katie. Yeah, like Byron, Katie.

Peter Cutler: Yeah. Byron, Katie’s on the definitely on the right track, particularly with puncturing your concepts, saying everything you think, is not true. You know, it’s very I know, with, with my students, it’s very hard for them to totally take that full, absolute step to say, like, every thought that I ever have had an ever will have cannot be true. You know, it’s like, Well, someone because they’re hoping one will be, you know, or they’re thinking, Well, this one was, but they never are. Because thoughts are concepts. Thoughts are abstractions of reality.

Rick Archer: But, you know, I get the impression from your book that you’ve been through a lot of relationships, and

Peter Cutler: I’m not like a serial. Like, like a

Rick Archer: philanderer?

Peter Cutler: Yeah, are using person, you know, ever. It’s always been love. You know, it’s always been about love. I mean, and I mean, my marriage, my last marriage was 22 years, you know, it was amazingly beautiful. And I learned, like a huge amount. And that was beautiful. I mean, I was locked out to be with a woman who is like, an extraordinary person, maybe this might be the only, you know, the most, you know, one or most perfect person or something for him. But that ended, you know, it ended because something else had to happen. I mean, she wasn’t going to follow me into a monk life. Right. And she wasn’t going to follow me into the way that my, you know, spiritual path was going and even. It’s funny, because when I moved to Sedona, she said, my youngest daughter, Lindsay, she was the one I had the second marriage. She said that Lindsay and I are worried about, you know, we think you’re going crazy, you know, with this healing and stuff. And I, you know, I said, Oh, well, I said, All I know is that I’m happy. You know? And if that’s crazy, then I’ll, I won’t take it. And that calmed her. She felt like, Okay, we don’t have a problem anymore. You know, he’s happy. You know, because she could tell I was happy. Yeah.

Rick Archer: Reminds me of something. My father said to me one time I was, I had done the monk thing for a while, you know, and then at certain point, I said, Hey, Dad, I’ve got a girlfriend, you’ll be happy to know, I have a girlfriend. And he said, I don’t care what whether you have girlfriends or not, he said, I’m miserable. And you know, you seem to be a pretty happy guy. So whatever you’re doing, you know, you even know better than I do.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s what you got. Yeah. miserable. But,

Rick Archer: yeah. So just dig into this a little bit more. Um, so, you know, the, I mean, what what would you have to say, with regard to, you know, enduring relationships that might last many, many decades or a lifetime, versus moving from one to the other? Like you just said, a lot of people, they keep making the mistakes, same mistakes over and over again, I think the statistics show and that stay with the one if you’re going to Yeah, I mean, I think the statistics show that second marriages end in divorce, even more than first ones do, which is about, you know, first ones or 50% in this country, and perhaps it even gets worse with the third and fourth. So, you know, I mean, what would you recommend in terms of like, hanging in there and working through Do things versus bailing and you know, trying something new? And well, this can all be related back to the whole theme of awakening and spirituality?

Peter Cutler: Well, it’s a, it’s about the lessons, you know, so bailing and, and staying or not what it’s about, it’s about the lessons, right? So are you learning something? Here? You know, you don’t have to think about that. I mean, you kind of know, right? Because if a marriage becomes really, a, maybe you call it flat, right? Just flat, just like, yeah, we’re kind of roommates. And not even that, you know, it’s like, I barely really want to talk to her, but I 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, right, there’s no interest. But if you’re, if you’re having conflicts, and fighting and stuff, there’s a lesson there to be learned, you’re not learning it, you know, like that. In that case, you want to get to the point, not where flatness is, but where love is, right? If you’re hating each other, there’s still a lesson there, right? You’re gonna probably leave that relationship if you do and go into another one that’s just like that. Right? Yeah. And why that’s going on?

Rick Archer: Well, it’s like, you know, look at your parents and mind, for instance, my father was also an alcoholic, and they, they stayed together for the sake of the kids, you know, and my mother ended up you know, commit, trying to commit suicide three times and going into mental hospitals, because she was so abused. So it would have been a lot better for the kids and for them, to,

Peter Cutler: I used to pray when I was a kid, when my parents would go away on a trip to Europe, or whatever, that they would get into plane crash or something. So we’d be free. You know, it was only like, seven years old or six years old when I did that, but I did it all the time. You know. So it’s Yeah, to stay together for the sake of the kids isn’t it was not helping the kids at all, we would have done a lot better being out in the street. Yeah. So So I’m not saying in the relationship that it’s like, you know, anything that I say only comes through this, this other thing, you know, I have no personal opinions about this at all, I don’t have any personal opinions about anything, really. But I was shown with, I had one relationship with a woman, Lilly, who was a an awakened person, you know, and I wasn’t, you know, and so I had this relationship with her and my ego is still there. And I thought, Oh, I, you know, a great meditator, and I’m teaching meditation, she can learn a lot from me, she’s just a yoga teacher, whatever. But she was awakened. I was and and she was very humble, she would never say anything about it. Like that. It took it was afterwards that I realized this. And, and when it was over, it also was really interesting how it came to be. And I think I also feel this too, when relationships come to be they’re not what we think they are. They’re not that we think, Oh, that’s the person for me or something else is going on. That is 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. So, with Lily, I just felt this connection with her so thoroughly and so quickly, you know, there was like no, like, getting to know you, it was just like, just totally binding just totally in love, you know, and both of us felt that so I thought well, this is that’s really interesting. You know, I mean, I usually try and suss things out and go step by step how much I’m gonna open my heart but it was just bang just their full out and not only that, it was this radiance you know, this radiance was pouring out of her and because I was with her also pouring out of me so when that was at some point she wanted me to move in with her and move to another place and I was dragging my feet it’s at all 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. So she just at some point, she just decided okay, well that’s fine if you’re not going to come up here okay, that’s over and like, you know, get to know you or whatever or you know, we learned our lessons and that’s it basically is what she said. So, at some point, you know, I thought like, oh crap, I made a huge mistake. You know, this is like my soulmate This is my you know, twin flame or words like that, you know, these concepts that I had, and now I blew it because there’s just one and and this is like, you know, destined through eternity or whatever. This is like very dramatic feelings. And it did I totally blow it so I asked, you know, I just asked Scott, I said, you know, so what’s is that my Twin Flame? Is that my like soulmate is that the one shot that I have with that, that I totally blow it should I go back and, you know, try and repair things. And that’s when I heard it’s no, none of it is that there’s not no such thing as these things. It’s all for lessons, it’s all for your learning to be to what you truly are. And she was the one person in the world that you needed to be with at that time to learn what you needed to learn. And it was amazing. I mean, I learned, I have my first past life experience with her. Since then many, but that was the first one and she’d had many before it was like, old hat to her. Have

Rick Archer: you tried to have it? Or did they just No, it just

Peter Cutler: happened, believe me, I wouldn’t want this one. It was very traumatic, it was very, 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. And how I had a past life experience, the way I experienced them is it’s a strange thing. It’s not like anything else. It’s it’s, it’s it’s literally like simultaneously being in two places at the same time. So you’re, you know, here, right at this point, we were like in bed, and then you’re in this totally other place at a completely other time in a different body. But it’s it’s literally happening. It’s not like a memory, it’s like, you can, you know, you can feel the sun on your skin, you can feel it, you can smell things, it’s like 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 know, it’s like you’re in this bat body, and you can see your body but you can’t see your face because there’s unless there’s a mirror. And at this point, this was a Native American Shaman. And these basically, the reason I had this is because, you know, I was asked, I was asking this question, how do we know each other, maybe we were together in a past life, you know, just the things you say. And then all of a sudden, she said, like, oh, I want to I have something, I want to do something. And she went and she put on this music of Native American chanting. You know, and then the lady then watched me. And all of a sudden, this whole thing came back to there was like these Union soldiers, blue coded soldiers came into the village, I was like an old man like 100 or so. And they would take me every day and prop me up by this tree and shade because it was around here. So there was no shade this one tree and the rest of it was just open sun. And the soldiers came in and burnt the village to the ground. And my granddaughter, I love my granddaughter, above everyone else, because she was going to be the shaman. She was she was a natural healer. She was born to be a healer. And this would be the first female healer that the village had ever had. And I was so proud of her. And I was dying, you know, I was oh, not in the dying part. But soon. So you know, this was I was so happy that she was going to come in the soldiers came in burnt the village down and killed every single person there every single person, but they left me and I could see that they killed my my granddaughter. And they let

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

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

Rick Archer: There might be some record of it.

Peter Cutler: They did destroy a number of Native American felt this was a small village. So I think it was during the time maybe when I don’t know if it was in Sedona or not, either. That was the all the village he had, or it was a traveling one, you know, to us, they can travel with them. So they was like this is coming to Sedona to do the sacred worship or whatever, and then go back to the other place. And so I realized that Lily, my girlfriend was the granddaughter. And she knew that 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 mean, I just sobbed for hours, you know, and then it came back to me many times after that, you know, just as traumatic experience. It was so traumatic. I hated those soldiers so much and died. It slowly starving to death up there dying of thirst and starvation. With my heart completely hating white people. And then my next life white person. Perfect, right.

Rick Archer: Is this your next life or was there this is

Peter Cutler: my next slide? Okay. Yes, about maybe 300 years or something like that. No, you hung out for a while before this one? Yeah, well, no, I hung out and I also remember the hanging out part. Yeah, I remember the hanging out part and that was amazing because you Like I had spirit guides, right? You know, people, it’s like, okay, there’s the overall everything, God, whatever you want to call it, and then filtering through an expression of God comes all the way down to humans. But before that there’s like, beings in other realms that are other, not other realms, I don’t know why they’re just not informed. They’re not in the form that we can see, that’s all. So there’s that and then down, you know, lower and 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 you know, beings according to what I needed. At any point. One of them happened to be this past life called Little Rock this this Native American who appeared to me when I could see it in a younger version, when he was a brave before he was a shaman, you know, not old man. So now, I lost track of where that was where I

Rick Archer: was talking about the life between life,

Peter Cutler: life between Oh, so I, I remembered, because I had these spirit guides that I was a spirit guide, that I was in that formless dimension, helping people in the form dimension. And that’s like an amazing life. You know,

Rick Archer: that was during the 300 year hiatus? Yeah. Yeah, it was

Peter Cutler: amazing. I mean, it was so beautiful, because without the physical body, there’s not these restrictions of the physical body. Plus, we’re conditioned with emotions, like fear, and anger, and envy and despair, none of that, that does have that. It’s only the essence feeling of love, peace and bliss, always only, and just fill out. And the challenge and why I chose to come in at one point, I, 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 just desperately wanted to be back there and not in a physical body. And that’s that was had a lot to do with my awakening. Finally, in the next time, it was the reason that I came down, which I discovered was because or into this form was because when you’re in that form, to communicate with people in form, when you’re in that formless state to communicate with people in form, it’s very difficult because they’re their energy, their vibration has to be open enough to so that you can match enough. So you can even get that feeling the intuition or the or the words, you know, from that. And then they have to pay attention. You know, so you can be open in that. But you could just go Yeah, yeah, turn on the television, what’s an Strache and 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 it. Until I stopped until I was shown, just don’t ever ignore it again. And you live like that. And I realized that, that what I was then in before I came into form, I’m still the same, nothing has changed, I just have a form. So this form is no problem. And that was shown to me too, because I had cancer, like, maybe 12 years ago or so. And I was shown that, well, basically, you know, I’d 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. But it was like, I would like to go more, but this is good. I, you know, pretty, you know, I have equanimity and not suffering and, and so I had the cancer. And I thought, well, I asked the doctor, I said, How long would it be would? What would happen if I didn’t have surgery? And 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. And I thought, That’s okay. I’m ready for that, you know, my career had done really well. I didn’t, couldn’t really get much further on that. My kids were things were starting to work out pretty well for them. You know, I felt the family was doing pretty well. So I felt done, you know, and I thought, Well, okay, I’ll come back again. And then I can wake up, right, because I’ve certainly reached a plateau. Next, I’ll start from here, and then I’ll be able to do it because I’m not going to do it in the rest of this life, probably. So. That’s okay. I’m ready to go. You know, and also I got five years to make peace with everybody to make sure everybody’s comfortable with that. We’ll talk about it and so they won’t have any regrets that they didn’t say 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 you know do this and I talked to my friends in the Sangha and they said the same Oh, I had surgery five years ago. So we all have surgery. Just Go, don’t be afraid of that or don’t, you know, just go and have the surgery. So I figured, okay, there. At the same time I had this, like, you know, this still silent voice came across like a megaphone do not have the surgery is what’s supposed to happen, this is destined to happen. And if you do this, this is like a huge sacrilege to God, you know, huge, you know, this is planned this is what’s supposed to happen. So just die at that point, you know, you’re supposed to that’s it and, you know, don’t rock the boat, you don’t know what you’re messing with. And so what I figured, well, in a democracy, there’s like, 100 people that want me to have the surgery, and there’s just God who doesn’t want me to have it. So I guess that loses right? 100 to one, maybe I’ll give him 10 Because it’s more than people. But that was my thinking, and how bad could it be? And they just convinced me to do it. And I knew they loved me, and I didn’t want to hurt them so. And I thought, How bad can it be? You know, so I went, and I had the surgery. And I spent the next three years living in hell, just living in hell, it was all the spiritual work that I’d done. And had just been, like, ripped out of me. And I was like, this empty shell, you know, there was like, sort of just the outside body and there was nothing inside and not in a good way. Not in a real emptiness way. This was like, just a living dead person. You know?

Rick Archer: No, I’m asking what kind of cancer was what kind of surgery? Bladder bladder cancer? Okay, so you had the surgery? And what did that entail?

Peter Cutler: It entailed putting like this, I don’t know how big a thing like up your penis right into your bladder, and then burning the cancer out. And then and then taking pictures and then pulling stuff out for a biopsy and all this stuff like that. And you’re in hell because I was in hell, because I didn’t listen to this inner voice.

Rick Archer: But what was your actual experience? Were you in pain? Or did you lose any sense of spiritual progress you’d made or Oh,

Peter Cutler: God, I lost all of it. If that had never happened, the last three years never did anything. You know,

Rick Archer: I suppose the surgery had that effect on you.

Peter Cutler: Because I went against this inner voice, and this inner voice was really important to listen to, was the truth. And I was listening to everything that was out of the dream. That wasn’t true. And, and, you know, 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 Archer: But now it’s 12 years later, and you you’re still alive and you have had the awakenings which, you know, he does

Peter Cutler: have that, because of that, because I went against it. And then because I went against it, and saw how bad it would be and suffered through that. So I said, Never again, will I ever not listen to this inner voice. So I made that thing. And then five years after the surgery on the anniversary of when I was going to die, but one thing happened, my daughter was having trouble with alcohol and drugs. And so we had her in therapy. And once a week, the parents would go to the therapy, we’d have the family therapy. And when we would go there, the therapist would often say, you’d ask everybody what they would like as an outcome, and then or what they would what they wanted in their life, you know? And then he asked me, what would you want in your life? And I said, I want Lindsey to be happy and said, No, you What do you want for you? And I said, I want Lindsay and Judith to be happy and said, No, you you What do you want? And I had no idea. I had a clue. And so I said, I want to be happy. I just made it up. I had no idea what I wanted. I just thought I just wanted to stop asking me because I didn’t know what I wanted. And then I went to a workshop about organization or something that had nothing to do with spirituality, really. But they’d ask that same question, what do you want in your life? What do you how do you want your business to be run? What do you want? You know, what do you want? And I didn’t know you know, I was talking to the teacher afterwards. And 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. And so that’s stuck in my mind. And then on the fifth year anniversary, it struck me as 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. And that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be the 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 the human form anymore, right? I really didn’t want to be in the form. But I didn’t know what to do. I mean, because, you know, I couldn’t commit suicide, we already had a suicide in the family, my son in law, and it just devastated all of us, including me. So I couldn’t do that to my family at all. And I was thinking like, well, what could I do? How could I, you know, die, you know, without them knowing that I killed myself. And I thought maybe I could, you know, join the military and go in the front line, but they knew I was a pacifist and against Versa, they ever built the load for that. Yeah, I will do it. So then I thought, Well, maybe if there’s a fire I’ll like rushed into the fire to save some money and burn up or something. But there were no fires. I mean, Somerville, where I was living had fires all the time. And there were no fires while I was away. So I said, I don’t know what to do. So I just did, the only thing that I learned to do when I was really at a Hard Place is pray to God and ask, you know, like, what can I do? You know, please. And this time, I was asking for something, not just information, but I wanted God to do something, I wanted to die in my sleep. So no one would think I committed suicide of natural causes or something. And if God granted me that I would give up everything that I loved everything that I was proud of my talent, you know, 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 that I care about that I feel proud of that I you know, my creativity, my relationships, my family, everything. I’ll give all of that to you if you just take my life, and I was really desperate. And what happened was this. What I realized that I don’t care that 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, this self centered thinking, that’s your problem.

Rick Archer: That’s the thing you really wanted to have die. Yeah, I

Peter Cutler: didn’t know that. And God said, like, in the five years that it was going to die anyways, you weren’t physically going to die at all, you know, because actually, the cancer was, was was in remission. It was healing itself, when they found it on its own. on its own. Well, I’ve done I’ve been on a macrobiotic diet. I was exercising, like,

Rick Archer: even if you hadn’t had the surgery, it probably wasn’t healed.

Peter Cutler: Yeah. But in five years, the ego would go Yeah, see ya. So it was It wasn’t physical death, it was the ego death, right. So but all of it was perfect, because I resisted this and, and so a lot of the ego didn’t just go at that point. But it’s like a chunk of it sort of left. And I got and I had the realization that nothing had changed with the body, I still was exactly this free spiritual spirit, being you know, the same as I was before it. Not only that I was 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 that other level, that higher level in a physical body. And the reason why I was in a physical body that was good that I can use this for teaching people, it was then that the healing began, you know, and this an even stronger connection to God, like God just worked through me to heal people. And I would surrender. And then if I ever didn’t surrender, I thought, I’ve got an idea how to help you, or I had this experience, it would just dead, it would just kill the whole healing process. So I learned just shut up and what comes out of your mouth will just be not you, whatever is supposed to come out and you just sit there listening to it. And it was so beautiful, I would hear my voice that would go I wish I had a voice like that that was coming at my mouth. But it sounded beautiful. It just sounded so loving and so perfect. And even the tone of it sounded beautiful. So it just taught me bit by bit to just totally let go and totally surrender. And then when I started teaching, it was the same my friend said I was teaching he went on a trip and he told me to take over his group and as I don’t know what to do, what am I going to do? And 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 all was perfect for each person there. So I thought wow, you know how effortless this is right? You don’t do anything at all you just surrender and then everything that you need just you know whatever supposed to happen comes out perfectly. So 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 what I eat when I you know going into a store or talking to someone I want them to be healed just because I walked into the store and bought something you know it I want always Is this radiance to be expressed. And then I went in these long retreats that I started doing these long, you know, month long, silent retreats to just saturate in this, you know, like Mooji is zip yourself up in the sleeping bag. So every year I do that I just sort of drop into these places I tell my students, I’m not going to see them, no one’s coming to the Zendo for a period of time. And they’ve been in Sedona, so they accept that now, every, all my friends accepted that I’m not going to see them. Until that happens, girlfriends maybe have a little harder time with it, you know, which I don’t, I don’t know, if I ever will have another relationship like that again, you know, because of that, because this this part is very important. It’s like, it’s, it’s very natural, you know, it’s like a tree, all the leaves fall off a tree in the winter, right. And this is when I feel called to go into it, the leaves fall off the tree. And the SAP like goes in, you know, and but there’s a lot of stuff happening there, a lot of transformation and stuff is happening. For the tree. And for me, right, 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. And, and often there’s these states of like enormous bliss, right, and then the body adjusts to it. And the radiance, more light is able to come through the physical body. And then come springtime, the buds are coming out in the tree. And I’m also I’m like flowering, you know. So now all this loving energy that was percolating, and building is like now expressing out into the world and people and everything that I see, you know, this radiance is like coming out. And every year, it’s the same thing, it just becomes more just comes more all the time simply from just not talking to anybody for a few months.

Rick Archer: It’s a nice routine.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, I don’t know how I don’t know what, you know, a marriage would be like that. It’s little, I mean, going more intense into this, but it’s also showing me this love is here. So there is no there’s no need of anything, there’s no need of anything at all. Everything that’s needed is is God. And this is whole, you know, like, I mean, I love my my ex wife, Judith, you know, she’s like 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, you know, I don’t have to live with her because she cannot be separate from me, nor can anybody else. So I go for I can go for seven months without talking to a single person. And never for a moment do I feel any loneliness, not even for a second. It’s like just absolute completion. If anything, I’m more connected, then than I am when I’m with a person, because I’m sort of connected with everything and all people to all individual people. And I think I’ve explained this to them. And I think they know it, and they feel it like, Oh, he’s not I’m not gonna see him for like this period of time for this months. But he’s not separate from me. He’s thinking of me. And I’m like, one with them. And then when I do see him, somehow, it’s going to be wonderful. Yeah, there’s going to be some radiants that’s gonna have an experience.

Rick Archer: When you do these retreat things. Do you have somebody doing your shopping for you and stuff? Or do you, you do that kind of thing. You go to the store and buy grow, I go

Peter Cutler: to the store, but you initially when I started doing it, I would go to the store five minutes before it closed. So I just rushed around, and no one would have time to talk to me, because I could always run into someone that I hadn’t told that I was doing this. And they theater because I’m very verbal as you know, so that we’d have this long conversation. They’re used to that. But that when I’m doing that, if someone comes up and says, Oh, Peter, it’s wonderful to see you. How are you? And I go fine.

Rick Archer: You could say, I’m doing silence for a few months. Good to see you. I’ll talk to you when I come out.

Peter Cutler: I don’t even want to go that far. I just hope they’ll go away. So I mean, I love them, but I don’t want to get into conversation, you know? Oh, it would be good to say that. It sounds because then people get this feeling that I for some reason. I don’t like them. Yeah, I don’t want to mislead people. Yeah, so after they come out, when I see them, I go, you know, I really do like you and it’s the wasn’t that I’m just inside and they go okay, I got it good. But most people now know this, that I’m this strange person. You go through this? Yeah, I do this every year in the winter, too. It’s like the silent. It’s like the winter retreats. Yeah, it happens to come in just at the time of the winter retreats. It may be a little longer than three months. But it just works perfectly. It’s I mean, I’m looking at Spring and seeing that nature. I’m realizing I’m just no different than a tree. Just doing the same thing. It’s like life is living me right and So that’s what life does, you know, it comes in the thing and then in the spring it like blossoms, and I’ve actually done it. Before I ever knew anything about this when I lived in the city, I lived in the northeast and Cambridge, Massachusetts or Somerville, it’s snowing and cold there in the winter. And people just naturally I would go in, I would do a lot of writing a lot of creative work during that time. And as soon as the first day of spring would come, I would walk into Harvard Square, and I would see, like 30 people I knew, and that’s and everybody was doing that. And it was just wonderful. It was like, everyone was a flower. Everyone was a budding flower. It was just spring, and we were so happy, you know, to do that. But in the winter, we went into caves. You know, we all do,

Rick Archer: like bears.

Peter Cutler: Yeah.

Rick Archer: 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 Cutler: The opposite of love?

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

Peter Cutler: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think hate hatred probably has some element of love in it. Actually, you know, if you really hate someone, you’re super emotional about them. Right? You’re, you’re connected to them. I just can’t stand Donald Trump. Every time I see. There’s some some connection there. Some learn?

Rick Archer: Yeah, there’s stories in the Vedic literature where someone would really hate Krishna. You see, yeah, and they’d be you know, just focused on him like a laser beam all the time. Yeah. Try hating him trying to kill him, trying to kill them and all that stuff. And then they didn’t getting enlightened because they were so focused on him.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, just like the love, like, just like the magnifying glass are the love. Yeah. So fear is, yeah, because fear is resistance, right? Fear is, we’re always resisting with fear, we go like, Okay, why if you stay there, you know, just not too close. To me. That’s kind of what the ego is doing, right? The physical posture, the ego is like, Don’t come too close, until I figure out if it’s okay, if you’re safe or not, you know, if you can do something for me or to me, I don’t want you to do something to me, I want, you know, we’re resisting. So 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? Right? It’s just gone. So you’re so open. Right? And the beauty of it is, we all experience this, right? Every time we see something of beauty, or experience love, we have that lack of resistance, lack of fear, lack of separation, we’re never going to look at a beautiful flower. And, you know, be like, Oh, I love this. But I’m kind of afraid, if that 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’s just took my breath away, you know, then 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 awakened consciousness. It’s just it’s very simple, really. Rocket Science, right? It’s whatever we’re attached to, is going to prevent us from, from opening to that from even having it or even seeing it, right. And whatever resisting is the same. I mean, if we, one form of meditation is simply to not resist life, to just accept everything that’s happening in this moment. It’s beautiful. You know, just for a moment, just everything that’s happening in this moment, just allow it to 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. And that’s how we heal fear, right? We totally open to it, and then it just sort of fades away. Right? But we can’t resist it. If we go like no fear. I don’t want to feel any more fear. I want to keep fear. Yeah, it’s we’re just going to keep it as long as we keep doing that it’s going to be 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 of our conditioned world.

Rick Archer: I have a question for you. You’re talking about I forget the woman’s name, who was like, you’ve thought she might be your soulmate. And she triggered triggered that past life experience. And at that point, you said, Well, she was awake and I wasn’t. You’ve made comments like that several times during the interview, which kind of indicates a kind of a black and white on off. understanding of what awakening is, is that the way you see it, I mean, it’s there’s 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 kind of great nations and many degrees of awakening and

Peter Cutler: many degrees of the way. Yeah, it’s all a process. It’s all progress. But there’s, there’s it.

Rick Archer: Say we’re awake then not to the same degree. Yes, exactly. She

Peter Cutler: was much more awake than I was. I thought I was awake, not awake, but I thought I was pretty, like highly spiritually developed. I mean, all my life, I’ve had certain things like the sensitivity that comes from this empathy where I can feel people’s feelings and their thoughts and things like that, which was a survival mechanism for me that I never learned how to shut down. And 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, you know, go to school and you’re feeling everybody’s thoughts and feelings. It’s, it’s challenging to, you know, yeah.

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

Peter Cutler: I would say the same. Yeah, I was using, it’s in language we’re doing, you know, to be quick about it. Yeah. They like awake or not awake is easier than saying her, you know, progression of awakeness was higher than mine was a point, then we miss the story by kind of trying to figure out what level that

Rick Archer: right. But it’s good to clarify. Because otherwise, people, they scratch their heads, they think Well, geez, maybe I guess I’m not awake, because I haven’t had some big aha thing. And for many, many people, some people do have big aha things, but many people just this gradual, incremental thing, which is if you know, if you could snap back to where you were 30 years ago, it would be catastrophic ly different. But it’s but it’s just grown, like the way your body grows or something. Yeah, you don’t notice it from day to day so much?

Peter Cutler: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And actually, that’s a good point to Rick because one of the things that I say in the book, too, before I tell the story of my awakening, you know, I I spend like at least like two or three pages, you know, saying like, this is not your awakening, your awakening is happening for you. So don’t think you have to have any single one of any of these things in what I my experience, or, or to look at your thing, or anybody else’s experience that you hear here, right, this is 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. So the thing to pay attention to you can use inspiration from listening to reminders or Eckhart Tolle is or mine or anybody’s, but the thing to pay attention to is yours is what’s happening in you, you know, in every moment, because that’s the awakening that matters by awakening doesn’t matter.

Rick Archer: Yeah. And even here, the terminology is tricky, because it’s not like awakening is something that you get, you know, it’s it’s lived through the vehicle of an apparent you, but it’s, it’s obviously, something more impersonal than that.

Peter Cutler: It’s freedom from that you. It’s the freedom from that you it’s like, if the you dissolves, then there’s just life. And there’s still a body and everything, but is this body not life? Is this different than a tree or a bud or a flower? You know, it’s, it’s different in some ways, you know, but it’s life. It’s not different in that this is not life and the tree is life. It’s all life. And when you surrender the you, that’s what happens, right? You, you feel this? That separation, even oneness is a word that we get conceptualize. It’s better to say what it’s not.

Rick Archer: 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. I mean, but my childhood was absolutely rosy compared to what some people go through. I didn’t grow up in, you know, Syria or something like that. And but here’s her question. She said, I’d like to know what he would say about children who were abused by their families, what the purpose of that is, in terms of our development and awakening.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, well, I was abused. I mean, my father, very violent, you know, and in me out at times, and, you know, unconscious, I was terrified of being killed, you know. Yeah. And also my mother was quite violent, too.

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

Peter Cutler: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, in Buddhism, they talk about the the Lotus growing out of the mud, the lotus blossoms because of the mud. And this is a common thing in Buddhism is that this suffering that you have, you know, it Is flowers into this awakening. Now it doesn’t happen for. It’s funny because I was. I’ve seen this so often that I met somebody who her life just seemed really pretty perfect from the time she was born. You know, she’s a Christian Scientist, and just everything she said about is like, I’m so lucky, everything just flowed. And I was so supported by everybody I knew. And she’s wonderful, you know, I mean, she really is in this really wonderful state, as far as is the progression of awakening not as much as I am, but really close and her feeling of, of the joy of life and love is very close to that. So she’s one person that I met like that I was really curious, because I was very excited to meet someone that had a life like that, because I haven’t met anybody like that before. But I think for most people, the suffering from abuse and things like that can very much flour. I mean, look at Eckhart Tolle, he’s a perfect example. He lived a hellish life, we probably wanted to commit suicide every day of it, until he woke up when he was in his 30s. Oh, but it was hellish. And that night, he was going to kill himself. Yeah, it just sounds absolutely restricted ego, horrible, you know, thing. But people can feel, I mean, suffering can come for anybody, you can be living in a palace and the, you know, carried around, and I don’t know, you can just live this like, as a prince, you know, or a princess and be given everything. And if your mind is set, your ego mind is set to suffering, then you’ll suffer just as bad as somebody in Sri Lanka, or dying of starvation, no, even more, depending on where their mind is that you know, and how restrictive they are with this ego, the ego creates the suffering not, you know, 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 Archer: I’m trying to think of the name of maybe I remember the name of a woman that I interviewed a while back lives up in Oregon, had a really horrific childhood. And she was raped by her father and stuff like that. So it’s, it speaks to Susan’s question. Yeah. Can’t remember the name of the moment. Yeah. But there’s a number of people I’ve interviewed that have gone through really bad suffering, and they see it as kind of catalytic to their awakening, like Shruti. Another one?

Peter Cutler: Yeah, I think so. Because if your life is really, really perfect, it’s going to be harder for you to say, like, Okay, I’m gonna surrender this. I 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. I mean, adults were like, crazy, you know, one minute they, you know, alcoholics are funny, because everything is unpredictable. You know? Like, I mean, I didn’t, you know, as a teenager, I was a kind of a wild kid, I stole cars I did dealing with gangs. I was like, you know, like, well, that’s how I grew up, you know. So it was, you never would know what they would do. I could steal a car. And they’d say, like, Hey, that’s a chip off the old block. You’re really, really that happened to me. Your parents said that? Yeah, my father was like, yeah, he’s a Rascoe liquid he did you know, and then you could just walk in the house for nothing, you know, and not have a smile on your face or something. And then he could, like, beat the hell out of you. You know? Yeah. So you didn’t know what it was, you could come home with a good report card, you know, and then they could hate you because of that, you know, and then you could do something. But it depends, sometimes you do something that society wouldn’t like, and they would, it was very, it was totally unpredictable, always. So you just never knew which created a lot of fear because you just never knew what was going to happen. There’s explosions that would just come from nowhere so that it gives you a sense of not trusting what you’re seeing as real you know, and then in order to survive I don’t know if this happens to other people that 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 super help super, you know, a catalyst I mean, it was it’s like I do feel that everything that happens to us is perfect. So must be all part of this process all part of this progress and you can ignore it right? You can go away from it and just whatever become criminal or become an alcoholic yourself and never progress, you know, but the lessons are there. No one’s holding your head down and forcing you to learn the lesson that the lessons are presented. And if you open enough, you’ll see the lesson. That’s why the ego is so bad because it has its own ideas and opinions about what the lesson should be right and it’s they’re not right. You know, you have to be open and then you see the lesson if you think you know what the lesson nears, you pretty much don’t write because it comes through thinking a

Rick Archer: few points here. One is I really looked up that woman, I was just trying to remember, Shelly Ray was her name. So Susan, or others might want to watch that interview. Second thing is, I remembered another quote from Maharshi, as he was speaking, he used to say, it’s really hard for the angels in heaven to even be interested in Enlightenment, because it’s just what they don’t want to close their eyes, you know, it’s just so glorious and and what they’re living. Here, it’s much more easy, because, you know, we were beset by so many things that we really want to find an escape or a solution. And a third point is just that this point you just made about everything being a lesson. I think it bears reiterating just that, you know, it what it implies, or what it what it leads to, is that there’s, there is a sort of an evolutionary motivation or trajectory to the universe. There’s a there’s a term evolution, evolutionary pantheism that everything is imbued with intelligence, and that there’s an evolutionary momentum or purpose to the whole shebang, the whole show, and, and if we kind of like, keep in mind that, well, you know, God is if we understand God to be omnipresent intelligence, then how could anything happen capriciously or randomly or accidentally or anything else? And if we further accept or understand or believe that, that there really is this, you know, I mean, look at the, the order that has come out of complete disorder, there’s the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, everything crumbles down, you know, if left to itself, but there, but life is this force, that is the opposite of entropy. And that emerges from, you know, from disorder. And so that, that there’s this evolutionary drive that is the, you know, the force behind life. And I, I guess I’ve made the point that, that things are not accidental, there’s a nature wants to evolve more and more sophisticated forms through which it can know itself.

Peter Cutler: Yeah. And the important thing of all of that, too, I totally agree with all that this beautiful understanding of life, is to realize that we don’t need to understand it, you know, we just need to surrender to it. Because it totally has, is taken care of everything, not just aspect, everything, everything in nature, when we look at nature, I think we love looking at nature, as it shows us this, you know, we don’t know really necessarily what we’re seeing. But it’s showing us this, this evolution, and in humans now, what’s evolving is our consciousness, which is extraordinary. I mean, you are a testament to this, you’ve interviewed like 400 people, right? Where else in the history in human history has this happen? Human consciousness itself, is evolving into this, this state, and it’s an amazing evolution. I mean, I think it’s really similar to, to the Neanderthal to the human, you know, it’s a big effect. When you think about people in this process of awakening these things that happen, the ability to heal, you know, abilities to, to, to know the psychically communicate with people without words, you know, ability to, to move to other places, without the body moving there and see things that are there. I mean, these are all cities, we call them, right. But these are not uncommon things that happen, you know, maybe not to everybody. And it’s not a good idea to be attached to them, you know, they arise when they need to arise. And there’s no reason to try and make them better or

Rick Archer: more, but there are human potentials. Yes,

Peter Cutler: there’s human potentials. And this is what humans are evolving into. It’s something it’s a species that we’re not even going to recognize, you know, from here. And it’s, for me, the big part of this awakening push that happened, and has been happening and is still happening now is like, it feels like feel like I’m riding on a tidal wave. You know, there’s the power of a tidal wave and I’m like surfing on it and saying, like, Okay, I’m going with it, you know, people who are fighting it, it’s going to be harder and harder to fight against this and resist it, because this is like, enormously powerful. And the more people that are awakening, the more power this has, it’s just human consciousness. You know, you can tell there people are dragging their feet a lot. You know, a lot of times people in great power, you know, they want to hold on to that power and not just let go of everything, which is what is being asked, you know, we’re gonna go into a new species. Do we have to let go the old species, we have to let go of everything. And then we’ll be shown by this inner guidance system, like when we let go. Awesome, you know, like, wow, this is amazing, you know, whatever it is, when we totally let go to it, we just feel so good. And if we resist it, life is has lots of problems and worse than it’s ever had, you know, we’re going to see that people that are dragging and trying to hold on and resisting this, this evolutionary process are going to suffer a lot. Even if they can live through

Rick Archer: it. It’s very well put.

Peter Cutler: It’s wonderful. We’re living in a time and 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 this is, I think this is way better than the end or thought to the human. I think this is like, I don’t think they maybe they experienced a lot of bliss when that happened to the first people that well, this is big stuff. Yeah,

Rick Archer: 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 kind of 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, has no way more fascinating.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, because this knows everything this has, we feel, the way to access it is to not know anything. So realize that we don’t know anything, just cancel, cancel all knowing, you know, take any concept we have and the opposite, and put them together until they just dissolve and are gone. And then this, this infinite knowing is just here, it’s just totally available to us, whatever. Whatever needs to come is just accessible to us. You know, not even our own memories, but the memories of all humans of all time, whatever we need. It’s amazing. It’s just unlimited. That’s, you know, to try and find out how it’s unlimited is we’re just chasing our tails, and we’re just making more concepts, but it’s enough to just surrender to it and, and let it do what it does. Yeah, again, it’s not it’s no different than a tree, you know, we’re, it’s, we’re having this consciousness that can do these amazing things. I don’t can’t speak for a tree, what it’s doing, but it’s not that different than a tree. The tree is also evolving, you know, spiders, insects, they’re evolving, everything is evolving, to be the the best it can be to be of the highest benefit for whatever it is, you know, and 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, 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 there.

Rick Archer: We better wrap it up, because we’ve been going pretty long. But um, there’s so want to read one more question that came in, because it’s a nice question and pretend you’re on NPR and it’s like, I’m gonna cut you off at a certain point if your answers to. Okay, now, you’ve been saying great things, and it’ll satisfy the people that tell me to, you know, 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. So this is Florrie 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 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 Cutler: Well, the awareness of someone that hurt me that I wasn’t aware of they hurt me. I don’t know about that. I don’t know

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

Peter Cutler: But I think the feeling of freedom and release from something repressed coming up. Yes, it’s very common. I mean, it is. As far as I know, the only true way for healing for real healing for cures of things you know, putting a bandaid on things or cutting out stuff or that is just a very temporary thing. Whatever you do that with, there’s a message in there and you’re cutting it out, just going to come back somewhere else. So whole thing about cancer treatment. Yeah. So internally what we do when we repress things, we store them in our body, and they can make us physically sick. If we don’t, you know, let them come up. But when they come up, when we open to it, and we let them come up, then they reveal everything about themselves. And one of the things they reveal is they’re not true, right? I mean, you look at Oh, I had that thought when I was two years old. Okay, it’s a two year old thought, and 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 a healing, if we do this as healing, which is a form of meditation and itself, to open to this is that if we’re feeling fear, or anger, or whatever, these these things that aren’t our essential nature, feelings, they’re energy, right? And so the more we can strip off word, say, we have a feeling of fear, we’re terrified of something, you know, we can just ask yourself, is it necessary to use that word fear? What if we took that word fear away, then what’s there, right? So then we have sort of anxiety is that necessary, you can take that away. And then maybe we have a sensation, oh, there’s a big sensation in my stomach, it’s really sensations there, you know, but it’s 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. And then that dissolves. And pretty soon that energy becomes doesn’t stay in one place, we realize it’s like moving throughout our whole body, it is throughout our whole body. And it’s only because we call 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? Because maybe when most of us are not aware of the energy of 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, you know, our toe to the top of our head, we can feel all of that intensely, like a little child does, you know, and really, it feels wonderful. I mean, we could even call that the feeling of bliss to just be aware of being in a living body. You know, at any age, it doesn’t change, too. I mean, 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 than when we’re really young, this energy. Yeah, so that’s a huge, a wonderful feeling to have that come up, you know, to just release things in that way, just by being open to them, just by being wide open to everything that is, we let all the things that aren’t true. Show us that, you know, we totally want to see we’re willing for it to show us that it’s true, we’re totally open to that. And it just happens that it’s not. And then it dissolves, you know, it’s like we’re loving even these negative feelings that are causing us suffering, even suffering all of it, we’re just opening to it. And it, it resolves itself. Simply by doing, it heals itself. Amazingly, things that were stuck in the body, the thoughts come up, we see we let them go, the energy is released. And it’s not stuck in one place. Not in the stomach, not in the shoulder, whatever we have. It’s throughout the whole body. And this is wonderful feeling of relaxation, and intense aliveness, you know, we are alive. Just like the trees nature, we look and we 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, you know, like a vehicle that I use, but it’s an amazing vehicle. It’s a really incredible self healing, amazing vehicle. And it itself is an expression of God. Right? 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. You know, it’s like, bodies are funny. They’re like, if we were told when we were going to get our first car, we had, you know, wise salesman that sold us our first is a brand new car and he said, This is the only car that you can have for the rest of your life in this life. You can get another car next life, but only one car can you have in this life. So take care of it. And I’m going to let’s go for a little drive and I’m going to take you to a place he takes you to a junkyard showing you all the other cars that weren’t taken care of so well. They’re rusting there. So take care of this car and it’ll last you for your whole life. You know, and 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, you know, take care of it. It’s beautiful. And at some point you may even identify with it because you’ve had it for like 50 years or so, you know, but you don’t have to do it. If it’s just a vehicle, you know,

Rick Archer: that’s the realization I had when I was 18, I kind of realized, you know, you’re stuck in this body. And if you damage it, you’re gonna be stuck in a damaged body. So that kind of turned me around and then taking care of it ever since.

Peter Cutler: Yeah, what you put in it, you know, and fasting is like an oil change, right? washing it is like going to the carwash. Yeah. You just you just take care of it. You take care of it, and you love it, but you don’t identify with it. You don’t have to think this is me. So then, you know, because you don’t identify with your car. If someone says, Hey, that’s a nice looking car. You go, yeah. Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, you’d like my car. But it’s not you. You know, if someone says I don’t like that car, they go that you don’t like car? You know,

Rick Archer: it’s not Yeah. Yeah. Well, on that note, we should probably wrap it up.

Peter Cutler: This is good. I wanted to interview you. Maybe someday, because I was so interested in, in, in, you know, that you’ve talked to like, almost 400 You know, people interviewed 400 people. I mean, this is amazing. You’re like a vehicle and a conduit for for the evolution of consciousness, you know, you are and you have a very position in this evolution of consciousness, which is amazing. You when we had that little trouble with the, the technical thing, you know, lagging, I went to look at a lot of a lot of the things to see if other people were doing that, too. And it was so beautiful that we had that this is how things are perfect. So 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. Oh, this is great. There’s so much here from JP Stewart, I think is hilarious. You know, stuff, what a great interview that was trying to be funny. He’s like, hilarious. He’s really good. So people

Rick Archer: didn’t realize that was a joke until about 20 minutes into thought I’d really flipped my lid.

Peter Cutler: It’s beautiful, though. I mean, there’s such a treasure trove of things here. And it helps all of us, you know, to, to awake and just to see what people are going through. And there’s so many people that are in the process of coming into this now or, you know, are benefited from this. I mean, it’s it’s part of the all of us are helping this awakened consciousness grow, even when we’re not aware of it. And as we start awakening, we become aware that this is kind of what our job is, you know, it’s like, it’s it’s life is life is evolving. So if we’re open to life, that’s where we are helping the evolution.

Rick Archer: And as you know, and you put yourself in the service of this, then you get a lot of support. And, you know, your, your own evolution is accelerated. So yeah, it’s a good Yeah.

Peter Cutler: Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you, Peter. And you’re fully it’s a privilege to be with you.

Rick Archer: Yeah. Likewise, let me make a few general wrap up points. So I’ve been speaking with Peter Cutler, and I’ll have a page on BatGap where I link to his websites and his YouTube page and his chat, he has a nice Facebook site where he writes a lot of stuff and some good discussion goes on. And, and all that. So go, if you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want to know those things, go to batgap.com. Go to Peter Cutler’s page, I’ll have a link to it right there on the YouTube description, then then you can bounce from there off to other things. This is an ongoing series, as most of you are aware. And if you go to batgap.com, and then go to the Add a glance menu, you’ll see all the various things we offer on the site, including, you know, being notified by email of new interviews and subscribing to the audio podcast and so on. So go and check that out. And that’s about it. So

Peter Cutler: when sure the book is free on the website.

Rick Archer: Yeah, inviting a link to that.

Peter Cutler: Okay.

Rick Archer: Yeah. So download it.

Peter Cutler: Have it for free. Yeah. Yeah.

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