Peter Fenner Interview

Summary

Peter Fenner and Rick Archer examine how nondual awareness relates to spiritual practice, psychological conditioning, suffering, and gradual maturation. They distinguish unconditioned awareness itself from the changing clarity, stability, and embodiment of realizing it.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual realization deepen if awareness is already complete?
• What does “nothing to do and nothing to know” mean in nondual spirituality?
• Can awareness remain present during pain, suffering, and difficult circumstances?
• How can spiritual practice make nondual awareness more stable and accessible?

Key takeaways

• Unconditioned awareness is not produced by practice, but practice can help us rest in it more readily.
• “Nothing to do” means non-doing—resting as awareness—not abandoning practice or ordinary responsibilities.
• Spiritual growth shows up as greater stability and embodiment, not a change in awareness itself.
• Repeatedly returning from identification to awareness makes access more automatic over time.
• Spiritual development does not guarantee freedom from future pain or difficult circumstances.
• Effective teaching meets people where they are without denying their conditioning.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. This show is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awake or awakening people. To check out the hundreds of interviews already done and other things on the site, go to batgap.com. There’s a donate button there if you’d like to support our efforts.

My guest today is Peter Fenner. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to Peter’s book Radiant Mind for the last week, and I got through pretty much the whole thing. It’s funny, Peter—as I’ll explain who you are in a minute—but as I was listening to the book, I really felt like we were brothers from another mother, in a sense. I don’t know if you’ve heard that expression, but I felt such a resonance with everything you were saying.

I didn’t really have much to disagree with, which doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I listen to teachers read their books and I’m a little critical. I think that point is a little off, or whatever, according to my own understanding. But I just felt a lot of resonance with what you’re saying.

It’s ironic in a way because we come from very different traditions. You’re from a Buddhist tradition. I have more of a Hindu-tradition background, although I don’t know if you consider yourself a Buddhist, and I don’t consider myself a Hindu. In any case, I could have written the book myself, in a sense, if I were as good a writer, because of what you’re saying.

Just about everything you said, for me, was like a springboard to an interesting discussion. But for the most part, I wasn’t taking notes at all. I was cutting the grass, riding my bicycle, doing all the things I usually do, and that’s how I managed to listen to all this stuff. I have a feeling that we’re just going to hit it off and have a great conversation and cover all kinds of ground.

As we’ve been doing recently, this is a live-stream show. If people listening live go to the Upcoming Interviews page under Future Interviews on batgap.com and then scroll down, they’ll see a form where they can submit questions that I will probably ask during the interview.

So let me just backtrack a little bit and read a little of your bio here. Peter is in Australia at the moment, as we speak. He’s a leader in the Western adaptation of Buddhist wisdom. He’s a pioneer in the new field of non-dual psychotherapy. He was a celibate monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for nine years. He has a PhD in the philosophical psychology of Mahayana Buddhism and has held teaching positions at universities in Australia and the United States.

He’s taught workshops at Naropa Institute—excuse me, Naropa University—the California Institute for Integral Studies, Omega Institute, and other centers. He’s given invited presentations at JFK University, Saybrook College, Stanford Medical School, Columbia University, and internationally.

I’ll just read this one last paragraph: Peter’s way of teaching is known for its dynamic and engaging deconstruction of all fixed frames of reference that block entry to unconditioned awareness, and for the purity and depth of natural, uncontrived silence that emerges in his work. He also has a unique capacity for sharing the skills and states of his transmission in a way that others can easily understand and begin to replicate in the non-dual transmission.

If I had to summarize you, Peter, I would say, having listened to that book and also some other interviews and things you did, that I found there was a great deal of honesty, and I guess I could use the word practicality. There’s something realistic about the way you talk about spirituality.

A lot of times, I feel, people have failed to distinguish between intellectual understanding and direct experience. They end up immersing themselves in books and teachings and getting very conversant with an intellectual understanding, but then they begin to espouse that and talk about it, perhaps even as a teacher or on chat groups and so on. They don’t realize that what they are really alluding to with their understanding is an experience that can be quite profoundly different and richer than any sort of intellectual understanding could be.

I really got the sense, as I was listening to you, that you had a realistic understanding of that distinction and also a realistic appreciation of the vast range of possibilities for human spiritual evolution—a sense that it can really go very far, far more than many people realize. Those are two points that resonate with me a lot.

Peter: Yeah, I appreciate that introduction, Rick, very much. Thank you. The realism, for me, is pretty important. The way to be realistic is just to watch how we are evolving ourselves and take this as the benchmark—not being seduced by other people’s stories, other people’s paths, or by the literature, much of which involves people living into ideals and fantasies.

I think if we accept that we have the capacity to fantasize, we think it would be so great if we could achieve that state of being beyond suffering as quickly as possible. So many people that I share with in different ways ask, “Is that possible in this life? Can I really achieve that?”

Maybe, maybe not. Historically, though, it was still a pretty rare occurrence to achieve, in this life, that state of just being in bliss consciousness no matter what’s happening, because life can throw so many different and difficult situations at us.

✨ Bliss consciousness and difficult circumstances

Rick: I have what I might call the crucifixion test. It’s easy to be in bliss consciousness under ideal circumstances, perhaps, but what if you find yourself in Christ’s circumstances? Did he remain in bliss consciousness? I would like to think he actually did, given the maturity of his spiritual evolution, but I don’t know.

That might seem totally contradictory, because how could somebody be in bliss consciousness when they’re being crucified? Perhaps you can answer that question and elaborate a little on what we mean by bliss consciousness.

In your own case, I know you were talking about when you had a ruptured disc in your spine or something, and you were in excruciating pain. You readily admitted that there was no question of bliss consciousness at that point; you were pretty much blotto from the pain. And you had people saying to you, “Oh, Peter, there’s no person to whom this is happening,” and that’s not very helpful advice under such circumstances. We have to be realistic with whatever actual stages of development we may have reached.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. How I see it is that when we have an opportunity to do the profound work of resting in pure awareness—which is sometimes bliss consciousness; that’s interesting—for me, it’s not always accompanied by sourceless bliss. Sometimes it’s there. It’s as if you’re saying, “What name can I put on this? Something is happening.” There’s some really subtle affective dimension. The only word I can put on it is bliss, but it’s not what I call somatic bliss, because it’s not coming from a source.

If I say, “Okay, so where’s the source of it?” it’s not coming from exquisite music or from being touched in a particular way. It simply does not have a source, the same as non-dual awareness. Where is it coming from? Nowhere and everywhere.

When we have that opportunity, yeah, we just take it. For me, that’s the practice: when it arises, just enjoying it in a way, even though it’s unconditioned. The mind stream is conditioned, so we’re conditioning ourselves to have more of this.

That’s the big thing. Then, when it’s not here, it’s not here, and we can appreciate that it’s this really weird thing that we can’t lose because there’s nothing to lose. We can even think that sometimes, and that takes us straight back into it. “What is it that I’ve lost? Oh, wow, yeah, you can’t lose this,” and then we’re back here.

Sometimes we think that thought and it doesn’t dig deeply enough. We think, “Ah, you can’t lose this,” but it doesn’t get into it because the conditioning has its own power.

Progressive development and stability

Rick: Some people don’t like the idea of progressive stages of development of bliss or anything else. They say, “Well, reality is what it is. How can it be progressive?” But I would respond that, yes, it is what it is, fine, but our experience of it can be quite a different matter. That can be progressive; it can evolve, mature, and develop. Wouldn’t you agree with that?

Peter: Yeah. For example, if you take something like depth, which is a dimension of unconditioned awareness that I talk about, when we’re here there’s no depth to it. There’s no directionality, no superficiality, and no depth. We can’t dig into it more because it’s non-dual, so it’s beyond those dualistic structures.

There is a sense that we can integrate this—which has no depth—more deeply into our conditioned being. In other words, over, let’s say, five or ten years after working with this, we can be present to difficult circumstances, things that trigger emotions, or physical pain, and it’s not producing a perturbation. We’re still fully and richly immersed in this.

Rick: There’s a Vedic metaphor in which they talk about conditioning. They say that a deeply conditioned, very deeply ingrained and habituated nervous system is like stone. You try to make a mark in the stone, and it’s a little hard to make the mark—in other words, the experience isn’t very deep—but whatever mark you do make stays in the stone.

A less conditioned nervous system is more like sand. You can actually make a deeper mark, a deeper experience, but it gets washed away a little faster. A less conditioned nervous system is like water: a really deep mark, but it just disappears. The least conditioned is more like air: you can make any depth of impression, and yet there’s no lasting impression.

So you hear people talk about—and you can elaborate on that—having some experience that has a deep impact, and a minute later they’re back to equilibrium.

Peter: I like that metaphor. I haven’t heard it before. Yeah, that’s great.

Rick: And wouldn’t you say, having been a practitioner for probably decades now, whatever you’ve been practicing, that if you look back five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, there has been a steady progression in terms of the depth or clarity of your experience and also the stability of it—in terms of its not being perturbable?

Peter: Yeah, for sure, and I think that’s the type of time frame to look at things in as well: one year, five years, ten years, fifteen years, and so on. Within that, we can be confronted by stuff that’s happening—death of a loved one, or just stuff that’s really complex for us to be dealing with. So, anything shorter than six months is a bit deceptive.

Someone can begin and think, “Okay, where am I going to be in six months?” Great. The main point is that whatever the experience is, we’re always building a resource if we’re working with this, even though life over a shorter time might be more challenging, just because of the circumstances.

Yeah, but over that longer term, for sure, there’s a stabilizing and, I think, particularly a more ready access to this. You don’t have to go through all the complexities, because we’re talking about making the journey from being identified with some conditioning—let’s say caught up in some conditioning, attraction, and aversion—through to here. We’re talking about making the journey thousands and thousands of times over decades. That’s how it happens.

Thousands of times we make it. We go to a teaching and you’re in and out of it maybe twenty, thirty, or forty times, resting in it for five minutes, then caught up in some belief system, and then returning to it. So, it’s just that the more times we’re making the journey, the easier it is and the more automatic and effortless it becomes.

The more times we’re making the journey, the easier it is and the more automatic and effortless it becomes.

Rick: I’ll give you another metaphor. In India, they used to dye cloth—maybe they still do—by dipping cloth in colored dye and then taking it out and bleaching it in the sun. It would lose most of its color, but to a certain extent it would retain the color. Then they’d dip it again, and bleach it again, and dip it and bleach it, and keep doing that until eventually it became colorfast. It wouldn’t lose its color even in the bright sunlight, no matter how long you left it there.

So, I think it’s just a metaphor to illustrate what you’re just saying. The reason I’m dwelling on this point to start out with is that, as I said, I like the fact that you seem to speak from your own experience and not just sort of go off into intellectual abstractions that don’t pertain to your experience.

This has been my experience over the decades, the kind of thing you’re just describing—the progressive development. And I’m always a little puzzled when I hear people saying, “Give up the search,” or, “You don’t need to do anything because you’re already enlightened,” and stuff like that. I just think they’re kind of in dreamland, or maybe they know something I don’t know, but that’s not the way my experience has been.

Peter: Right. Yeah, what happens for me often when people are sharing like that, I think, “Are you telling me something?” or, “It seems to me that you’re telling me something.” If that’s the intention—you’re telling me something—then that’s conceptual, it’s content; it’s not what this is, which is non-conceptual awareness.

Rick: Yeah, all right. Well, I think we’ve probably clarified that point enough. What we’re discussing here, and what spirituality in general is really all about, is non-conceptual. The conceptual is kind of like the icing on the cake, but the important thing is the actual experience.

You can stand out on the sidewalk and read the menu at a restaurant and get a concept of what it might be like to eat there, but that’s a far cry from actually going in and eating, as far as deriving any kind of enjoyment or nutrition is concerned.

Beginning at the end

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Good. So, as I said, I really enjoyed your book, Radiant Mind, and I see someone sent in some questions about it, which I’ll ask. But why don’t you give us a kind of—let’s sort of walk us through some of the main points of your book as they come to your mind, and we’ll just stop and discuss these points as we go along.

Peter: Okay. Well, the book and what I offer generally is what’s sometimes called the result-level approach. I sort of assume at the beginning that there’s nothing that we need to do. We can be here without needing to do anything, because this is acausal. It’s not caused. This, as pure awareness, is not the product of anything, so there’s nothing that we have to do or not do to just be here.

That’s the beginning assumption. So, I come in and so often I’ll say, “Why don’t we just begin at the end?” Often what I find is that if people are attending a workshop, somehow they think they have to do a lot of work and they can really only get the goodies at the end.

You actually see it. In the last two or three hours, people’s mindset changes and they think, “Okay, I’ve done enough work. Now I’d better get what I’m here for.” So, I say, “Well, if we start at the end, then we can just do more of this. We can just be in the place where there’s no gap, where nothing is missing.”

That’s the assumption that’s always there in the background: that nothing more needs to happen. We don’t have to practice. This is not about knowing anything. We can just be here in this state of completion, and we can check it if we’re complete by, for example, asking a question like, “Can I enhance this? Can I make it better?”

And make what better? No, I mean, there’s nothing here to make better. So, just checking that it’s the real, pure, non-dual state. That’s the beginning assumption, and then I go back as much as is necessary to connect with people.

It’s like going on a journey with people. Imagine going for a walk in the mountains, and you’ve got a group of people. I sort of know how to get there, where the path is, and how to do it—how to get to the peak. A lot of the work is working out what I call the gradient.

If you’re trying to go up too steeply, being too radical, you lose people. It’s just, “What is this? What is he talking about? This is impossible. I don’t get it.” But then, if the gradient is just flat, you’re wasting people’s time. You’re just engaging in stories and intellectual stuff like you were talking about.

So, Radiant Mind is just a broad program that’s pretty secular in how it’s presented. It can appeal to people of no faith and of different faiths. People can be beginners; they can be mature practitioners. It really does pick up a lot of different people, and then it just works in as refined a way as possible to produce as much resting in awareness as possible. That’s the name of the game.

Rick: There’s something paradoxical about what you just said, though, and in a way it might sound like it contradicts what we have just spent the first fifteen minutes talking about. If a person comes, let’s say, to a retreat or any situation and they are very stressed, very conditioned, kind of all keyed up, and have been through a lot—to take an extreme example, going to a prison or something—and people have led pretty hellacious lives in many cases and really seen some tough things and done some tough things, do you just say to them, “Well, this can’t be improved. This is what it is, and how can it be made any better?”

It seems to me, on the one hand, there is an element to our experience which is non-changing, however dimly we experience that, and there are degrees of clarity with which it can be experienced. So, that in and of itself can’t be enhanced or improved, but our appreciation of it, the clarity with which we experience it, and the degree to which we can embody it, know no end of possible enhancement.

Peter: Yeah, that’s how I see it. For some reason, I think that we are infinitely complex and rich, so yeah, there’s no end to the depth to which this can be embodied.

But no, that’s an important point that you’re making. You don’t present this to someone when there’s a big disconnection, a big discontinuity between where they are, because then they would invalidate this priceless state, the non-dual state.

In the type of situation that you’re describing, I would move more in the direction of, “Yes, life has been really stressful, even just a few minutes ago, and maybe in half an hour it’s going to reconstitute, it’s going to come back in that stressful way. But right now, we do have thirty minutes; we do have one day, whatever it is, together. So, let’s make the optimum opportunity of this time. Let’s really bring to ourselves—it’s like a gift to ourselves, a gift to consciousness—what’s the optimum possibility?”

Yeah, all that suffering is happening. So, what’s better: to bring in something fresh and peaceful and serene and open and spacious, or to process all that stuff, just to let all the stories come out? Or we could just start to get into, “But when this finishes, it’s going to be like…” Yeah, we could do that. But then we’re devaluing the possibility of this moment.

So, it would be introducing it like that, rather than with that more radical non-dual language.

Rick: Yeah, so it’s like if a room is really dark and maybe there are some people in the room you’re talking to, but you don’t say, “All right, let’s analyze this darkness, let’s talk about the darkness, let’s dwell in the darkness.” You say, “Oh, let’s just flick on a light,” and then all of a sudden all this darkness that was such a problem is nowhere to be found.

I think what you’re trying to say is that you do your best to point out to people that even in the midst of a difficult life, there is some still, quiet center that can be detected if you stop for a moment to detect it, and that can be cultured and strengthened in one’s experience. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s what I hear you saying.

Peter: Yeah, and I think another important point is taking stock of the fact that we will suffer in the future. At least, it’s very, very likely that we will. So, then we can sort of put that to the side, because often people come in saying, “I’m wanting to get the thing that will make it impossible to ever suffer in the future.”

To which I often say, “Oh, just forget that. Just accept that, very likely, you will.” And now, what can we do now that we’ve said, “Okay, that will probably happen”? Do I have to be suffering now? Well, no, not necessarily.

Rick: Yeah, and you can kind of get a toehold in that which is beyond suffering and hopefully strengthen your stand in that as you go along.

Peter: Exactly, yeah.

Nothing to do and nothing to know

Rick: Okay, so what would you say—that was a good introduction to your book—what would you say was the next kind of main point that comes to mind?

Peter: The main point that’s here for me is that we can’t know this, because the two—that’s probably the biggest thing. In doing the work I’m doing, often I see it as having two mountains that we either need to go through, drill through, or go around. It really doesn’t matter how you do it; we need to see that they’re not there.

They are the mountains of needing to be doing something—“What do I need to do to get there?”—and “How do I know it?” So, what we’re dissolving are those mountains. There’s nothing to know and nothing to do. In a sense, Radiant Mind is dissolving the notion of being on the path.

Rick: Okay. Go ahead, you can finish.

Peter: Well, then, when we’re not on the path, it’s not like we achieve a goal, but then there’s no more struggle; there’s no further step to take.

Rick: Okay, so nothing to do and nothing to know. Let’s pick those apart a little bit. The first one—nothing to do—how do you reconcile that with your own history as a Buddhist practitioner, during which you probably did hundreds and thousands of hours of meditation practice? Was that kind of a non-doing, and that’s how you can kind of say, “Oh yes, I did that,” but at the same time there’s nothing to do?

Peter: Well, the “nothing to do” that we’re talking about here is not like doing nothing; it’s really doing the no-thing. It’s doing this. It doesn’t mean just giving up. I mean, that’s a misinterpretation that I feel people can extract from some non-dual teachings and approaches: that you just walk away and whatever—you just do it, you’re doing nothing.

Rick: Live life, crack a beer, watch the football game. There’s nothing to do; I’m there.

Peter: Right. This doing nothing is a non-doing, but it’s doing the no-thing. It’s doing pure awareness, minute after minute, just resting here effortlessly. So, it’s a profound not-doing; it’s not the opposite of action. We could say it’s non-doing rather than not doing.

Rick: Okay, I think I’m—go ahead.

Peter: Yes. So, going back to my practice, I really wouldn’t be able to analyze it, but it does make sense to me—the Zen notion that we have to do as much as we’ve done in order to realize that we didn’t have to do that in order to be here.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: And without doing that which we didn’t need to do, we wouldn’t be here.

Rick: That’s very paradoxical, isn’t it?

Peter: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. In fact, you read that over and over again. People say that when they wake up, when they attain enlightenment, so to speak, they realize that they always were that. How could they have been anything other than that? How can reality not have been real? What is that verse in the Gita that says, “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be”? But paradoxically, as you say, we go through all these rigmaroles in order to come to that realization. I like to think of the sun-and-clouds analogy. The sun doesn’t have to do anything to shine, but if there are clouds, they might obscure the view of the sun for those who are on the other side of them. So maybe there needs to be some wind or something to blow the clouds away, and then the sun is found—oh, it’s always been shining. Analogies have their limitations, but it helps to illustrate it.

Peter: But yeah, I think in this work, that’s part of what we’re looking for in working with a more strictly non-dual or results-oriented approach. We’re just looking for the way that we create something that needs to happen before we can rest in that structure. That’s how we get on the path. The clouds need to disperse, or I need to do more practice, or I need to go back and fix this part of my life up, or I need to do whatever it is. And then, of course, we just prolong being here. We can’t be here if we think it happens in the future.

Rick: Well, I’m going to keep picking on this with you, because on the other hand, if you’re deeply conditioned and attached and bound up in things, you may be here, but there’s a lot of conditioning that’s running your life. It may be that after ten or twenty years of some sort of discipline or practice, your future, from the current perspective, ends up being a lot brighter than your present, because you’ve undergone a lot of transformation, right?

Peter: For sure, for sure. But getting into that story—contextualizing what you’re doing in the moment in that way—not saying that’s what you’re doing, because you were looking at it more retrospectively, but if that’s what we’re doing, we’re thinking, “Ah, so I do this, and it’s sort of working, and then it’s going to get even better. I’m going to get this resource that will be more solidly integrated in me.” That’s not resting in awareness. You’re in time.

So that’s again part of what I’m looking for. Are we in time, in the construction that’s in a construction, a construction that’s in time—how it’s going to be in the future? The other option is to not be in time, not be… The past is there, the future is there, as whatever we think it may be, but this is here in its purity. We can’t say what this is. There are all the labels that have been applied to it, and this is the ultimate state, because when we’re here, the great thing is we don’t need anything. That’s what it is. We’re here, and someone comes and says, “Look, Peter, what do you need?”

I don’t need anything. It just doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t compute. “Wouldn’t you like more of it?” It just doesn’t compute. “Would you like a thousand dollars?”

Rick: Sure, why not?

Peter: Here, right now.

Rick: What for?

Peter: If you leave it, if it gets left there, yes. If it doesn’t, there is no difference.

Rick: When you say non-doing, is that similar to the notion that breathing is kind of a non-doing? You don’t have to think about it; it just happens spontaneously. Are you saying that living pure awareness, or whatever you want to call it, should be so natural that it’s just being lived without our having to think about it or hold on to it or make a fuss about it? It just kind of gets to be second nature. Is that what you’re saying?

Peter: Yeah, exactly. So it is natural meditation, and it doesn’t have to have the form of meditation at all. This is natural meditation. The way to check that out is: Is there any value to be derived in this moment from meditating? No, that’s not evident. That’s not obvious to me at all. Why would I meditate in this moment?

Rick: You’re talking to me; you’d better not meditate.

Peter: Right, whatever. But there’s no need, because the fruition of meditation has happened through resting in awareness. So it’s natural meditation, or another phrase that’s used, “meditation that’s not meditation.” It’s like it’s happening without needing to do it. It just comes to us.

Rick: And yet the Buddha was said to have meditated a couple of hours a day for the rest of his life after attaining enlightenment. So if that’s true, why did he do that? Because he was already enlightened.

Peter: Yeah, but I doubt that he was sitting down and thinking, “Ah, so I’ve got to meditate now.”

Rick: He may have done a sitting meditation of some kind. He may have just sat.

Peter: But he may not have been able to do that. It’s not as though we’ve become totally unconditioned and don’t need to eat, dress, and do whatever else. People who’ve been meditating a lot, in some form, connect with the non-dual, but they still sit a lot.

Rick: Because it’s like a habit.

Peter: Yeah, they’re used to doing it, to just being sort of pretty immobile and watching awareness, watching the mind. But it’s not something that’s being done to produce a particular or anticipated goal.

Rick: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. People who know me well are probably thinking at this point, “Oh yeah, Rick is just sort of arguing his particular obsession, which is that he’s been meditating for a long, long time and he’s kind of defending the fact that he still does this practice.” And I would admit to that in a way.

But I also have to be true to my own experience, which differs a little bit from what you’re saying, in that I do find that every time I meditate, I derive very profound benefit from it. It’s refreshing, enlivening, and over the years it continues to sort of take me deeper, so to speak, into the very same thing that I’m already experiencing, but there’s greater depth and clarity that seems to continue to unfold.

Peter: Yeah, for sure, because earlier I was talking about creating the optimal opportunity in the moment. That includes creating the optimal conditions. So a retreat environment is an attempt to create great conditions for accessing the non-dual. A component of that is meditation, like at home or in a retreat environment, in which you’re effectively sitting down and saying, “Okay, so this time is for something different. This is not for just getting engaged in all the projects. This is not for thinking and planning what I’ll be doing for the rest of the day or next month. I’m sitting down because this is an opportunity for awareness.”

“All right, so that’s the opportunity here. Yeah, okay, so what is that? And also, the other opportunity, of course, is: Who’s meditating? All right, so I’ve done this thing. I’m here. Who is here? Presence in what?”

So, for sure, meditation has been shown to be one of the structures that lends itself to really supporting access to awareness.

Rick: Yeah, and like I think you said earlier, if done in a certain way, it’s sort of a natural thing, like eating or sleeping or drinking water, or the various things we need to do. It can become that kind of integral to one’s life. I’m not trying to argue it as a universal practice necessarily. Other people might find other things more useful. I’m just sort of playing with you here on this first thing you said.

You said two things: “nothing to do” and “nothing to know.” About this “nothing to do” point, just about every spiritual tradition in the world has all kinds of things one can do to apparently progress, become more pure, become more clear, whatever they offer. So it can be confusing for people when they juxtapose a statement like “there’s nothing to do” with traditions with which they may be familiar.

Peter: So we should really change the phrase. I should have introduced it differently and spoken about “doing nothing,” perhaps, rather than “nothing to do.” How do we do nothing—the no-thing? How do we do contentlessness? How do we do selflessness? How do we do atmavidya? How do we do beyond the personal self?

One of the best ways to do it is: here, you sit down. Already, we’re meditating. We sit down and think, “Okay, so how do I do that? Where is the soul? How do I…” We just pick a word, whatever it is. “Consciousness itself, centerlessness—what is that? Where is that? Who is doing this? Doing what?”

Those pointers happen much more easily, obviously, in that container of what we would call meditation, because from the outside that’s what it looks like. People can come to a workshop, and I’ll sometimes point out, “So, are you meditating?”

“No, no, no, we’re not meditating.” But then I just note that if someone from the outside were to open the door—because there’s a lot of silence in my retreats, people just resting, eyes open, eyes closed—they would say, “Ah, they’re meditating. This is a meditation retreat, a meditation class.”

Rick: Yeah, there’s that old saying, “It takes a thorn to remove a thorn.” I guess you could consider meditation in some of its forms to be a doing that takes you out of doing. It’s a reduction of doing, doing less and less, and yet you’re still doing something as you retreat from doing.

It’s kind of like if a person is standing in the middle of a great big mud puddle and they want to know how to get out of the mud puddle, and somebody at the edge of the puddle says, “Well, take a step.” He might say, “Well, yeah, but you’re asking me to put my foot in the mud again.” “Yeah, but just take a step, and then take another step.” At a certain point, you’re out of the puddle.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. Then the important point is to be aware of the way a practice can be doing what you’re saying—undoing the conditioning, moving us through to awareness—or the way that a practice can be conditioning us, which is not the intention of a practice.

A practice isn’t intended to just embed a need, a necessity, to forever do that practice. It’s meant to release us, to bring Nirvana, Moksha.

✨ Not knowing awareness

Rick: Yep, good. So the other part of it that you said is not knowing. You hear that a fair amount, and yet there are all kinds of scriptures one can read, and you can learn all kinds of things. So-called enlightened people seem very wise and sometimes very articulate, and they say profound things. It seems like they know a lot.

So play with that. What are you saying when you mean “not knowing”?

Peter: What I mean in saying “not knowing” is pointing out that this awareness isn’t an object of knowledge, so we can’t know this. It’s no more complicated than that.

Rick: Yeah. Could you say it knows itself in some way, or is that even too dualistic to say?

Peter: Well, what I do at this point, when I hear you or someone say something like that—“Can this know itself? Can awareness know itself?”—I just look at what my mind does with that. That’s the only really significant thing. If my mind starts to do something with that, then it’s not that the phrase isn’t doing what I think it’s intended to do, which is to take me beyond the mind. In fact, it’s giving me something to think about: “This can know itself. Is this the same thing? How does it know itself?”

As a philosopher, I could get quite involved. I know that you can—in fact, there are whole schools built on the fact that awareness is self-knowing, and others refute that. It can become a big thing. I’m just looking for how we disengage the mind so that we can presence this. I try to keep it as simple as possible.

Rick: Yeah. Speaking in terms of our own experience, I think we both have some experiential familiarity with what we’re discussing here, but it’s not like something we know the way I know what my ring is made of, or I know some mathematical formula, or I know my wife’s name, or something. It’s not a subject-object relationship kind of thing.

Would you say that it’s the knower, radiant awareness, and that the knower can know this, that, or the other thing, but to know itself, what does it have to do?

Peter: Yeah, it’s the knower that can’t be found.

Rick: Because it can’t step apart from itself and say, “Oh, here I am over here,” because then it wouldn’t be.

Peter: Because then the subject is being objectified. So we’re continuing to look for the ground of subjectivity, like where the knowing is coming from, who the knower is. If we know anything about that, that’s no longer the knower.

Radiant mind and non-duality

Rick: There’s something that actually relates to both these points—the doing and the knowing—and it’s reflected in a question that someone named Elizabeth sent in. She said, “Is what you call radiant mind equivalent to Sahaj samadhi?”

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with all those samadhi terms, and I’m not either. There are all these different flavors of samadhi, but if we think of what we’re talking about, ordinarily the mind is agitated, to a certain extent, and the attention is directed outwards. What we’re talking about here is a kind of settling down.

Are you familiar with the Yoga Sutras? The second verse in the Yoga Sutras says that yoga is the cessation of fluctuations of the mind. Yoga is Chitta Vritti Nirodha, and then the seer rests in the self, or the knower rests in itself. That’s what we’re describing here.

How would you describe what you’re saying in terms of some of those more traditional Hindu terms? I know you had a Buddhist background, but in terms of some of those traditional terms—I guess Buddhists have the same things. They talk about samadhi and so on, don’t they?

Peter: Sure, sure, sure. Radiant mind is just one phrase to talk about the co-arising of the conditioned and the unconditioned; the co-arising of awareness and the contents of awareness; the co-arising inseparability of emptiness and appearances, emptiness and form, which is the Sahaj state.

It’s not emptiness as a state that’s disconnected from conditioned reality. It’s this weird recognition that this is unconditioned and really totally inseparable from all of these conditions—the shapes, the forms, the sounds, this infinitely complex matrix that can be subdivided probably in so many ways—and that this awareness that has no content can’t be differentiated.

It’s impossible. In some ways, it shouldn’t be like this. This should be impossible, what’s happening right now, but it isn’t. Just the way that awareness that has no content can interface—that’s not even the right word, because there’s no interface—but that it can interface with the contents of awareness, I’m never going to have an answer for that.

For me, in Buddhism, that’s an unanswerable question. It’s not formally one of the unanswerable questions, but it is unanswerable.

Rick: It’s a beautiful point, actually—the mystery of awareness being able to interact or interface with stuff. The way I understand it is that the stuff with which awareness appears to be interacting or interfacing is actually also awareness. So awareness is interacting with itself, and through the process of doing that, it gives rise to the apparent diversity of subject-object relationships, forms, and phenomena.

Even from the standpoint of contemporary physics, at least as some physicists understand it, if you analyze anything deeply enough, you get right down to that bedrock of the non-dual state. That thing which appears to be a thing is nothing other than that non-dual state. So it’s a fascinating thing to consider.

If the non-dual state is the ultimate reality, then can there actually be—there can be subsidiary realities, we can say, all the forces and fields and matter, and so on, that comprise the universe—but what are they essentially other than that non-dual state having somehow gotten excited or perturbed?

But look at it more closely, and it never did get excited or perturbed. There are saints like Ramana Maharshi and others who say nothing ever happened, actually; it just appears to have happened. The string was never a snake. It was just mistaken to be one.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. I, uh—

Rick: Well, let me throw a question at you, because I left you stumped there.

Peter: I don’t have—nothing’s happening.

Rick: One thing I find interesting is that you define yourself as a non-dual psychotherapist, or you have a non-dual approach to psychotherapy. Is non-dual—and I’m not very familiar with the Buddhist tradition—is non-duality really a lively term in Buddhist thinking, or are you a hybrid between the Buddhist tradition and Advaita? Is that why you use the term non-dual a lot?

Peter: I really appreciate the question, because many people don’t realize how thoroughly the term non-duality is used in Mahayana Buddhism in particular. It’s used again and again in anything that is coming out of what’s called the Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom tradition—Zen, Dzogchen, Madhyamika, Mahamudra, all of the central texts.

You can go to any glossary and you’ll find “non-duality.” So it is an integral part of those traditions, and a non-duality that is essentially the same as the non-duality in which you find the language of contradiction—“neither this nor that”—the language that you find in Advaita.

The interesting thing is that, probably closest just in terms of language, is Gaudapada from Advaita, whom some people thought was a crypto-Buddhist. But no, it’s embedded in Buddhism.

You also have the notion of upaya, skillful methods—this great diversity of methods all leading to the non-dual state. So that’s, in a way, what has supported this diffusion of methods and diffusion of different non-dual approaches.

Rick: Okay, yeah. I would hope that non-duality would be there as much in Buddhism as anywhere, because obviously I’m of a mind that if you got together the founders of all these great traditions—Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad—and put them in a room together, they would all describe a common experience that they had, just spoken about in different languages and different cultures.

There’s really—what is it?—the Incredible String Band saying, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.”

Peter: Yeah. Going back to what we were saying about meditation, I think there’s a certain point at which we’re just taken through into the non-dual.

For a while, it’s efforting and mindfulness, or just observing what is awareness, like deconstructive inquiry, unfindability, self-inquiry, pointing out whatever it is. It seems to require something from outside, but then, when you really are close to awareness, it just draws us in. Then you get that natural release and that deconstruction, the dissolving of thoughts, and just the play of awareness.

Rick: Yeah, that point about it drawing us in is nice. We started talking about bliss in the very beginning, right? It would seem that the mind would naturally be drawn toward bliss if given the opportunity.

If you and I are talking like this and then some beautiful music started to play over here, our attention would just be attracted to it, because the mind has this natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness.

It seems almost perplexing, in a way, that all these traditions speak of the blissful nature of reality—Sat-Chit-Ananda, the bliss of the self, and all that stuff—and yet we are kind of estranged from it. It would seem that we would just sort of sink like a stone into that bliss.

Peter: And yet, given conducive opportunities and elegant instructions—elegant ways of doing it—that is what happens. People just see the opportunity, and you can feel them go into these real samadhi states that are so nourishing, because they’re just giving our nervous system a different message.

They’re giving our nervous system the message that, yes, we are capable of generating great bliss—mahasukha—within ourselves as a function of consciousness and our nervous system.

Rick: Yeah. Speaking neurobiologically and neurochemically, I’m sure you’ve heard of neuroplasticity, where the brain can actually be sculpted through experiences like that, and all the various chemicals that one could hope to take as a drug in order to elicit some kind of response. Our own body manufactures those if we learn how to, and can manufacture them in greater abundance if we know how to use that instrument.

Someone asked here—Elizabeth again. I have a bunch of questions from her, and maybe others will be sending in some questions—but let’s try to nail down a definition of enlightenment.

Her question is: “Is enlightenment really anything other than resting as awareness—that is, in the innermost nature of mind—with stability?” Would that be a good working definition of enlightenment?

Peter: See, when you’re asking someone who’s versed in the Buddhist tradition, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, what enlightenment is, you’re going to get a different answer than if you ask someone in, let’s say, the Advaita tradition, Sufism, Taoism, or whatever other non-dual traditions, because a distinction is made between enlightenment and nirvana, enlightenment and personal freedom.

Rick: What’s the difference?

Peter: The difference is, personal freedom is sometimes called realizing the profound, which is the profound empty nature of mind. It’s really what I am offering in Radiant Mind, and what I guess I would say is a path that I feel that, in a lifetime, you can do something with it. You can get somewhere with it.

It’s accessing, becoming more and more—firstly recognizing and then becoming more familiar with—awareness, centerlessness, pure awareness. So that’s reaching a state in which it’s like this mind stream, who I am, who I connect myself with being, that I have reached a state of fulfillment, contentment, that there’s nowhere further to go.

It’s like the work’s done. This is it, in this moment at least. We can regress from that and think we’ve lost it and so on, but in this moment it’s complete.

Enlightenment is this—what you referred to, I think, at least how I understood what you’re saying—it’s the possibility that we are infinite in some way at the conditioned level. I’m not just like a skin-encapsulated body with a pretty small mind that can become liberated, but in some way I am infinitely complex and the awareness can be deepened.

It’s so out there. Enlightenment, relative to moksha or nirvana, is so out there. It’s like the macrocosm and the microcosm becoming one. It’s more like it’s becoming divine.

Enlightenment is part of Tantra, for example, and the practice of deity yoga. So, in contrast to the profound, it’s called the extensive or the expansive. So, it has this notion of expansion, to include or infuse—somehow we become the consciousness that infuses the universe.

That would probably be the best, and perhaps the only, way I can describe it at the moment, without it starting to sound like Buddhist theology or something.

Rick: And maybe we’re extrapolating beyond our direct experience, but I suppose it’s good to define our terms so that we’re on the same page in terms of what we’re talking about. I would have thought that in Buddhism, enlightenment is just the English word for moksha or nirvana, but what you seem to be saying is that those are, in a way, more preliminary or fundamental, and that enlightenment is kind of even more glorious or profound or expansive or something than those.

Peter: Yeah, that’s how it’s understood. It’s like the first thing you get under your belt is moksha, nirvana, because then how can you become a cosmic contribution to others, to the universe? First, you’ve got to get your own liberation handled.

So, you sort of go to preliminary school and get that out of the way, and then you go for this deepening through your own internal structure, and then this cosmic vision in which the subject-object isn’t playing out. You’re not just a unique body-mind, but somehow connected with the cosmos.

Rick: Okay, so based on what you’ve just said, let me just summarize it to see if I understand it. What you’re saying is that moksha, nirvana, would be sort of a realization of oneself as pure awareness and resting in that state of pure awareness, but not necessarily an appreciation of that pure awareness permeating the entire universe or containing the entire universe within it.

But enlightenment would be that with the latter—that there’s a much greater wholeness which kind of subsumes both relative and absolute within its…

Peter: Yeah, I appreciate the way that you’re describing it.

Rick: Okay, great. Another question from Elizabeth. Elizabeth is conducting this interview. Well, we’ve kind of covered this one. Let me know if there’s anything more you want to say about it. She said, “What is the role of various sadhanas in relation to simply resting in and as the nature of mind?”

And I think you may have done it pretty well in terms of one can do all sorts of things to eventually arrive at the realization that one isn’t doing, or doesn’t need to, or doesn’t need to have done anything, but is there any more you’d like to say on that?

Peter: Just that, yeah, you’d like to pick a sadhana that at some point has you asking the question, “Who’s doing this?” That would be good.

Rick: Not one that you’re just going to kind of grind away at endlessly.

Peter: Right, right.

✨ Awareness and psychological health

Rick: Okay, good. This is an interesting question. Is something like confidence necessary in order to rest as awareness? And is this confidence emotional—in other words, a sense of being capable, worthy, deserving—or is it cognitive, based upon just a clear understanding of our true nature being nothing other than pure awareness?

I guess I would just add to that question: does one need to sort of be emotionally healthy, mature, or integrated, as well as mentally capable and clear, in order to rest as pure awareness? Or can one be flawed in one or another of these dimensions and yet still rest as pure awareness?

Peter: Sure. I think we see that again and again, that there are no preconditions. So, you can have someone who looks really healthy. You could put them directly to psychometric testing and they come out as a really healthy individual who lives life well, and they’re responsible and confident and so on.

It doesn’t necessarily give them a basis for letting go of self-identity, letting go of everything and being no one, going nowhere, and being awareness.

And you can have someone who’s like, the whole thing’s a bit shaky—who I am and what’s what, and life doesn’t look particularly together—and who has a history of even some psychological imbalance or disturbance, for whom that person has ready access to this.

So that’s possible because there are no preconditions. Certainly, going back to India and Tibet, you didn’t have to be mentally integrated. There were pretty weird and wild and wonderful women and men who were often the virtuosos in nondual practice.

Then the other question is, though, from a teaching point of view: whom do you offer this perspective to? For me, the important point in this is that you don’t—two things. It’s important not to make this attractive, to look attractive. It’s important not to package awareness as something that people should have, that they need, that if they have this then they will have everything they want.

Because then that brings people in on the basis of deficiency, on the basis of need, and that’s a tricky, tricky business.

Rick: Well, I can—

Peter: Oh, go ahead.

Rick: Well, I can see how you don’t want to package it in such a way as to suggest that if you have awareness, you’re going to get the Mercedes and the flashy girlfriend and all that kind of stuff.

But speaking of sort of emotional and psychological abnormalities, isn’t the world, the condition of the world, a kind of display of collective psychological problems on a mass scale? And I’ve kind of always thought of spiritual development as not only getting established in pure awareness, but also kind of getting all your loose screws tightened and getting all the blind spots, shadow stuff, and the psychological twists and turns that might be disrupting your personal life resolved and healed in the process of your spiritual development.

And if enough people were to do that, we might see that effect on societal scales.

Peter: Yeah, for sure. In the long term, if someone has an initial recognition and wants to take this to heart, take the nondual to heart, and work with it and develop it, yeah, it does require healing your mind. It requires working with your mind, perhaps at a psychological level, but just in terms of how you’re interacting with people, so you’re not creating one drama, one trauma, one breakdown after another, which just throws you further into the conditions, further into samsara, and doesn’t let you engage with the practice—the simplicity of just, “What is this? This is awareness, and this is what we’re doing,” just sitting here in this really uncontrived, settled way.

Rick: Yeah, and we might ask if getting established in your own nature—pure awareness, settled awareness, whatever we want to call it—does not result in you being a better person in some way. If it’s just sort of marinating in my own inner bliss and then I come out and act like a jerk, what good is it?

I mean, it seems to me that I’ve seen people get very self-indulgent in pursuing spiritual development and actually become less nice as people than the average person, rather than “more nice,” and that’s sometimes a head-scratcher.

Peter: Right. But I’m not sure that the states that you’re talking about are the state of pure awareness, centerlessness—the state that is really embracing, the state that, in a way, compels us to deal with whatever’s arising, the state that doesn’t let us retreat from engagement, doesn’t let us retreat from complexity.

Awareness is the state where there’s no escape. Whatever’s arising, it’s there and has to be worked with and dealt with in whatever way it is. There’s no power or energy within awareness that lets us avoid anything.

Rick: Good, yeah. So, you’re the psychologist, which is why I’m asking you these questions. Are you saying that awareness is like light, in a way, that it kind of begins to illuminate stuff that might have been hidden from us?

Or, to use another metaphor, it’s like a solvent that begins to dissolve stuff that’s been embedded, and that if awareness is developed, then the dark corners of our minds and emotions, or the tight knots of constriction that might be hidden to us, begin to resolve, and life begins to flow more smoothly because we’re not carrying around this hidden baggage?

Peter: What happens as we become more familiar with awareness, as awareness infuses our being more comprehensively, is that we become aware of our conditioning in a more subtle way. We become aware of how we’re conditioning things moment by moment.

So, in relationships and in conversations, there’s just more acuity, more sensitivity. We say a sentence, and we sense the impact of that. In Radiant Mind, I talk about working in a way that we are ongoingly complete, so that we’re not creating incompletions.

So, we’re being in the world in a way that we’re taking care of what has to be taken care of in the moment, in the here and now. Then, in the next moment, we have more possibility, more opportunity of being in that moment, because we don’t have to go back and do repair work because we were rough and unskillful in communication, in an engagement that we had.

Rick: Well, that’s a good point. There’s a verse in the Gita that says, “Yoga is skill in action”—yoga karmasu kaushalam. And you think of what Christ said when they were crucifying him. He said, “Forgive them, Father; they know not what they do.”

If a person were spiritually aware and, as you say, sensitive and attuned, they wouldn’t be able to do a thing like that. So, it would seem that kindness is an outcome of greater spiritual attunement.

Peter: Kindness.

Rick: Compassion, all those good things.

Peter: Yeah, and just in relationships, not being manipulative, being able to have a greater intimacy in relationships because we’re not trying to manipulate people. There’s nothing from our side that we’re trying or needing to defend, so we can really let people enter us and interact with us.

Rick: I wanted to dwell on that a little bit, because sometimes, even in this conversation we’ve been having, it’s suggested that spiritual development is intrinsically useful in terms of the subjective experience one has, but it doesn’t necessarily have practical implications or applications to one’s behavior in daily life. I don’t agree with that, and I think you’ve articulated nicely how it does have practical implications in terms of being less of a schmuck and, ideally, possibly an even saintly person as time goes on.

Now, related to this a little bit, we’ve been talking about emotions and treating people more kindly, and that being an outcome of being more sensitively attuned to awareness. A more superlative degree of this sort of thing would be devotion. Elizabeth asks, what is the role of devotion in relation to resting as awareness?

Peter: I’m just looking at it now. What I enjoy doing is taking a word, hearing a word like devotion, and just seeing where I can go with that—taking a word like centerlessness, a word like source, Christ consciousness, whatever it would be—and just seeing where I go, what journey I can take, how I can move with that.

Devotion has something very sweet. Is there something that I can do with that personally? It’s not like there’s a right answer to any of these things. I think that we have to bring a great deal of responsibility to how we work with different concepts.

Something like devotion, if we can do something very sweet and very simple with it—perhaps being identified with someone or something, a source of energy, a saint, or a teaching, and having devotion to it—that’s great. But also, just realizing that the devotion here is devotion to the totality. I can see devotion working with a lot of what we’ve been saying, which is this notion of taking care of the totality of our existence so that we can do what we’re doing now.

Even though what we’re doing now is unconditioned, it is a product of all the things that we’ve done and the care that we’ve taken, and the devotion and commitment that we’ve had to teachings, to the path, and to other people. So, I see devotion in a more holistic way that can work.

Rick: Have you ever been in a relationship with a teacher, let’s say, and experienced real waves of love and devotion? Devotion is a better word than just love because of its purity and the heights to which it can soar.

Peter: I have.

Rick: It’s a sweet thing, and I have, too. Sometimes there’s a sort of dryness to the way spiritual teachings are presented, but if you look into the heart of them a little more, you usually find that these teachers whom we revere—Ramana and Nisargadatta and all that—really had their devotional dimension. They themselves lauded that as something really precious and sweet, not to be missed.

Peter: Absolutely.

Mind streams and reincarnation

Rick: Here’s an interesting question. This is a little philosophical, I think, another one from Elizabeth. Some people say that, since there really is no person essentially at the core of who we are, and we’re really just pure awareness, reincarnation doesn’t make sense because that would imply a person who somehow reincarnates from body to body.

Elizabeth asks, “What is a mind stream, and what is it that reincarnates from one day to the next, one lifetime to the next, one moment to the next? How, if at all, is reincarnation consistent with a nondual view?”

Peter: The question comes down to how we exist from one day to the next, from one second to the next. It’s not a question of the possibility of there being a continuity from one life to another. If there’s no self, how is it that I wake up thinking I’m the same self today as this person whom I remember waking up as yesterday, in the same environment and the same body?

I don’t really have an answer for it. There are a lot of things that I’ve thought about, taught, written about, and studied, but a stream of consciousness is what a person is. It’s just a body-mind, the conditioning of which is contained—sort of causally contained—in a particular way. You don’t need a self for that to be coherent, for that to function coherently, for it to function and have continuity over time.

The question of reincarnation is a little bit different because it assumes something more—what would you say?—mentalist. It assumes that the universe may not be as solid as we think it is.

Rick: In a way, I’m asking you all kinds of metaphysical questions, and it’s not really fair because we’ve been talking from the beginning about being true to our own experience. I’m hitting you with all this stuff that no one can really answer for sure, so I apologize for that.

I want to make sure to keep it real here. Elizabeth is asking some interesting questions, but I want to make sure that we don’t miss the opportunity for you to talk about things that are really dear to your heart and that you consider really important for people to hear.

So, if I don’t bring up some question and you feel, “I wish he’d ask me this,” feel free to throw it out there and start talking about something, okay?

Peter: Okay, thank you.

The natural state

Rick: Is there anything like that that’s important to you that we’ve totally ignored?

Peter: I think we haven’t been ignoring it; we’ve been touching on it. I think that’s just the ease of what we’re talking about, that it is effortless, and that it’s—I love the idea of the natural state, just the words “natural state,” because it works for me at two levels.

We have our natural state at the unconditioned level, in which our natural state is awareness. Everyone who realizes their natural state has awareness. It’s the same realization, and I find it beautiful to think that the saints of the past—Sufism, Advaita, Taoism, Buddhism—when they were resting in awareness, we know what was happening. We know where they were.

For me, being able to draw on the lineage in that way—not just the Buddhist lineage, but the nondual lineage—and to feel, “Wow, we are participating in this lineage that’s been represented so comprehensively, and there have historically been hundreds of thousands of people who have been masters and virtuosos, who lived their lives in this state,” is really inspiring.

For many people in the West, it’s new. What is it? But it’s something that is part of our historical heritage to draw on.

Then there’s also realizing that there is no work, that this is the utmost in simplicity. When you’ve got nothing to give your mind to think about, that’s a beautiful gift for however long we do it: nothing to work out, nothing to think about, nothing to process. Just a break from the whole thing, just to say, “Yes.”

Then realizing that there’s nothing to do—no work, doing nothing, doing no-thing—and realizing that it is the ultimate medicine, as it’s spoken about in Buddhism. The Buddha was the preeminent doctor, teaching the ultimate medicine.

The words that we use are just not important: emptiness, self-knowledge, sahaja samadhi. The word that I really go for is the one that’s often used in

Buddhism: “tathata,” just this. It keeps it simple.

Rick: In your own experience, was resting in the natural state something that just sort of grew imperceptibly, like the sun rising very slowly—it just starts to get a little bit light, and a little bit lighter, and a little bit lighter? Or was there some kind of dramatic shift at some point when you said, “Aha!” and then never went back after that?

Peter: Certainly the former. Things grew and developed incrementally over the years, and then that was punctuated by—

Rick: Milestones.

Peter: Yes, something that I would say was a particular time and place, a particular insight or realization, something happening where I thought, “Oh, wow, that was pretty—yeah, that was important. That was a significant milestone.”

But those things, of course, can take you all the way through, just as we can come all the way through now to presencing awareness, but still regress from that, still have things close up, and still feel contracted. So, no, I haven’t had states that have taken me all the way through and then stabilized beyond that. I think I was trying to clarify that at the beginning.

Rick: Do you feel that, for you, the degree to which you rest in the natural state oscillates—sometimes much more so, sometimes less so?

Peter: Yeah.

Rick: So, when you feel more constricted, or like you’ve lost the natural state to some extent, what do you do to regain it?

Peter: The best thing is to engage in a conversation about it. That can be a conversation with myself, with other people, with students, or with peers.

Writing is great because, when I write, I want to write from this. That’s a great way to come back here. I can read something that I’ve written that comes from this state, and then it takes me back into it. So, that would be the way: conversations that are deconstructive, conversations designed to take us beyond the mind and bring us back here.

Rick: Is this conversation doing it?

Peter: Yeah, definitely. Thank you very much.

Rick: When you’re resting in your natural state most clearly, most profoundly, most deeply, how would you describe that experience?

Peter: I think it has the two components I was describing. Our natural state is awareness. The other component is that the natural state can be talking about our conditioned state as well.

In other words, just being natural—not feeling contrived, not feeling artificial, not trying to prove anything, not trying to avoid anything, not trying to be someone different from how we are, and not deploying energy trying to be someone different from how we are.

So, it’s natural at the conditioned level: just being who I am, and the effortlessness that’s involved in that, and the naturalness. In fact, we have to discover ourselves in that way to also allow for the recognition of our natural state in this more profound way.

Otherwise, we’re just involved in the management of our identity: How are people thinking of me? What do I need to do? We can get so preoccupied with all of that stuff.

Rick: It strikes me that a good synonym for “natural,” the way you’re describing it, would be “simple.” Christ said, “Except you be as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” We think of children as simple and innocent, the opposite of all the contriving and complexity and everything that people get caught up in. “Innocent”—that’s another good synonym.

Peter: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Childlike, almost.

Peter: Yeah.

Rick: Wise as serpents, gentle as doves. You see that more vividly in certain saints, like Ramana, just sitting there with this look of complete innocence on his face, gentleness, and naturalness. Contrast him, perhaps, with someone in the commodities trading pit at the Chicago Stock Exchange, and it gives you a good illustration of what the natural state looks like.

Peter: Yeah.

Embodiment and daily life

Rick: One thing that people are talking a lot about these days is embodiment. There seems to be a trend in contemporary spirituality where a lot of people have had some sort of non-dual realization or recognition of their natural state, of their true nature, but it was not really integrated with their experience as a human being who has relationships, financial challenges, and all kinds of things like that. So, a lot of people these days are talking about embodiment and somehow integrating self-realization, or whatever you want to call it, into real life. Do you have any comments on that?

Peter: Well, I think if we’re doing it in the way that we’re doing it now, let’s just say a little bit like in the Radiant Mind way, embodiment is happening because this is not something that’s happening separately from everything else in our life. You’re in your environment, I’m in my environment—our familiar environments, books, this and that, things that signify different projects, the kitchen, and all of that, what have you. So, the integration happens through presencing the non-dual in our regular daily environment and activity.

So, in a program like Radiant Mind running over nine months, a lot of it is happening end on end with what’s happening in people’s lives. A lot of the work happens through video conferencing and teleconferencing, so people might have just come out of a difficult conversation with their partner or come back from work stressed out, and then a few minutes later they’re on the phone, presencing awareness and making the journey, but still with an awareness of the context of their lives.

So, the integration is happening by being. There’s no segmentation happening. You don’t have to segment yourself and compartmentalize yourself in a particular way to be here. For me, this is how embodiment happens. You can’t take awareness and shove it into your body or push it into relationships. It comes through being open, not being closed. As I said, when we’re aware—I mean real awareness—we can’t close down anyway. We’re compelled to be open.

So, I think what’s happening is that the emphasis on embodiment is describing an integrated practice of awareness, basically. It’s describing what more and more people are looking for in the

West: an integrated practice, not one where you head off to India, Nepal, the Himalayas, or wherever and hang out there for a few months doing a retreat.

Which is great. I think that is really excellent, and I think that’s integrated too. I don’t see that as being unintegrated. There, you’re integrating with things that wouldn’t come up if you weren’t sitting with yourself for a few months. Overall, I think it’s great what everyone is doing. I just think it’s really wonderful. I don’t find myself being critical and thinking, “That’s not so good; they should be doing this.” I think there’s just so much energy, application, and interest that we find these days in spirituality and non-dual Buddhism. It’s all wonderful.

Rick: Well, I agree. I wasn’t criticizing those people who were talking about embodiment. I think it’s long overdue. There was too much disembodied talk going on for a while, and that could only last so long because life smacks you in the face. In your case, you were like a celibate monk in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions for nine years. Were you in monasteries over there in Tibet or something?

Peter: No, in India, but more in Australia.

Rick: And then was there a bit of a reintegration period that was a little difficult for you after those nine years?

Peter: The transition was very difficult. That took about a year. It was a transition from a system that, in a profound way, had supported me—really supported me. So, I was really indebted to what I received from it. That wasn’t simple, but it seemed necessary. It seemed it was going to be pulled apart anyway, in part perhaps in order to do what I’ve been doing in the last couple of decades in terms of discovering and then offering something that’s more secular, not overtly Buddhist-based, and has a wider spread to it.

Happiness, suffering, and appreciation

Rick: So, you had a preparatory phase, and then you had to come out in the world and do your thing. Someone named Doug sent in a question just now. He said, “How does happiness relate to resting in awareness?” This is the second part of the question. He said, “Sometimes meditators appear to be more paranoid and have higher anxiety than the rest of the populace.” Why is that? I would say that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t, but I see his point. Why would that be, do you think?

Peter: Yeah, well, I don’t see that.

Rick: You don’t?

Peter: Maybe meditators can get a little bit nervous if they’re holding on to their meditative state. If they’re wanting to hold on to it, then it can easily feel threatened, sure.

Rick: I guess the way I’d phrase it is that sometimes it seems that people who are really into spiritual stuff are kind of obsessive, idiosyncratic, and nutty sometimes. I’ve often wondered: Are nutty people attracted to spirituality, or does spirituality make you nutty? And yet that’s not a total generalization, because there are all kinds of wonderful, bright, clear people. But it does seem—or maybe it’s just the cross-section of the general population, and you’d find that anywhere, spiritual or non-spiritual.

Peter: Yeah, I don’t have enough experience to know. I don’t know what to say.

Rick: Well, “I don’t know” is a perfectly good answer.

Peter: Okay. The first part, the happiness: All I’ve really got to say there is that, obviously, the non-dual is different from feeling happy, because happiness is something that comes and goes. It’s a conditioned state, and I think it’s great. Happy is being healthy; the more happiness we have, the better. But it’s not the final goal or final objective, and if it becomes the final objective, it begins to produce suffering. We become attached to it and then suffer when we lose it.

Rick: Well, it also sort of depends on what we mean by happiness, doesn’t it? There’s relative, transitory happiness that’s based upon the condition of our physiology or what we’re experiencing, and then there’s that ground of awareness we’ve been talking about, which is said to be intrinsically blissful.

But this is worth dwelling on for a second. It may be intrinsically blissful, but who experiences that bliss other than a being such as ourselves? It seems that our capacity to experience is always going to be somewhat vulnerable and fluctuating. When Ramana was screaming in pain as he was dying of cancer, was he experiencing bliss underneath that pain? When people said to him, “Oh, we’re so sorry that you’re suffering like this,” he would say, “I’m not suffering.”

So, perhaps it is possible to achieve a state in which, despite outward appearances to the contrary, one resides in a field that is untouched by relative pain and pleasure and so on—just establishing an equanimity regardless of whether you’re burning in a fire or getting a nice oil massage.

Peter: Yeah. Well, I think that’s what we are discovering for ourselves, that possibility. Occasionally, we can break through to that, finding that something intensely painful can become transformed—does become transformed, perhaps just for a few seconds—into something that’s blissful. But then quickly, like a rubber band, it just snaps back into an experience of pain.

For me, the most important thing is being really appreciative of what we already have and not racing ahead too quickly into how things might be, but really appreciating that we have the recognition of awareness—the most profound recognition that’s possible for any human being. So, that’s happened. That is incredible and marvelous. It is rare; it doesn’t happen to everyone.

That recognition has happened. We’ve got the marker. We know what it is, without any doubt or dispute, and it has become an integral part of our lives. We’re living our lives in order to develop and grow this. So, there’s nothing more to do. That’s what we’re doing, as much as can be done. If we were trying harder, we’d be doing something else. It wouldn’t be this. It would be being caught by our desires, our need to suffer less, or whatever.

So, really appreciating what we have already accomplished—and having someone mention confidence, Elizabeth—the confidence is there. It’s great when you arrive at the point where you know that you can be confident that you can’t let go of this, that this has got you and it’s going to be with you at least for the rest of this life. It’s not just something that we’ve picked up, looked at, and played around with a little bit and said, “That was fun and that was interesting, but we’ll move on to something else.” No, we’ve gone beyond that, and that’s a really wonderful state to have achieved.

The most important thing is being really appreciative of what we already have.

🕊️ Service and the wisdom tradition

Rick: Yeah, you used the word “rare” a minute ago. It has been relatively rare. Given the eight billion people in the world, what percentage of people are having the kind of experience we’re talking about? But I do find it kind of inspiring and hopeful that it seems to be becoming more commonplace. Whereas 2,000 years ago you had to be a spiritual superman to have the kind of breakthrough that these days people are having all over the place, there seems to be some kind of popcorn effect going on, some kind of epidemic effect, that I think bodes well for the future of humanity, hopefully.

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And it’s great that people like you are playing their part and helping to bring that about.

Peter: It is wonderful that you are profiling so many people and doing what you’re doing. You’re bringing sophistication to the conversation in your sessions. I really appreciate that sophistication. You’re right at the edge of where the conversation is and needs to be, and you’re able to profile so many people who are sharing awareness and sharing their experience of it. That is a testament to what you’re saying.

Rick: Well, I really enjoy doing it. I realize that there are a lot of people out there whom I would love to talk to, who deserve to be on this show, and whom people would like to get exposed to. I just do as many as possible, which so far is one a week. I hope to eventually increase the frequency, but I still have somewhat of a day job and other things going on.

For me, this has been a lifelong interest—not just a curiosity, but really a passion. I’ve devoted literally hours a day to focused application of this interest, and it’s been very fulfilling for me. It’s brought me from being a very unhappy, confused, mixed-up kid to a pretty happy guy.

And I use the word “happiness” somewhat tritely, but it’s a lot more than that, obviously. So, it’s an honor to be able to have conversations with people like you and all the people I talk to every week. It’s a real joy for me.

It’s also a joy to be able to think that, in our own ways, each of us is kind of a tool of the divine. I like to think of it that way. You know that beautiful prayer by Saint Francis:

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”

And it goes on to say, “Where there is sadness, let me sow happiness,” or whatever—however the poem goes. I’ve always wanted to embody that sentiment, ever since I was a teenager: to make my life a contribution to the world, as much as I could make it. You know what I mean? I bet you feel that way too.

Peter: Yeah, I feel that we’re all doing our little bit. There is a phenomenon of the wisdom of the East coming to the West, and there’s so much to be done—all the little bits and pieces. You’re doing what you’re doing, and it’s not a matter of, “Who’s doing it? Am I doing the right thing?” We’re all doing our bit. I feel we’re all a product of the ages, a product of who we are, and if I wasn’t doing this, someone would effectively be doing the same thing. It’s not personal. We’re all doing the bit assigned to us and doing that as best we can. Karma yoga, desireless action, without getting focused on the results of our work.

Rick: There’s a cool story in one of the Vedic scriptures. I think it might be the Srimad Bhagavatam, where Indra became jealous of Krishna because Krishna had all these devotees in Vrindavan who loved him so much, and Indra felt like, “Who’s he? What about me?”

So, he started to pour down all this rain on the village, and it was inundating the village. Everybody was going to drown, so all the devotees of Krishna prayed to him to save them. Krishna just took this mountain and lifted it up, holding it above the village as an umbrella with one hand.

After a while, the villagers thought, “Well, that’s a very heavy mountain. We better help him.” So, they all grabbed sticks and held them up to support the mountain, so it wouldn’t strain Krishna’s wrist or something. They all felt like they were doing something, but of course it was Krishna doing it; it wasn’t them. So, you and I and all of us are just kind of holding up our sticks.

Peter: Hmm, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Closing thoughts and resources

Rick: Okay, great. Is there anything else? Usually, after I hang up from these interviews, I think, “Oh, I wish I’d asked that.” Is there anything that you feel like you want to throw in there before we wrap it up?

Peter: Just appreciation. That’s the word: appreciation for everyone who’s holding up the stick, everyone who’s helping in this profound movement that really will be—and already is—an important part of human history.

Appreciating all of it: how, when we began, it wasn’t quite as easy to make the connections, and it was often a bit of a struggle. There’s already been an amazing contribution over 40 years, so acknowledging everyone, and acknowledging how it moves forward from here and how, through your work and so on, it’s really diffusing much more widely into the population.

Rick: If people want to plug in more to what you’re doing and participate in some way with what you’re offering, what can they do?

Peter: The easiest website to remember, which will take them to three or four websites that we have, is wisdom.org. That’s the easiest one to remember: wisdom.org.

Rick: Okay, and I’ll be linking to that, of course, from your page on batgap.com. So, wisdom.org. What kind of things would they find there? You’re in Australia.

Peter: Yeah. I think people really enjoy the audios that Sounds True produced. I meet people who say, “Wow, I’ve been listening to your audios for a year.” And I go, “What? How do you do that?” That’s fantastic.

They say the audios have helped them sleep, helped them drink less, and really helped them on their path. I thought it was all nondual, but it seems to have something more in it than just the nondual. So, I would say the audio programs, and then there are conference calls, many of them coming out of Portland, that people can connect to.

If they email yes@wisdom.org, I will get them onto the Portland calls. I do video calls, although I’m not sure when I’ll be back in the U.S.

I also do an advanced program, Natural Awakening, which teaches people how to do the type of nondual transmission that I do. That’s what I’ve put a lot of work into in recent years: teaching teachers and teaching facilitators.

Rick: Is all this stuff done in person, or do you do it remotely?

Peter: It’s based on three workshops. That particular course runs over 10 months: three four-day workshops and then a lot of other components, including what we call a nondual coaching lab, designed by my wife.

So, that’s an intense process that we do in person and by phone, with small groups, conference calls, and projects that people work on.

Rick: Okay, so it sounds like people can go to your website and explore all the possibilities. Some of it may involve flying to Australia or something, but other parts will be over the phone or Skype or whatever.

Peter: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Rick: Okay, great. And you come to the States once in a while too, don’t you?

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Okay, great. I should mention that there’s a page on BatGap, under the past interviews section, which has geographic locations or something, and you’ll be adding information there. If you type in a location, such as London, you’ll automatically see a list of the teachers who are going to be doing something in London or who come there regularly. Then you can go to their websites to get the details about what they might be doing. We’ll have you put your information there.

All right, well, thanks, Peter. I really appreciate spending some time with you.

Peter: Yeah.

Rick: We’ll probably run into each other in person one of these days.

Peter: Yeah, that would be great. I look forward to that. That would be wonderful.

Rick: Yeah. Let me make just a couple of general wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Peter Fenner, and I think you must know that by now. This interview has been one in an ongoing series, and we have them planned well into the future. I hope to continue doing this for many years. I love doing it, and it seems to be beneficial for people.

If you want to explore the archives of interviews that have been done, go to batgap.com, look under the past interviews menu, and you’ll see them organized in four or five different ways. There’s also a future interviews menu, which shows what’s upcoming.

There’s a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking if they can, to help support this. There’s a place to sign up for email notifications of each new interview. There’s an audio podcast and a page dedicated to various ways to sign up for that, along with a bunch of other things if you explore the menus. There’s even a ringtone for your cell phone if you want to download it.

Next week it’s going to be Bonnie Greenwell, who has written a couple of books about Kundalini and has been through a whole lot of experiences herself. She then made it her life’s focus to understand Kundalini and has interviewed thousands of people who have had all kinds of Kundalini awakenings.

That should be interesting because I get emails from people saying, “What is happening to me? I can’t sleep. My legs are thrashing. I feel like I’m having seizures or something, but I know it’s not that.” This is something that one should probably have in one’s collection of understanding in case one encounters it. It’s an interesting topic.

So, that’s what we’ll do next week. Thanks for listening or watching. Thanks again, Peter.

Peter: Pleasure.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a pleasure, and we’ll see you all next week.

Peter: Okay, thanks, Rick.

Rick: You’re welcome. Bye. [Music]