Philip Wade Transcript

Philip Wade Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over please go to www.batgap.com and check out the previous ones. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the website and a page giving you more details about donations. My guest today is Philip Wade. Philip lives in the UK, and he is kind of an ordinary guy who had a spiritual awakening and has become a spiritual teacher of some kind, although I don’t know if he would define himself as that, but we’ll see. So, he had been meditating for about 14 years when he experientially realized the nature of the true self, which referred to itself as Infinite Silence. And before that, he was a Chartered Civil Engineer and Operating Group Director of a large business, and in 2000, in response to dreaming about work on a skiing holiday, what were you doing dreaming about work on a skiing holiday?

Philip: Yes, that’s true.

Rick: Philip began meditation. Ultimately this led him to leave his old world behind in don’t you take it from there, elaborate on what I just said and continue on and tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Philip: Yes, sure so that the skiing holiday thing is probably the point I often, or most often referred to, say what started you on this because we were in Whistler on the west coast of Canada so probably skiing wise about as far as you could get from home, certainly from the UK.

Rick: You could have gone to Chile.

Philip: Yes maybe yes maybe that would have been further wouldn’t it, but anyway it was a long way 13 hour flight or whatever and I used to go for two weeks and skied hard and I remember waking up having dreamt about about work, and I kind of sat on the side of the bed I think, I remember saying under my breath, this has got to stop.

Rick: Dreaming about work?

Philip: Yes, dreaming about work. like I’ve come here to ski, I worked hard and this was my break. So that kind of led me in fairly short order, that was in the year 2000, to meditation. I’ll skip a few steps there, but, and I kind of just read this book by this guy, Paul Wilson, I think his name was, called “Calm for Life” and it included some instructions about how to meditate in there. And I thought, yes, okay, I’ll give this a go.

Rick: I know that guy, I think, is he an American?

Philip: Australian.

Rick: AustraliaN, okay, I don’t know him then.

Philip: I think he was referred to as the guru of calm for quite a while. He’s written quite a lot of books. But anyhow, I read his book and I kind of learnt the basics of meditation and I just basically totally committed to it. and as I did that I mean I was pretty calm on the outside but inside you know there was stuff going on and things just kind of settled down really quickly and I found that I thought this was really beneficial and even though I was working 60 hour weeks probably was the norm and quite a bit of that period traveling around the Country for the businesses I was running I still managed to get my half an hour meditation a day in. like if it was like, if I could do it before I left for the train in the morning, that was great. Sometimes it was on the train, sometimes it was back after a day’s meeting, but half an hour was my kind of commitment to myself. And that just proved to be profoundly beneficial in my work, but in my life in general. That led to exploring a few things with my then partner with Complementary Therapy type things and I found out that you could learn these things and I thought wow this is amazing and the results I got for myself were profound but also part of it was sharing with others. And It had a big impact on the people who I worked with at the time and it just became clear by about coming and it took about four years to make the decision to leave my old world behind. I kind of knew it was going to come, I changed, I left my old relationship behind at the time, I wasn’t married but we mutually decided it was time to move on and in 2009 just after I’d turned a big business around which was nothing to do with my core discipline that the company had asked me to do. I just knew that that was the time. It was a big contract extension for the Company but I thought I’ve got to go. If I don’t go now I’ll regret it. And I left and walked into a big big void with a vague plan in my head about the things I might do. Very little of which actually turned out to be the things I actually did do. Some months before, maybe not quite a year before, I met my now wife at an EFT workshop.

Rick: EFT is what?

Philip: Emotional Freedom Techniques.

Rick: Is that the tapping thing?

Philip: That’s the tapping, yes. I call it acupuncture without the needles. I don’t use any of this stuff anymore by the way. That was an insight I got. I had to drop all that, but that’s where I met her and she [was there]. As I walked into the room and with this lady I knew who was the Teacher for that class. Sue [my Wife] said: “Oh you’re Philip Wade!” and I’m thinking how does this woman know who I am? And she’d found me on the internet through the EFT I think it was. Anyway, long story short she contacted me in the May [2009] I’d already handed in my notice and by the end of July that year [2009] I had already handed in my notice. We started seeing each other and a year later we were married but I was meditating and as soon as I left work which was, ridiculously long hours the energy in my body just started to transform and I carried on meditating and a couple of years into that I think that was around 2011 so I left work end of July 2009 the first really major insight emerged. I won’t bore everybody with the details but in essence it is what became known as, if you look on my website now, you’d see a reference to Spheres Of Light or The Spheres and basically in this deep meditation space I got a vision of leaving something behind that I’d just paid a lot of money for. This presence said you don’t need any of that, just do this and it basically just said to me just connect from your heart with The Spheres and I was lying in bed and I remember doing that. I remember just thinking okay well in for a penny in for a pound and as I just opened to that there was a whoosh of energy through my body and it felt like I was being upgraded in some way. It was like something really powerful was going on for quite some time and I wasn’t really quite sure what it was at the time but I remember being clear that I was to tell some friends whom I’d connected with and I said hey guys just try this and there was about seven or eight of them and they all came back over the next few days they came back with “wow that was fantastic what was that where did you get that from?” I said well it just came in this meditation and then the next thing that happened was I was stood in the kitchen and washing the dishes and I suddenly got these words appeared in consciousness and it was: “Open Source”, “Open Source” and I knew the words and I knew it was connected with this thing called The Spheres which became The Spheres meditation or The Spheres of Light meditation and I looked it up and it just happened so happened to be 20 years to the day when the Open Source Foundation had been created by Linus Torvalds. And there were some principles on there that really spoke to me about what this was supposed to be and it was really clear and I became bombarded with messages saying right “You’ve now got to put this out there to the world” and essentially what happened was this group of friends helped me and we built a Website and put it all out there and people and it touched quite a lot of people very very quickly. I was getting asked all sorts of questions about where this came from, “What did it mean?”, “What was it?” and these answers were just coming out of nowhere. I was thinking ‘where’s this stuff coming from?’ and it just accelerated, accelerated and deepened and accelerated and deepened and it was clear that I was meant to be sharing it and I ended up doing loads of events, not because Philip wanted to, but because I was being kind of pushed into it. I remember somebody said, “Oh, you should come to this place called The Sanctuary of Healing.” And I thought, “Okay, I’ll go there. We’ll maybe have half a dozen people. That’ll be fine.” And like 30 people showed up and they were having wow moments. We’d be five minutes into the workshop. I’d start the meditation and somebody would have an absolutely enormous energetic shift and leaving all sorts of trauma behind. People [in the room] about 30 people in the room were a bit spooked by it, but I was just like totally calm and I would go over to these people and say “are you all right?” They would say “Yes I feel completely held don’t worry I’m okay.” This happened regularly at the events and it just went I went on like that for a for a while and then about a year and a half later [2014] and there was a ton of energetic shifts going on in me in that process as well all sorts of baggage being left behind, stuff being cleared out of the emotional body and so forth. Just off the scale experiences that I can’t really put into words, one of which I call my annihilation experience. I mean I literally thought I was going to die and I thought okay we’ll get on with it kind of thing you know. It was just… the energy was buzzing in my body for days. And then in [May] 2014, which was about a year and a half later, it was the unequivocal Realization flowered, like there was just no sense of this body. I couldn’t even recognize the idea of a Philip in that process. There was just Awareness, just Awareness and knowing, and it was Eternal. I’m trying to use words to describe that something that I cannot put into words. It was just, “Eternity” was the word, I guess, you’d use. Somewhere in that space, it was like, suddenly, these words, “Infinite Silence” emerged. In that same moment, the very subtlest sense of this body, I thought, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, there was a kind of body here.” Vaguely recall that. It was really, really subtle, though, you know. I wouldn’t have I’ve been able to tell you where I was. And with those words and knowing the clarity that that’s what, whom I really was. I sometimes refer to it now as ‘everything had changed and nothing had changed.’ It was like, all that I thought I was, Philip Wade, this guy who used to be a Civil Engineer and all the rest of it. Yes, well, that was all kind of an experience that I’ve been had, but it wasn’t that which I really was. So all of that had changed, and nothing had changed in the sense that, oh yes, yes, Infinite Silence. That’s who I am, that’s who we all are. That’s the way, and it was made clear that I was to use this term [Infinite Silence] in the sharing that had already been going on, but this was the word to gave the “New Way.” I eventually came out of that. I don’t know how long it lasted, It was quite a long time. My body was like, it was plugged into the Universal Grid and it was absolutely buzzing. And this lasted for about two weeks and my body wouldn’t sleep. The mind started to try to kick back in going, “what on earth is going on?” and I remember just sitting there, that kind of question came up and consciousness said: “Life is Death.”

Rick: Life is death.

Philip: Life is death. And I realized instantly that it wasn’t the body that was dying, which is what the mind thought was happening. it was the identification, the attachment to and the belief that all I was that, that was dying, that was really clear. “Life is Death,” it said. And then it gave me a date saying, basically no need to worry. This preparation, this phase is going to finish on this date. And we were part of that phase, we were on holiday, we’d planned to go on holiday. I wasn’t sleeping. and I was walking around in this garden barefooted to try and ground myself. And then it ended whilst you’re aware and all of that kind of the energy settled down and I could sleep again. I remember sharing it with Sue, my wife, when it had happened and she just loved the words Infinite Silence and everybody I started using that term to just somehow seem to resonate with it. And in that process, it became clear that I’d had this Website Domain appear in consciousness in 2007. It happened twice and what happened was I got this name gatewaylocation.org and I thought okay I’ll go and look at this domain and it wasn’t there. So I thought well strange and then six months later I got it again and this time it said do you want to buy it? I thought oh that’s what I’m supposed to do with this Domain. So come fast forward seven years this happens and it suddenly became clear gatewaylocation.org was basically to be used to share this, the message of Self-Realization. So, the website got built from that process and that’s what happened there.

Rick: Well, let me pause you for a second and ask you a few questions about everything you just said, because I’d like you to embellish on some of it. So, first of all, you strike me as, from everything you’ve said and I’ve heard you say on recordings, as being a very intuitive guy, very much guided, actually. I don’t know, you can perhaps suggest by whom or what you are guided, but, and trusting of your intuitions, which is a good thing. I mean, there are a lot of fairy tales about this, where Frodo, just has this impulse that he has to go and do this thing or, the Jack and the Beanstalk, I think I’ll sell the family cow for a handful of beans and see what happens. And so, it’s kind of a leap of faith, you know? But in these stories, it works out. So, it’s kind of part of the culture, actually, that people can operate this way. So that’s interesting. And then, I find it interesting that you took to meditation so readily, just learning it from a book. I don’t think that is usually the case with most people, at least most people I talk to. I run into a lot of people who say, “Well, I’ve tried to meditate in this and that and it never, it’s not easy for me, it’s hard for me to keep at it,” and things. So you do seem like a fish to water in terms of meditation. And to my mind, it suggests past life involvement in this kind of thing, which, that we pick up again at a certain point and take to it naturally. So I have some more questions but maybe you could comment on the things I just said.

Philip: So yes, if I miss anything, pick me up, remind me. The intuitive bit, I wouldn’t have necessarily said that, to be honest, back in 2000. if I necessarily looking at other people who had seen whom I thought were intuitive. And I think reflecting on it now, with the benefit of a lot of hindsight, there was this sense that I’d had that by the time I was 50 I was going to be doing something different but I didn’t know what it was. And it was 48 when I left work, 47, 48. So I suppose that was a bit of intuition, a knowing. And what I think I’d established from the small amount of stuff that I’d read, it was…. and I really knew nothing about this subject whatsoever. Like so just trust was [key], was really ….. just, I totally committed to that. I realized that I needed to do that because I knew nothing, really. That was pretty clear to me, I knew nothing.

Rick: So you hadn’t had any interest in, you hadn’t read like “The Power of Now or Autobiography of a Yogi” or something like that when you were younger?

Philip: I read “The Power of Now” when it first came out. I think that was around 2000, 2001 was it?

Rick: Something like that, I think.

Philip: I remember reading that thinking, “Yes, this speaks to me.” And I think I read “The Conversations with God” books at the time.

Rick: Right.

Philip: I remember having an experience with that, it’s right at the beginning of the book where… Walsch [author] Asks the question, “To whom does God talk and when?” And I know what the answer is going to be. And ‘God’ says, “I talk to everybody all the time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens?” Yes, that’s for me. I completely get that. It just made so much sense to me. And the books, when I read them, I thought, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” kind of, but which was a complete contrast to the Catholic upbringing I’d had. So, that was interesting. So, I wouldn’t have classed myself as intuitive, but trusting, probably, and I think I’ve probably become, as this has been integrated, more intuitive.

Rick: What do you think intuition is in the deepest sense? do you think it comes exclusively from within us or do you think that there’s some kind of, divine entity or entities or something that guide us and are concerned with our welfare? What’s your personal hunch about that?

Philip: Okay, well, I refer to it as coming from the Silence.

Rick: Okay.

Philip: So, the Infinite Silence as was realized. And that is, for me, if you like, is the source of wisdom. So I don’t class anything that I share as Phillip’s, I refer to it as coming from this Silence. And what I’ve found over the years, particularly since things really flowered, was that it just comes up with insight, clarity, and it feels like it’s arising from that space. And then, the brain or whatever translates into a word or a vision to show me you’re something and I just trusted that completely because I it was clear that it’s not it wasn’t coming from here [touches head].

Rick: Right.

Philip: You know my head so I the way I look at it it’s it’s just the Silence speaks and it’ll do that in many ways and it’ll do that through intuitive insight it may give you a word I get I’ll often get a set of words that I’m to use as a message to give to people, like in a little quote or whatever, and when I do that, it has a big impact on people. So, it’s all arising from the source of wisdom that I refer to as the Silence or the Infinite Silence.

Rick: Well, it’s interesting how the Silence is so pregnant with possibilities. I mean, you hear people like Beethoven or Mozart or great writers, J.K. Rowling or whoever, talk about how this idea will just come to in a flash and out of apparently nowhere, but it’s, or like, Mozart, he’d say he would cognize a whole symphony in a few seconds, and then it would take him hours and hours to write it all down. But it’s interesting, I mean, sometimes this word Silence has a kind of a plain vanilla connotation, like it’s just this flat nothingness, but some people like Deepak Chopra likes to use the phrase “field of all possibilities.” like it’s this cornucopia of creative possibilities.

Philip: Yes, I like that. I mean, actually, the words that were coming to me there and it’s not a phrase I’ve used for a long time, but a Sphere of all possibilities.

Rick: Aha.

Philip: And the reason Sphere is because when I got “just use your intention, your heart-based intention to connect with The Spheres. I realized, or one of the realizations was that it’s just a metaphor really but if you were to consider a single finite point and radiate out equally in every direction you get a Sphere. So you could think of the Universe as an Infinite Sphere, not that it has a shape, but you know. So The Sphere of all possibilities, that Silence is that for me is the birthplace of everything. And the bit about The Spheres bit, what I realized was The Spheres, that meditation, just use [your intention], that I was shown that that was connected with what’s referred to in India as Hiranyagarbha. I might not have got the pronunciation right.

Rick: No, that’s right, golden egg.

Philip: Yes, Golden Egg, The Golden Womb of Creation. What became clear was that the reason that meditation [The Spheres] and the reason that appeared first was it was both an energetic bridge to the Silence, so it would transport you there, if you like. It was like a portal to it, but also it was the creation point, The Womb of Creation, The Golden Egg of Creation, through which the manifest realms occur. I refer to this now as, you’ll see this in many spiritual traditions, you must be more aware of it than I am, but ‘The Triality of Consciousness’, so in my terms that would be ‘Infinite Silence, Spheres or Spheres Of Light and the physical domain form.’ It has many names and I realized that those were the three in one that’s referred to in many traditions, but going back on the intuition question, I wouldn’t have necessarily said that, but I certainly trusted. Certainly trusted. What was the other thing that you asked? There was something else that…

Rick: Well, I do want to talk more about the Spheres Of Light, but what you just said about the intuition thing and the Universe, there’s that saying, “Man is made in the image of God.” You think of the Universe as just the expression or the manifestation of that infinite potentiality, but then we are a microcosm of that and just as the Universe emerges from that and evolves and evolves into greater and greater expressions, from within us there can be these seeds of impulse that give rise to an expression of something. And I think you’ve just described, that process to some extent. I have this friend who’s been on Batgap a few times, we have this ongoing debate. He somehow feels that God or the creative intelligence that governs the Universe is just emerging or developing as the Universe grows. And I keep saying, that’s like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. It’s got to come from someplace ultimately. And I think that, that we could think of God as having an unmanifest phase and then a manifest phase, and perhaps it’s cyclical, and so yes, in the manifest phase, the Universe is evolving. We could think of that as God’s body, but it comes from a field of potentiality that makes that possible. So, anyway, my debate with him is kind of on my mind, but you’re reminding me of it by what you’re saying?

Philip: I can say something about that if you want, because this phrase “made in the image of likeness of God” in my Catholic upbringing would come up. But what I eventually realized that there’s a misinterpretation of that, what that actually means, because, you get this thing where, the bearded guy in the sky, the typical image you see of God looking down upon humanity. That’s not what it means. Made in the image of God, likeness of God, as experientially seen, means that we too are that.

Rick: Yes, yes. That’s what I was trying to get at there.

Philip: Yes, yes. And so I use this metaphor. Do you mind if I just use it?

Rick: Oh, yes. I like that metaphor. I heard you use it.

Philip: Yes. And it’s actually the first part of the metaphor came to Sue my wife, but I’ve developed it a load over the years. But the metaphor is really good. It’s really helpful for people. But typically…

Rick: Explain what you’re holding because some people just be listening to this in audio.

Philip: Yes, I’m going to do that. So basically I’ve got a fiber optic lamp in my hand and you can see if you’re on audio only some points of light at the end of the fiber optic filaments. And typically, if you consider yourself, your body-mind experience as one of those points of light, then most people spend most of the time thinking, believing that that’s all they are and they look outward into the world and it’s a world of separation. Every other point of light is separate from every other point of light and the world’s a pretty scary place when you look at it that way, this separation, there’s them over there and there’s us over here and all the rest of it. The whole meditative journey, the whole Self-Realization journey, is about turning, what I call a turning point and we start to look down the filament, look down the fiber optic. And the first thing that we come to on this metaphor is this blue light at the base here. And for those that can see it, you’ll see that all of the light in all of these filaments at the end of the fiber optic, all of the light comes from this One Source, so it’s the single Source made manifest in multiple variety. And this, in the experiences that emerged, are referred to as the spheres. This is the spheres bit, the Hiranyagarbha bit.

Rick: Well, why is spheres, the word Spheres, first of all, it’s plural, and secondly, it implies some kind of limitation because you could have a Sphere here and a Sphere there and a Sphere there, but you’re alluding to something which is Universal, not individuated.

Philip: Correct. So, the reason it’s Spheres, the reference for that, because it was plural, it was plural in the insight, is its multi-dimensional, multifaceted nature. If I just said Sphere, it would just [be limited]. So, that’s its multi-dimensional nature. this Sphere of the Hiranyagarbha, I’ve been shown a visual for this which I’ll try and articulate to people, but if this was, if Silence, Infinite Silence had an edge and it doesn’t, then this abuts it or is like birthed within it. It’s the first expression of that. So it’s within that Infinite Sphere, Hiranyagarbha appears and it’s powered by, using the rest of the metaphor, the battery here at the base is the power, the Infinite Silence. Now, that’s a limitation in the metaphor because actually that power is everywhere, so it would be Infinite Silence would surround this completely and this wouldn’t be at the base only, it would be everywhere. and the dots. You know like Russian dolls?

Rick: Yes.

Philip: You’d have kind of Spheres within Spheres, and this way you’d get multiple Universes, multiple expressions, multi-dimensions, all occurring within the Infinite Sphere. And how I see it, or how it’s seen, is that all of its expressions, all of its manifestations are here now. Because the Infinite Silence, one of the things that was clear with it, I’ll just put that down now, was that one of the many things that was clear was that it [Infinite Silence] was beyond time, beyond space, beyond form, beyond contrast, and there was just no thing happening there, yet it was full of Infinite potential. And without [Infinite Silence] it’s first its expression as Hiranyagarbha or Spheres and then the form. It wouldn’t have any experience because there was no time, no space, no form, no contrast, and so it creates this, if you like, it chooses to create this first Hiranyagarbha or Spheres Of Light, then the physical domain and those are Spheres within Spheres and through that Triality it comes to know itself in its own experience. So it goes, “Hey, wouldn’t it be a great idea to be Rick Archer?” like, “Wouldn’t it be great to be Irene Archer? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to be Philip Wade?” And through this vehicle, without that, it wouldn’t be able to come to know itself in its own experience. So, that’s how I articulate it.

Rick: That’s great. I love that.

Philip: It’s more than that, but, that’s a way of expressing it.

Rick: Yes, that’s so interesting. Have you ever seen that picture of Vishnu lying on his serpent couch and these kind of like Spheres are bubbling up out of his mind or something, and each one of them is a little Universe that is getting created? Kind of of what you said reminded me of that.

Philip: I’m not sure if I have, but it sounds perfect to me.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: Yes, these Spheres have been burst from [Infinite Silence], like the Russian dolls almost, the kind of Spheres. Yes, in fact, I think the picture might show them coming from his heart area, just as you’ve gestured. But what you’re saying, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Philip: No, I have a picture, I went unexpectedly a few years ago, I went to Iceland, and I met this intuitive artist lady, and it’s like, she has to draw a picture for me, and she has a picture. I said, “What I want you to do, your commission, is to create a picture that represents this.” It’s not quite the same picture as Vishnu, but it’s got Spheres.

Rick: Yes, well, what you’re saying is so interesting and might be worth dwelling on for a little bit. I’ve heard this whole explanation in very similar terms about what you could call the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness, where, in its primordial unmanifest state, it’s all oneness, but then there’s, through some mechanics, there’s some kind of emergence in which you end up with knower, known, and process of knowing, and all of that really is just the oneness, but somehow it has become three, and that three-fold nature enables experience to happen, and yet it’s still one, and yet it’s three, and yet it’s one, and yet it’s three. And somehow the one in three creates this Infinite Frequency which results in a tremendous dynamism at the foundation of creation. And that dynamism is what gives rise to the whole show. But I also love what you said about, through these manifest forms that that oneness becomes a living reality.

Philip: Yes, yes.

Rick: Being Rick Archer or Philip Wade or something, which some say is actually the whole purpose of creation. It’s like God got bored just being one that’s, let me play the Leela, let’s have some play. And so, then we’re all kind of like your laser thingy, your [Fibre Optic] filament thing, we’re all expressions of the one, kind of having a relative experience, which wouldn’t be possible if diversity hadn’t arisen. And our whole purpose is to embody to greater and greater degrees that divinity or oneness or whatever you want to call it, and yet be human beings, breathing and acting and living and loving and doing all the things we do as that.

Philip: Yes, absolutely. I mean I have a whole live stream on this called Life, Purpose and Meaning and basically, I take people on a journey to help them [to] start to open up to this because without this, this three in one there wouldn’t be experience and so there would just be Infinite Silence, there would just be Silence Absolute, that’s all. It would just be Silence, aware of itself as that, and there’d be no experience, think. So this process, if you want to call it cyclical, you could do, that’s necessary for it to come to know itself. This is, and it’s all here, is how I see it, it’s all here. I don’t ask anybody to believe this, by the way, because when the clarity of that Silence emerges that it will become what I call it capital S self-evident that although we experience linear time, time is not an intrinsic property of the universe. Physics is seeing that now. It’s just all here and it’s like if you had a light, I remember seeing a great metaphor many years ago, it’s like a light flashing on and off, on, off, on, off. Now if you do that fast enough that it looks like the lights on all the time?

Rick: Sure, like a movie. Movies are actually discrete frames, but they look like one thing.

Philip: Basically, now you take that to infinite speed, if there was such a thing as infinite speed, then you get, it’s like on and off, it’s just, Infinite means it’s Infinite, it’s unlimited, it has no limitations whatsoever, whatsoever. And so it’s just all here. And And so, we experience linear time because that gives us the gift of experience. Without linear time, we wouldn’t have experience. But it’s like if you actually, it’s just a movie running, a Universal-sized movie running at how many frames per second and you’re just looking at those frames, that’s one way of looking at it, I would say. But it’s not about believing this, it’s about realizing this.

Rick: Yes, everything we’re saying here is about that. was another thing you just said which actually adds another little flavor to the whole thing. You said something about Silence being aware of itself or something like that?

Philip: Yes. Yes.

Rick: If you think about it, at that fundamental level, there’s nothing else down there for it to be aware of other than itself. But in becoming aware of itself, that automatically begins to set up the three in one structure. all of a sudden there’s the observer and the observed. And it does that by virtue of the fact that it is consciousness, and consciousness by its very nature has to be conscious of something, so it becomes conscious of itself. And then boom, you end up with the whole phantasmagoria unfolding from that.

Philip: It all flows from that. In fact, I used to, but now let me express it this way rather than what I say you used to say. What came into articulating this for people was, So if it’s Infinite Silence, just Infinite Silence, and then if I said at this point there’s no awareness there, then awareness is what I would refer to as its first born.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: First born. And then Spheres Of Light, this bit on the metaphor here, the base of the fiber optic lamp, that is its first expression. And through that Golden Womb or Golden Egg, Hiranyagarbha, the physical domain emerges, but it all happens in no time like that.

Rick: Yes. Did most of this just come to you?

Philip: Yes, it just came to me.

Rick: It’s really cool because I mean, what you’re elaborating is some of the deepest principles of Hinduism and Kashmir Shaivism and some of these different traditions of knowledge who, these guys came up with the same thing and elaborated it and I know these days, I know scientists who are trying to take that knowledge and then juxtapose it with modern scientific understanding and figure out to what extent they can align. And so it’s really cool that you’re expressing it so clearly.

Philip: I mean, it was like I was just bombarded with insight after insight after insight after insight. It was difficult to keep up from the human perspective, like showing more and more stuff and I was just gradually piecing it all together. So it took a while for the kind of intellect part to integrate it all. So like over, well, 13 years since 2011 now and 10 since the Infinite Silence Realisation, all of that’s been integrated so I can articulate it a lot more clearly now. That would have been down to 10 years ago.

Rick: Ah, that’s really good.

Philip: But I was still pretty clear then. I look at some of my old stuff and think, “Wow, did I say that then? Or was that set then?” but it’s definitely clearer now.

Rick: It takes practice to work out all the words.

Philip: Yes, it’s just more immediate, more instant.

Philip: And what is the significance of the phrase gateway location? I have a feeling what it might be, but I wanna hear you say it.

Philip: Yes, well, it took me a long time to figure that out because in 2007, I had no idea what that meant. But essentially, you are, we are the gateway ourselves. that is located within us, the gateway location is within. It’s not something that’s outside of you. It’s within you.

Rick: I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Philip: Correct, that. And that’s a phrase that’s been misunderstood because…

Rick: Right, because they attribute it just to that guy who lived 2000 years ago. And actually, no, no, it doesn’t mean that. What he was saying was, I am, here’s the thing, Not me personally, I, infinite I, I, Infinite I, am, which is pure being, that’s this bit [light near base of lamp]. So that’s the entry point to the Realization of the Infinite Silence at the base of the lamp here. I am, the way, the truth, and the light means through this vehicle of I am, the Infinite I am, non-personal I am, through that you will go through the portal to Realize the essence because people often stop at this I am and the first thing that mistake is it’s a personal I am, no, it’s not that, it’s an Infinite I, but even the sense I am, Infinite I am, Pure Being, that can be recognized as a phenomena, as a phenomena that’s I am. And that’s seen or aware of from the Silence itself, from the awareness of the silence. And so when I share this with people, like they go, [aha moment], like it blows a gasket because they start to see something deeper that they hadn’t realized before. Yes. So, “I am the way” means Infinite “I am.”

Rick: Right. Another way I take it is that not only that subtle level you’re talking about, but the whole mind-body structure is a vehicle. And, we need this gross fleshly body as well as all the subtler realms that nest within it, like the Russian dolls. And the whole thing is a vehicle through which we can, traverse the full range of creation and arrive at its source and then live it through this vehicle.

Philip: Exactly. So, this body that you have, we call it Rick Archer, but it’s like a car, you know? You might have a car, but you’re not your car. And the Silence creates its car and it gets called Rick and it goes around experiencing itself as Rick and comes to know itself through that vehicle. And it does that in Infinite variety because it’s Infinite, so why wouldn’t it? like, let’s try everything.

Rick: Yes, mosquitoes and elephants and…

Philip: Yes, let’s get planets, stars, neutrons, electrons. I’ll try all of those things. I mean, why wouldn’t it? It’s infinite. It’s like, let’s try everything. And I’ll do it all now. All now. Yes, like that.

Rick: Now, I found all this fascinating, and I’m sure the listeners do, but it does seem rather philosophical. So, how do you help people make this kind of more practical and concrete and experiential?

Philip: Yes, it’s a good question. And that’s really been the focus of my last 13, 10 years, depending on where you measure it from, really. It’s been about how do you then translate this into life and share it with people. So loads of insight has come around that and basically I use a number of key tools to do that. I introduced them to back in 2011, first phase was The Spheres Meditation. I used to do like a whole two day event just on that. was like a big impact. Just this, just use your heart-based intention to connect with The Spheres. We’d go through multiple exercises over those two days getting people used to that. That was the first part. The next part that came was the Infinite Silence Meditation which is the natural progression and the simplest version of that is just be open from your heart to the experience of Infinite Silence. And I used to do these with like, next to no guidance in those days. No guidance at all. Just say, “Right, guys, you’re going to really have to trust this, and we’re just going to sit here.” And like, people used to go, “Ooooh.” So that was the first two parts.

Rick: What do you mean they went, “Ooooh”? What happened to them?

Philip: It’s like a big impact, because like, the minds couldn’t cope with it.

Rick: So it actually did something.

Philip: Yes, it switched the mind off. It would switch the mind off. wouldn’t just be sitting there getting sleepy or thinking about what’s for dinner?

Philip: They’d be having, yes, in fact that was one of the comments where I remember I said like, “Well normally when I’m meditating I’m thinking about what’s for dinner and all the rest of it,” but it wasn’t with that, with your meditation. It was like, I just went somewhere else.

Rick: And do you feel that’s because of the instructions you gave them or because of the atmosphere that got created when you’re sitting with a group of people?

Philip: Bit of both.

Rick: Bit of both? Okay.

Philip: Bit of both. I would tell them the story. I would tell them the story and then we’d do the exercise. And there was a kind of, it felt like it wasn’t Philip, it was like the just that presence was there imbued in the space. It was like that. So that was how I started it and then I got a vision. I wasn’t planning to do this, I wasn’t asking to do this, but I was shown a vision of a glass Sphere. It was a bit like you would see as a goldfish bowl really. And people were putting questions in it and I was to put this in the middle of the room during these events and I’d invite people to put their questions in and then I was to go through and look at these questions and answer them live. So that was a trust thing because I’ve never done that before.

Rick: So that’s something you actually did? Yes, yes, so I actually physically did that. I used to put the glass spear in the middle of the room. I used to have bought this £3 ($4) goldfish bowl basically. I said right guys this is what this is for. People used to put in there’d be like 20-30 questions in there.

Rick: Why did you do that rather than just have them ask the questions vocally?

Philip: Because that’s the vision I was shown.

Rick: Okay.

Philip: So I did that for quite a long time. Now I just get them to ask it. The reason it was done that way it was representative of The Spheres, this glass bowl shape. And it was it was a way for for Philip to get used to being asked questions that could be about anything. So I did that and the answers would just come. So the Inquiry part started from that and then I realized that a lot of the books were after the realization. I realized that all the questions came down to the one key question which is: “Who or what am I?” So I then guided people to explore why that was, why all the questions came down to that and then developed other elements to that. I ask all sorts of questions now when I’m doing meditations, which snaps people out of their minds. So I bring them in by surprise, so I might ask them to say, “Who am I without memory?” in meditation or “Who am I without knowledge?” Or “Who am I without time?”

Rick: …. almost like Zen Koans.

Philip: Yes, yes. Or “Who am I without this body-mind?”

Rick: Right.

Philip: “What if I know nothing?” I’ve got a list of these that I just throw in when I feel it. And it just snaps people out and they get answers like space, silence, awareness, stillness, consciousness. and, it’s the first time for some people that they’ve had that opening and they tend to feel very expanded, like something’s opened up. So the inquiry came, this was all in quite quick succession, I didn’t plan to do inquiry, inquiry was that you’ve got to do inquiry, and then I was shown what I refer to, was something I use very sparingly, the Infinite Touch. This was another vision. If I was to try to show you physically, if I was to put my thumb on the third eye area, this thumb, and then fingers on the crown of the head like that, I was shown that I was to do this for certain people at certain times, and it became known as Infinite Touch. And basically, I do use it fairly sparingly, but if somebody’s particularly struggling either with some emotion coming up or they can’t connect, I usually get this pull and go, “are you okay if I just do this?” I remember I wanted a place called the Monastery in Manchester to a couple of people and they said it was like a morphine high.

Rick: Morphine is kind of a downer.

Philip: Yes, well, yes, but that’s what she said anyway, but I had a massive kind of like spiritual experience when I did it.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: I was with another lady and other people, it’s like they just struggle and then then somehow it seems to connect them. So, I use that pretty sparingly, but if people are struggling then I’ll feel like, oh, I’ll help them.

Rick: Yes, I had a dream one time in which some kind of a Rishi or a Sage did that to me in my dream, and it was really powerful. I woke up like in a really profound kind of state.

Philip: Yes, I can imagine you can’t do it energetically, you could just literally. That was the other, that was the next part you just reminded me just there. The other thing I got was really strong calling in a vision that I was to do what I was now called the Open Gaze.

Rick: Oh yes, like gazing.

Philip: It’s not new. A lot of people do that.

Philip: Yes, yes, a lot of people do it, but I hadn’t thought about doing it and I remember I was doing a series of live streams. I think the first time I did it was around thinking really on my live stream? There could be anybody watching and I did it and it had a big impact.

Rick: I see.

Philip: And I was shown that it had to have its own [WebPage], this [Open] Gaze thing had to have its own web page. So I’ve now got a sister meditation site, if you’re looking the main navigation of that gateway location.org, there’s a meditation site and one of the experiences on there is the Open Gaze. So they just all evolved over time, evolved over time.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: So now it’s really just a combination of meditation and inquiry.

Rick: Cool. I have a question for you. Well, first I’ll put it in a nutshell, which is, what is it like to be Philip Wade? But let me elaborate a little bit. So, if you were to suddenly snap back to where you were 15 years ago, and, remember what it was like to be Philip then, what your day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience was like, or Or conversely, if you were back then and you were all of a sudden to be transported to your current state, how would you describe the contrast? And what is your day-to-day experience like in your relationships, your friendships, your marriage, your whatever you do?

Philip: Good questions. So looking back, the bit looking back there, I can see all of that happened and it was all necessary to happen. In a way it feels like a bit of a dream in a way. But they were all important experiences I would say. Even right back to childhood there were things that happened then that I now see clearly. There was an awareness there that I hadn’t realised what it was. So I can see that as a bit of, part of it feels like it’s a bit unreal and a bit of a dream and another part feels like yes it was all necessary to get to this point.

Rick: Did you ever have phases in your life where you suffered a lot?

Philip: No, I didn’t. Not major. I remember being, when I first went to University, that was probably the biggest challenge I had because I came from a background, I didn’t even [pass the 11+], in the UK we have something called the before you go to the secondary school, and somehow or other they left my name.

Rick: It’s like middle school, we call it here. We have grammar school, middle school, and then high school.

Philip: When you’re 11 then you go to another school [Secondary School]

Rick: Right.

Philip: You go to school where you do your O-levels [Ordinary Level Exams] and then your pre-university stuff [A Level = Advanced Level Exams]. And then somehow I forgot my name on the list and they put me in the wrong class and it was known as the dunces class. And six months into that, the kind of teacher realized that I was in the wrong class, but wasn’t ready to then take the 11+, so I got sent to this other school. And of course, I was probably in the wrong school at one level because I ended up top of the class in everything, top of the year. And I was offered to go to the Grammar School, but my parents turned it down, which in a way was a good thing. But I remember being miffed at the time. So by the time it kind of came to university, I had to transfer schools because you didn’t do what was called A-levels [Advanced Level Exams] in the UK at this school. And the head teacher, [actually] the Deputy Head Teacher called me in and I’m thinking, “Crikey, what have I done wrong?” “If you’re going to see Miss Hall, “you’ve done something wrong.” And she says, “Oh, I’ve got a place for you “at the Grammar School.” I’m thinking, “Really?” So, beccause I met a bunch of lads who were all expecting to go to University. Nobody in my family had ever thought of going to University. So that was kind of challenging when I first got to University. Like, I was amongst all these people who basically had parents who had been to University or had been to [Fee Paying] Public School . And I found that quite hard. I found that [hard], I remember being really, really down at one point in the First Year at University, looking out the kind of window thinking, oh, this is heavy, but kind of got through it. And I remember shortly after that, lying in the study bedroom. And I think that was probably my first, really profound spiritual experience with and everything was okay with the world, this mustn’t have been long after that heavy experience. And it’s like, I just thought I could just stay here forever, sat in this study bedroom. It was incredible. And that was like the other side of the coin too, the heaviness that felt before that. But other than that, no, I mean, there were challenging experiences, because people didn’t understand me, and I was a very friendly and affable type person. and probably misunderstood in the industry I went into in Civil Engineering, which is a very, in the UK, is a very hard, full of conflict type industry. And I was forever trying to bring people together to work together. So I was a of a bit of a misfit, but I enjoyed Civil Engineering.

Rick: Well, to get back to my question though.

Philip: Go on, yes, go on. Yes, so, my essential question, what is it like to be Philip Wade? So as you go through your day, do you feel bliss? Do you feel silence? Do you feel detachment from activity? Do you feel unity? Do you see Angels? I mean, what is your subjective experience as you go through your life?

Philip: Peace.

Rick: Peace? That’s your primary thing.

Philip: Yes. I would say… Even in the midst of running through a busy Airport or something.

Philip: Yes, yes, definitely. the, I was going say, ever since 2014 the silence, that awareness has never gone. How about during sleep? it’s Awareness of absence I think is the best way to describe that, but it’s just there. Even, you could say there’s a a witnessing of sleep.

Philip: Yes, yes, yes, have a dream that’s being watched. Right, right. Peaceful, I would say, that doesn’t mean I don’t make a mistake or do something wrong or you cut your finger when you’re chopping some veg or… because you do all that stuff, you’ve got a body. But peaceful, it’s in the past [less so] and as it’s integrated more, what I noticed over time is that because of the emotional body, I wouldn’t say it’s 100% cleared, but a lot has gone.

Rick: Was there some turbulence as it was being purged? Did you go through like emotional upheavals?

Philip: Yes, multiple, multiple releases but short, very short, not long.

Rick: Feeling strong emotions, crying, different things like that.

Philip: Yes, the EFT and the quantum touch and stuff all helped with a lot of that. I did a load of that then but then there were some other big releases but they were short-lived, they weren’t long phases, they were kind of like gone, gone like that. In a matter of usually minutes and and then the body would take a while to recover. But now it’s, so it doesn’t seem to get triggered. It’s, but if something is in there and I notice it, it’s like something comes up, awareness sees it and it kind of feels like it gets lasered, something like that, from the inside.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: So mostly, mostly it’s just peace. I mean, my wife Sue, she says, you’re like, you’re kind of just like this. Like a flat line.

Rick: So when’s the last time you lost your temper?

Philip: I can’t really recall.

Rick: Like years ago?

Philip: Yes, I mean at work probably.

Rick: Yes, yes.

Philip: Yes.

Rick: Do you find that, let’s say some situation is very frustrating, maybe you don’t run into such situations, but do you find that in a situation like that where you might have lost your temper years ago, you can feel the impulse but you’re kind of able to nip it in the bud because you actually reside prior to the expression of it, kind of like as if you were at the source of a river and you can block off the river right there rather than down at the mouth of the river where it enters the ocean where it’s too late to do anything about it.

Philip: Yes, so I mean I wasn’t actually big on losing my temper anyway when I was working. I can remember three or four big occasions like I would tend to, it would just come out in a short burst. But that’s kind of going back [to what I mentioned earlier] to what you were just saying there, it was kind of like if I notice anything now that’s, would have been say a trigger event in the past, it’s instantly seen like you say, you’re before that.

Rick: Right.

Philip: And then it gets dissolved. It’s mostly like that. I wouldn’t claim perfection on this.

Rick: No, who can?

Philip: Yes, who can? I don’t think it’s possible while she’s still have a buddy.

Rick: Right.

Philip: You can get, “Oof, why has that happened?” Whatever. But it tends to be very, very quick and it’s not like, in the past when you’ve had a stressful day, it’s not really like that anymore.

Rick: Yes. There’s an analogy they use in the Eastern Teaching where an impression caused by some experience can be like a line in stone, which is kind of hard to etch, but once it’s etched It doesn’t go away, or it can be like a line in sand, which is easier to etch, but it goes away more quickly, or it can be like a line in water, or it can be like a line in air. And in air, you can actually have a deeper experience, so you can put your arm right through it, which you can’t do with stone, but it’s instantaneously gone. And so, that’s used to kind of illustrate the conditioning process of our nervous system and how we can have rich deep experiences, but they pass right through us and don’t leave a samskara, as they’re called, or an impression, which is going to condition us to a cycle.

Philip: Definitely. What I would say is the process, both before in the lead up to and post in integration phases, huge amounts of energy have been cleared from this emotional body. And ever since the Realization and the deep integration, it’s much more like the air kind of thing. It just, it feels like once it’s gone, it’s gone now. And it feels more like whatever was there in the energetic imprint of the body, in the cellular memory body, I wouldn’t say it’s 100% cleared, but it’s definitely vastly different from 20 years ago.

Rick: Nice, I was listening to an interview the other day with an older Buddhist nun who had actually lived in a cave for 12 years, and she brought up an interesting analogy. She said that, and she was getting this from one of her predecessors, but she was saying that the mind is like a mirror with a lot of dust on it. And, you can take your finger and clear away a little spot of that dust, and if you look at that spot, you can actually see your image. And so that’s like a a Self-Realization thing that can happen where you see your true nature, but there’s still a lot of dust on the mirror. So as you said, you’re not finished. It’s going to be quite some time, perhaps your whole life, getting the whole mirror dust-free.

Philip: I would say there’s truth in that because, it’s 10 years since the full-blown Realization and I would say integration has deepened in that time, as I was saying earlier. I sometimes refer to it as ‘ghosts in the machine’ is the analogy I use. there was a lot of clearing of the emotional body beforehand, fortunately in my case because of the EFT and the Quantum Touch and all the things that I’ve done. They were really helpful stepping stones, but sometimes, like an insight will come up and it just clears something. I don’t spend ages thinking about it, it just happens. It just happens. I think as long as you’ve got a body, there’s probably stuff like that’s going to happen.

Rick: What you say about the EFT and Quantum Touch and many other such things is interesting, because there’s that saying that you should just dig one deep well, don’t try to dig a lot of little shallow wells because you’ll never hit water. another way of putting it might be to, okay, but maybe use ten different tools to dig the one deep well. You need a pickaxe and a drill and a this and a that. So it can be useful to have a kind of toolkit of different things that can help you along.

Philip: Sure, I mean, what I found with those is that they were basically what, as I was going through that process, which was quite intense and short was that each one had a different entry point. There was a dawning awareness, a realization that these aren’t it. And I could see that there was a golden thread at that point, that I just didn’t know what that was.

Rick: These aren’t it, meaning this technique isn’t going to be the be all and end all, but it’s useful? Is that what you’re saying?

Philip: Yes, exactly that. Exactly that. And so I could see, I thought this isn’t quite it. This isn’t quite it. really good EFT, Quantum Touch, really good. Reconnective Healing, really good, but it wasn’t it. And I knew that it wasn’t it. And I was… sensing, I was sensing this golden thread emerging. And when The Spheres Bit came through, that was another part of it. That still wasn’t quite it. It was, because that used to have big energetic shifts, not just for me, but for the [other] people, as I was explaining earlier. And then the dawning Realization with the Infinite Silence, it was Awareness, it was Awareness that was going to dissolve all of the crap [emotional body], the emotional body. And so now when I’m guiding people, particularly people who are kind of on the path, so to speak, then I’ll point them at Awareness as this is your, you are that, and this is your tool. And if you let this emotional release, this wave or tsunami of emotion occur in front of Awareness. There’s only one thing that’s going to happen and it’s going to dissolve. It’s going to fade to Silence. So I endlessly talk to people about understanding, recognizing Awareness, trusting awareness, and that that will clear the emotional body. However, for some people who are in unstable positions might be getting Psychiatric help or Psychotherapy help, then that’s probably too big a step. And there’s going be other things like these tools that have become very, very useful for those people to get people to a kind of point of stability where they can trust Awareness. because as just as well as I, the spiritual journey isn’t a bed of roses at times. You’ve really gotta face the music, so to speak. And that’s very important. So, this stability is very, very important, but ultimately it’s the Awareness, it’s the Awareness that you’re looking for.

Rick: Yes, yes, I mean, as you were talking I was thinking, “Well, I’m still a little bit incredulous to some extent because, you seem to have taken like this to a duck to water, but I’m thinking of the general audience…., the general audience that you encounter, and, perhaps some of the people just feel a little frustrated because they say, “Well, I’m not getting it the way Philip got it. It was so easy for him. What’s my problem?” And you have in your notes here, you say, “The fundamental block to Self-Realization [is belief that all you are is the body mind]” and then you just referred to people that might need to see a Psychiatrist or something like that. So, obviously, we’re all at different stages of development and some people do take to it like a duck to water, and others might think, “Well, this is rubbish. I’m not even interested,” or others might say, “Well, I’m interested, but golly, my life is so difficult.” There’s so many different possibilities. And so, how do you accommodate yourself to all these different varieties of human beings?

Philip: Sure, yes, I mean, one of the things I have on my website is that, if you want to have this up front thing, if people want to have a one-to-one with me, for instance, or you come into an event, I say things like, “This isn’t a bed of roses. It’s not a not fluffy bunny, you kind of have to be ready. And I even have this caveat saying, look, if you’re on Psychiatric Treatment or Psychotherapy, whatever, then don’t come. And I’ve said to people, don’t come for that reason, because, I’m [careful with it], and on the odd occasion…

Rick: Or maybe come a year from now, once you’ve [dissolved it]

Philip: Yes, yes.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: And I’ve even had some people who’ve been at an event and they’ve just not been ready for it. And I said, look, this isn’t [for you yet], you’re not ready for this.

Rick: Right.

Philip: You really need to go away and do X, Y, and Z. and spend time with them, guiding them, pointing them in that direction and then later come back. So I’m very clear about that but what I’ve, apart from the few occasions where that has been an issue and it has cropped up a few times, what I find is, or…, if you can say, it’s put out there is that people that have come and showed up, they’ve usually felt called and and they’re ready to hear this, I’ll ask as many times as I can, “Why are you here?” whether it’s on a live stream or, why are you here? Why are you listening to this now with Rick and Philip speaking? “Why are you here?” And usually, people say it many ways, but usually they ‘feel called’ to be here. And then I know that I can guide them. Some people, using the analogies you used earlier about the stone, one of the guys helped quite a bit, he used exactly that same [example], he says, “I’m the stone guy.”

Rick: [Laughter]

Philip: And there are some people like that, and there are others who are just like, they just open up like that.

Rick: Well, Jesus used, remember the parable of the sower, where you throw the seeds on the ground and some of it is rough, stony ground, nothing happens. Some of it is fertile, but it’s only an inch deep, so it sprouts, but then it dies, and then some of it lands on deep fertile soil, and it really grows.

Philip: Yes, exactly. I see all of that. I see a spectrum of that with the people that I see. Usually, it’s people, without trying to overgeneralize, people are kind of lost in the intellect and trying to understand it too much and trying to get it from the mind. Those are the ones that tend to struggle more, whereas if there was a spectrum, people are like, “I’m ready, and I’m ready to trust, and I’ll just go with my heart.” They tend to open up more easily.

Rick: Yes, yes. And about the intellect people, “Seek and ye shall find.” Where there’s a will, there’s a way. One thing leads to the next, and that might be a phase that they’ll grow out of.

Philip: Oh yes, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in it. It’s just a different set of conditioning. It’s just some people need to control this and they try to control it by understanding it from the intellect and manage the spiritual process, whereas in reality you’ve got no control over it at all. That’s kind of tough when you come at it from the mind.

Rick: Which reminds me of something I heard you say in one of the talks you sent me, which was about Neo-Advaita, which always strikes me as being a kind of a mistaking of intellectual understanding for actual Realization. I’ve run into a number of these people over the years and interviewed a few of them and I don’t know, it’s always, it seems to have…, and there are actually people these days, Jessica Nathanson is one, there’s a girl in Germany, Tim Freke, another person who are kind of on a campaign to bust that bubble because it actually has a deleterious effect on a lot of people.

Philip: I’ve seen that too by the way, that deleterious effect. Some of this stuff, the way things opened up for me, some of this stuff came to me after the fact and I started to see that and I thought “What’s Neo-Advaita?” and I started seeing it and I thought “Wow really?” and I could see at some level that what it did is stepped people out of their mind and had, at some level, it could have a benefit. What I saw happening, and I’ve seen it happen, various people come to mind, is that they’re going to run into a brick wall at some point. I’ve seen this happen with various people who tried to take this really deep intellectual understanding of it, and kind of bypass all the emotional energy that’s stored in the body, and you can’t do that in the end.

Rick: Yes, I mean, I could just hear one of them saying in response to that, “Well, there is no emotional energy because it’s all an illusion, and there is no body, and don’t worry about practices because that implies that there’s a practicer, so chuck that, I mean, just Realize you’re already Enlightened. You’re done.”

Philip: Basically, you’re going to run into, basically going to run into a brick wall is what I’ve seen multiple people do. I’ve heard people, know people and I’ve seen people who are advocates of that run into those walls. I’m not going to, we’re going to get into speaking about people, but I’ve seen it all, seen all those things happen. I say seen it all, seen those things happen and it’s sad in a way, but it’s just part, it’s part of their path in another way.

Rick: Yes, and I don’t want to sound holier than thou or…

Philip: No, absolutely. It’s just, it’s a different route, that’s all.

Rick: Yes, well that’s an interesting point in itself. There can be routes that one takes which you look back on 20 years ago and you thought, well that was kind of stupid, but hey, that’s where I was 20 years ago and now I’m here and so it must have, one thing led to the next.

Philip: Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, definitely. I mean, it would, you might have done some things, think, well…., but actually it just all led to that. It just all led to that. So, I don’t see it as wrong or right. When I see it, those kinds of things, I just feel the word, the Silence gave me for any, for all of this, because the kind of question came up, why, why share? Why share? And it was just got…

Rick:

Philip: What do you mean why share? Why share the the message.

Rick: Why should you?

Philip: Yes, why should I share the message of Self-Realization? When it’s all okay at this absolute level. And I got the words “Compelling Compassion.”

Rick: Yes, there you go.

Philip: It’s a compelling compassion. So when I see whatever it is, whether it’s somebody who’s new to the path, or somebody who might be, if there is no this, there is no the other kind of point in the point in the spectrum. There’s just this compelling compassion.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: It’s just there. It’s like I know who you are and I know I can see the identity overlay and that’s not who you are and it’s just this profound compassion that I feel.

Rick: Yes. Yes, it reminds me of a story of Sri Ramakrishna when Vivekananda had his Realization. He came to Ramakrishna and he said, “Oh, this is so wonderful. Now I just want to go to the Himalayas and sit in Samadhi for for the rest of my life and Ramakrishna said, “Oh, I’m so disappointed in you. I expected you to go out and help the people, do something with this.”

Philip: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I did ask that question. I remember in the Spheres Of Light phase, just before the full Realization, I was doing this talk in my hometown in Manchester, and Sue [my wife] turned around to me and said, “Why are you doing this?” And I thought, “What a great And I kind of just stopped and closed my eyes. And about two seconds later, I said, “It’s bursting out of me.” And she said, “Oh, that’s a good answer.” So I went ahead and did the talk. Then the question came up again, like when you, the perfection, if you like, if you can call it that, the absolute essence, was seen like, well, so what….., …..what is the reason then for sharing? And that’s when the, “It’s a compelling compassion,” came up and I thought, “Okay,” and that did it for me. I thought, “Okay.” Because Philip was resisting the idea of sharing, and then I thought, “Okay, that’s why I’m sharing.”

Rick: It reminds me of the 23rd Psalm, that phrase, “My cup runneth over.” once the cup is full, it overflows. And you can just think of every spiritual luminary throughout history, they, as well, I keep quoting Jesus today for some reason, they didn’t hide their light under a bushel, they felt compelled to be an instrument of the divine, not just to enjoy it for themselves, but to, …enable others to enjoy it.

Philip: Yes, and that’s what it feels like, and it’s like this listening process, going on, saying, “This way now, that way now, this next.” …..that and I wouldn’t say claim perfection on that but the kind of things that have unfolded have unfolded because this essence wanted it to unfold and things that hasn’t necessarily come as easily because the mind was trying to get involved in making it happen and it’s far easier when it just flows and it comes from within.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: That includes anything I write down. I have endless videos I’ve recorded…, talk about this today, five-minute video, don’t think about it, just do it.

Rick: Yes, nice.

Philip: Yes.

Rick: St. Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”

Philip: Yes. that whole beautiful prayer.

Philip: Yes, yes.

Rick: One of the notes you sent me was just the line, “There’s no spiritual bypass.” What did you mean by that?

Philip: Yes, this was a term I came across again after the Realization because I’ve gone through all these Complementary Therapy things and I started hearing this term.

Rick: John Wellwood coined it.

Philip: I found out it was John Wellwood. I thought where’s this come from? What on earth is a Spiritual Bypass? I found a wiki article. Oh right, okay, John Wellwood. I thought, oh yes, okay, I can see what he’s getting at now because I was wondering what a Spiritual Bypass was. Obviously that’s [these statements], there is no [this], there is no whatever, and then you’re forgetting to address what’s something I’m quite keen on people recognizing that there’s this emotional body. And whether you like it or not, as you deepen into Awareness, Awareness is going to jet wash you from the inside, and it’s going to show you all this crap [emotional energy] that you’ve been carrying and it’s going to go so here you are have a look at this and if you’re not ready for that that can be challenging. I say to people you know there isn’t a bypass you’re going to have to face this stuff it’s going to come up at some point and and here are the ways that that you can address this. People will try to bypass but that’s a delusion that’s like the Neo-Advaita we were talking about there is no this, there is no the other, whatever, but actually you know you’ve had 10, 20, 30, 40, your emotional body and at some point it’s going to come out and I’ve seen it so often. So for me the whole idea of trying to bypass this is a it’s like a delusion and it’s better to come at it from a space of Awareness, rather than trying to do something that ultimately is impossible, which is bypassing.

Rick: Yes, it seems to me that pretty much everybody has stuff bottled up, and if you don’t do anything about it, it’ll just plague you your entire life, influencing your behavior patterns and things like that. And, processing it, actually resolving it can be uncomfortable. And so, there’s a tendency to want to avoid that, but things are so much better off if you do deal with it and process it and rid yourself of it. It’s almost like, to take a simple example, almost like the heroin addict who, doesn’t want the withdrawal symptoms, so he takes some more heroin, and then that makes the problem even worse. And, he can go on like that for a long, long time, just trying to keep that thing, all that pain bottled up. But sooner or later you have to go through the, what do they call it, the withdrawal and process it. And then you’re in the clear, and then you’re no longer plagued by this baggage you’ve been carrying around.

Philip: Yes, because it affects your behaviors even unconsciously. You might not be aware that this belief or this experience, this trauma, for which I have profound compassion because, anybody you look at has got some of that there somewhere in their system. And the approach …whether I’m unusual on this, I don’t know – but the view I took was if it’s there, let’s face it, and let’s deal with it head on.

Rick: Well that’s good. I mean, I don’t know if you’re unusual, but I think we all have a tendency to want to, like, you don’t want to jump into cold water. ….you stick your toe in and then maybe your foot, and it might be easier to just jump in. and get it over with.

Philip: What I found is life presents you the opportunities.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: What I’ve said, I’ll say to people that you don’t need to go, you don’t particularly need to go looking for this. What you’ll find is that relationships, events, places will present you the opportunity and so when the trigger arises I refer to it as a treasure, triggers are treasures.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: And that’s that’s your invitation, and I refer to then say, that’s not a challenge, it’s an invitation from [Awareness], oh, hang on a minute, Rick or Jane or Joe, you’ve been carrying this now for 20 years, because this event has arisen for you to face it. And if you’re ready to look at it from the space of Awareness in that moment, then just by literally looking at it from within, trusting only that Awareness, feeling it in the body, this Tsunami will just fall away. And what I’ve guided hundreds of people with that, in person, online, whatever, and consistently when they allow that to happen, they go through, it comes in waves, comes in waves, it falls away, and then often sadness will crop up. And they’ll just say, “I’m feeling sad now”, I’ll say “That’s great because that’s a letting go energy.” I say [to] witness the sadness and when the sadness goes, I’ll say, “What’s here now?” and they see stillness, peace, silence. So, these invitations, these triggers are invitations, are treasures.

Rick: Yes, which has an interesting implication, which is that, life is not a series of accidents. It’s meaningful. It’s everything that happens is actually a potential lesson for us or an opportunity to grow in some way.

Philip: Every experience, I would say, some are might be trivial, like putting the dishes in the dishwasher or whatever, but at the heart of every experience is an invitation to this.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: And these big ones…, people like, might like to have profound spiritual experiences, blissful states, and they’re great, but they’re also invitations because they’re not it. They’re not it. There’s a witness even to those profound ones that’s completely still and untouched and silent and unmoved. And that’s an invitation for you to go deeper. And the emotional release is just another manifestation of that. You might label one good and one bad, but take that label away and they’re both just invitations.

Rick: Yes. I was talking to a friend yesterday who is 51, and since the age of 15, she’s had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia and stuff like that. And, even I can tell she can’t even walk very fast. She has low energy. And she’s saying, “But, I realized that that everything is a gift. I feel like this has taught me a lot about patience, about tolerance, about my own body.” And she doesn’t have poor me syndrome, it’s more like, there’s some kind of wisdom guiding life and this is meant to happen for a reason and I’m just trying to extract maximum insight from it, rather than feel bad about it.

Philip: That’s a good place to be. I’ve come across people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and that’s very debilitating as you well know. And if she’s in that space with it, and is at peace with it, then there’s a reason that’s showing up. And there’s an invitation there that is unique to her experience. not better or worse than anybody else’s, it would be my perspective on that.

Rick: Yes, of course, we would all prefer to just be radiantly healthy and have plenty of money and great relationships and everything’s going well, but if that was the way life was supposed to be, it would be.

Philip: That’s what you said earlier, “What’s my relationships like?” and I forgot to answer that bit. I would say relationships are good.

Rick: Yes. There was a famous line by Ram Dass, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a weekend with your parents.”

Philip: Yes, yes, I’m aware of that one. In fact, I was just chatting, I don’t want to go into it too much, but my mom died last year, and we had like three or four intense weeks, 24/7 in the hospital. And I was just calm throughout. I did get a release once she eventually passed, but it was noticeable. I wouldn’t have been able do that.

Rick: Which probably had a much better effect on your mom.

Philip: Yes, well I was actually shown what was going to happen. I saw this expansion taking place. So yes, whilst there was a sadness [releases] at the end… Is my camera okay there? Yes,

Rick: You’re fine. Okay, looks good to me.

Philip: Yes, I just got a message there saying something happened. Yes, I was shown what was going to happen and that was very, very, very, very helpful.

Rick: You mean like a premonition or something?

Philip:Yes, yes, that now was the time and I kind of saw what, it was like…, I was shown a vision of mom and it was this awe opening up within her once she passed.

Rick: Oh, yes, right.

Philip: Like that. I thought it was helpful. That was really helpful.

Rick: Yes, I find it inspiring to interview people and read books about near-death experiences. I was doing that years ago, long before I started doing these interviews, just because it broadens your perspective beyond the confines of this life of you realize that this life is like a brief chapter in a big book, and there’s many wonderful chapters yet to come.

Philip: Oh, yes, absolutely. Yes, yes, indeed. I think somewhere in the process I read about near-death experiences and past lives and stuff like that, and it all made sense to me as the process was unfolding and integrating.

Rick: Yes,

Philip: I think it’s really helpful for people to touch on some of that stuff because it can open people up I’ve found. I remember seeing, It just, it just came to me so I may as well mention it very very quickly, there’s a guy called Dr Lloyd Rudy. So I remember seeing this video of this guy, he was a heart surgeon, I’m not sure where he was but it was, I think he’s passed over now but he was being interviewed by another doctor and basically he was describing this experience where this guy had basically been dead for like 25-30 minutes and he was there at the side of the Operating Room and they’d left all the kit on and they were thinking was there anything else we could have done you know something else we should have done the rest of it and suddenly this guy 25-30 minutes later kicks back into life and this guy reports afterwards once he’s been brought back to life. He’d seen everything happening in the operating theater the notes that Lloyd Rudy was being given, [for] phone calls or everything. And, he [Dr Lloyd Rudy] couldn’t believe it. And then he shared this news with his other colleagues around the country, and they all said, “Oh yes, we’ve had one of those.”

Rick: Yes, this is especially true in recent years since the resuscitation techniques have become so much more effective. It used to be people would just die, but now they get them back to life, and then so the incidence of these near-death experiences has become quite common.

Philip: Yes yes, absolutely. So, I think that’s something that helps open people up, from what I’ve seen.

Rick: It does. There’s this ongoing debate. In fact, you mentioned the Scientific and Medical Network in your notes here, and I’ve interviewed David Lorimer and other people like Marjorie Woollacott and people like that who are involved in that, but there’s this whole issue of the paradigm shift from materialistic, reductionistic thinking to the understanding that consciousness is fundamental and so on. Why did you mention Scientific and Medical Network in your notes?

Philip: Because I came across them a few years ago through another route and ended up speaking to David Lorimer, who you’ve interviewed, and Dr Peter Fenwick, who is the President Emeritus of the Network. And long story short, Peter has this weekly meditation on a Sunday, so I was invited to do, participate in that and lead one of their Sunday meditations for their people. So they seemed to quite like that and then I discussed it further with David and Peter and said, “Well, why don’t I do an event for you?” So I ended up doing one of their events online a few years ago now, I can’t remember when it was. I’m not sure, sorry, I think it was three or four years ago. And I realized that they were, whilst they were interested in meditation and do loads of stuff around this paradigm shift and what have you, I wasn’t quite sure how they were going to be ready, whether they were going to be ready for what I was going to share. So I thought, well, okay, well, I’ll take them on a journey because I like to make it experiential for people. So I explained all this to Peter, what I was gonna do, and he was happy with that and right at the beginning I said I want to get a feel for you guys because you know so I asked I think it was three or four questions about how many were regular meditators, how many had had a profound spiritual experience or expansive sense of consciousness that they couldn’t explain, things like that and but they were like they were all pretty much like 80 odd percent were regular meditators I think there was something like that obviously no [it was] 60-70 with regular meditators. 80 odd percent had had a profound spiritual experience, but only 40% of them knew what it was about. And these were people who were Scientists, Medics, and people interested in that kind of thing. And I thought, “Wow, that’s interesting.” So I took them all on On a journey and it kind of just was really profound for them. Peter emailed me the next day and said, “That was absolutely brilliant. I’ve had emails coming in from everywhere.” And so it was kind kind of interesting because, here are people who are, you wouldn’t necessarily put in this, Scientists, Medics, people interested in Applied Sciences and so forth, all really being touched by this.

Rick: Yes, but that group is very consciousness-oriented, they’re interested in this kind of stuff.

Philip: Then I read recently, I was in touch with, was it Marjorie Woollacott via David because there was an Indian guy who contacted me wanted to do some research on Kundalini. He was going through a Kundalini Awakening and then Marjorie sent me some papers that she’d referred to that I’d heard of earlier and one of those papers focus around people who are Scientists who’ve all had some kind of spiritual awakening type experience and that was kind of interesting reading those as well. I think these were people who weren’t necessarily meditators.

Rick: Yes, I think there’s something in the water, so to speak. I mean, these days, well, even people like yourself, here you were the 60-hour-a-week Civil Engineer, and all this whole spiritual awakening bubbled up. And that’s happening more and more, I think. There’s some kind of ambient uprise in the level of world consciousness that is lifting all boats, at least those which aren’t firmly anchored to the mud.

Philip: Yes, yes, no, I feel like I see it. It’s definitely, it feels like sometimes I refer to it as we’re standing on the shoulders of spiritual giants, you know what I mean?

Rick: Yes. There’s, well…, obviously, has gradually been rising. Yes, it looks pretty messy. If you listen to the news right now,

Rick: Right.

Philip: Well what I’ve been shown is that’s all part of the, that’s kind of like the collective release that’s going on. All of this has to come to the surface.

Rick: Yes, let’s talk about that some more. A question did come in which I’ll ask you in a bit, but talk about your vision, your perspective on the whole world situation and the prospects for a better world and you know things like that. Because the world does seem to be going to hell in a hand-basket in many areas and people are rightfully concerned about these things?

Philip: Yes, I mean, I’ve looked [at this], I’ve had some insights around this, without getting into too much controversial stuff, but around COVID, I was shown a lot of stuff, and I was called to do a series of online events there for people who, that varied from people who had never meditated before, and I was doing lots of meditations, introducing people to meditation, through to, I ended up doing this live stream mid-COVID and it was called, the title I was given was This Earthquake, This Earth-Quake, A Shift in Consciousness. There was a whole series of insights that had come from the Silence that we talked about earlier, that I was made clear that I needed to share there. So I guided people through that on a live stream gave them [insights] and the day after I’d done that I got this insight that came through to say the world is, I can’t remember the full detail of it now but the Live Stream is on my YouTube Channel and it was something like “the world’s in a deeper place now, the world’s in a deeper place now.” So it, what was being shown there was that whoever people wanted to attribute that whole thing to, for whatever reason that was there and it was it was it actually now realized after the fact I was shown that this was going to happen. I didn’t know what was going to happen precisely but this event was going to happen, a worldwide event, and this was somehow the whole of that process was necessary and that the insights on that Live Stream were about some of the things that I had seen at that time and in that process that the world was shifting, you talked about the tide rising, but with the tide rising, like I was saying earlier, as the tide rises, as the Awareness arises within you, all of the collective rubbish we’re either carrying individually or collectively, somehow that has to come out and it looks pretty chaotic and it’s a bit like, it’s darkest before the dawn. It kind of feels like that, but I feel this phase is really quite long from what I’ve been shown. I’m talking a long time.

Rick: Decades?

Philip: Beyond, yes, beyond my lifetime, beyond yours.

Rick: So, do you think that we could look at history as being a, all the plagues and pandemics and wars and genocides and all these things as being a necessary purging of rubbish or symptomatic of that anyway?

Philip: Symptomatic of it, a function of it, yes, yes, all of those, all of those things. And at the human level, of course, it looks horrific. Some of the events that we’ve experienced as humanity, even right now, there’s plenty of it that’s horrific. Somehow, all of this process is unfolding and all of this is happening and it’s a pretty noisy phase, but somehow it has to happen. Somehow it has to.

Rick: Yes. It’s very hypothetical, but I wonder if people could be more proactively on the spiritual path in greater numbers. I wonder if the severity of these turbulences could be diminished, like if the static electricity and clouds could be somehow drained off slowly rather than allowed to build up, then we wouldn’t have huge lightning strikes. It could just be a cloudy day or something like that.

Philip: Yes, I would say there’s some truth in that, from what I see. The more people that will be meditating, opening to this and so forth, all of that is definitely helping. In fact, I think there’s some research on this.

Rick: There is.

Philip: That shows the effects of people…

Rick: Large groups.

Philip: Large groups meditating on crime in an area and stuff like that.

Rick: Yes, I’ve been in some of those groups.

Philip: Right, okay. So, I’m certain that that will have an impact, from both from that research but also from direct seeing.

Rick: Yes, let me see what this question is. it came in. This is from someone named Prachi Dixit, sounds like an Indian name. “What do you think about sharing knowledge in exchange for money or other material things? Since this is an Earth experience, how do you balance that?”

Philip: Yes, it’s a great question and it’s something that’s been a long journey, I would say. One of the things that happened, so to answer that, if I go through and give people a brief summary of the journey.

Rick: Sure.

Philip: When the Spheres Of Light bit came through the Open Source bit that I referred to, what that was about was making this freely available. There was no entry portal to it. The meditation was there on the website and you could just use it. You didn’t have to pay Philip or the other people that were helping me at the time to experience that it was there and we provided a load of free resources. And I then got, I remember getting this insight and it was that time when money was fairly at that time tight for Sue and I, but I got this clear insight to say you’ve got to share this for free now. So I used to go and do these events and actually what it was was share it for free but you can accept donations. So I said to people, just come along. And so I did that for several years, sharing it for free. And that was an interesting journey because loads of people came and have benefited from it greatly. But what started to happen fairly quickly was, because it was free and nobody paid anything before they came, in the 48 hours before the event, I’d get anywhere between 50 and 70% cancellations.

Rick: Interesting, because they weren’t committed?

Philip: Yes, because they weren’t committed.

Rick: I see. And there was a bunch of people, as long as you’re arm, on the waiting list, because they would fill up very quickly. Then I’d then start phoning saying, “You can come.” but I they’d “Oh I can’t come now because…”

Rick: Yes, they had something else scheduled.

Philip: I realized the insight then came was to do a fixed donation. It was a very small sum and that stopped the cancellations dead in their tracks just like that. And what I discovered was that people who were then even if it was like £10 (quid) $12 or £15 ($18) quid or whatever it was…

Rick: What’s a quid? A pound?

Philip: A Pound (£), yes. One pound (£1) would be like $1.20 to 1.30 dollars or something like that. Even if it was a relatively small sum, people just came because they were committed. And it wasn’t because I was trying to earn money, it was because they wanted to be there and they’d spent some money. And so what I’ve been shown is I’ve got a number of Streams now that’s evolved even further over the years from basically the Open Source has been been a principle I’ve stuck to all the time. So everything I share is freely available. I’ve got, 260 YouTube videos, 50 live streams on Insight Timer, tons of stuff. There’s enough, more than enough material there. But if you want to come to an event or have a One to One, then there’s a donation that you you will you choose to make. And I remember being asked by this guy, highly qualified guy, but who’d come to see me for the first time, who’d been on the path for some time but had come across my work and had been really taken by it. And he suddenly turned around in exasperation and he said to me, “How much do I have to pay?” And I said to him, “Nothing. It’s completely free. It’s right here for you, right now. The question is, are you ready to open to that? You’re not paying for this. You will never pay for truth. You will never pay for Self-Realization, but you might pay for, to contribute to the lighting, the heating, the food or whatever, because we live in a Commercial Economy.” Fortunately or unfortunately, we live in a Commercial Economy. So I had a whole phase of looking at the difference between a Gift Economy, like you people say that Native American or First Peoples, as you now call it, was largely a Gift Economy, but it got destroyed by the West and became a Commercial Economy. So we live in a Commercial Economy. And so the matter of the fact is that things, for now at least, we pay money for certain things, certain facilities and certain events. So I have a, the way I approach it is I’ve got a vast array of material and if people want that for free I say, “Here you go, have a look at that.” There’s more than enough stuff there to keep you going for the next two, three years. But if you do make a donation then it helps fund more of that.

Rick: So that’s the way we’ve done Buddha at the Gas Pump is, to make it freely available and grow it to the point where voluntary donations without a lot of arm twisting and fuss enable us to devote all the time, we devote to it. Unless you and I can get to the point where the local grocery store and gas station and everything else are just going to give us stuff, it’s necessary to pay for things.

Philip: Absolutely, indeed, and so that’s a fact of life. But the point I like to make to people is you’re never going to pay for Truth. You’re never going to pay for that, because that’s who you are.

Rick: Yes, it’s priceless.

Philip: It’s priceless and it’s and but you might need to contribute to your service that you’re providing which is an invaluable service as I see it.

Rick: Yes I mean it’s like I don’t know for an analogy perhaps the water in a reservoir is free water but you have to like it costs money to hook up the pipes and filter it and you know bring it into people’s homes and all that stuff. The rain comes down for free, but it costs money, the infrastructure to get it into your tap.

Philip: I was a Civil Engineer in a previous life, so I know all about that.

Rick: Oh, there you go, right, that is your thing.

Philip: Yes, so I don’t see a problem. Money itself, here’s another part, isn’t a problem. It’s an energy and it’s an energetic exchange. It’s the beliefs that people have around it is where the problems arise.

Rick: Yes, and I mean, just in case anybody still has a problem with this, I mean, in ancient India, for instance, you would join an Ashram, perhaps you would serve the Guru for a number of years, or maybe you’d bring a cow as a gift or something like that. It was called a Dakshina, and service was a thing. And so, there was always an understanding that there had to be some kind of support on a material level in order for this non-material priceless teaching to be disseminated.

Philip: Yes, absolutely, and that’s how I see it basically. So, I’ve been on probably a 13-year journey with that and I’ve got stuff about it on my website if people want to explore that journey. I can’t remember what it’s called now, but there is stuff on the website.

Rick: All righty, so what would you like to say in conclusion, like either as some kind of philosophical wrap-up or just in terms of practical things like how people can interact with you in various ways?

Philip: Yes, so on the practical level the main site gatewaylocation.org is an entry to a vast array of freely available resources, whether it’s on the website itself, on the YouTube channel, or Insight Timer, where I’ve got a whole free Self-Realization program there.

Rick: I’m linking to all these from your BatGap.com page?

Philip: Yes, you’ll have all that on the BatGap.com page. So there’s one of the key ones, I mean, the website, YouTube channel, Insight Timer, there’s years of material on there. Insight Timer is a little bit bit unusual in that what I did, I felt a call to do a live stream Self-Realization program. So there’s a whole, it’s the first time I’ve done it that way, structured program there, that’s on there, you can go work your way through those Live Streams and it comes along with freely available Infinite Silence meditations. So that’s been profound for many people, so that’s a good tool. There’s a whole series of Live Streams on the YouTube channel, hundreds of insights on the Website. And then alongside the main Website are the three main meditation experiences I use. So, I’d guide people to that. That’s on the header bar of GateLocation.org. You’ll see meditation site. You’ll find those there.

Rick: A question came in that I think you might be able to weave your general statement into as part of the answer. This is from my friend, Canta Dadlaney in Bombay. She asks, “It seems a little ironic that despite the sudden surge in so many people holding talks on spirituality, meditation, and more, the world is in a mess. Most people are vulnerable and follow self-proclaimed realized individuals at the drop of a hat. Holding talks, teaching people how to meditate, how to realize the Self, seems to have become a money-making industry.” Okay, “…your thoughts please.” We already talked about the money thing so you don’t have to go over that again but if there’s anything that in what I just read that helps to inspire what you were about to say by way of conclusion go at it.

Philip: Yes so the I mean it’s, I think there’s truth in what what your friend’s pointing at there I think there’s definitely a case of just one thing on the spirituality and money thing I think it has become a bit of a money-making business.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: There’s no doubt about that. That’s not why I’m here, fortunately, and my previous life pays for my life. So I’ve never made any money from this. But all this noise, this chaos, this vulnerability that you see in the world, that’s where the Compelling Compassion bit comes in. And for me, that’s the reason for sharing. And what I’d like to say to people is, going back to that question I asked, why are you watching this? Why are you here now? And beyond that, why are you here in this body? And what I’d offer to you is that you’re here for this. This is the primary reason you’re here. It’s not to get married, have 2.4 children, have a nice house, have a nice car. You might do those things, and they might come with it, and they’ll be nice. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Rick: Yes, it’s really rough on the point four child.

Philip: Yes, yes, yes.

Rick: He has a tough life.

Philip: That’s a thing from many years back in the UK. That was the average number of children.

Rick: Oh, I know, I know. I’m just making a joke. Go ahead.

Philip: Yes, all of those things may happen in your life, but the real reason you’re here in this form, as I was talking about in that very ‘philosophical’ phase or [key] insight or whatever you want to call it we spoke about earlier, The real reason you’re here manifest in this form is because the Universe, The Universe itself chose to express itself in your form and it’s choosing, if you like, to come to know itself in its own experience. Life is its own purpose, its own meaning, and the purpose and meaning of your life wrapped into one is to realize this. That’s why you’re here. You don’t need to believe me, but when this is seen, when this is realized, then it will become Self-evident and capital S, Self-evident, the true essence. That’s why you’re here. That’s what I’d like to say.

Rick: Good. And I think most, hopefully, most people listening to this will heartily agree with you. I think a lot of us have that feeling that all these, relative expressions are just icing on the cake, but there’s a more fundamental reason for our being here. If we can, to whatever extent we can make that our highest priority, the better things will go.

Philip: Make it your highest priority.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: Yes, there’s nothing more important than this. That doesn’t mean…., because everybody’s journey is different, that doesn’t mean that, you have to do Philip’s journey, leave your old world, people can still integrate this into their lives and it just happened to be that that was the way for me at that time.

Rick: Yes yes, obviously you couldn’t be doing this if you were working 60 hours a week as a Civil Engineer.

Philip: I didn’t anticipate being, the term the Silence gave me after many years thinking what on Earth am I supposed to say, having used Spiritual Advocate for a number of years, it said use Western Mystic.

Rick: Yes. That’s what the Silence said. So I didn’t anticipate that. Twenty odd years ago, twenty four years, twenty five years ago when I began meditation, that was like unbelievable. You would never have dreamt that. But, people can, I’ve known, I’ve seen people come to realization, people I’ve guided, and they’re not specifically going out there. they might be parents, they might be doing music, they might be doing other things. It doesn’t have to be what Philip does.

Rick: Nope. Anyway, I appreciate what you’re doing and I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and listening to your recordings before this conversation and I think you made a good choice following that intuition. You have a knack for this.

Philip: Maybe.

Rick: Seems like it. So keep doing it.

Philip: Thank you very much for everybody listening and thank you for the opportunity. It’s been fantastic. I should have said that right at the beginning.

Rick: Oh that’s okay, yes, thank you Philip. And we’ll be in touch, we’ve got some interesting ideas we’ve been cooking on.

Philip: Yes, yes, let’s talk further.

Rick: Yes, alrighty, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. My next interview will be with a Brahmacharini, I guess you would call her, in India, and she has a big long name which I couldn’t recount without looking it up and reading it. But, she looks very bright and very interesting, and she has a beautiful website with all kinds of profound content on it, and I’m really looking forward to that conversation. So we’ll see you for the next one. Thank you.