Philip Weber Transcript

Philip Weber Interview

Summary:

Introductory Remarks

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 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to www.BatGap.com and look under the “Interviews” menu where you’ll see them arranged in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners, viewers, and readers so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. And donations are a little skimpy lately, so if you’ve been thinking of donating and haven’t gotten around to it, give it a go.

My guest today is Philip Weber. Philip had a 35-year career as an executive in the hospitality and hotel industry. He has been a member of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship since 1999. He is known for his highly ecumenical outlook, holding a deep appreciation for many of the world’s spiritual traditions and teachings, and often affirming Yogananda’s adage, “Truth is one, paths are many.” Phil is currently retired and living in Carlsbad, California. He prefers a quiet, contemplative life. He is not a spiritual teacher and has no online or social media presence, and therefore any comments or inquiries for Phil should be made through his editor’s website, which I’ll be linking to his page on BatGap.com.

Phil wrote two books, one called Grace Happens: An Awakening of Consciousness, and the other entitled Reflections of Consciousness: Essays on the Journey of Awakening and the Nature of Reality. I listened to them both as audio books, and I was just telling Phil that I’ve read a lot of spiritual books over the years, and these were among the most enjoyable I’ve ever read. And I think the reason was that he writes very well, for one. As you could tell from the intro I just read, he is somewhat self-effacing. He’s not trying to make himself famous or even sell a lot of books, and also just the subject matter and the thoughts he expressed aligned very closely with my way of thinking about things. So, we’re going to try to pack in a lot of points from both books over the next couple of hours. So welcome, Phil.

Philip: Thank you, Rick. There are a few things in life that you end up doing and you go, “Yeah, I never thought I’d be doing this.” And then there are a few where, “I never thought I would be doing this.” And this falls into the second category. It’s just something you never think about, so I really want to share my appreciation for you and Irene for inviting me and I look forward to our chat today.

Rick: Yeah, I never thought I’d be doing this either. If you asked me, this has been the most fulfilling period of my life doing this.

Selfless Service

Philip: I’ve been aware of BatGap for years, and I think what you guys are doing is a real service, and I’m sure it helps a lot of people. I know it has me.

Rick: Well, that’s the aim. And we can discuss as we get into it what we mean by “helping a lot of people.” There are a lot of ways of helping people.

Philip: Absolutely.

Rick: And they’re all essential, really.

Philip: Well, I agree that there are an infinite number of ways to help people, and I don’t think that one way is any better or worse than another. Help is help.

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: You do what you can and that’s what I would consider living a dharmic and self-fulfilling life. It’s not about what you can get, it’s about what you can give. Paradoxically, it’s like St. Francis said, “It is in giving that we receive,” and it comes back. In my experience, it comes back. It seems like I receive more than I give, and I don’t know why that is. It may be an equal thing, but I feel very blessed by the people that I’ve been able to assist both through the books, through my years in hospice, and through working with the homeless. It’s just a wonderful thing to be able to do in life. I’ve been very fortunate.

Rick: And you know, in a way, the receiving more than you give is not so much a reward as it is an augmentation of your ability to give. It’s almost like the powers that be say, “Okay, this guy is giving a lot. Let’s help him give more. Give him some more juice.”

Philip: That’s true, and I think the more one is blessed, the more it’s incumbent that one does help. If you’ve been blessed with a lot of advantages, then I think it’s even more important that you do help in the ways that you can.

Rick: Yeah, and in a way, if ultimately everything is God, then we’re kind of agents of the Divine or sense organs of the Infinite or whatever, however you want to phrase it. And so, it’s almost like it’s not us helping, it’s the Divine helping through a willing instrument.

Grace Happens

Philip: Absolutely, and that’s the purpose of the books. I am, by nature, a very private individual and these things that I talk about through my awakening experience and leading up to it and after are extremely personal. I’m essentially lifting my dress in front of the whole world through these books; it’s not what I would have chosen to do, but it’s not about me.

The book, Grace Happens – when I was on a 40-day and 40-night private retreat at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat facility up in the Arizona mountains, I hadn’t planned on doing anything other than being in solitude and silence, as they’re two of my favorite things in life – on the third day, it just started gushing out. If I wouldn’t have written, I think I would have exploded there on the spot. So it just needed to come out and that was the contextual field which provided the space for it. Like 85% came out there, and then over the next year or so, the next 15% came out; I kind of just filled in the corners here and there. Fortunately, I have a wonderful editor who could piece it all together.

The first book in particular was challenging because it had emails and journal entries from when I was going through the initial awakening shift, and that wasn’t my best time for communicating, so I did the best I could with it. I hadn’t planned on keeping the emails or using them at all, but I had a little intuitive hit one day that said, “Just file these away and don’t worry about it. They’ll be useful later.” And ultimately, they became the first half of the first book. A lot of these types of books about awakening are either in retrospect or what it may be like after, but mine is fairly unique in that most of what came through in that first book was as it was happening. Trying to figure out what was going on, and the rebirthing process into Unity consciousness instead of separation consciousness, was fairly difficult for me. And I hope that comes through in the book.

Rick: It does, and I think it’ll be useful for people to hear, so we’ll get into describing it. You know, one of my initial motivations for starting BatGap was to illustrate or demonstrate that awakening or enlightenment, or whatever term you want to use, is not the exclusive domain of really far out unusual people who live in caves. It’s hotel managers and housewives and, you know, ordinary people. That’s the subtitle of BatGap: “Conversations with ‘Ordinary’ Spiritually Awakening People.” The reason I had that incentive was that I live in a town where a lot of people have been meditating for a long time, and people were having profound awakenings, and they would sometimes tell their friends about them and be scoffed at: “Oh, this couldn’t be happening to you. I know you. I’ve known you for years. You’re an ordinary guy.” So people had this thought that you have to be something extraordinary in order to have these kinds of experiences, but I really think that spiritual awakening is the birthright of everyone. We all have the potential for it. We’re all essentially awakened already and just have to realize it. That was one of my motivations for starting this, just to demonstrate that.

Philip: Yeah, in terms of the first book, Grace Happens: An Awakening of Consciousness, that is probably the main message too: “If it can happen to a guy like me, it can happen to anybody.”

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: And it won’t possibly happen, it will happen! It’s inevitable, it’s built into the System. We’re always playing with the House’s money, and you can’t screw it up. You just gotta do your best and not worry about the result because you’re already there.

Rick: And if somebody is reading this interview and they happen to be on their deathbed, this applies to you too. He doesn’t mean it will happen in the coming month before you pass away. It will happen. Life is not confined to the 80 years or whatever that we live in this body.

Philip: Absolutely, and I think one of the big stumbling blocks to people awakening is that they may in their head go, “Oh yeah, you know, Yogananda said it can happen in one lifetime and I get that.” But in their heart, there’s doubt or “I’m not doing enough of something” or “I’m not worthy” or “I’m not…” whatever it may be. And that’s just simply not true. In the second book, Reflections of Consciousness, I write about when I first joined SRF. I heard a lot of people talk about a little metaphor of starting out in Glendale, which is near Los Angeles. And the idea is like, “Well, we’re very close to Los Angeles,” which was awakening, “and that we just do the techniques and it’s a short path and you’re there.” Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know; I’m not passing any judgment on it. But what I think happens is that people tend to buy into that metaphor so literally that they think they’re trying to get from point A to point B, from where they are to where they’re not. And the truth is they always were in “Los Angeles.”

Rick: Yeah, so to interpret the metaphor in other words, on some level we’re already realized.

Philip: The techniques just take away the appearance of that not being the case. It’s not like you’re adding something. You already are a spark of infinite conscious awareness; you just don’t know it. The technique, whatever it may be, isn’t getting us from point A to point B, it’s just blowing the illusion that you’re not already at point B away.

Rick: Right. I just want to contrast that with what some of the Neo-Advaita people say, which is that “you’re already enlightened and so that’s it, you’re done, don’t bother about practices or anything like that.” To take an extreme example, imagine saying that to somebody who is deeply chronically depressed or psychotic or something like that. On some level they’re already enlightened, but obviously some work needs to be done to enhance the functioning of the mind-body system so that Realization becomes a living reality and not just a concept. And so, it’s very important not to mistake an understanding or a concept for actual Realization.

Philip: Absolutely. It’s like how Nisargadatta said that earnest spiritual effort is critical, or like Adyashanti says, it makes you “Grace prone.” There are certain things we can do – the methods and the techniques and the teachings, whatever they are that resonate with us – that are really important. What I’m wanting to stress through my writings is that it’s more of an inner attitude. When I first started with SRF and I read that Yogananda said it can happen, I didn’t just mentally go, “Well, okay, it probably does for one in a million.” I said, “If he’s saying it’s true, then it is true for me.” The inner attitude, then, was “this is going to happen.” Paraphrasing Wayne Dyer, you just gotta try to see it from the end, but you still have to do your part and make the effort, for sure. And just saying stuff like, “Well, there’s no one doing it and nothing to do” and blah blah blah, I don’t think it’s very helpful.

Awakening

Rick: Well, we’re gonna get into your personal story a bunch, but let’s elaborate on what this “it” is that we’re referring to. There was a question that came in from Anthony Parshall in Burlington, Vermont, who asked, “What exactly is enlightenment?” So, why don’t we start with that and then we’ll loop back and get into your whole history.

Philip: It’s a great question. “Enlightenment” has so much baggage around it. I wish they would just put it on the shelf for a couple hundred years and get a clean look at it, because I think if you asked a hundred different people, even if they’re all on the same spiritual path, I think you would get a hundred variations on it. Personally, I prefer the term “awakening.” I’m not going to say anything theoretical; I’m just going to share from my own experience, which is the best thing that I can do.

First of all, I’ll tell you what it’s not. Awakening is not some finish line that you cross and then you’re done. Because once the awakening happens, there’s an embodiment that goes on forever. You become an ever-clearer, more refined expression of the Divine. And that doesn’t eliminate our humanness or our personality quirks. I think the idea that “all of a sudden nothing goes wrong, and I’m done, and now I can just sit back and cruise” is an unfortunate misconception. I probably had that early on myself. I think the fundamental attribute to awakening, in my experience, is that separation consciousness dissolves. In other words, the idea that “I’m separate from everything else” falls away, and you wonder how you ever saw it that way. It’s like an optical illusion of consciousness, as Albert Einstein said.

Rick: Before you entered that phase, did you go through a phase where you did feel separate in the sense that you began to appreciate the distinction between Self and non-Self, or pure consciousness and the material world, a kind of duality period before there was a merger in which the world is seen in terms of the Self?

Philip: Yes, I would call that “witnessing consciousness.” That’s when you realize that you’re not the content of the experience; that there’s “experience” and there’s “me.” This way of witnessing is dualistic, but at least you’re not caught in the illusion that “I am what I have” or “I am what I do.” Of course, that’s how I was for most of my life.

Rick: Right, or “I am this body,” etc.

Philip: Yeah, “I’m separate” or “I’m a body” or “I am my thoughts” or “I am my feelings” or “I’m how much I have in my bank” or “I am my car” or “I am my house,” etc. Whatever identity you think that you are, you’re definitely not. But the witnessing consciousness does share a cab ride about halfway to awakening, and it’s an important demarcation in one’s spiritual journey. I found that, as I practiced the witnessing consciousness and as I ripened, there was just a Presence there that grew and eventually it was just too much for the ego structure to hold up, and it crumbled. And that’s when the other half of the equation came in. That’s when I saw my true nature. The first realization in the first moments was, “I am nothing.” In other words, “I am no thing in particular,” and then like a tidal wave coming back on that, I realized, “Well, if I am nothing, then I am everything.” And that was the Awakening. But then integrating and embodying that Realization was quite a ride, and it took several years to really get comfortable with it.

Rick: You mentioned an experience that you called “The Kiss,” in which you were playing solitaire on your laptop and all of a sudden you got zapped. Is that what you’re alluding to right now?

Philip: I am. I was out at the Hidden Valley Ashram and it was a normal, beautiful day. I had come back from lunch, and at that time I was really enjoying listening to a talk. On Sounds True, there are a couple of beautiful tapes by James Finley, one talking about Meister Eckhart and the other talking about Thomas Merton, both who I love.

Rick: Incidentally, I just want to say that I’ve interviewed just about everybody you mention in your books including James. So, for anybody reading Phil’s books, if you want to know more about some of the people he mentions, look them up on BatGap.

Philip: Yeah, James Finley is just a wonderful man. I’ve never met him, but I love his work. So I was listening to his Meister Eckhart talk and just killing some time. I had Spider Solitaire going on and listening to that at the same time, and the words were just so beautiful. I just kind of stopped, and I sat back and kept saying, “it’s just so beautiful, so beautiful.” And I had tears that started, and then there was just this descent of Grace. Apparently, I was ripe and that’s all it took. And for the next hour, I was drunk on energy. The kundalini had gone nuts, and I was staggering around my room having fits of uncontrollable alternating laughing and crying and saying, “Take me” and “I am One.” I mean, it was just insane, like a flood. The curtain came down and that was the Awakening. Of course, there was a lot of work afterwards that needed to take place, but that was The Kiss.

Rick: Yeah, and incidentally, I’ve interviewed people who had an Awakening like that while tying their shoes, or while eating tomato soup, or whatever. You shouldn’t all run out and get Spider Solitaire and a copy of James Finley’s talk and hope that it’s going to happen. I mean, you could be breathing bus fumes in New York City and all of a sudden it could happen.

Philip: And that’s why I shared it, to point out that you cannot plan it.

Rick: Right. It happens when you’re ready.

Philip: Yeah, it happens when you’re ready.

Rick: But you can enhance your readiness.

Philip: That’s for sure, and that’s what sadhana does. I wrote that, ultimately, “our sadhana sets the table, but it’s God’s Grace that delivers the feast.”

The Spiritual Path

Rick: And you had an experience of remembering, or in some way recognizing, a past life with Yogananda in Boston, right? So your spiritual sadhana didn’t really start in 1999. You picked up where you left off.

Philip: I think that’s right. My sister and her husband moved to Waltham, which is just outside Boston. He was getting his Ph.D. at Harvard in Biochemistry. I was 12 when I first went out there, and there was an immediate familiarity with Boston that I couldn’t explain. I went back almost every summer and when I was 15, the third summer that I visited, I was already bussing around the city by myself and going down to Cambridge Square and playing chess with the locals. And I had an experience on the top of the Prudential building, which had a great view. My sister and her husband kind of went their way and I kind of went my way, and I was looking off into the city, and suddenly everything fell away. I could hear an Indian drone in my mind, and I saw a building and knew that I’d lived there. I was 15, so I didn’t know what was happening, but I immediately had the remembrance that I lived in Boston. I had lived there in the 1920s and I didn’t make it to the 30s and I was a white male and that was about all I remembered. And this memory kind of went on the shelf for about 20 years until I first read the A.Y. in early 1999.

Rick: Autobiography of a Yogi.

Philip: Yes, and when I was reading about Yogananda’s time in Boston, that past life came back immediately and I realized that we had been together. So when I was ripe in this lifetime, finding him was easy. Strangely, Yogananda’s first ashram was in Waltham!

Rick: Interesting.

Philip: In fact, I went to a Borders Bookstore looking for spiritual books to read, and I knew there was something that I needed to find, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. Walking down the aisle, I looked up and I saw Yogananda’s picture on the spine of the Autobiography. There was such a magnetic pull to it that if I hadn’t picked it up, I think it probably would have just flown off the shelf and hit me between the eyes!

Rick: That happens too.

Philip: And I just knew, as soon as I got it, I knew “this is it.”

Rick: That’s cool. I don’t doubt that in the least. I think that kind of thing happens. And I think many of you who are reading this interview today, if you’ve been really keen on spiritual development, this is not the first time around that you have had that interest.

Philip: Clearly not.

Rick: There are verses in the Bhagavad Gita like that, which basically say the same thing. Paraphrasing, Arjuna asks Krishna, “Well, what happens if you don’t make it? Do you not perish like a broken cloud?” And Krishna says, “No, you basically just pick up where you left off.”

Philip: You do. You really do. For people who are a little iffy about Gurus, and I think there may be fewer and far between now than there used to be…I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems like at least the emphasis on the Guru is momentarily falling away…

Rick: There have been a lot of Gurus that give Gurus a bad name, so people are a little squeamish about them.

Philip: There are, but I wrote repeatedly in my two books that “God, Guru, and Self are One,” so it’s not about a loyalty to an individual in a body or to some organization. It’s really about loyalty to Truth with a capital T. As long as Truth is your polestar – that you want to find the true nature of reality and yourself, which are one and the same – then I don’t think you need to worry about whether you have a Guru or not, although I am very grateful for mine.

Rick: Yeah, I think that the ultimate ingredient, or the most fundamental prerequisite, to a spiritual path is just the desire and the earnestness, because when you have that, the means present themselves in whatever form. It’ll be different for different people, but all kinds of opportunities manifest.

This is often attributed to Goethe, but there’s a British mountain climber, I forget his name, who actually said it, which is that there’s really a great power in just starting a thing if you have the impetus to start it. And once you start it, then all kinds of accessories and aids and support opportunities will come to you that wouldn’t have come if you just had waited for something to happen.

Philip: Absolutely. Life is supportive. Life is a contextual field that always has our back. It’s always got our long-term highest good in mind, even though that may be hard to see when we’re going through a tough time. When we make an effort, things that wouldn’t have presented themselves otherwise do, and it could be anything. It could be a book. It could be meeting someone. It could be watching a BatGap. It’s infinite, and that’s why I would encourage anyone reading this to not try to put any preconceived notions on what it ought to look like. Don’t superimpose that onto the Infinite because you’re just making it more difficult. It can happen in any way, “always and in all ways,” as the CWG material says. I love that line.

Rick: What’s that, CWG?

Philip: Conversations with God.

Rick: Oh, Conversations with God. Yeah, you use these acronyms.

Philip: Sorry, yeah. I read Conversations with God when I first started on the path, probably in the year 2000. I really loved Neale Donald Walsch’s message in the books, and I thought the early stuff in particular was beautifully expressed. And so, over the years, I’ve tended to just incorporate some of that into my own vernacular because it resonates so well with me.

Rick: Sure.

Philip: I love the line that says, “God is with you always and in all ways.”

Rick: Now you sent me some notes of points we wanted to discuss from each book. Do you have those notes in front of you also or just me?

Philip: No, I do.

Rick: Okay, good. So, as we go along, I just want to make sure we cover as much as possible and get as deep as we can. We want to be both horizontal and vertical in our coverage of all your points, so feel free to elaborate on things or bring things up if I’m not mentioning them that you want to be sure to cover. Otherwise, I’ll just sort of mention points as they jump out at me, but don’t limit yourself to what I happen to think of or ask.

Philip: Gotcha.

Rick: Okay. So, let’s talk more at this point, unless you want to cover something else, about your initial awakening while you were playing Spider Solitaire and listening to James Finley, and then the challenges you met after that, including getting your feet back on the ground and integrating.

Philip: I’d like to touch on how I got to that point and then we can dive in. Briefly, my sadhana began when I was in my teens.

Rick: “Sadhana” means spiritual practice, by the way, for those who don’t know.

Philip: Yep. When I was in my teens, I was very interested in philosophy. I read widely both Western and Eastern philosophers, and I really enjoyed a guy named Alan Watts, who was one of the main vehicles for presenting Zen and Buddhism to the West back in the 60s; I really resonated with his stuff early on. And then I turned 18 and all I wanted to do for a few years was party and chase girls and stuff.

Rick: Did you catch any?

Philip: My share, yeah. Never enough, but I did okay. And then, at about 23, an alarm bell went off that was like, “You need to do something with your life beyond this.” And I was very fortunate to get a job at a hotel, and I just loved it. It was perfect. Within a year and a half, I was in management. And within three more years, I was a GM.

Rick: General manager. You’re really an acronym aficionado. Anyway, general manager.

Philip: Yeah, general manager, and I went on to have a 35-year career in the hospitality industry, which provided me all types of opportunities I wouldn’t have had in the world. I got to see a lot of the country and it was really fortunate that I had this. But about 15 years in, that started wearing off in terms of driving my satisfaction. I couldn’t understand the sense of dissatisfaction since I had seemingly everything. I had a great house and a beautiful convertible BMW, and I was making good money, and all these things that I thought were going to be fulfilling ultimately weren’t. Fortunately, I never had any addiction issues and I never really bottomed out in a bad way, but I was pretty unhappy internally.

And one night, I was watching TV, just channel surfing, and everything was inane. Nothing interested me, and I was spending mostly 30 seconds or a minute on each channel. I’d hit the “next” button and see something else. I can remember this like it was a moment ago…I hit the button and I saw the PBS channel, and there was this bald guy on the screen talking about whatever he was talking about, and that wouldn’t have lasted maybe a minute either, except he mentioned Alan Watts! And suddenly, I froze, and I was just enthralled by what he was talking about. It was Wayne Dyer.

Rick: Oh, Wayne.

Philip: I immediately went out the next day and got a couple of Wayne Dyer books. And that moment was another descent of Grace, which I later called The Shift. It wasn’t the type of Grace that provided the awakening, but it was the type that provided the impetus for the reignition of my spiritual path. And within a couple of months, I got Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi, and the rest took care of itself. So there was about an 18-year period of spiritual seeking, in which my primary techniques were Kriya Yoga, seva, which is selfless service, introspection, and more. I went to SRF services on Sundays, and the community in Atlanta there was just phenomenal. I mean, when I first walked in there, they didn’t have a temple yet, but it was in a little business park, and it felt like being wrapped up in a warm blanket. I knew I had come home. And some of the people there became my family.

Rick: Do you find Kriya Yoga effective and easy to practice? It is gratifying? Have you had good experiences with it?

Philip: Yes, very. I think it’s a very powerful technique, but it’s not for everyone. I mean, there’s no one technique that’s right for everyone. I make it a point in my books not to promote SRF or Kriya Yoga or anything else as an ideology or methodology. I think you have to find that on your own. It certainly worked for me though.

I also spent a lot of time investigating other teachings. I loved exploring the teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi as well as the more contemporary teachers like Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra, David Hawkins, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, and others. I soaked up whatever I could from whatever resonated. And that went on for about 18 years.

Then, in 2016, I found myself in a difficult situation. I had started a new job, and within a few weeks, it looked worse than worms on a waffle iron, Rick. I hated it. On top of that, I started having health challenges and my heart was starting to go out, and I ended up on disability in early 2017. I was sitting at home most of the time just sliding into depression. I wasn’t clinically diagnosed, but I was in maybe the worst shape I’d ever been in. And then I thought about it, “Well, if this is the year I go down, if this is the year I die, I’m going to go down swinging. I’m not going to go down like this.” I had talked about downsizing for years, and so that’s what I did. When the lease on the house that I had ran out, I gave away probably 80% of everything I owned, all the furniture, to the homeless facility that I was working with. And that’s another thing: a really great way out of whatever challenges you’re going through is to find someone who has the same challenges only worse and help them. It’s a great way to help yourself. Anyway, by the time I got rid of everything, I ended up back at the Hidden Valley Ashram in September of 2017, and I felt better than I had maybe in my whole life. And within two weeks, the Awakening happened. So, I had about an 18-year spiritual path that led up to The Kiss.

Integration and Acclimation

Rick: And then after The Kiss, after this blowout experience, you went through what we used to call in the TM movement, “unstressing.” There’s kind of a collection of deep impressions and gunk in your nervous system, in your subtle body, that a profound spiritual experience like that acts as a solvent to, and this stuff starts to dissolve and come out, and then you have to deal with that. So, talk a little bit about what that was like for you.

Philip: Sure. First of all, I had intermittent bouts of bliss. And when I say “bliss,” I would describe it as a fluid mix of peace and joy with a dash or two of euphoria. It was very disorienting. Before The Kiss, I never really had much in the way of kundalini issues, I think in large part because in Kriya Yoga, you’re channeling that energy.

Rick: You mean you’re helping it to kind of flow in an unimpeded way or something? You’re clearing the blocks and allowing?

Philip: Yeah, and it’s a gradual thing. Over years of practice, Kriya is incrementally increasing the energy flow and opening the chakras; the kundalini is slowly being activated, which reduces the chances of a damaging eruption. The only issues I’d had with Kriya and with kundalini was that occasionally I used to have what I call a “bliss rush.” I used to meditate in a chair, and one day I had one of these rushes, and the next thing I knew I had face-planted on the floor. I’d fallen right off the chair and damn near broke my nose. It was bad.

Rick: And you weren’t just falling asleep, you’d gone into some samadhi state or something.

Philip: Yeah, the energy was so great that I lost bodily consciousness for long enough to fall out. So, from then on, I got a little bench and meditated Zen style because I figured that I can’t fall too far from there! But other than that, kundalini had never been a problem. It’s an intelligent thing, so my attitude toward it is to let it do its thing and not try to force anything.

Rick: That’s good. I know people who’ve had trouble with it, and in some cases, who have had trouble because they tried to force it. They’re doing like an hour of rapid pranayama or something to try to force the energy up. That can be dangerous.

Philip: Well, you’ve probably read Gopi Krishna…

Rick: Gopi Krishna, yeah. Actually, there’s some guy we might interview who was his right-hand man. He lived with him and it would be interesting to get into that.

Philip: Reading his book, I realized that I’m not going to push it. Kundalini knows what it’s doing, and I have a Guru overseeing the process and I have my Kriya Yoga and I’m just not going to try to force anything, and I would really recommend not forcing it because kundalini’s a powerful force and you can get fried pretty quickly from it.

Rick: Safety first is a good motto, and that relates to all kinds of things on the spiritual path including psychedelics potentially. In my position, I get a lot of feedback from different people and I’m aware of people getting into trouble when not applying that dictum of safety first.

Philip: You bet. The spiritual path is not unlike any other thing in life; there are casualties along the way. Whatever “moderation” means to the individual is probably what they ought to do, and not go too crazy on any one thing.

Rick: Which is the traditional approach, actually. The Buddha and the Bhagavad Gita and other sources espouse the middle way and a balanced life. You don’t fast yourself to death. The Gita effectively says, “don’t sleep too much or too little, don’t eat too much or too little, don’t work too much or too little…just balance.”

Philip: But having said all that, suddenly I was having crazy kundalini going on and it was disorienting, and I found myself – not through any cognitive analysis of, “Well, this is happening, so I should do this,” it just was intuitive – I found myself outdoors walking.

Rick: What do you mean by crazy kundalini? What actually was happening to you?

Philip: Well, I was in a euphoric bliss and it was hard to operate.

Rick: Were you having kriyas where you’re shaking around and stuff?

Philip: Not so much shaking, but it was hard to do anything normal, like drive a car. It was interesting though, when I did need to drive my car, like when I would go down to the Interfaith Community Services homeless shelter, for some amazing reason, the kundalini and bliss would subside when I needed it to. But when I was back at the ashram, it was just raging and I found myself walking outside very slowly, like a meditation walk. I would do that for hours trying to ground it, not that I knew what I was doing at the time, that’s just what I found myself doing.

Rick: Some people say walking barefoot is very helpful.

Philip: It is, and certainly if that’s happening, don’t do anything that’s going to stimulate it. I wasn’t doing any Kriyas, that’s for sure. Everything else was difficult too. My sleep patterns were whacked. I couldn’t read very well. I remember flying out to see my sister…When I was in the corporate world, I was an Advantage Platinum member, and I racked up a quarter of a million miles a year for a couple of years and had more air miles than God. So, I knew what I was doing and yet, when I got to the airport, the credit card that I used wasn’t bringing my itinerary up and I hadn’t written the flight down, so I couldn’t figure out how to get on the plane! I called my sister up, “Can you tell me what flight I’m on?” And she must have thought, “This guy’s lost his mind!” Everything was challenging in that respect, and that went on for about nine months. SRF, and I think most teachings in general on the progressive path, are really good about helping you get to Self-Realization, but they don’t do a great job, if at all, of telling you what to do once you’re there.

Rick: You mentioned you actually had a moment when this anger was bubbling up and you were swearing and stuff like that.

Philip: That was a couple of months later. I got back from my trip and all this gunk was being expelled. It would’ve made a sailor blush, some of the stuff that I was spewing, and I felt horrible, and I knew that this was just a cleansing process of some sort, probably on the subtle body level, I don’t know for sure.

Rick: Yeah, I think so.

Philip: What really helped me during that whole time were Adyashanti’s talks. He had, and I imagine he still has, a large audio library that’s keyworded pretty good, so I could target what I wanted to hear specifically about awakening. I downloaded a bunch of stuff and, even though I couldn’t read, I could listen. His talks were like a lifeline to me.

Rick: You couldn’t read because you were in the bliss ninny phase.

Philip: Yeah, my brain was mushy. My memory, which is normally phenomenal, was suboptimal. I didn’t have the concentration capabilities of reading, but I could listen. So that’s why half the book is dedicated to SRF and Yogananda, but the other half is dedicated to Adya because his stuff was really helpful during those months. So Adya, if you’re out there, U Da Man!

Rick: He’s out there. He probably won’t be reading this.

Philip: Probably not, but I do sincerely appreciate his help during that. And then the other person at ground zero who really helped me, probably the most of anything, was the Abbot, the minister in charge of the Hidden Valley Ashram, who’d been a long-time friend of mine. We’d known each other for close to 20 years at that point. And he, in my estimation, was Awake already. He understood what I was going through and was really helpful in some critical junctures.

Rick: Can people go there to this place and do retreats and things?

Philip: They do.

Rick: Okay, so people listening, if they think, “Okay, this might work for me,” they could look into it and sign up for retreats and learn Kriya there or whatever.

Philip: Yeah, the only caveat to that, I think, is that the ashram is only for SRF members.

Rick: Which means you just have to get the right instruction and everything to be an SRF member.

Philip: Yeah, so if you’re a Lessons student, which means that you mail away for the SRF Lessons, then that’s all that would be required.

Rick: So, if you’re into Zen or TM or something, it wouldn’t be appropriate to go there, but if you’re into SRF, then it would be.

Philip: Yeah, or if you’re into both or multiple things. I mean, they’re not excluding anybody for that. Both the Abbot and I have wide-ranging interests, including Zen. He was really into the third Zen patriarch and stuff like that.

Rick: I recall that some SRF fundamentalists gave you a little bit of a hard time for being so eclectic.

Philip: You know, that’s true, but I would say it was the exception rather than the rule because Yogananda started SRF as a church of all religions, and I think most of the people that I dealt with were very understanding of my wide-ranging tastes. Truth is Truth. You get something said a little bit differently than somebody else, and it clicks. And so, if someone out there just wants one teacher, and all they need are those teachings and that individual, that’s great. But that wasn’t my route through.

Rick: Yeah, I think for some people, that might be an important phase that should be respected, and they shouldn’t feel any need to be a dilettante, a superficial dabbler. And other people are different. I get exposed to different stuff constantly, and there might have been a point in my journey where that wouldn’t have been a good idea, but now it does seem like a good idea. It’s enriching for me as it is for you.

Philip: There were times in my experience when I was heavily into one thing or another and that just seemed to be right at the time. But then a shift would come along, and instead of diving deep into Dzogchen or diving deep into Kashmir Shaivism or whatever it might have been, the shift was appropriate. So I pick that up when the energy is there and I set it down when it shifts to something else. One’s spiritual path can look like anything, and I think in our spiritual adolescence, until we really are firm in our own path, the idea of swapping around can be a little bit disturbing. But with the monks that I knew, they were all well enough along in their journey to understand me doing that, so there was never any problem with that at all, and a lot of them did that as well.

Rick: So, you obviously have gotten through that initial phase, the dust settled eventually, and you got more integrated, and you could actually get on airplanes.

Philip: I actually got a job, that was the big one!

Rick: You got a job, yeah.

Philip: I could work, and that was important.

Rick: Right, I guess the transition phase just sort of tapered off?

Philip: It did. There was one key moment that really bookended The Kiss, and I called it a “karma-ectomy.” If that term hasn’t been copyrighted yet, I think I might do that. I was doing Kriya one morning, about nine months after The Kiss, and I was at the ashram. At this point, I think I had already secured my job, but because of the length of their process, it took a couple of months for me to actually start working. I had been doing Kriya again intuitively, and one morning, from the very first Kriya, there was a deep, deep focus, and the energy was just immense.

Rick: Let me just clarify one thing. So, “Kriya” is the name of the practice in Yogananda’s movement. You do Kriya, but also “kriya” is a word that sometimes means involuntary movements that happen when you’re having kundalini energy flowing. In your usage of it here, you’re talking about an actual practice you were doing.

Philip: Yes, I’m talking about an actual practice, but during this particular practice, the latter also happened. So basically, for anyone not familiar, the technique of Kriya Yoga is mentally channeling the energy up and down the astral spine, the sushumna, and focusing it eventually at the third eye. So it goes up all the chakras and then it just goes back and forth.

In 2012 I was recruited out to the ashram as the Operations Manager, so I did a lot of what I did in the hotels. There were renovations going on, the installation of big solar systems and wells for irrigation, and renovation of rooms, the front office, and much more. This is what I did, and it was a way to serve the organization and have a lot of fun for a couple of years. During that time, I was also doing about eight hours a day of meditation, about four in the morning and four at night. So, I would get up about four o’clock in the morning and I would do 180 Kriyas, and then I would do the same thing at night. I was doing about 360 Kriyas per day, which is an enormous amount.

Rick: And each Kriya is a whole cycle of going through the various points on the subtle body.

Philip: Yep, but after the awakening, I wasn’t doing any Kriyas because that’s not what I needed. I needed to ground. I didn’t need any more energy flowing through! But it started to ground out and intuitively I picked it up again. That was the intuitive hit I got, so that’s what I did. And one Thursday morning in mid-June, I started up again. There are 108 beads, as you know, on a mala, so I was able to track the amount I was doing. I went through 108, which is a lot, and I just felt great, and the energy was incredible. So, I did another 108, and then another 108, and then another 108…I ended up close to 600 that day. Don’t try this at home!

And during the latter part of that session, my arms would raise up involuntarily, and from the waist up, there was a white light/energy hitting me. It was bliss beyond belief, the greatest feeling I’ve ever had in my body. And it felt like I was being purged of the karma. And then, at one point, the third eye opened up and I could see somebody’s face, and then another, and then another, and another, and they flashed through fast enough to where I could see them, but not so long that I could get distracted or lost in them; hundreds went by. And I knew intuitively that these had been my past incarnations that were being fried. It’s like how Nisargadatta says that there are two types of karma – one that can be mitigated by Grace and one that has to be lived – and this was the type that was being mitigated, and this is what Kriya ultimately is designed to do, to reduce that karma. At the end of the vision, I saw a symbolic type of thing: there was this infinitely long train with all these cars behind it, and it had decoupled and they all fell away, and all that was left was the engine and one car. I knew that that one car represented the active karma that was left for me to burn out post-awakening and that all the rest had been severed. And the reason it can be severed, I’m sure you know, is that it’s not active. What’s active has to get mitigated through living it because that karma is what got you to the point where you are, so it’s needed karma.

Rick: Right, it’s like how Ramana Maharshi talks about the electric fan that keeps spinning even after you turn off the switch.

Philip: That’s right. You unplug the fan, but it takes a while for the fan blades to slow down. How long it takes the fan blades to slow is unknown to me. It could take months, years, lifetimes. I don’t know. But they will stop and then, even that karma, known as leshavidya, will be gone.

This Karmic Purge experience was the bookend to The Kiss. Once that had taken place, even though my memory was still a little mushy, the bliss subsided and I was able to work, which was a very strange deal. Somehow, I knew what to do and how to do it, but there just wasn’t anybody there doing it! And then I was on my road back to embodying the Realization in a way that was useful.

Who Am I?

Rick: Well, it’s funny you should say there wasn’t anybody there doing it, because Anthony Parshall, who asked that first question, sent in another one asking, “If you are not no one and not someone, who are you?”

Philip: Well, you’re both.

Rick: Yes.

Philip: If we are excitations of infinite consciousness, which I would posit that we are, then that is beyond duality. You can’t name it. Reality is both illusory and at the same time here. Immanent and Transcendent. The Unity and the Multiplicity are both there, yet neither on their own.

Rick: With relationship to Anthony’s first question, let me take a quick crack at a definition and then see what you think about it. Like you, I avoid the word “enlightenment” because it has too static and superlative a connotation, but if we want to use it, I would say it’s a state in which a kind of multi-dimensionality has been established. There is a level of your life at which you are Phil, and there’s a level of your life at which nothing ever happened, where there is no Phil. So you’re everywhere, you’re nowhere, and you’re right here, and all of that has been incorporated into a living experience which is perfectly normal and natural and functional, and you can drive cars and do whatever you need to do, but those subtler dimensions sometimes might be more predominant if the situation allows it, and other times more in the background, but it’s all always there.

Philip: That’s well put, Rick. It does flow, and it flows between those two, like Nisargadatta said, “Wisdom is knowing that I am nothing, love is knowing that I am everything, and between the two my life flows.”

Rick: Yes, nice.

Philip: So ultimately, you can’t objectify existence as a thing, you have to just be it. It has to be lived. What would be there to separate and objectify it? It can’t do that to itself. I mean, it seemingly does that through separation consciousness, but once you realize that there is no separation and the Unity takes over, it can’t be objectified, it can only be lived.

Rick: Yeah, it also can’t be intellectualized, it can only be lived.

Philip: Yeah, it’s a non-conceptual understanding. If someone’s asked, “Well, what is non-conceptual understanding?” It’s simply an understanding that you can’t put words around. “The Tao that is the Tao is the Tao that can’t be named.” As much as you want to try, the intellect isn’t capable of perceiving it. It’s a non-conceptual perception, and it’s very self-evident when it happens. You can’t miss it. Any sense of lack is gone. There’s a fullness to the emptiness, if that makes sense. And things like loneliness, for me anyway, don’t happen. Boredom doesn’t happen. It’s not an exotic state. They call it the “natural state,” even though it’s not technically a state. But it’s very ordinary, and yet in that ordinariness – because you’re not mentally superimposing dialogue onto what’s happening, you’re seeing it as raw subjectivity, so to speak – there’s a beauty, a sacredness. Because the mental chatter isn’t happening and the judgments and the evaluations and things aren’t happening mentally, there’s an extraordinary beauty to things that you see every day that are right in front of you.

Rick: We kind of started in the beginning talking about enlightenment and whether it was extraordinary or ordinary, and you’re expressing it very well here. It’s the natural state, as you just said, and it’s everyone’s birthright, as we said earlier, and it’s not some kind of superpower, but it is the most wonderful thing that could happen to you.

Philip: That’s right.

Rick: Everybody’s looking for fulfillment. Everybody’s looking for happiness. And like you were saying in the beginning, you were chasing it through BMWs and fancy homes and things like that. There’s nothing wrong with that stuff, but ultimately, it’s not going to give you what you’re looking for. You live in a nice home now, so you’re not sleeping on a bed of nails, but I don’t think that you primarily derive your fulfillment from the room you’re living in.

Philip: No I don’t, but awakening doesn’t preclude the enjoyment of anything either. I enjoy going out and having a nice dinner or a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir or whatever it may be. I’m not sitting around in a loincloth doing some austere practices. Enlightenment, if that’s the term you wanted to use, can look like anything. Our personality still is mostly intact, I would say. Some things have changed, but it is the most ordinary of things and yet the most beautiful.

Rick: On the news at Christmastime, they always have these stories about how much people are shopping, and they always have these scenes of people trampling each other when the doors open at 6am or whatever to get the latest big TV, and they’re having fistfights in the aisles. It’s such a demonstration of the desperation that is so common for trying to derive fulfillment from things.

Philip: The mistake that people make, at least the mistake that I made, is that once you get it – like I really wanted the BMW, it could be anything – then you feel peace for a while and you think, “Well, it was the BMW.” But then the next thing, and then the next thing, and the next thing, and the bigger house, and the cuter girlfriend, and whatever it may be, you just keep going and going…What’s fulfilling that desire and that yearning, that feeling of lack for a while, isn’t the thing itself, it’s that the desire went away.

Ultimately, I don’t have any desires. Now, that doesn’t mean that I might not want a burrito for lunch and some ice cream afterwards. I’m not talking about that type of thing, but there isn’t anything I need. I don’t have any sense of lack, and yeah, I live in a beautiful place, but I live very simply. There’s nothing I feel that I need to do or to have. Life takes care of me in the way that it does. Therefore, to me, Awakening is being okay with What Is.

Rick: You were talking about bliss a little while ago. You weren’t experiencing bliss because of something you were tasting or seeing or smelling or hearing or touching. It was just bliss, this intrinsic happiness that was welling up inside of you, regardless of the external circumstances.

Philip: Yes, it’s the peace that “passeth all understanding.”

Rick: Yeah, and that’s kind of a vivid illustration of what all the scriptures say, which is “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” or “Brahman is Ananda,” or “Sat Chit Ananda.” We all possess this inner reservoir of happiness, which we overlook for the most part. We desperately seek outwardly for that which we already possess inwardly.

Philip: That’s right. It was kind of an interesting time in those first nine months where it felt like the inside was larger than the outside.

Rick: Interesting. Elaborate on that.

Philip: Well, it felt like an expansive Unity. Like Douglas Harding talked about, my head just didn’t seem to be there, and the “outside” was becoming my “inside.” The Unity that I was experiencing felt like it was larger than anything I had experienced; in terms of an orientation, all the reference points were gone. That was part of the process where the separation was falling away. One of the things, too, that I would say to anyone reading this is that if you’re a “seeker,” don’t let that be an identity because ultimately, the seeking doesn’t end, the seeker dissolves.

Rick: Papaji said, “Give up the search.” Wouldn’t you say, or has it been your experience, that this can be a premature instruction in some cases?

Philip: Absolutely.

Rick: Because one could say, “All right whatever, I’ll just kick back and have a beer and watch football and it’ll happen if it’s supposed to happen.”

Philip: That’s not the message!

Rick: Right, maybe that’s not what he meant anyway. But in your case, wouldn’t you say, in a sense – maybe you don’t want to use the word “seeker” anymore because there’s a santosh, there’s contentment – that you’re as much of an enthusiast for all this stuff as you ever were, and you’re like a kid in a candy shop with all kinds of interesting things to explore and learn and all that.

Love and Wisdom

Philip: The real voyage of discovery begins after the Awakening because then you’re right back where you were only now it’s like you’re seeing it for the first time. Like T.S. Eliot said, “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Also, Rumi said, “I’d been knocking on the door only to find myself knocking from the inside.”

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: It’s an interesting thing when it happens, to say the least, but now I still enjoy things. Basically all the things that I used to enjoy, I still do, only I don’t have any emotional investment in them. So, if the Red Sox lose to the Yankees, I’m not going to be happy about it, but it’s not going to ruin my day either.

Rick: Well, I prefer the Yankees win personally.

Philip: Ouch!

Rick: I was a Yankees fan when I was a kid.

Philip: This interview is over!

Rick: I lived outside New York City and I would lie there and listen to my little crystal radio; Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford and the whole gang.

Philip: Well, I’ll let you have that. These things, you can enjoy them, but you also see it for what it is and it’s just not that important.

Rick: Icing on the cake.

Philip: Yeah, but on the other side of that, I think it’s really important not to deny our humanness. Things can still happen occasionally that are experienced as a cloud. For example, I see some things in the world that happen – some of the utter unnecessary cruelty and poverty and war and things –and I feel those more intensely now than ever before, for two reasons. One is, I view it as happening to me in one sense. Two is, when the sense of separation dissolves, there’s no defense mechanisms around the heart. So I tend to feel much more keenly now than ever. I can be profoundly sad or angry; these things still can come up. The difference is that they don’t last as long, and they don’t happen as often. The important thing to realize is that Awakening is not some panacea where all of a sudden you don’t feel things and things don’t ever bother you and everything goes right and all that. That’s not what it is, at least not for me.

Rick: There’s an analogy that’s interesting here. I didn’t make this up, but let’s say a very unenlightened state would be like stone. You can scratch a line in stone with an iron bar or something like that. It’s hard to scratch a line, but once you’ve scratched it, the line stays there quite a while. It’s not a deep line, but it’s there and it lasts a long time. Then, a little bit more evolved state would be like sand. You can dig a deeper line in sand more easily and it’s erased more quickly. Then, a line in water. You can make a deeper line, so you can put your whole arm through it, but it disappears almost instantly. And then, a line in air. You can just dive through the air and there’s no trace. So, like that, in a nervous system in a state of consciousness that is very bound and entrenched, one doesn’t have the capacity for deep experience, but the experiences one does have leave very lasting impressions. And I won’t go through all the steps, but finally, in a state that you’re describing, you feel very, very deeply, but it doesn’t create this lasting impression that takes forever to work out.

Philip: That’s right, and the reason it doesn’t last is because it’s processed fully.

Rick: Processed fully, yes.

Philip: Whereas in separation consciousness, the impressions happen – things happen like traumas, resentments, or past negative conditionings – and they don’t get worked through.

Rick: They accumulate.

Philip: They accumulate, yeah, and they don’t get processed. You might get through some of it in a lifetime, but you’re also creating more, and that’s the wheel you’re trying to get off. But in an awakened state, things get processed fully because there’s no fear there of feeling what you’re capable of feeling.

Rick: Right. One of my motivations with all this – all these horrible things that happen in the world and how terrible they are for the people who experience them, and they’re very sad to observe – is the realization that if the world were populated more by people like you, or entirely by people like you, not exactly like you, but…

Philip: Red Sox fans, one and all!

Rick: Red Sox fundamentalists. Everybody’d have to wear Red Sox shirts.

Philip: I’m fine with that!

Rick: No, but you know what I’m saying?

Philip: I do.

Rick: If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have these wars and these inequities and the famine and the poverty and the fanaticism and all these horrible things, because all that stuff is just the manifestation of the collective consciousness of billions of people who are like the rock that have all these deep grooves etched in it.

Philip: That’s right. From a place of love, it breaks my heart, and that’s what I’m feeling. From a place of wisdom, however, I realize that the things that are happening in the world are happening because, without suffering, there isn’t really any grist for the mill. In terms of my own journey, if I hadn’t been gradually more and more dissatisfied with the corporate world and everything that I had, The Shift wouldn’t have happened; that was actually fueling The Shift. And so I realized from a place of wisdom that everything is happening because it has to happen. And the proof for that is that it is happening.

People are, in their own way, in their own place, in the perfect contextual field for them to evolve. But I wouldn’t want to live in that knowing alone because that would be a cold place. You’d just go, “Well, that’s their karma, tough luck,” and that’s not where you want to be. That’s not where I want to be living from. So, knowing that helps me not become overwhelmed by the suffering that I feel, but feeling it allows compassion, and then you do whatever you can do from wherever you are to alleviate it, and that’s part of the perfection as well.

Rick: I totally agree with what you’re saying, and it’s easy for people to see how getting bored with a BMW might be an incentive to spiritual advancement, but what would you say to the person who asks, “Yeah, but how about the Holocaust? How about what’s happening in Gaza to all those children and everything? How can you frame that in the context of some kind of a loving God that is trying to help all those people evolve?” It seems that you really have to step back and zoom out to make sense of that.

Philip: You do, and that’s the age-old question, “Why do ‘bad’ things happen to ‘good’ people, and how can a loving God permit the evil that we see?” And my response to that, from a place of wisdom, is that even those things, even the Holocaust, even Gaza, even…I don’t know – there’s always something that really gets you, and for me, child abuse and animal abuse are two that really make me want to just strangle somebody if I see them doing it – even those things, though, in the Grand Perfection are necessary because they’re there. Life doesn’t have to look a particular way for me. On the other hand, if there’s something that I can do to help somebody, then I absolutely will, and that’s part of the perfection as well. But I don’t have an ego-mind that is superimposing what it thinks life ought to look like onto life. I think Anthony DeMello said, “Awakening is an absolute intimacy with the 10,000 things,” or something close to that. You realize that it is the way it is because it needed to be that way and the proof for that is that it is.

Rick: Sounds very Byron Katie-ish.

Philip: It is, yeah. You don’t have to like it. I don’t like it. I wish we had a world that got along. As a species, we haven’t even figured out how to stop killing each other! I mean, people think we’re at some advanced point in our evolution. I would say, “Well, then why are we still killing each other? And why do two billion people not have electricity or working plumbing and live in abject poverty?” From a place in consciousness, we still have a long way to go. You do what you do in the outer world because that’s what you do, but then the main thing is that you work on yourself because that’s the ultimate gift that you can give to the world.

Rick: I saw a touching thing the other day. It was an article, and it was about this professional bullfighter who had been doing that for quite some time. One day, he and the bull were facing each other, and neither were sort of attacking at that point, and they looked into each other’s eyes and the bullfighter just tuned in to the bull, and he sat down and started weeping, and he thought, “What am I doing?” He had this epiphany, and long story short, he left bullfighting, became a vegetarian, and became an activist for stopping bullfighting. It was just that moment of connection on a soul level that turned him around.

Philip: That’s a great point regarding what we were talking about earlier. These epiphanies, satoris, awakenings, or shifts – whatever term you want to use – they can happen anywhere when we’re open enough. He was open enough in that moment to where the look in the bull’s eyes was enough to create the shift. That’s the beauty of life. Life is the ultimate vehicle for its own evolution.

Mystical Experiences

Rick: Speaking of shifts, let me do a dramatic, abrupt segue here. You recounted an experience in your second book where you went into this really deep state. It was an out-of-body experience, and you encountered Meher Baba, who you had an affinity with, and he kind of did a number on you that was very interesting. You know what I’m alluding to, but let’s talk about that for a minute.

Philip: Sure. This was probably the most amazing mystical experience that I’ve had in this lifetime. Let me first say a bit about mystical experiences in general. Mystical experiences are fine if you have them, and if you’re not having them, that’s fine too. People are wired in different ways. If you’re not having them, I would almost say you’re better off because mystical experiences can distract you. They’re a blessing in the sense that you have them, but then the ego-mind can attach to them and then go, “Oh, when’s the next one?” or “Why am I not having another one?” or somebody else can hear it and think, “Well, why has he got one and I don’t?” That’s just what ego-minds do. With the experiences that I’ve had, I would use the term “grateful indifference.” I’m always grateful for them happening, but experiences come and go, and at the end of the day, has the experience changed where you’re living from? If it hasn’t, then it’s a blessing, but let it go and stay in the now and keep doing your work. That’s my spiel about mystical experiences as a whole.

Rick: If anybody’s been in a spiritual movement, there have always been people who are mic hogs, you know, who get up and talk about their flashy experiences. Often, it’s a one-upmanship, ego-aggrandizement kind of a thing. You have to look at whether these people actually walk their talk, and if they do, to see whether that really is meaningful or significant at all.

Philip: Yeah, and I did not want to include this experience in the book from a personal standpoint because of all that. But there was an energy that just said, “You need to write about this, and you just really don’t have much choice.” So I trust that and I did.

Rick: There’s an energy that’s making you talk about it now.

Philip: There’s an energy, yeah, and it’s called Rick Archer! Life isn’t about me, so I’ll do my best here. It was an out-of-body experience…Yogananda is my Guru and my foremost Master, but there have been other Masters that have also radically assisted me over the years at different times. St. Francis early on, Meher Baba early on and afterwards as well.

Rick: Let me just ask, is that because you were inspired by their books or because you actually established some kind of a subtle affinity or connection with the soul of St. Francis or something?

Philip: It was through their works, but through their works, it felt like a transmission. I never had any visions of St. Francis or anybody else, but there was a connection in the heart.

Rick: Right.

Philip: It was a living thing and not just an intellectual concept.

Rick: Yeah, people really get that, with Jesus Christ or Ramana Maharshi, for example, they tune into these people that may have been dead for a couple thousand years and it’s very real and present.

Philip: Oh, yeah. And during the time of the awakening, Meister Eckhart was a big one, and Nisargadatta Maharaj as well. Over the last couple of years, I really connected with Longchenpa in the Dzogchen tradition, with Abhinavagupta in Kashmir Shaivism, and even with Plotinus in Neoplatonism.

Regarding Meher Baba, he was and still is really important. He and Yogananda, I think, are my two main guys. And there’s a wonderful Meher Baba retreat center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina that I’ve visited many times, but the interesting thing about this was that this experience came during an SRF retreat, which just goes to show that these guys aren’t fighting over devotees. It’s about whosever consciousness is reaching out and needs it at that point, because ultimately, they’re just one aspect of ourselves. I don’t really even look at it as personal so much.

So I was at an SRF retreat and I had an out-of-body experience. And to anyone wondering how you know: if you’ve had one, you know; there’s just a difference between a dream or even a lucid dream. There’s a qualitative difference. I was with Baba and he put his hands on the top of my head and I felt, and I could see both from within and without, a white light coming up all the way through my body. And when it hit, it was like I was being electrocuted from the inside out. It was agony. I don’t know how long that went on, but all of a sudden, I was floating in the cosmos. And it wasn’t that I was experiencing bliss, I was bliss. It was an “ever-changing, ever-new bliss” that the Masters have written about. What the point of that was, I don’t know. But it happened twice. He did it twice, and I looked at him afterwards and I said – at least in my experience, when you’re having these kinds of interactions, you’re not thinking on a mental level, it just really wells up out of the soul – and I said, “Why isn’t my Master doing this for me?,” meaning Yogananda, and verbatim he smiled so sweetly and he said, “Because at this level we are all One and lately your consciousness has been reaching out to me.” And I always knew, from then on, that no matter what, whoever the seemingly outward vehicle is, we get what we need.

If that would have been all the experience was, that still would have registered at about a 9.5 on my mystical-o-meter. But then I looked down for some reason and he followed my vision and there was a little freckle about halfway in between my waist and my shoulder. And he reached out with his left hand with what looked like a carpet knife – wood with a slightly curved blade – and he flicked it. And then I fell back because it hurt! When I straightened back up, I saw that there had been something attached to my energy body, because half of it, the half that he’d ripped out, was kind of flapping around in the air, and the other half was still hooked in me. It looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. This is just my intuition, I really don’t know, but it looked like some sort of an astral parasite. I’ve heard some people posit that these can be the source, or at least one source, for addictions and things like that, which is why addictions can be incredibly difficult to get rid of; you almost have to just starve them to death. This parasite was about three or four inches tall, and on the top, it had alternating yellow and black checks, and it was horrific. I’m like, “What the…” I started swiping at it, and I started saying, “Take this away!” I freaked. It’s like, “God dang, this thing’s in me and I want it out!” And he sat there for a minute and then he flicked it again, and I passed out. And then I woke up back in bed, back in the body. And it took a couple of hours before I could move. I was just frozen, staring up at the ceiling. It was a little after dawn. There was a pale light coming through the window, so I knew about what time it was. And eventually, I got one finger to move and then another, and then I started rebooting. That was the experience, and it was crazy.

Rick: Well, when you got up and took a shower and started your day, did you feel like something huge had happened, like you’d really been freed from something that had been plaguing you deeply for a long time?

Philip: Not really, but two things did happen. One is, I woke up with a headache at the third eye, which I think was from overstimulation as he put that energy in me, and it got worse throughout the day. It was really bad. Then, like an idiot, I threw gas on the fire. I tried to do Kriyas thinking that was going to help, but it only made it worse. So, don’t do that; if you’ve got something happening there, then just leave it alone. The other thing that occurred was that it felt like there was a hole, like a membrane that had been opened up, and it felt like an energetic breathing where the freckle had been. It took about a year for that to go away, as if something in the etheric body had to heal, and that there was a gap there. It was a very strange feeling. I didn’t have it 24/7, but I had it quite a bit off and on.

Rick: I guess the reason I wanted you to tell that story is that I have a feeling that this is something fairly common that we’re generally unaware of. As you said, it could be the cause of addictions – of which there’s a whole lot these days, and addictions to all kinds of things – some sort of astral entities that are feeding off that kind of energy and that are impelling us to behave in certain ways in order to be fed. I don’t know what people can do about it other than maybe do spiritual practice and any kind of purificatory things. I had a thing one time where something seemed to be attacking me and I just started to do this Sanskrit puja in my mind that dispelled it. So, people talk about exorcisms and prayers that dispel negative entities. There are probably things in all the ancient traditions that deal with this kind of thing, so I just wanted to touch upon it for whatever benefit it might provide people listening.

Philip: Well, sure, I mean the human body, the physical body, has all kinds of germs and parasites and things, so why wouldn’t that be the case at the astral level?

Rick: Right, subtle body. There was another neat story you told about how there was a new Yogananda Center being opened in Atlanta and you felt this kind of compulsion to show up there at midnight and do something. I’m not sure if you knew what, it was kind of like a strange thing for you to do, but you just followed your impulses, and it turned out to be very interesting. Do you want to tell that story?

Philip: Sure. Let’s see, it would have been sometime in 1999. I mentioned that when I first started with SRF at the Atlanta Center, or Group, they were in a business park. They had a rented place, but through some very generous individuals in the Group, a temple was built. I won’t go into all the details, but it was pretty miraculous in how they found it, and how it could be afforded, and how the architect just happened to be there at the right time, and then the construction company had a window when they could do the work. Everything fell together and it was pretty incredible. I lived about a mile from where they built the Center, and I started feeling in the fall of 1999 like someone should be there at midnight on New Year’s Eve when the property became theirs. I couldn’t imagine why someone should be there, but then I thought, “Well, it’s Atlanta in the winter, so it’s going to be wet and it’s going to be cold.” This really wasn’t what I wanted to do for the turn of the millennium, but it just kept nagging me for a couple of months. And then, as I got closer to the date, it was warm, it was dry, there was no reason not to, and so I thought, “All right, I’m going to take my blanket, I’m going to go there, and I hope no one sees me.” Police are out everywhere looking for drunk drivers and here’s this guy sitting out in the field, they’re gonna think he’s lost his mind.

I sat down and I tried to meditate, but there was a lot of traffic noise and I felt like an idiot. So, I was internally restless, and I’m sharing this because what happened next wasn’t because of me, it happened despite me. Suddenly, everything fell away, and I couldn’t hear any noise. I’m sitting there, and in my hands was a small bowling-ball-sized glowing orb of energy. And I had no idea what to do. My eyes were closed, so I was seeing it through the third eye, and something said, “Don’t open your eyes.” And then I mentally said, “Well, what do I do now?” And in response I heard “prayer circle,” which is what happens at the end of an SRF service, where everyone raises their hands and chants “Om” three times, sending out healing vibrations to the universe. And so that’s what I did. I raised my hands and I slowly pointed them outwards and then to the sides, and I could see the orb flying apart. The pieces of the orb were kind of yellowish orange, and when the little particles started floating down, they kind of looked like Cheetos, you know…that’s best I can do to describe them. And I could see them permeating the ground; most of them went in the direction I was facing, but all of them went somewhere. And then, just as fast as I went out, I came back in, and I could hear the traffic noise again, and I was looking at the ground. My intuition said that the ground had been consecrated, that it had been blessed and that a physical intermediary had been needed for the energy to come through the higher planes into this plane. So, I packed up my stuff and went home, told a couple people about it and they were like, “Dang, that’s really cool,” and that was it.

Clearly, there were people in the Atlanta Group that deserved it more than I did. They’d been working for 30 or 40 years to achieve all this, and I was kind of a Johnny-come-lately in the Group at that point. So, maybe the Masters just felt like, “Well, hell, he only lives a mile away. We’ll use him!” I don’t know how or why it happened, but I obviously felt incredibly blessed to have been chosen for that. It wasn’t anything I did. I was just the one that got picked and the land had been permeated. What I found out later was that the direction I had been facing was actually where the building was built. So, the area that got the most of it was where the temple was going to be sitting.

Three Paths Home

Rick: Nice. Celestial Cheetos. Okay, so now we’ve got about 20 minutes left or so, and there are a few points that maybe we could cover while in the remaining time. The gradual, direct, and pathless path controversy would be one. Grace would be another. Free will, determinism, non-doership is another, and anything else that you see on that list of points you sent me, but those three jump out at me. So, Gradual, Direct, and Pathless. Let’s do that first. What are your thoughts on it?

Philip: I think that whatever path is resonating with someone at the time is the best path. A lot of people, when they hear “short” or “direct” path, they think it’s got to be better, but I would say that’s not true. I mean, I woke up through the progressive, or gradual, path. So it obviously works.

Rick: Yeah, McDonald’s is not necessarily better than a fine restaurant where it takes a few hours to eat.

Philip: No. If I had given up the techniques, the methods that I had chosen early on, for something labeled “short,” I don’t think I would be sitting here. I mean, it worked. The teachings through Yogananda and SRF do work and I can say that because they worked for me. I’m sure they worked for other people as well. But that said, after the awakening, the short path – like Ramana Maharshi and self-inquiry, or Nisargadatta Maharaj and just resting in the “I am,” and these types of things – resonated more deeply with me. I was like, “Well, geez, that makes a lot of sense.” But, you know, are you really purifying anything? It’s like when Rupert Spira talks about his journey, he was doing all kinds of progressive path stuff for I don’t know how long, but then it was more of a direct path encounter with his teacher, Francis Lucille, that brought the awakening. Now, that wasn’t the case for me, but I think it’s whatever resonates and whatever you’re ripe for.

And then the Pathless Path is ultimately just not doing anything. There’s a non-meditation, a non-method of just simply Being Here Now. And that’s really tough to do, unless it isn’t. I couldn’t have begun to conceive of anything like that, let alone do it. When I started, I needed a technique, I needed something to do, and I needed a practice. But maybe somebody who is riper than I was back in 1999 wouldn’t. I think when Ramana would meet people, he would always give them the benefit of the doubt and start with the highest teaching, because you don’t know if it’s going to work or not. So, he would bring that and then if they couldn’t conceive of a pathless path of just “you’re it, this is it,” then he’d try self-inquiry, and then if that wasn’t going to work, then okay, here’s a progressive discipline that they could use. But I don’t think there’s a better or worse path. Being a former photographer, there’s an eternal debate among enthusiasts, “gearheads” they used to call them, about what’s the best camera. And ultimately, everybody agrees that the best camera is the one you have with you when you need to take the picture!

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: And I would say it’s the same with the spiritual path. If it’s resonating with you and it’s working for you, then go with it. And then if a shift is needed, it’ll present itself. Don’t get hung up on one being better than another because it’s solely dependent on the person.

Rick: Yeah. My interpretation of those words and those paths is that different ones can be appropriate for different people at different stages. It’s like mathematics. I mean, it’s not that studying calculus is better than studying third-grade arithmetic. Both are appropriate for people at different stages. Also, in a sense, all three can be components of one’s path at the same time. You can be having direct dives into samadhi, for instance, and at the same time, day by day, you’re progressing. And then, you also recognize that you’re not doing anything, and it’s all being done. So all those three are just different components of a path.

I’ve moderated a panel discussion at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences on this debate of direct versus progressive, and what I’ve found is that in many cases, people who are advocating the direct path –like, “Boom, you’re done. All this progressive stuff is a waste of time” – ended up getting into trouble later on, behaviorally and with different things, so obviously some need for progress was there. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think it’s a both/and.

Philip: It’s definitely not an either/or. They’re not mutually exclusive.

Rick: Right.

Philip: For instance, in Yogananda’s teachings, one of the central premises that I adopted very seriously early on is that he said, “Not only can you achieve Self-realization in one lifetime, but you’re already there. All you have to do is improve your knowing.” And that is certainly a short or pathless path tenet, so these things ebb and flow according to whatever is appropriate at the time, and they’re certainly not mutually exclusive.

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: The short path or pathless path could even be a little bit of a trap in terms of spiritual bypassing and not owning up to the work you’ve got to do, like you were alluding to, whether it’s psychological or purification or whatever it may be. It holds that caveat as well.

Rick: It’s been used that way, especially by Neo-Advaita people, like “you’re already enlightened, you don’t need to do anything,” and it’s a disservice to people to present them with that. You know, if Yogananda said, “You’re already there,” that’s very true, but it might take you 40 years to actually fully embody that Realization. And just the initial concept when you first hear it is not the same as fully embodying that Realization.

Philip: Yeah, and I would say particularly with Grace Happens, but with both books, they’re written for anybody that’s called to them, certainly. They’re not exclusive to one particular segment of the spiritual marketplace, but there’s one particular target group, so to speak, that I was trying to reach. It was the people that have been on the path for 20 or 30 or 40 years and can’t seem to be able to get over the hump. And while you can’t make it happen, I think having the inner attitudinal stance of “you’re already there” and then surrendering is really important. Sometimes the way forward is the backward step.

Surrender and know that you can’t make it happen and that the methods aren’t the goal. Don’t mistake the map for the territory. Like the third Zen patriarch said, even an attachment to enlightenment is an attachment. After 30 or 40 years, if you haven’t found yourself in L.A. yet, using the SRF analogy or metaphor, then I would say you’ve got to work on surrender. That’s what I did at the end. I surrendered to the point where I didn’t even realize I was surrendering. You just give up. I’m not saying you give up your practice, but you give up trying to control it. I think that vulnerability, that openness, allows the Grace to descend. I think it’s more difficult for that to happen when you think you’re controlling it and are going to punch through by force of will. You’re not. You do all you can, but then you just give it to God and let it happen the way it will.

Free Will vs. Determinism

Rick: Yeah, God helps those who help themselves. How about the free will and determinism thing? This is an age-old debate, what’s your take on it?

Philip: Oh, yeah, I know. That’s one reason I wrote about it. If I see another YouTube video about free will and determinism, I think I’m just gonna throw up on my computer. You know, it’s just not that difficult. There’s always free will, but not in the way that people think. The ego has no free will because it’s just a mental construct, but we’re not our ego, fortunately. There is a connection to Universal Will, which does give us free will. For me, the idea of surrendering, and all the things we do in our sadhana, is like opening a camera aperture. The more we’re out of the way, the more that free will can flow. Even without that, relatively speaking, there are some pretty impressive results by people in the world who are operating under the premise that they’re the ones doing it. People can achieve some major, what most people in the world would call, desirable goals. It’s not like you can’t achieve anything in separation consciousness…

Rick: But even then, some of the great achievers – Michael Jordan, Arthur Ashe, and other people – talk about being “in the zone” where you feel like you’re not doing anything and it’s just being done through you somehow, and that’s when you’re at your best.

Philip: And that can happen all the time because, once the ego-mind has been transcended and Unity is established – I mean, there’s always Unity, but now you Know it – then that’s the feeling you have all the time, that life just flows in a perfect way. If action needs to take place, it does, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. So, free will and determinism, you could say both are true from a different perspective.

Rick: I think one thing that helps to resolve the debate is to try not to make absolutes out of it. At least in the ordinary state of consciousness, we don’t have absolute free will, nor are we absolutely determined. We have a certain amount of leeway, a certain amount of wiggle room, and according to how we exercise the free will we seem to have, we either move in the direction of less conditioning, greater freedom, or more conditioning, greater bondage. You just kind of move up on the scale or down on the scale, as the case may be. But if you think about it, if we could do anything we wanted to do, what would we want to do? Well, the way you and I think about things, we would want to be in complete attunement with the will of God. In a sense, that would be the ultimate free will, and yet that’s also the ultimate not having any free will whatsoever because it’s God’s will now, it’s not yours.

Philip: That’s right. Ibn ‘Arabi said – I love Sufism and Sufic teachings, especially Ibn ‘Arabi – and he said something to that effect: “When I realized my greatest freedom is when I became God’s servant.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s just what you said; it’s in surrender that we gain our ultimate freedom.

God and Science

Rick: We’re using the word “God” here as if we assume that everyone agrees that there is one or knows what we mean by the word. I realize this is kind of a big question, but what’s your understanding of what God is? How would you explain it?

Philip: Well, he’s certainly not an old guy with a white beard. I get how you could want to conceptualize It that way at a certain point, but I don’t see God as personal. I see It as infinite conscious existence, and that everything is happening in and as the Divine Mind. So, there isn’t anything that isn’t God, and there isn’t anything outside God. It is literally the Light of Awareness, you could say, or conscious awareness. There are all kinds of terms that point to It, but of course, you’re never going to be able to objectify God. You can only live It.

Rick: I like to say that God is hiding in plain sight. Just from what we know about what science has taught us, if you look closely at anything and understand the laws of nature that are functioning in the universe, whoa, it’s just this amazing display of intelligence at every level. Just in a single cell, what’s going on is mind-boggling, or clusters of galaxies. At every scale, wherever you look, large or small, there’s this orderliness and non-random, non-accidentalness of the way things are functioning that just makes you feel like it’s one great big ocean of intelligence and we’re just little fish which are actually made of the same stuff but often consider ourselves separate from it and often suffer thirst despite the fact that we’re swimming in this ocean of infinite satiation.

Philip: Yeah, you’ve heard the old metaphor, it’s like the fish that don’t see the water.

Rick: Right.

Philip: It’s so hidden in plain sight that you just don’t see it…until you do.

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: What’s really exciting is that science is starting to see this in its own way, quantum mechanics, certainly. But when I look at someone like Bernardo Kastrup and his Analytic Idealism, he’s a guy who’s like, “I’m not awakened, I’m a hardhead that way, but through rigorous analysis, I have determined that this is how things are,” and the conclusions that he comes to beautifully elucidate my awareness-experience now, except he’s come about it from a completely different angle. It’s not a lived experience for him, and he admits that, yet there’s a way of coming through from that scientific, rational angle where you can at least cognitively understand the mystical experience. And I think that’s really important for people who need that.

Rick: He’s a Jnani, really.

Philip: He is.

Rick: He’s like a genius with this brilliant intellect and he’s able to parse the subtle understanding of reality so finely that I think it’s more of a lived experience for him than he might realize.

Philip: Well, I agree. I think it’ll happen for him.

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: What I really appreciate about Bernardo and Rupert Spira as well, and they’re friends, is – I think part of the obstacles we have in understanding these things is that everybody’s got their own terminology and they don’t necessarily jibe, so it’s confusing – I think they both do a wonderful job in stripping religious jargon and spiritual jargon and being very, easily approachable. I’ve tried to do that as best I can. I don’t write as well as Bernardo does, and I’m not as articulate verbally, certainly, as Rupert is, but I find myself trying to emulate their technical expression as much as I can because I think it’s helpful.

Rick: I think you’re a really good writer, and I’m not just saying that. You kind of disincentivize me from writing a book because I think I could never write a book that well.

Philip: Oh no! I’m telling you, I’ve got a great editor. That’s why.

Rick: Yeah, well, if I ever write one, I’ll get in touch with him. Your books are interesting. I found them just full of all kinds of interesting points and thought-provoking. They’re nice reference manuals too, because you refer to all these teachers and footnote them in many cases so that one can explore other angles. You just give the reader a taste that might inspire them to explore those angles.

Philip: Hopefully. If somebody wants an autographed copy of either book with a free bookmark, they can contact my editor. As you mentioned at the beginning, I don’t have a website, or any social media presence, and I don’t think I ever will. I guess you’ll have the link to my editor’s website.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll put the links on your BatGap page.

Philip: If they go there, then they can shoot a message to Eli, and he’ll forward it to me, and I can send them one. Or if somebody is in the northern San Diego County area, SoulScape in Encinitas is the exclusive bookseller of my books. I like promoting the local bookstores because they’re getting fewer and farther between. So, anybody in this area that wants one can get them there too.

Concluding Remarks

Rick: So you have no intention to do Zoom meetings or any kind of interactive things like that? All right, no problem. A bunch of people would…

Philip: I don’t.

Rick: I mean, you’d be good at it if you did, but it’s no big deal if you don’t want to.

Philip: I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. I mean, I never know.

Rick: Yeah.

Philip: But that’s certainly not my intention. The books are there and they’re not promoting an ideology or methodology. They’re just a description of what happened to me.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really good.

Philip: Basically, here are the things that went into the particular stew that got me to where I am, and if you find them interesting, you can explore them and it’s across the board. I mean, I will forever be grateful to SRF and Yogananda as my Guru, but it bothered some people, I think, when I said that after awakening, the Guru isn’t necessarily needed anymore. And it’s not that there isn’t still a relationship going on there, but the relationship changes. And the ultimate tip of the cap is you don’t need them anymore because it worked! If you had a great calculus teacher and you graduated, you don’t need to go back and take the course again. You got it. So I’m forever grateful for that, but there was so much more that went into my process, and that isn’t just spiritual teachings. It’s also all the people that I’ve known in this life, my family, my friends, the Upa Gurus that aren’t necessarily the Teacher, but teach you things about life. I’m grateful to everyone I’ve ever known and everything I’ve ever had to experience, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant, because it all got me to where I am.

Rick: Yeah, that’s very well put. I think we’ll end it there. We can’t top that little point. So thanks, Phil. It’s been really fun talking to you for a couple of hours and it was really great reading your books and I hope we get to meet in person one of these days.

Philip: That’d be great, Rick. Both you and Irene have been wonderful from the beginning and I really appreciate the opportunity to come on. And even if we don’t do another one of these, I hope we stay in touch because we’ve shared some emails about some of the things we’re concerned about in terms of spiritual ethics and your involvement with ASI, which I think is commendable.

Rick: Association for Spiritual Integrity, Mr. Acronym Man.

Philip: I had to throw one last acronym at you there, just to drive people crazy. There’s enough out there that isn’t necessarily what it purports to be or what is healthy for people that I think the group that you’re involved with is really helpful for people. So I thank you for doing that.

Rick: Yeah, that’s part of what I’m inclined to do. Okay, so thanks to those who have been reading. Most of you are probably familiar with BatGap, but if you’re not and you just stumbled upon this, don’t just look at the YouTube channel, check out the website because we have some things there that you won’t find on the YouTube channel. And there are some ways we’ve categorized and organized the interviews on the website that are hard to do on YouTube. You can also sign up to be notified by email whenever there’s a new interview, and then there’s the BatGap Bot, which is this big project I’ve been working on. It’s an AI chatbot that has a vast wealth of spiritual wisdom loaded into it, and you can ask it questions and interact with it and all. So anyway, it rolls along. Thanks, Phil, and we’ll be in touch, as you say.

Philip: Thanks Rick. God bless to everyone out there and I appreciate your time here today. I hope it helps!

Rick: All right. I think it will.

Philip: Take care.

Rick: Okay, bye.