Silence, Art, and Liberation – Ricard Perez – Transcript 
Summary:
- Background: Berlin-based meditation coach and multi-instrumentalist musician who bridges ancient contemplative traditions (Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, A Course in Miracles) with contemporary approaches, emphasizing meditation as dynamic balance of clarity and release
- Core Concept – Latency: Perez introduces “latency” as the crucial gap between sensory experience and conscious awareness—the milliseconds where suffering originates through resistance and personal interpretation. Reducing this latency creates intimacy with present-moment experience
- Fractals & Stages: Argues that spiritual stages aren’t linear achievements but fractal patterns that deepen “here and now”—the path is simultaneously progressive and already complete
- Integration & Practice: Emphasizes meditation as natural “housekeeping” rather than discipline, drawing parallels between music and meditation as pattern recognition beyond conceptual thinking
- Authenticity in Spirituality: Critical of spiritual communities’ performative aspects while acknowledging value of guidance; advocates detachment from labels like “enlightened” in favor of ongoing exploration and beginner’s mind
Key Takeaways:
- Latency as Gateway to Freedom: The delay between sensory contact and conscious response is where suffering accumulates. By shortening this gap through meditation, practitioners move from reactive interpretation to direct experience, dissolving the “solid sense of me” that creates resistance to life as it unfolds.
- Meditation as Release, Not Achievement: Effective practice isn’t about forcing discipline or reaching altered states, but naturally returning to simplicity (breath, mantra, object) to “clean your basement”—releasing accumulated mental patterns. The resulting bliss is a byproduct of letting go, not a goal to manufacture.
- Fractal Understanding of Spiritual Progress: Stages of development aren’t linear checkpoints but deepening recognitions of what’s already present. This paradoxical view reconciles progressive practice with direct realization—you’re simultaneously walking the path and already “here.”
- Science and Art as Complementary: Clarity (vipassana, scientific precision) must balance with release (devotion, artistic expression). Over-emphasis on either creates problems: dry insight without heart, or blissful escapism without understanding. Authentic practice integrates both dimensions.
- Integrity Over Identity: Genuine spiritual maturity involves honest self-assessment rather than claiming enlightened status. Teachers should demonstrate ethical behavior and continued growth, acknowledging struggles (anxiety, depression) rather than presenting false perfection. The goal is becoming more loving, compassionate, and functional—not transcending humanity.
Full interview, edited for readability
The Single Desire
Ricard: Papaji, when he was describing how instead of, he said, “You shouldn’t have desires.” And he said, “No, you have to have that one desire.” You know, I love that. That’s like samatha. It’s like, desires are not bad. They’re only bad because you’re confused. We only have one desire. Just one.
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. I’ve done 730-something of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and check under the past interviews menu where you’ll see all the old ones, the previous ones, organized in a variety of ways. And there’s also some other cool stuff there like an AI spiritual chat bot and other things. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website. And there’s also a page which explains other things. Some people don’t like to send, to use PayPal, they send us a check or whatever. My guest today is Ricard Perez. He is living in Berlin, Germany. He’s a meditation coach and a musician whose work bridges ancient traditions with fresh practical insight. What kind of musician are you, Ricard?
Ricard: The good ones.
Rick: I mean, what do you play?
Ricard: I play a little bit of everything.
Rick: Drums, guitar, horns?
Ricard: Exactly.
Rick: All those things, wow.
Ricard: Yes, piano.
Rick: Piano, wow, you’re multi-talented. Is that like your main profession?
Ricard: Yes.
Rick: Meditation?
Ricard: Yeah, that’s what I spent my whole life with until recently, actually. So it’s not that I never – this thing of becoming a meditation coach is very much of a spontaneous thing happening in the last months, 18 months.
Rick: Okay. So we’ll talk about that. And you know you have an eclectic appreciation of a variety of paths and traditions. Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, “A Course in Miracles,” and other things. You have been a friend and student of Shinzen Young, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times, and you emphasize meditation as a dynamic balance of clarity and release, with simple methods for direct entering silence. I read your book, “A Gap to Eternity,” or rather I should say I converted it to audio and listened to it, and I liked it a lot. And two main points jumped out at me, which we’re going to discuss. One is latency and the other is fractals, and we’ll have to go into an explanation of what both of those things are. You like the connection of science with spirituality and science and creativity, which I very much like also, I think for various reasons we’ll also discuss and you say that your love of music, art, and ecstatic expression bring a celebratory dimension to the path of awakening. That’s good. I like the idea of a celebratory path to awakening instead of the overly serious, morose one. So what got you started on the spiritual path? Have you been meditating for a long, long time? You know, what first attracted you to it?
Ricard: I was, I was worrying that you will ask me that question. It’s difficult to answer. Well, the first moment that I recall something special, especially, what I mean, something that felt, something I couldn’t talk to anyone or understand what it was, it happened with music. That’s why I became a musician. I recently actually hear somewhere that when people have this first stage of arising and passing, and this greater also, whatever is the activity they’re involved in becomes a very important thing in their life. That seems to be what happened to me when I was nine. I remember a Saturday morning, I was just casually listening to the radio and the people, there were kids in the pool, and beautiful summer sun coming in. And there was just this great rock song, just getting in with drums and “dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.” And I just felt like a strong sense of energy through my body. And, I don’t know, I was like all all over the place. I don’t know, something… when I look back, I clearly see something happened there because, since then, I’ve been kind of obsessed with music, like many of you. I think you were a musician too, right?
I felt like a strong sense of energy through my body. Something happened there because, since then, I’ve been kind of obsessed with music.
Rick: I was a drummer.
Ricard: You were a drummer? Oh cool, best friend of a musician. And um… that’s a musician’s joke, there’s nothing wrong with it.
Rick: I’ve never heard it before but I get it.
Ricard: Anyway, so yeah, that kind of changed a little the curse. I felt a little bit awkward about everything and I went down into experiences, drugs, mysticism, books, like I don’t know… how you call that in English? John Seagull… …oh, my God.
Rick: St. John of the Cross?
Ricard: I mean, it’s gonna be the seagull.
Rick: Oh, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Richard Bach.
Ricard: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that was something, also the man in search for meaning. Yeah, there were some books I casually read, and Castaneda, that I read during my teenage years. I said, “Oh my God, this is it.” There is something about that. And from then on, yeah, well, the story goes on.
Rick: Yeah. Well, that’s good. I’d say that for me, music was also kind of an initial impetus to interest in spirituality. I mean, you know, summer of ’67, we’re doing drugs, The Beatles came out with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and you’re lying there on the floor between two big speakers, high on something or other, and, you know, I would have these profound, you know, expansive experiences, and they’re talking about spiritual stuff and their lyrics and everything, and then they learned to meditate, and that became a big sort of phenomenon that everybody heard about what they were doing. So, it was a springboard, you know.
Ricard: Was that your connection to TM?
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Because they went to India to study with the Maharishi, who was the founder of TM, and everybody heard about it. And so, when I finally decided I should stop taking drugs and learn to meditate, that was the kind of meditation. I figured, “Oh, I might as well do that. That’s what The Beatles did.” And it was one of the only things around in those days. But music can really, I mean, probably almost everyone listening to this has experienced that music can change your consciousness, you know, you get into a different, an altered state when you’re listening to some kinds of music. That’s why kirtans are very popular, things like that.
Ricard: Yeah, and what I think many people… Music is obviously a great entertainer. Let’s say it helps connect people at every level. But what I didn’t really understand until way way later is that, and it’s related to the book, because I didn’t know this, I was just like diving in all this stuff all my life. I never felt, I just felt the most casual thing. But it seems that when you really go, you really give yourself to the music, let’s say if you listen clearly to every detail of it, you’re really going to something that is more like a meditation rather than just the pleasure of playing a music and a song and remember, “Oh, that last summer, oh, I like that song.” You know, that’s one level, certainly.
Rick: Yeah.
Ricard: There are deeper and deeper and deeper levels of music, and I think that’s what many of us, I would say even accidentally in some way, just get pulled into deeper experiences.
Rick: Yeah, and when you’re actually playing the music and not just listening, and you’re playing with a band, it creates a sort of coherence in your brain, at least I experience, where, after you’ve been playing a little while, you just are again in a different state. And then it’s you’re kind of also in a different state with a group of other people. Everybody’s coming into a kind of collective coherence with each other.
Meditation as Music Without Music
Ricard: Yeah, that’s… actually, my relationship with meditation grows out of those experiences, so meditation for me has been the way of integrating that, but many times I’ve been always surprised, like meditation is music without music. You know, it is, they just figure out all these patterns of your consciousness behind what is behind the experience of music, in the case of many of us. They just were able to put it out, and were able to sustain that connection, not beyond the music itself. So you can enjoy it 24/7 rather than just when you play music.
Rick: Yeah, that’s an important point. Not only with regard to music, but with regard to meditation, it’s not just an experience here and experience there. It’s more a matter of culturing something that abides continuously without your having to even think about it. It’s just there, like breathing.
Temporary vs. Permanent Samadhi
Ricard: Yeah. One of Shinzen’s teachers said, “If you go out of it, it wasn’t a true samadhi.” I always say, “Well, that’s brilliant.” This is one of these, if, meaning that sometimes you go through stages and through experiences and through stuff like that. He was referring to that, when you really hit something that is more transcendental, to use a word, more real, that’s not something you come back from it. It’s just like real samadhi is a samadhi that stays.
Rick: Yeah. Well, there are terms in this, in the tradition that has given us the word samadhi. And some samadhis, by definition, are temporary and intermittent. But then, you know, what is it? Nirvikalpa samadhi is the permanent one, which just never goes.
Ricard: Yeah, in this context, this was a Zen teacher.
Rick: A Zen teacher, okay.
Ricard: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, they use the word samadhi also, it’s true.
Ricard: I mean, it’s a bit not so specific, like in more yoga or advaita samadhis. It was more like, you know, when you go, for example, in Zen, you go into these kind of states of deep concentration, a certain kind of temporary samadhi that you reach. And the teacher was making a distinction. If you get out of it, then it wasn’t so real, some way.
Rick: Yeah, I think the way I would put a fine point on that is that even the temporary ones are going to be less clear and deep than a sort of final one that one might have, of which you never lose once you have it. So in other words, there’s always gonna be some fog, some lack of clarity, to some subtle degree in these temporary samadhis, but then finally there’s a time when the fog totally clears and then it’s there all the time, waking, dreaming, and sleeping.
Ricard: Yeah, I think this leads a little bit to a very interesting point that I was looking forward to discuss with you, because I really would like to pick your brain on this, because you were mentioning before, this progressive versus direct.
Rick: Yeah, we were talking about that before we started recording.
Ricard: And I found this as really interesting. I think we are falling into that conversation a little bit. And I think when, for example, Shinzen’s teacher was saying that was pejorative to the sense that temporary samadis are not useful or are not important. I don’t think he got it, but meaning that there is some kind of, there’s some kind of… something you can contact that suddenly it changes the perception of everything, and, as we were discussing, it’s not that it will never finish, it’s that it never really started even. It seems that it has been always there, we just didn’t notice it. And I think that’s the permanent goldmine of something that can help us flow through all the comings and goings with a nice continuum, let’s say.
There’s something you can contact that suddenly changes the perception of everything. It seems that it has been always there, we just didn’t notice it.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that says, “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.” And, you know, regarding our experience of that, obviously it’s something that initially, for most people, is going to be intermittent and partial and perhaps unclear, but that’s the whole idea of spiritual practice is that it becomes more and more clear. And I could give you an analogy. Let’s say in India, the way they used to dye cloth, and maybe they still do out in the villages, is they would take a white cloth and dip it in some colored dye, and then they would put it and bleach it in the sun for a few hours until it dried out and it was bleached as much as it was going to be. And then they would dip it in the dye again and then bleach it in the sun again, and they’d go back and forth until eventually it wouldn’t bleach, even if you left it in the bright sunlight. So that’s a good analogy for what certain types of spiritual practice can be, where you know, you dip in…
Ricard: Sorry, what do you mean? It will bleach? What it means that it was…
Rick: Well, bleaching means it loses its color when it’s sitting in the bright sun, as things do. They fade if they’re in the sun.
Ricard: Yeah.
Rick: But eventually, if you repeat this process enough, the cloth won’t fade, even if it’s in the bright sun. So like that, spiritual practice, you don’t do it 24 hours a day. You’d starve to death if you’re sitting with your eyes closed all day. But you dip in, you engage in activity, you dip in again, you engage in activity. There are neurophysiological changes which take place, which that, and on subtle levels, I’m sure, with a subtle body and everything, a culturing or a refinement takes place, which ultimately results in a permanent, abiding state of pure awareness.
Ricard: Yeah, yeah. That learning by contrast and how that contrast creates, you know, just brings me to my mind, vipassana, in the sense of all this discerning between, or advaita vedanta, what is real and what is not real, and how you both go back and forth between things. And let’s say you sit to meditate and it’s relatively easy. I mean, you see if you spend some time with it to feel how you can calm your body, how can your metabolism, how your mind calms. And then you have a certain sense of, certain perspective where you can intuitively feel something real behind your personal. And then you go into life and you get engaged again. And the point is how to get to feel it. That thing that you were, let’s say, noticing in the meditation, because meditation created this special mind that makes it easier to notice. The mastery, I think, becomes when you’re reintegrated in all your life, in every moment you feel that. Even when your body moves and your mouth talks, there’s still this sense of, yeah, something that, man, emptiness, maybe, is that the first word that comes to my mind in the sense of something that is not necessarily based on perceptions. You cannot talk about it, you cannot remember it, it’s just there.
Rick: Emptiness, fullness, same thing.
Ricard: Yeah.
Rick: And it’s there, I think you’re saying this, it’s there without your having to remind yourself all day. Although I think it’s good to sort of have a certain quality of vigilance. Carlos Castaneda’s teacher talked about this. He said, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability.” In other words, you have to sort of be on your toes and not be careless, thoughtless, and so on. But on the other hand, you don’t hold on to pure awareness by trying to remember it all day any more than you remain clean by remembering the shower you took this morning.
Remembrance and Being Present
Ricard: Like, you know, mindfulness is kind of a trendy word nowadays and always to me, what it struck me, like what it really made me realize, okay, that’s what that word means. The original word, as probably everybody knows, is sati. And one of the meanings is remembrance. When I hear that, I say, yeah, obviously that’s what he was, so whenever I hear some speeches of the Buddha or someone talking about mindfulness or sati, it was just, I said, yeah, yeah, I know what you’re remembering. I know what remember means. It’s not remembering like you’re recollecting a memory. It’s just you’re landing in the here and now. You’re remembering that you are. I mean, I don’t know if I’m going a bit too deep, too soon.
Rick: No, it’s okay. And it kind of relates to your latency point, which we’re gonna get into. And there’s another thing, towards the very end of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna says to Krishna, “I remember my true nature now.” You know, something like that. And usually we think of remembrance as being, “Oh, I remember what I did in high school,” you know, or “I remember my first date,” or “I remember I used to play in a band.” But that’s a different sense of the word. This is not like remembering something in the past. It’s more like a recognition of what has always been here, as you were saying a few minutes ago.
Ricard: Yeah.
Rick: Okay. Okay, so we’re talking about remembrance and abiding awakening. And one of the main themes of the first part of your book was latency, and I’d never heard that word used in the way you were using it, and I found it very interesting. And I had some thoughts about it as I was listening to your book. So if you want, why don’t you start talking about that right now, explain what you mean by it and why you consider it important.
Ricard: Yeah, well, the story comes that I’m actually not a fan of science. Yeah, I’m just saying this because it was never in my scope. I like it like everyone else, you know, I find it super interesting, but it was more in the artistic side, where you’re not so meticulous on the reason for this book, and all these terms and trying to explain, it’s not like something that came out naturally to me, it’s the cultural shock to me at Shinzen, because for–
Rick: You’re referring to Shinzen Young here.
Ricard: Yeah, for those of you who may not know him, he’s basically a scientist in a way. He really likes science, he knows very well about science. And he tries to even use language like scientists, very, very, very impeccable, very precise. So when I got to start talking to him, I find out, okay, we have a problem. I don’t know how to, I just throw concepts lightly, carelessly all the time. And so I started thinking, okay, how can I start connecting with this bright, specific mind? And I say, okay. I started noticing some of his exercises, for those of you who don’t know, he works in a kind of like vipassana style where you’re just noticing what’s happening. For example, suddenly you hear something and you say, “Hear.” You feel something, you say, “Feel.” So you’re labeling.
Rick: Do you really? I mean, if I hear a bird singing, do I say, “Hear,” or do I just, do I just experience the bird?
Ricard: Sorry, I’m just talking about the techniques Shinzen is promoting most. Unified mindfulness. He has this fantastic way he has synthesized, I say this for anyone interesting on that is really, I think he did an incredible job in synthesizing all these traditions into something accessible for anyone. Nevertheless, I’m just trying to explain where all this comes from, that making this process of noticing things, which doesn’t imply that you have to say the word. You say the word in the beginning, just you label the experience, but later on, you just kind of like, like picture, not picturing, but kind of noticing the experience.
Rick: Recognize, yeah, you recognize that you’re–
Discovering Latency
Ricard: Recognize an experience, recognize. So as he put me into this kind of pressure, and I was like going through this deep process with his techniques. When I started talking to him, I started realizing a frustrating sensation. And I didn’t know that I was starting noticing that there was a delay. Consciousness had a delay. It was shocking to me to feel that sometimes there was like a sensory contact and it took a few milliseconds for me consciously understand and let’s say, have a reaction to that. Let’s say if it’s a gust of wind on your skin or anything, whatever it is, it took time to build that reaction. And, and I was just like all the time feeling that I was behind the experience. I couldn’t be here and now really, it just felt like everything was just pointing towards like, I’m just full of a processing, interpreting device of my personal life. And I was just, became extremely curious with that. And as we discussed before, I’m a musician, so I got to be very sensitive to delays. Delays, I say, for those of you who don’t know, latency is a technical word for a certain delay. So you put something in a system and it takes some time to get out of it. And so that’s the latency. So for example, now, if I’m talking, there will be a difference between my mouth moving and the words coming to everybody listening to this. There will be a gap, that will be latency. There is this mismatch.
I was feeling all the time, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” I’m always behind, I can never catch the moment right as it is.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, right now people are listening to the live stream of this and what they’re hearing is what we said like five seconds ago. It takes that a little while for it to come on the live stream.
The Gap Between Experience and Interpretation
Ricard: That is true, but I was just trying to say something that people could relate to, not to make it too scientific in the sense that if people, you may think, oh, I don’t notice that, I don’t notice that delay between my experience and me and so on. So I was trying to explain, actually, if you really pay attention, everybody’s noticing because for example, now in this, for some reason, the audio and the video of this becomes a bit mismatched, even in just a few milliseconds, people can’t pinpoint. “Oh, it seems that there is lip syncing or something like that. It seems there’s something weird about it.” So that’s kind of the experience that I had with my direct experience. I was feeling all the time, “Oh my God, what’s happening? What’s happening?” I’m always behind, I was like, I can never catch the moment right as it is. So that’s why my entry point of the conversation with Shinzen and yeah, we started. So I find, okay, that’s something I can talk that I know very well and it’s really bugging me, my experience of meditation. And I went to hear and he explained me, first thing, he throw back at me that actually my music training had a lot to do with me noticing that things. Many people may not have noticed that specific aspect. Like I said, it will go into your brain. We will see there are certain areas that are more trained for that. That’s why you notice that. And we started discussing about what this latency means. What it is, how it affects your experience. The fact that you notice something right as it’s happening on real time, or if you’re noticing a little gap and what’s happening in this gap. So the more, Shinzen was kind of guiding me, it wasn’t really telling me things, it was just like helping me to understand what I was saying. What, what happened all the, the reason the first part of the book is all about what happens when you open up and this little millisecond that apparently seems to be something we don’t notice and yet that’s where all our suffering is taking place, which is the notice because it kind of happens relatively quickly. But if you, for example, when people have the expression of being here and now, like you just made a retreat, or you made a meditation or you just leave it, you were about to die just a few moments ago and suddenly just kind of everything feels so real. You’re not processing, you’re not thinking about things you normally think. This kind of intimacy with the moment as it happens, that will be like a low latency. And on the, on the contrary, someone who is, you know, this is something that happens to all of us that sometimes you get angry at something, someone, but you just even notice that you’re angry, like long before you were so infused in this reaction to it that you even, you didn’t even notice that you were reacting like that, you know, that, I don’t know if this is a clear example, but there is a… the more we have all these thoughts where we think and we talk, “Oh yeah, because that shouldn’t have happened.” And the more we create like a gap between how we experience life and how life is actually happening.
Thoughts Rising from the Depths
Rick: Yeah. Let me tell you some thoughts that I have about what you just said and what I was thinking as I was listening to your book. My understanding, which kind of again corresponds with a Vedic tradition, is that there are different levels of thought from subtle to gross, you could say, and they even have names for that in Sanskrit. The gross spoken word, the gross thought word, subtle impulse of thought even before it gets any kind of verbal quality to it, and then something that’s beyond all those, just sort of the silent absolute field. And you could use an analogy to understand this, which is like, let’s say in a pond or an ocean, bubbles come up from the bottom and they bubble up and they get larger as they come up and they finally burst on the surface of the water. And the average person doesn’t see the bubble until it comes, until it bursts on the surface, but that’s actually some time since it left the bottom of the ocean. So a diver, you know, goes down and he can see the bubbles at earlier stages of their emergence to the surface. And he can even go to the very bottom and watch as the bubble comes out right from the mud or whatever, from the bottom of the ocean. So with thoughts, impulses come from a deep level of the mind of which we’re generally unaware. And they bubble up until eventually they burst on the surface as a conscious thought. But when you do certain types of spiritual practice, you can kind of like trace the thought back to its source. You can kind of ride the bubbles down, so to speak, and then arrive at the source from which they arose. And you can kind of end up residing in a place that’s prior to the emergence of thought. If that becomes kind of established, then you catch thoughts spontaneously when they first emerge. And you therefore can have, not sort of a manipulative kind of control, but a discriminative kind of control, where you can just more easily choose to ignore a thought, which otherwise might come out as a burst of anger in the average person, you can just sort of say, “Nope, I’m not going to express that. I’m just gonna check it.” And it dissipates like just a ball of sawdust disintegrating in your hand. You can reside at a level at which, I talked to people who described this beautifully, you can reside at a level at which thoughts have not even taken on a verbal quality. They’re just kind of like subtle impulses that don’t have English or Spanish or German words associated with them yet. And you can reside on that… it’s a deep intuitive level of experiencing. And one can live that from there and act from there. And it results in a whole different quality. And so the latency is very short because there’s not this delay between the emergence of the thought and the point at which you finally become aware of it. You’re aware even before the thought emerges and you’re aware as it emerges. And so there’s virtually, there’s little or no latency.
Ricard: Exactly, exactly, it matches perfectly. Yeah, as you’re saying, this is not the new discovery.
Rick: Right.
Ricard: Hopefully it’s something that helps people reflect in their experience in a slightly different way and notice this effect that you’re, as you’re describing, is well known actually.
Rick: But you’re the first person I’ve ever heard talk about it, really. I mean, I was aware of the concepts and there’s some Vedic literature about it, but you’re the first spiritual teacher person that I’ve ever heard really use the word latency.
Ricard: Yeah, latency, as I said, it was because I had to talk to Shinzen, but we were discussing about the anxiety. I think it’s there. I think it’s there. There’s the moments of consciousness in Theravada. There is some, yeah, as you’re saying, in Hinduism, there is all this, you made me think a lot when you, the way you were describing it, you made me think so much about inquiry with Ramana Maharshi, right? Like following the thought eye to the source.
Rick: Exactly.
Ricard: And that way, transcending it.
Rick: I think that’s what he was describing, actually. And there’s different ways of doing that. It can be done with a mantra or it can be done in the way Ramana described and so on.
Ricard: And also dependent origination, all this. I was having a conversation like this with Shinzen just this Wednesday, which he declined to comment on. (laughs) Because I don’t know, but if you see his system, he just goes right to the spot, which is beautiful. He doesn’t make levels, he doesn’t make distinctions between people, he just shows a technique that is useful like a razor.
Rick: Yeah, if it works, if he can do it, great.
Ricard: He has all this way about how to go about it. He’s super direct. So I think that’s why he didn’t follow me on this conversation. But he helped me to articulate something I never said before. And he’s so personal, I never come to think about it, which is the way that I was experiencing perception. We start talking about what perception is and so on. And I just started talking to him and I just get the analogy of brain waves. That how, when we are, for example, now talking our brain is certain ways, and let’s say if someone would go to sleep or to meditation and you go on a deeper state, there’s a more fundamental kind of way of thinking. And to me, I don’t know to which extent people following this, which are meditators, are also aware of this, because I’ve been experiencing this mostly privately for most of the time. I have a certain kind of like direct access to this more primordial kind of way of thinking that is not, it’s not thoughts, it’s more like these abstract images that you–
Rick: Impulses.
Cymatics and the Mind
Ricard: — that you see, like hypnagogic imagery, these images you get before, when you’re falling asleep, but you’re nicely, you see this kind of, it’s something like that, it’s geometric. That’s where the conversation with Shinzen comes in. It made me realize what I’m so, so why fractals became such an important topic and what I was saying, because it made me realize that that’s why, because I sort of have this sense that, that how my experience comes from this grounding that we’re saying, like, whatever it is, let’s say, it’s like, I was starting to describe, trying to describe to him like a hum, you know, when you put this, cymatics is the name we were going on researching words. That’s why he makes me do it. Cymatics is this, this kind of research of, you may have seen how they put a certain surfaces and they put sand, for example, or even some liquids, and you put sound, created some geometric patterns. It’s fascinating. Fascinating, because that’s exactly to me how it feels to be a person. Like there is some fundamental level where there’s this force, let’s say the sound in this example, and how that creates, and in that specific medium, probably this mind and this body, it creates a certain kind of shapes. This will be like the primary thoughts. And how that, these thoughts as it keeps processing, it’s kind of break down into little bits, into little bits, into little bits. And for those of you who have been meditating long, you may have noticed this experience that you may be in a deep meditation state, let’s say in the sense that your mind is very calm and you feel everything feel very effortless. You don’t need to think much about anything. And how when you’re resuming your day and going back to it, you can clearly see how your mind is just like, it starts throwing meaning and thoughts and so you’re getting, there’s all this conversation popping up in your mind that wasn’t there a few moments before. Like it all came out of that. And I think, I hope you see the parallel to what you were saying. So I’m just trying to say, I think we agree on this.
Rick: But eventually, I mean, some people, their minds are like three, you know, 10 radio stations playing at the same time, you know, just a million different thoughts. And most of them are not useful or relevant to what they’re doing or anything. But, you know, eventually you can get it to a point where you don’t think anywhere near as many thoughts as you used to, but the thoughts you think are useful. And so you’re not wasting energy on superfluous thoughts.
Ricard: Because they’re not personal.
Rick: Because they’re not personal?
The Ego as Afterthought
Ricard: They’re not personal. I mean, I’m just gonna pull out a bit of Advaita Vedanta here. In the sense there’s this, supposedly in Advaita Vedanta they talk, I think Rupert Spira was making this analogy, I don’t know, maybe he just put it up from somewhere else, but this idea of the ego, the ‘I’ thought, is just a clown that comes after the show and takes all the classes to itself. You know, I did that, I did that. And that’s kind of honestly what it felt, all these latency thing that as we were leaving behind very much behind more of this contaminated sense of “I’m a separated thing,” rather than imagine when you’re lost in a dance, when you’re lost in enjoyment, a moment with your family or in a moment where you’re just, you’re not really thinking much. It just comes as a spontaneous action. and it’s mostly loving, it’s mostly enjoyable, it’s mostly peaceful. And these have a shorter latency. And that’s the thing. I actually was like a couple of years ago, I had this, I’ve been meditating at that point. Actually, that’s matching with this period with Shinzen. Actually, some way I was just like focusing on my experience moment by moment, no matter what, and trying to see all these little tiny little things about the experience. And I remember I had this beautiful moment, I was at the beach with my wife. It was, it was a little before, it wasn’t Corona. And we just move out of the city and went to a place where there were like huge beaches and my son could run and there was this whole moment, it was like, you can’t imagine it was like paradise in the sense, like I just had this kind of like, I will call it like blissful natural state out of the situation, let’s say that everything was conductive to that. But at this moment, I was just, I was, I was only looking at me. I wasn’t looking about the sensory experience. I was just looking at how I was relating to it, let’s say. At that point, the specific one probably happens for most people also in little compartments. For me, that one was like very clear that, as you were describing just now, there are no thoughts, actually. I mean, someone could say, if you pull into that experience dramatically, you clearly say, “Oh yeah, there’s a certain, you’re aware that there’s absence of talking, blah, blah, inside of your mind and trying to manipulate or control your life. This sense… But also as you were describing, the thoughts that come are more like these experiences that happen in this moment where are just something that is happening. It’s not something you’re attached to it. It’s just something that is… It has a specific function and comes, this thought says its thing and it goes. That’s what creative thoughts are to me. It doesn’t engage into and this and that and the other and the other in this way that if you stop the chain, it feels like you have to pull yourself out of it, back into it. It feels like these natural thoughts, I would call them non-personal thoughts, they just come like the most natural thing, this bubbling you were discussing, just passing through your net, your personal net, your body mind, and just comes this activity or this spontaneous thought. And, but there’s this quality of detachment from them, they are joyful, and you’re okay with not thinking anymore, right after. You know, there’s this sense of space to it, in the sense of appreciation, like in a museum, you have the artworks in a world where you can actually see it. In some way, you see the thoughts and have this space around them that you’re gonna appreciate them.
The thoughts that come are not something you’re attached to. They have a specific function and come, this thought says its thing and it goes.
Rick: Yeah, a couple of thoughts on that. Oh, thoughts, I’m having thoughts! (both laughing) I interviewed a guy, might have been 10 or 12 years ago, named Gary Weber. And he said one time he had been doing spiritual practice. One time he did a yoga asana, I think he was doing a shoulder stand or something, and his mind stopped. And he said, “I haven’t had any thoughts since then. I just haven’t had any thoughts.” And I said, “Well, Gary, you’re talking to me.” You know, and talking is a verbal expression of a subtler impulse in the mind, you know, certain ideas that you’re expressing. So I would argue that, maybe it’s a semantic thing or how we’re defining thoughts. I would argue like, you can have… go ahead…
Can You Stop Your Thoughts?
Ricard: I think you’re making a very good point, and that’s one of the rhetorics that I have, as I go on the YouTube videos and so on. Because most people nowadays in mindfulness and meditation are like, you cannot stop your thoughts. That’s stupid, trying to stop your mind or that has nothing to do with meditation. And here’s the truth. Actually, okay, we need to be a little careful how we discuss this. But at the same time, you talk to someone who had deep meditative experiences, they will be making references as we were just doing about this kind of sense of silence, stillness, grounded. But the thoughts that… the point that what I was trying to say that the thoughts, these thoughts that come as in Tibetan Buddhism, they have a specific way of describing this, but it’s something like you don’t engage in thinking. Thoughts come. You will have the thought, OK, I need to go to the kitchen and cook something. But it’s not even personal. It’s like something that is happening. You know, it’s not, I go to the kitchen, to my kitchen and going to make my favorite, there is no all these extra layers to it. There is just kind of like a physiological, probably just a brain minimal action that you do. But these thoughts, like, I think many people listening to this who have been meditating and you’ve been observing your mind, could tell about that moment where you are in regular absorbing thinking, when you’re like, everything feels like you’re fighting the world, you’re controlling the world. Everything is not as you would like it to be. And so you have to be trying to do something to be happy. And suddenly for a moment, just give yourself a break. And for many people, I heard many people describing to me how they noticed that suddenly the thoughts were there, but they weren’t bothered by it. And I think that’s a very important distinction. So thoughts are there, but the deeper you go, first thing, thoughts become only practical or creative or there has a reason to be. It’s not a self-reflective nonsense that is useless and a waste of energy. No, the thoughts are just perfect on their own. That’s the ones that you are not thinking as a person, let’s say, they just appear like you’re, my hands are moving. I’m not thinking about moving my hands or any word that we say, just seems to happen, hopefully spontaneously and making sense. But what I’m saying is that it’s the layers of resistance that create this delay, this latency, are layers that creates a stronger sense of me. And that resistance is what it could make you feel this exact moment as it is. To be painful, to be a fight, to be something miserable, let’s say, or to have a sense that your thoughts are like your body moving when you’re just dancing. You’re not thinking about how you move every, but you’re enjoying it so much. So it seems that you are dance. So in the same way, I think when you are free from this personal solid sense of artificial structure of me, that you need to feed it with thoughts all the time. If you stop thinking, it just falls apart. That’s where I was discussing before, temporary cymatics, so to say, these techniques that are actually suggesting you don’t just fucking give up on thought, do anything you can to get, it’s actually useful because it’s gonna give you an open window to observe what happens if you don’t feedback this structure. What is the truth if you’re not trying to make it up all the time in your mind, you know, to observe directly? And I think in that space, it comes a very important revelation that is, again, nothing new, but it’s that if you have to go closer and closer to this latency, to this gap between what’s happening and how you’re interpreting it, so you start getting free and letting go of your own personal interpretation, at some point you notice that you pass that point, meaning that before you thought, I am doing this, and as you start shortening this gap between this intimacy to the experience, at some point you notice that you are there, like let’s say in some sort of stillness silence or some kind of like being, and the experience is happening. And I think this shift from the person who’s fighting about the world, who’s trying to control the world, who’s trying to make the world be as you want, as you need, and based on fear and survival, as you release that power, you realize that everything was just ridiculous from the first place. You know, sometimes this is a conversation we have with my group of meditation, and we’re talking, and someone says, okay, if there is no doer, who is meditating? What’s the point of sitting to meditate? And the conversation was along the lines that, here’s the thing, something happens in the core of your being. You were talking about these layers of thought. Something disrupts, like the epicenter of an earthquake, for example. And what you see your body sitting or not sitting to meditate, it’s just waves of it. It’s happening. It doesn’t need to try to meditate. It’s just a celebration of your body and mind, of something breaking deep in the core of your own mental slavery. It’s like it happens after that glimpse that you had, suddenly your body and your mind start something and you start like feeling back into that, let’s say, in your body and your mind. But it happens naturally. It shouldn’t be something that you discipline yourself. You know, people recently have, normally have a lot of people tell me, “No, now I can meditate one hour. I can sit to meditate one hour.” And it was, I’m saying, how could I say this more carefully? Think twice before I say it. Because it’s more like, who, I mean, what’s the point of forcing yourself to meditate? You know, I know, I know, I know, okay, okay. There is some initial point where you, it seems that you are collecting yourself and saying, this is good for me, I should meditate, you know? So there’s an initial point, that we all agree. But if you’ve been sitting to meditate, let’s say for a few months, especially after a few years, you should be enjoying your meditation, like a bee going back to a flower. I mean, no, no, there should be nothing like discipline or more like you’re visiting your lover or something like that. You’re sitting there just to, oh yeah, now you can feel yourself.
The layers of resistance that create this latency are layers that create a stronger sense of me. That resistance is what makes this exact moment feel painful.
Rick: Lots of good things there that you just said. I mean, yeah. I mean, for me, luckily or fortunately, meditation was like that from day one. It was like, ahhh! And these days it’s like I get to just visit heaven twice a day and I just sit in this blissful, beautiful state. And I could, you know, I don’t sit there all day. I’ve got things to do, but it certainly doesn’t take any discipline to sit there for an hour because it’s just so sweet. Sometimes it takes discipline to come out of it and do other things. And there’s a principle to this, which is that, you know, we’ve all heard the tradition say that ananda, or bliss, is a characteristic of Brahman or or the ultimate reality and so on. And so our minds have a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness. I mean, as a musician, you should know that, you know, if you’re listening to some bubblegum music and then some beautiful music that you love comes from another direction, your mind is just gonna shift to the good music. And this happens all day long. Talk about bees, I mean, bees do it. You know, they just kind of follow, where’s the nice flower? Okay, here’s one, and they go for it. All life does this. The mind has a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness. And the ground state of the universe and of ourselves is a state of bliss, among other things. And so if the mind could be given an opportunity to begin to go in that direction, it will encounter greater charm at each step. And that greater charm will allow it to just settle down effortlessly to a clearer and clearer experience of it, kind of like just taking the correct angle off a diving board and letting go, to mix metaphors. So anyway, that’s my idea.
Beyond Hedonism to Inner Bliss
Ricard: I think you’re bringing up such an important topic because I was hearing Ram Dass recently talking about this, specifically how many of us westerners, and the reason why mindfulness is so popular, because the Buddhist approach fits very well with our scientific. We’ve been burned out by all the religious crap and we decided, okay, now science is the only thing we can trust. So all these things come in line with the gurus. And I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to say your generation, because you describe yourself in the 68th year. Enjoy yourself in there. And, and, um, which is beautiful. Um, but at the same time, as we know, there’s a lot of people who… who’s this guy who has a song to say, like, what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? And this is the lyrics from, from someone else. I don’t know.
Rick: I don’t think I know that one.
Ricard: Yeah, there’s a song that says that. And I always say, “Oh, that’s a great lyric!” Because what’s so funny about this thing, I say, sorry, let me go back to the point. I was trying to say that with the hippies, and we know there’s like overuse of the words peace, love, happiness. You have all the Hare Krishna, you have all these things. And we, again, we have like a wave of people using all these kind of appealing sense of, I’m gonna be happy if I do this, if I follow this, if I do that. And again, of course, that just went really bad, as we know. In general terms.
Rick: The theme in the 60s was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And that’s where the happiness was expected to be found. And within a year or two of that, everyone got burned out. A lot of them started to turn to hard drugs and so on. And who was it? Joseph Campbell says, “Follow your bliss.” That doesn’t mean hedonism. It means something more subtle and deep than that. It really means what I was saying a few minutes ago. There’s a reservoir of inner bliss and you want to follow that or, you know, dive into that. Just one more quick thing I’m going to throw out and then let you continue. You know, you were saying meditation should be so enjoyable and everything that you just naturally want to do it. Well, you know, we get caught up in activities and we think, “Well, maybe I’ll just watch this TV show or maybe I’ll go and do that,” because the attention is habitually directed outwards. So it might, especially in the early days of one’s practice, it might take a little discipline to say, “No, I can do that later. I’m just going to sit down and meditate now.” And within a few minutes, you’re like, “Okay, much better than watching the TV show.”
Ricard: Yeah.
Rick: But I’m just saying, it’s not going to just automatically happen. Sometimes you might need to just give yourself a nudge in the right direction.
Ricard: Yeah.
Rick: Sometimes they might have to be more disciplined because some people are so caught up in things, maybe drug addiction or something else, that they need a little bit more vigilance to…
Ricard: I know. You know Patch Adams?
Rick: Yes, he’s the clown guy that Robin Williams played in…
Ricard: Yeah, the movie. Yeah, well, for those of you who know, it’s a funny movie, but it has a point that I’m going to be answering to you, about discipline. In the movie, Patch Adams basically was healing people just by, “What do you want?” “Oh, I want spaghetti.” “Okay, this is spaghetti,” and people will just heal. You know, there’s this silly thing about it. And here’s the thing, I, through my music, for example, I was one of the worst students at school you could imagine.
Rick: Me, too. I was like ADHD to the max, you know, looking out the window and getting distracted by every little thing.
Ricard: Exactly. So the thing is I was drawn to music and my, so I took always myself, like a really self-pleasing kind of being. That’s the nature, right? I was just…
Rick: Self-pleasing?
Ricard: Yeah, self-pleasing. Like I was just looking for this kind of, if I enjoy one ice cream, what happens if I eat ten? You know? And with drugs too, of course. You were bringing up a very important point, which with a lot of confusion, because one side of the story, people think, okay, you have one side of the spectrum with this Buddhism influence and mindfulness, you should be kind of like, there’s this sense of neutrality. Like you hear people saying, I’m enlightened and I’m still depressed. You have all these kind of people saying that stuff, like to me, it’s very Buddhist, although there’s a lot of Neo-Advaita people also talking like that. And so one side, you have people who say like, your life shouldn’t change at all. Like if you’re miserable, you still keep miserable, even when you’re enlightened.
Rick: Yeah, these guys like Chogyam Trungpa, who’s an alcoholic and he’s enlightened, but he’s killing himself with alcohol. It’s like, uh…
The Blissful Aspect as Side Effect
Ricard: And then the other side of the story, you have people who are saying, “No, meditation is just to feel bliss.” So your life sucks, your boss sucks, your relationship sucks, you hate your guts, and you’re trying just to get there to do some yoga and just some meditation just to feel good for a little bit, you know? So that’s the other side of the spectrum where we’re looking for meditation to give you something that you are denying yourself as a whole. So I think there are reasons why some people would say, because I’m, I think very much on the line of what you were saying, that meditation should be pleasant. If it’s not pleasant and by that, I think in this, in my case, I mean that yeah, meditation, let’s say that the blissful aspect of meditation is kind of like a side effect of meditation rather than the goal of meditation. But it’s important to recognize it because otherwise you hear all these people, I mean, now the younger generation are talking about being awakened. And I think they are picking this word and that’s just like an awareness and they’re turning to something else. And the people say that I awakened, we are the awakened, the awakened generation. And some people go on YouTube, I hear some people talking about they were awakened. There were people who were like miserably alone with social anxiety, with huge amounts of depression. And they were pointing, yeah, but I’m awakened because this life is not real and so on.
Rick: That’s just a concept. It’s not-
Ricard: That’s kind of basically the thread of my YouTube channel is to actually go on that line and say, hey, wait a minute, let’s not make stuff. Because one thing, it is true that as you release your suffering, you become blissful. But this blissful is not something you look as a goal. Let’s say, you don’t use meditation as escape, you know, because that there will be the danger of some, let’s say, as again, some Buddhists will say, yeah. But if you sit and you try to, your life sucks, and you try to sit to meditate and get yourself into, well, what could be more Buddhist than the yamas, right? Just go there and just please yourself because you can close your eyes and absorb yourself into state and you’re, “Wow.” And what the Buddha basically said like, yeah, what happens when you get out of that? You can bliss yourself out in that high concentration meditation, which is an incredible skill, skillful thing to do. So bravo to anyone who was able to do that. At the same time, you still wake up and you were talking about teachers. And this is a conversation that I had with Shinzen. I think Shinzen is a great person to talk about this because he talks the truth about, he’s very human. So he doesn’t give a fuck about “oh, my teacher said,” you know, like say my teacher was the most fucked up person I ever met, you know, he talked about all these abuses and scandals and things like that, and, but just to join at some point in the conversation, I have that conversation in the middle with him, because he’s always talking about how all these meditation teachers are way beyond perfect, and they have all these huge problems, all these gurus, all these scandals in the spiritual community. But I was telling him, I was asking him, yeah, but he wasn’t conscious when he did that. So what that tell us, these great advanced people who were able to do something pretty much athletic. And they have certain kind of profound understanding about reality, even. Still, they have these blanks where they behave like as they didn’t have these filters of behaving correctly, they didn’t give much a crap about that. And they were probably in a position where, I mean, Shinzen’s teacher was a Zen monk, and to train as a Zen monk, you basically go through torture. So these people are psychologically tortured and they have this kind of, I I don’t know how to describe that, a bit of like a, like people who have been living through concentration camps or something like that, have been abused.
Rick: Trauma.
Ricard: Yeah, they have something in there that still needs to work out. So some of these people, for example, in Zen, they may, they still have this kind of incredible achievements and understanding about very complex and fascinating things. They may still have these gaps, but this is where it comes to conversation. So should be blissful, shouldn’t be blissful. There is responsibility, I don’t know if, I’m bringing up a very broad topic right now, but I was trying to say, I was trying to discuss about this idea that I suggest people, and I talk about love, I dare to talk about love and happiness and stuff like that, because it seems to be like, you shouldn’t be talking so much about that. I mean, at first, what do you think, Rick?
Spiritual Integrity and Teacher Misconduct
Rick: Well, this is a big topic for me. I helped to establish an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity because I have encountered so much lack of integrity in spirituality. So many teachers have been hypocritical, to say the least, in terms of the discrepancy between their public face and their private life. And I naively and optimistically feel that a spiritual practice should enhance your life and make you a better person. How old-fashioned, you know? I think you should naturally become more loving, more compassionate, more ethical, happier, which is not to say that you might not have depression or other issues. You’re a human being and you have a neurophysiology that can get influenced by things that can cause depression. But in general, I mean, it’s fair to speak of generalities. Someone who is claiming to be enlightened or awakened or anything like that, if those words mean anything, is not going to be a sexual predator or abusive or a drug addict or an alcoholic or any of those things. And if they are those things and yet they are really enlightened, then I’m not interested in enlightenment. You can have it. I don’t want it. So I’ll just be a regular guy and hopefully a decent one.
Ricard: So that’s a great initiative. And I think as you probably know, Shinzen is kind of on the same side of the story. You know, like I think it’s beautiful that some of you are really taking an active part to clean up the bad fame of spirituality in communities. I personally detach myself from any kind of spiritual communities for more than 20 years. Because I don’t know if I have, I really, I have always been impressed by the Daoist model of enlightenment.
Rick: The Daoist?
Ricard: Yeah. Like the role model figure, someone enlightened would be someone who would be like a shoemaker or something like that, you know, it’s not someone who goes-
Rick: Could be, I mean, you know, it doesn’t have to be a shoemaker. He could be a, you know, a scientist or a musician. It doesn’t have to be doing a simple job.
Sects and Spiritual Communities
Ricard: Exactly. What I was trying to say is that, for the first day that, and I really appreciate all that, but my wife, who is really not into that, but she always gives me grounding in so many ways, but participating in spiritual communities, not at the level of, I’ve never seen anything, let’s say really out of line. And it will have been like in dangerous. Funny story, my mother got me brainwashed.
Rick: Into what?
Ricard: No, brainwashed, sorry, but the expression is like when someone is like kept by a sect.
Rick: Right.
Ricard: So my mother had to make an intervation… intervention?
Rick: Oh, because you were in some kind of sect.
Ricard: Because I was in some weird stuff.
Rick: Uh-huh.
Ricard: So my mother was creeped out because I was always doing this stuff.
Rick: So in other words, your mother, you were brainwashed and your mother had you deprogrammed.
Ricard: Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s the word I was looking for. Yeah. That’s supposed what it was happening, but the funny story is that, because at that point I was working on, on the fourth path, you know.
Rick: I’m not familiar with it. I don’t think. Is that a Gurdjieff-Ospensky thing?
Ricard: Exactly.
Rick: Okay.
Ricard: So these people work in a very private level. So you just kind of find them randomly and the relationship with them is, in my mind, it was very strange because they would kind of like would dress for the occasion it was, everything very, for my mind was like ringing so wrong.
Rick: Yeah.
Ricard: And, but the truth is that to me, I never had any problem with them, but they were working in a kind of structure that it seemed to fall into that category of dangerous sects and so on. But the truth is, so my mother got the most, like mothers are when they are looking for their babies, let’s say.
Rick: She got a respected deprogrammer.
Ricard: Exactly. She got the best in Spain. And I was talking, see, I had to make these trips to Barcelona to talk to this person and she was giving me books about how sects brainwash you and what is a destructive sect, you know? And I was reading all that and I said like, I don’t understand. That’s like, that’s like any religion, and literally everything that’s written there as a sect. And the person who was leading this was supposedly reprogramming me. She was an ex-nun. And the conversation went a bit strange because I was saying, “Okay, I really want to believe you. Honestly, I don’t care. I just give up to this group. No problem. I’m not attached to anything.” But she kept like digging and I was asked to start asking her about her, when she was trying to bring me ideas of what, why these sects were dangerous, or they were like getting into telling me how I should treat my family or how to treat the people or in which way they could be like misleading, like talking about the end of the world and all that. I was thinking, yeah, but can you tell me a bit more about your life as a nun?
Rick: Right.
Ricard: And so she was telling me like, can you explain to me why it’s different? You know? So anyway, the thing, the story goes like, I just dropped that. I just did it. It didn’t matter because I was more into the actual integration rather than attached to certain teachings. So I went out of that and I went through Course In Miracles, I went through Rebirthing, I went, I’ve been through many different angles and participating in all these communities also gave me a sense that something was profoundly wrong in these communities.
Rick: Yeah.
Ricard:
I’ll break this into more readable paragraphs for you:
In the sense that, and again, I never had a bad experience, but there was something like ritualistic? Fake? And there were many people who were not really trying to go there to do the work, but they were, when you go into these places and I’ve been to many different kind of groups, they were all saying these words and they all have this idea of what is to be good. And which, you know, there’s the kind of this way of talking about things that is kind of creepy. And, and at the same time, there are beautiful people. They just have, I think sometimes they just need to belong to something. I think that’s a danger in this sect or spiritual groups thing that people can sometimes, they have like problems in their emotional life. That can be dangerous if there is someone out there that who would take advantage of that from their money actually, or for sexually, or as you know, all these kind of episodes we have.
But anyways, I just saying that my wife said was like, “Oh, why’d you go? That place is where you go is like kind of like groups of therapy or something.” And I said, “You’re kind of right. We’re all nuts.” I mean, it looks like we are so spiritual and looking for this enlightenment thing of more than above people, but actually we are as screwed as anyone else, or even more, because we’re looking for happiness, where my neighbor is just enjoying himself (laughs) and I’m trying harder to meditate to whatever it is, the thing that we were doing.
But anyways, I just wanted to say that at some point in my path, it became very important to be alone. So I realized that all these backgrounds weren’t really supporting me. But because of these dynamics that happens in the spiritual worlds. And, and so I went on my own. I just wanted to check to which extent I really understood on my own. So I stopped talking to spirituality for probably 10 years and I didn’t have it in a conversation, not even with my wife about it. And I was meditating every day, you know, three times. And so it’s not that I dropped the whole thing. I knew what I was doing, but I just had a strong sense of detaching myself from anything spiritual and finding myself, because I was finding people who were more real and they had nothing spiritual.
Like people you could see, you could see in their eyes, you could see the way they talk, you can see the way they do things in life. You can see in their motivation. And I always realized that, OK, these people are more real than all these people who are supposed to be spiritual. So I kind of went on this solo trip for… actually I’m still there. In the sense that I never went back to any group, I keep it there.
I just started organizing groups of meditation a long time ago, just because I realized people didn’t know anything about meditation and people didn’t have resources to sit, to meditate anywhere really, or at least everything was, or Buddhist or in certain kind of strongly cultural influenced traditions and things like that. So I wanted to create an environment for that. So I did that here, but it was, so I just got in contact with people who, for example, Alan Wallace and some other teacher, and then now Shinzen. So I’m pretty much kind of detached from spiritual communities, although I think it’s very important to have, this is my personal view, it can be very beneficial to have a relationship with someone who knows better than you. That I think, yeah, that’s a really good idea. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s necessary. I think it’s beneficial for many people. So I’m not saying this should be the case for, I’m not suggesting that this would be everybody’s experience.
But I think a bit of more honesty in the spiritual path and spiritual communities will be really good. And I say, we’re climbing back from this conversation about bliss because that’s, that’s the place where nowadays I’ve been a couple of times here with my wife in these events where people do ecstatic dance and all this stuff, and it’s going to, into the basic people are looking for this kind of cathartic space, which I think is really cool. But at the same time, I think they just stop too soon. I would say, in the sense they are looking for like experience, if it was a drug or if it was something.
Meditation as Housekeeping
And I think that’s the thing with maybe if we have to restructure the understanding of meditation and spiritual communities, I think we should be careful to understand when we’re looking for escapism from our lives because your life sucks and you try to go for a place to get in an altered state because you cannot deal with your own thoughts in your mind. I think that’s useful. It can be very therapeutical if done with someone who is making therapy with that. I’m not saying that it’s fantastic shamanism, for example, but at the same time, I think we should just keep it grounded to what I tell most of the people that I coach, it’s like, because that you basically, what you’re doing is just cleaning your basement.
That’s how your meditation should feel like, in the beginning, especially, because the beginning is not like trying to reach a higher state of, they’re kind of waiting, okay, when I’m gonna get this bliss you’re talking about, asking me, when is that going to happen for me? I say, okay, you know what, that’s sorry to mislead you. I didn’t mean like that. I’m saying it’s important for you to know that’s going to happen. So don’t get too much used to your crap and to your psychosis and all that. Just let that go. You don’t need to stay with that. Just focus on just rebalancing.
What I’ve been working a lot is with samatha. That’s one of the nicest thing I ever found. So I’m so incredibly grateful to Alan Wallace and Culadasa for the two books. I don’t know, in case someone in here doesn’t know about these books, Alan Wallace wrote “The Attention Revolution”, and Culadasa wrote “The Mind Illuminated.” And I was so thankful for them because they were able to bring all this tremendous technology into the use of anyone. And what I like from this methodology is that you just go back to the object. There is no this and that and the other and the Four Noble Truths and just go back to the object. And I realized, okay, this is what we all need. this is in this age of overstimulation and over, we are all the time like in this desperate looking for things, for things that make me happy, for ways to fix myself, you know, it’s just go back to the object.
So yeah, that may feel temporary, but what I like, like you’re dealing with your shit, so it may not be nice in the sense that, yeah, that’s the thing you’re trying to avoid every time you go on this pleasure, escapism, like, yeah. So yeah, you sit and meditate. Yeah, in one side, don’t expect it to be bliss in the sense of like, the meditation is gonna make you blissful. That’s not how it works. But just sit there and just make your laundry. Clean your, clean, let go, let go, let go of all these chains of thoughts that are really not serving you and just pick something as simple as your breath. Or it could be, yeah, it could be a mantra, as you very well know. It could be anything. Just, you make a conscious decision and notice how much you are unconscious because of all these flows of thoughts that are just pushing you away.
And you think you’re conscious, you think you’re managing your life, but actually if you stop for a while and just experience yourself, I think that’s a space where meditation allows you to do that. All the techniques, one way or another, allows you to realize that you are, you’re not yourself. You’re just, you’re experiencing a very messy, meaningless entropy of thinking experience. And meditation, so in this way, going back to the original point of the meditation, may feel like it’s uncomfortable. It will bring all the time, continuously people report all this somatic experience, like you were making, “Why I’m feeling like this now? I’m feeling these physical experiences.” Some people would say, “I even feel pain in here.” Or I had a friend who had tremendous pain in his hands while on a retreat meditating.
And all this somatic, yeah, that’s normal. That’s part of the process, that part probably is very helpful to be around people who’ve been through that, because you realize, it just doesn’t matter, let it go. But if you just keep cleaning, so to say, you’re not really creating the bliss, you’re rediscovering by, with the words of my book, by shortening that latency, but just resting in what’s happening as it happens. And that’s what’s for me meditation in the sense that it just brings you, just helps you release.
So I say this to this topic we’re discussing, meditation blissful, not blissful, so should it be pleasant, should it not be pleasant, should it be like pushing yourself through your own trauma? How should it feel? Well, different techniques will push in different directions, but mostly what I’m trying to say is that, yeah, it may feel initially, especially in the beginning, it feels like, oh, this thing of going back to the object seems like the most tedious, boring thing to do in the world. And it can even become when you’re, if you’re someone who has suffered, and you have accumulated these deep tensions, you may even having this kind of outburst of something uncomfortable. But hopefully you’re working with someone who can lead you or this is some of the 10 stages who make very discrete point, you just keep going through, keep going through, then things are gonna start clearing up.
And then when the bliss you’re gonna find is not the bliss that you have manufactured because you did a technique meditation, is the natural bliss that was covered with a lot of contradiction and distraction.
I realized, OK, these people are more real than all these people who are supposed to be spiritual. So I kind of went on this solo trip.
Rick: Good, yeah, that was great. There are two main points in what you said that I want to comment on. One is about groups, you know, spiritual groups, which become cult-like. You know who the Marx Brothers were, those comedians from many years ago? Maybe you don’t.
Ricard: The Marx Brothers?
Rick: The Marx, M-A-R-X.
Ricard: Yeah, yeah, of course.
The Cult-Like Quality of Groups
Rick: One of them was Groucho Marx, and Groucho said, “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would accept me as a member.” And so it’s weird about groups and organizations. I mean, almost all of them have some kind of cult-like qualities. I think some are way worse and some are better, but there’s always something. There’s always sort of an in-group way of thinking and speaking and talking and dressing and eating and all that stuff. And it’s funny because when you’re in such a group, it’s like the frog in the warming water, you know, you don’t realize that it’s getting warmer and warmer because it’s going gradually. Groups can get so weird and you’re part of it and you don’t even realize how weird it is or or how weird it appears to people on the outside, they’re the ones who look weird ’cause they’re not like you. So anyway, I would just sort of be cautious, or to caution anyone on the spiritual path that don’t totally avoid teachers in groups, but be discerning, and if a teacher is behaving strangely or inappropriately, don’t rationalize that you are stupid and he’s enlightened and so you should ignore your own common sense. Get up and leave or call him on his stuff, you know, if he’s misbehaving in some way. So anyway, that’s that point. Then the other thing about bliss, I think you kind of have to earn bliss in a way, because the mind and body are correlated. And if our mind is in a kind of confused, foggy state, there’s a corresponding neurophysiological basis for that mental condition, namely that the physiology is full of impurities, impressions, and so on, which, you know, sometimes called some samskaras in Sanskrit, and there’s all kinds of terminology for it. But the spiritual path is actually a journey of housekeeping, housecleaning, where you have to purify your whole mind-body system, both gross and subtle body, and it doesn’t happen overnight. And as it happens, there’s going to be a release of impurities. And that can cause upsurges of anxiety or anger or depression or physical discomfort, all kinds of things. And it’s good to recognize it for what it is. And perhaps you can do some supplementary things such as, I don’t know, yoga or massage or exercise or whatever to help facilitate the purification. But it’s gotta happen in order for any kind of abiding state to be achieved. And so don’t think that it’s just gonna be all roses, you know, or daffodils and unicorns. There’s got to be a whole catharsis that takes place, a purification, and it’s a lifelong process, really, because there’s no end to it. Which is not to say, I mean, there was some Zen story about some guy polishing a brick or something, expecting it to become a mirror. It’s not like that. It’s not like no end to it means you’re never going to reach some kind of desirable state. It just means that, you know, you’re never gonna be perfect. You know, you’re a human being and human bodies aren’t perfect, human minds aren’t perfect. So there’s always going to be some further refinement and purification that can take place. And you’re never above and beyond the obligation to continue to do that and also to continue to watch your own behavior. One of my favorite quotes, which I’ve used a million times, you’ve probably heard me use it, is from Padmasambhava, who said, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” And so what he’s saying is, he’s in a pretty good state, but it doesn’t give him a free license to do whatever he wants. He has to be meticulously careful about his behavior because, even in a very high state of consciousness, you can screw up and you’re going to end up regressing, or losing ground that you have arduously gained, if you get careless like that.
Ricard: And it’s gonna be a big screw up.
Rick: It can be. I mean, the bigger they are, the harder they fall, you know?
Ricard: I say this because sometimes we are very easy to judge we’re in a position where we haven’t been, for example, talking about some of these teachers who have been abused, who have misused funds, for example, or something like that.
Rick: Or misused women or whatever.
Ricard: Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I think, honestly, they had it so easy to do. So I say, because sometimes we like to feel, oh yeah, how these people could do that? Well, honestly, I think maybe from where they were, it was a bit more difficult than it looks. So much respect for everyone who’s trying to do their best and fail in the way. I still have much respect.
Rick: Yeah, and as they say, “But for the grace of God go I.” You know, none of us are beyond the possibility of some kind of fall.
Ricard: But you brought something that I don’t know if you want me to ask. You wanted to ask me.
Rick: Yeah, sure.
Ricard: But it has to do with the book.
Rick: Oh, yes, please. Go ahead.
Ricard: Because we discussed about latency. But I’m very much, that’s what I really like you, Rick, because you acknowledge stages. And we’ve been talking about this, about this process of deepening and samskaras and so on. But there’s a problem that I have to be all the time kind of explaining people, because when you get someone presented to this idea, you say, you will never really going to get it. For many people, oh, I’m a stage one. I’ve been meditating for many years and now you’re coming here in your system and I’m just a stage one. And it feels really hard on their ego, but here’s the thing, normally, I tell them. No, wait, wait, wait, but relax, you’re way better than you think you are, because the stages are fractals.
Rick: Aha, good point.
Ricard: We tend to think them as something linear you do in time. If you want me to do something very simple, it would be more like something you’re deepening down here and now, that we go again back into this latency modes. So the stages, you know, something that kind of traps you or limits you or something that you could may judge yourself, there are orientative symptoms that may happen. It may be helpful to you to orientate. And if someone comes and tell me, I don’t need stages. And I say, oh, fantastic, you may not need them. You are the only judge to know yourself. If you’re really free from suffering or what you’re doing is working, you don’t need to have the stages. Stages are not there to trap you into a system. On the contrary, there is this incredible bulk of value that people before us doing the same thing have found. I think it’s such a irresponsible thing for new generations to just drop all these cultural things out of the context, just because it’s Buddhist, just because it’s Hindu, just because that, I think we need to make an effort. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do, to bring and tell people, guys, these people really rocked. They really know everything about how is the process, if you do this in certain, so they created these incredible maps. So you don’t need them. If you feel that you can’t go there straight, one step, please be my guest, do it. But if you fall and you need some support, yeah, here’s the thing. So I’ve been presenting samatha for many years. Now I’m presenting anapanasati and making a kind of like a brave move in there. But just to explain to people, no guys, this is here to help you and not to trap you. And it’s not that you’re gonna become, is that you’re gonna notice that there’s this apparent thing that you were mentioning, this experience where you still feel that you’re walking the path. So you still feel in the sense you haven’t completed, you haven’t become the ultimate enlightened being on earth finally, because you reach that stage or whatever. Now you feel that you’re there, you’re doing your laundry, cleaning your thing, but you’re already here and there and everywhere, as The Beatles will say. That you feel that you already completed the path, that you are the path itself.
Rick: The goal is all along the path, you could say. The goal is all along the path.
Ricard: You find yourself being very patient. And I don’t know if I get this from anyone at some point reading so much and doing so many things, but I always tell some of my coaches, the moment you’re ready to wait forever, that’s the moment that eternity finds you. Just there, in the moment that you say, “I’m okay being a level one meditator.” That very moment where you say, yeah, okay, you know, you just make peace with who you are in the sense of personal body. This is not obviously everything that you are, but just for a second, just let yourself be and being this person who is learning and just walking this path. And it’s not perfect, but it’s just going through that. And just there at the moment that you accept yourself and make peace with that, it comes to the dimension of peace. Like someone, suddenly your life turns, instead of being a nightmare that you’re trying to control your dream of things that happened to you and so on with manifestation. (both laughing) And so on, suddenly you start saying, “Wait, I’m here, I’m dreaming.” But at the same time, there’s this sense of light, that it doesn’t belong, this timelessness that doesn’t belong to the dream. So you’re living this kind of strange parallel experience of being nothing and being everything, of being a person and not being a person.
The moment you’re ready to wait forever, that’s the moment that eternity finds you. Just there, when you say, “I’m okay being a level one meditator.
So I think you expressed it very well with Padmasambhava. So for me, that’s fractal. That’s what I go into fractals because fractals is scientific. And this is one of the things that Shinzen has actually been helping me to do because I wouldn’t have done all this without him. And that it helped me to understand that the new, the way you have to talk to people nowadays is to ground in science. Because not because of science is a new religion, which is kind of is so many cases, but because these mathematical laws, there is something about physics, there is something about mathematics, there is something that is actually does help the mind behave in a different way. And that’s something that can be communicated even beyond crossing cultural barriers. Say this because he’s working with Chinese, with the Russians, he’s doing all this thing, working on this model of communication that is based on this. So, of course, this has influenced me on taking this thing, this side that I was I explained before that I’m not, my mind doesn’t think, I don’t consider myself scientist at all because I’m too busy making music, not because I think they wanted to say anything. I love science when I read about it and I learn it. Now, of course, Shinzen is making, open my eyes to see, wow, new mathematics are really, really fascinating. So, but for example, when I try to implement, I try to, I think I’m in the mission of bringing up these cultural grade maps, so to say, and I want to make them useful to new generations. And one of the reasons why I’m bringing up anapanasati, which for those of you who don’t know, is a system of 16 stages that the Buddha designed, let’s say, 2,500 years ago. Because honestly, that it really fits very, very, very, very precise with my experience of the process and he’s done it in the most gentle way. It’s genius, it’s genius to the level that is fascinating to me. And these are not really stages like accomplishments, are just descriptions of what happens if you do this, if you do this, this happens. So it’s an incredible value in terms of, as a compass to orientate yourself when you’re trying to see, okay, how you go. So what I’m trying to do is to put all this, bringing it out of the Buddhist context and trying to present what I’ve been working for a long time, which is to synthesize, make a universal tool, so to say, a way of accessing all these devices in a simple way like Zen, but at the same time in a complex way like samatha, as we were discussing before, some of the systems that have all these very complex things going on at the same time, and since you’d be on the path to go somewhere, how to integrate that in a way that anyone can use anytime without the cultural baggage. That’s what the word I’ve been doing. I just discovered that. So there’s the path. I normally tend to say that close to every practice that I know, that I ever known of, every path that I’ve been investigating for all these years, it all falls into one of the three. The stillness path that I call it, that is what I call it the direct path, or the bliss path, that’s more like tantric and so on, or art actually, or the understanding insight path, which obviously has a lot to do with vipassana or advaita vedanta. Now we find that anywhere you go, it’s just normally, some of these paths have a combination of elements from all these. So I just go into synthesizing this, but when I was trying to teach this to people, I say, “Oh my God, this is so long.” It would take me years to go through all these stages. Then I say, “Okay, what?” So I just come across again to the end up and I suddenly say, “Wow, these stages are so genius because you can devise, for example, things that we were discussing now from the letting go of all, you were talking about samskaras, this kind of deep rooted aspects of our conditioning. But you also, you can talk about bliss and he discussed different levels of bliss. It’s beautiful and I think it’s very useful. And I don’t know if you really, I’m just dropping this thing in here, that I’m super excited about this. And I’m hoping this is getting contagious and someone there kind of revisits and gets re-inspired by all these models of people who’ve been doing this before us. And I think probably the way to keep all this alive is by bringing into, correlating your direct experience with all these teachings and, okay, just speak whatever really works for you and transmit to others what works for you in the context of what all these geniuses have been saying. I don’t know, do you understand what I mean?
Rick: Oh yeah, I have some thoughts on what you said. First of all, Adyashanti often used to say, and I’ve heard others say, it’s always good to have the attitude of a beginner. And he himself lived that way, not that he was a beginner, but there was a certain humility. And at a certain point, a couple of years ago, he said, “Okay, I have to stop teaching because I’m in a lot of physical pain from problems I have, and I’m also experiencing a lot of anxiety, and I’m taking anti-anxiety medication.” Now, how many spiritual teachers would admit that? I was very impressed when he did that. And these days he’s been living in the mountains and running for hours a day and just getting in great physical shape. He even grew his hair out. And so, you know, this attitude of a beginner, we’re all beginners relative to what is possible. I mean, you know, Ramana Maharshi was a beginner compared to what some beings in this universe may be, you know. Or gods, if you want to buy into that whole thing. So it’s… And there’s a certain safety valve in having that attitude. Its cultures humility.
Ricard: When you were… I certainly don’t describe myself as a teacher, ever. And I don’t think I will ever.
Rick: Maybe you could consider yourself a coach, a friend, you know.
Ricard: A coach, because I’ve been doing this as a profession with music. I’ve been coaching musicians since I was 13 years old, actually. I never really worked in a bar like many people did in their teenagehood. I just been coaching people all the time. So I realized that, because music, as you know, is very practical. That’s one of the things that I really love from music. It’s not theory. It’s just one device around what music really is, let’s say. So it has its own use, but just whenever it’s needed, if it’s not needed, it’s a problem that you think in the middle of an improvisation, let’s say. So that got me to decide, so that’s what I’ve been doing extensively for the last, I don’t know, a lot of years, but professionally since a long time. So I’m always open and someone comes and I don’t have anything specifically to teach. I don’t have an idea what a person should do, you know? So I just, I just follow whatever is there. And I don’t have a path in the sense I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not an anything, and I damn appreciate all of them and I love all of them. But I think that’s important to have this sense that you can just freely decide what works, works, and what doesn’t work, then, okay, that doesn’t work. And, from that point of view, I think the work we are doing, you’re talking about this beginner mind, this exploring mind, maybe he’s living that. He may say, I’m having in my body an experience like anxiety. And we all think, that means he cannot, he’s not a master. But maybe he’s experiencing in a completely different way that someone will experience it. I’m saying this because there’s this… anything could be anything. There’s no meaning to anything. What is the meaning of this situation, that situation? So, you know, it’s just popping in my head because I didn’t went through it, but something that I really enjoy talking about is “A Course in Miracles,” because I think it has a lot of points that I think other traditions don’t have, so haven’t stated so clearly. And the workbook of the “Course in Miracles” starts from the very beginning. For lesson one, I think it is one and second is something like, you go around everything you see and you see this object, you go through the objects and you say, everything I see, I have created all the meaning that it has to me. And I think that’s so damn genius. It just goes straight to the point. I say this because judging ourselves as a human experience, it doesn’t make much sense. I say this because I think I will, I don’t know, they say, never say never, but I think I will never say that I’m enlightened or I’m awakened or I will put a… because it feels limiting to me to have a label, as if there is a something that you have to, I think the life is way more beautiful and mysterious.
It feels limiting to me to have a label. I think life is way more beautiful and mysterious.
Rick: It makes it sound like you’ve reached some end point, you know, that has this static superlative connotation like, okay, I can hang up my running shoes. I’m just relaxing now because I’m totally there. No, you’re not totally. I mean, there’s always going to be something more.
Ricard: Yeah. Yeah. I know. You’re making me think of Byron Katie. You know Byron Katie?
Rick: Sure.
Ricard: You never had her, right?
Rick: I had her scheduled three times and three times she canceled rather at the last minute with no explanation or apology. So I haven’t tried to get her again.
Ricard: Okay. Yeah. Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but nevertheless, she mentioned, she was asked this question and ask what she was experiencing and she told that she was feeling that so far.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Ricard: I love that. Like, yeah, okay, I think if spiritual teachers or spiritual people who accomplish stuff, which, yeah, you did that, but what if now you don’t?
Rick: Right. Yeah. A couple more thoughts on what you’ve been saying. So regarding traditions, you know, ancient traditions, and let me just add for those of you who are listening to the live stream. I forgot to mention this in the beginning. If you would like to ask a question, there is a link in the description field underneath this video, and if you click on that, you’ll go to a page through which you can submit your question.
Anyway, regarding traditions, I think there’s a lot of valuable stuff in them, like as you were saying, but also there’s a lot of weird stuff. I mean, maybe a lot of it is metaphorical or mythological, like did a monkey really pick up a mountain and carry it from the Himalayas down to Sri Lanka to help Lord Rama? I mean, yeah, okay, maybe, but maybe it’s just a cool story. The Buddha said something. He said, “Don’t accept something just because it’s in some old book. And don’t accept something because I said it. Work it out for yourself. Give it some thought. It should concur with your own direct experience.” I’m paraphrasing roughly, but he said something like that. And that’s where science comes in because religion has been filled with all kinds of crazy ideas. Before science came along, I mean, you could be burned at the stake for believing that the stars were other suns like our own and they might have planets around them. You know, someone was burned at the stake for espousing that. Giordano Bruno was his name. And so science came along and with the concept of the working hypothesis, where everything can be taken as a hypothesis, and it has to kind of stand on the accumulated merit of empirical evidence. And if the empirical evidence is not available, then perhaps it’s not a right idea. And nothing is ever final, nothing is ever perfect. Things can always be changed. You know, all crows are black, but if we see an albino crow, we can no longer say that.
So I think that religion, I mean, spirituality could do very well to incorporate a scientific attitude based upon direct experience and not believing things that you can’t experience. And on the other hand, I think that science could benefit a lot from spirituality because in many respects, science has a very superficial understanding of life. It doesn’t realize that there are all these subtle realms and God and all that other stuff. But spiritual practices can actually be scientific methods to empirically explore those kinds of things.
Ricard: Well, all of them are deluded in the end, right? Meaning that the principle of science is that there is someone who knows and is external to an experiment and can conclude certain concept that represents the truth some way.
Art and Science as Complementary
Rick: Right, so it has its limits because there’s always gonna be a dichotomy or duality.
Ricard: Yeah, there’s this arrogance from the beginning and that sometimes, I mean, I know, actually my father-in-law is a great scientist and I’ve been, of course, since then too, in the sense that people who really understand science, they will never say they know the truth.
Rick: Right.
Ricard: They will never go for stating, no, this is what the experiments showed. No, they will say, no.
Rick: We have a lot of evidence. It’s a pretty good hypothesis, you know.
Ricard: Yeah, they kind of, yeah, they talk in a way that say, but they never say a strong statement that this is the truth or something like that.
Rick: Well, unfortunately, many of them do, and that’s called “scientism.” And there are people like Dean Radin who do all this great research on psi phenomenon, things like that.
Ricard: Yeah, but it’s like–
Rick: You know, scientists won’t even look at it because they say, “It can’t be true. I’m not gonna look at it.”
Ricard: One of the reasons why I had never been so strong on science is because I’ve been through some experiences when I was young and I got to blend, you would say, the sleepings. I had a lot of lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences and stuff like that, but I was having them like every night for a long time. And at some point, literally my experience of being awake started blending the sense of this is not ultimate reality. This is just an experience that I’m having. Started becoming so common that for me since then, I wouldn’t take anything inside of my perception as the ultimate truth ever. That’s why I’ve had a hard time to follow science. I love science for the reasons we’re discussing because it’s practical, it goes to the spot, and it doesn’t have any blurry thing. It’s trying to get clarity out of life. So that’s really, really good. It’s a very important aspect. And as you know, in meditation, that’s vipassana. That is the clarity, the knowing, the understanding.
But on the other hand, you said spirituality, but I would say it is more like art to me. So for me, the dichotomy is between art and science. None of them are right, none of them are fully right, none of them are fully wrong. I mean, science will be very on spot, very statistically provable and testable and so on. So very much on spot, but at the same time, science cannot explain you what love is or what consciousness is. So you still, okay, we need more answers.
And then we have the devotional part of art where you are just feeling, you’re noticing everything more from your heart. And then what you think is not so relevant, the fact that you tell this is a conversation or this is, or you understand this, you play with the perception when you do art or you’re creative, you’re basically making not new associations, but different associations for the ones that you have. In this case, we may have a conversation related to a book, or in this case, we are just deluding people. We’re just, meaning that there are many different ways of how to see what’s happening.
And I think that’s the beauty of art, that you sit in there and science is all about doing something practical and art is all about doing the most impractical thing ever. Do the unnecessary, do something just because you want to do it, because you feel like doing it, when you look like an idiot, just go for it, you know, and just enjoy yourself. So I think they complement in this.
And I see that in meditation, like intensifying this clarity aspect, this understanding, this insight. But at the same time, what I think many times Buddhism, not all Buddhism, because you have Tibetan Buddhism that certainly clearly integrates aspects of this other side where they understand about bliss. They understand about all the things that is difficult to scientifically talk about and yet is the most profound direct experience you some way can have, at least without your mind to some extent. But, you know, it’s this kind of living, these two things, and this is more what is for me like the releasing part of meditation. So there is one that is clarity, and there is releasing, and there is clarity. That’s what I see in all of the systems. They are working some way leaning towards these two things.
So people who go for dry insight or try to, like philosophers, or try to go into this kind of like narrow aspect of the story, they’re still missing a huge part of their own experience and neglecting that. And that leads them to go into some vicious circles where they still not get it. The same way for the other way, that people you were discussing about devotion and how people would just believe something because it feels good to think that someone came out of blue and could fly and could do things. It feels inspiring to me. Why not? I mean, the whole Bible, it could be said that it’s written like that. It’s just a beautiful story. You know, it’s just the whole thing. It is true, it’s not true. It doesn’t matter. It’s not the point. It is something else that it’s talking about. It’s talking to a different part of your mind.
Balancing Clarity and Release
And I think the complementarity between this recognition of clarity and at the same time, this letting go, it is, to me, if you ask me, that’s the core of all these meditations. That’s, for me, I would even say mindfulness, my interpretation of it in a practical sense, is you need that because when someone lets go too much and you go into the blissful side of story and you feel like, “I sit to meditate and I,” you know? Okay, that’s good. That’s better than just being stressed and running around life trying to get somewhere. But at the same time, you’re still not noticing what, where are the roots of the samskaras, as you said, of all this thing that keeps driving you crazy on a daily basis and keep you, creating a lot of suffering for you and probably for other people.
But at the same time, if you go only on the, I’m just gonna think my way through spirituality, so that’s where we go into Buddhism mostly, you know, because you have this scientific way about everything and it seems like, yeah, but sometimes you read the forums, Buddhist forums, and you say, oh my God, what is wrong with these people? (laughs) You know, it’s like they have really uncomfortable experience, I would say, because they are kind of exposing themselves to the trauma of, for example, of impermanence, when you’re not ready for it. You didn’t let go of your personal vision and you’re trying to understand that you’re fucking going to die and everyone you love and the whole world is going to disappear. You cannot talk to your little mind like that. It’s going to break. It’s going to have a heart attack. What do you think about that?
Rick: Well, I think that the feeling I was getting as I was listening to you is that life is multifaceted, multidimensional, and so are we. And you know that old saying of, you should dig one deep well rather than 10 shallow wells, you know, if you want to hit water. But there’s another way of looking at it, which is like maybe use 10 different tools to dig one deep well. You know, you need a jackhammer, you need a pickaxe, you need a shovel, you need different tools. So, you know, you’re you’re talking about science and art and religion and this and that and all kinds of different practices. Now, I don’t think we should be dilettantes and just flit about, you know, trying a little of this practice and a little of that practice. But I think for each of us, we can develop a toolbox that includes a number of different things that covers different aspects of life and of our makeup. So there can be an intellectual component, there can be a heart component, you know, there can be a physical component. And I suppose Buddhist tradition, certainly the Hindu tradition, has all these things with bhakti and jnana and then, you know, hatha yoga and different practices that deal with different aspects of life. And you could say that, you know, if you pull any one leg of the table, the whole table and all the other legs will come along, but maybe sometimes it’s better to grab a couple legs at the same time to pull the table. I think we can each formulate an approach that suits us personally and I think there are certain critical components, you know, that almost should be universal. One is development of critical thinking skills because it can easily get off on some tangent if you don’t do that. But it’s nice to have some devotional aspect. It’s nice to have some effective way of settling into a very deep state, you know, samadhi or whatever you want to call it. It’s good to keep your body healthy, it’s good to keep getting proper exercise. It’s good to have, you know, family, nice relationships, all these different things make a life and every day is life and we don’t want to pass over the present for some glorious potential future.
Ricard: Yeah. And it changes over time, right? So there will be times where you are deep into this certain kind of, but to me, that is like, you know, these experiments where they just give little kids in the daycare or something like that, they did experiment, which I think is pretty brutal. Give them options to eat. And what the scientists realized is that the kids would, for example, when they were sick, they will eat certain things rather than others. Meaning that kind of was proving that there’s some certain kind of intuition to, it’s not just, so I think when we talk about the spiritual practice, the reason why I think what you’re saying is very important and meaningful is because we all are on our own. So yes, we’re going to find friends and people and and paths to stay in there for a while. And some of them for a very long time, but ultimately, as actually the Buddha said, you’re on your own. You have to be your own light, right? And, but what I’m saying is that, that’s also what I think of myself as a coach, because I don’t have like a predefined way of telling people, this is how it’s gonna be for you. You know, I don’t know, you don’t know either. We’re just here having a lot of fun. And we just spontaneously going through, okay, let’s do this, let’s do that. and things just turn into one way or another. And someone, what is shocking to me is, for example, people who were like scientists, people who you see them, that they have this strong sense of, they turn to be people who work really well with blissful states. Like you say, “Oh, this is what you were missing all along.” And you will never know unless you give it a try. So I think keeping this openness to give it a try, as you were discussing on trying, on picking things and following your intuition. But ultimately, I think there’s an underlying, there’s an underlying source of all these behaviors. And it comes to my mind, Papaji?
Rick: Papaji.
The One Desire
Ricard: Papaji, when he was describing how, instead of, he said, “You shouldn’t have desires.” And he said, “No, you have to have one desire.” You know, I love that. That’s like samatha, it’s like, desires are not bad, are only bad because you’re confused. We only have one desire, just one. If we get to realize that simplicity, then suddenly all your behavior and everything feels like the most natural thing. This leads back into when we were discussing about discipline with meditation and sati as remembering, mindfulness as remembering. Because for me, there shouldn’t be any of yourselves of forcing. And yes, sometimes people may drop meditation for a while just to come stronger when they realize that, oh yeah, I’m looking for that. I’m looking for experiencing myself, for a deeper connection with myself, for this moment and with everything. And that’s a moment they may start meditating or may find a new way of meditating. Who knows, you know, in the sense that they find maybe there are special people who, I don’t know, I’m just thinking about people now with AI or with social media, there are new generations coming and finding new ways of connecting and using all this technology for, using it for the ultimate longing, desire that we have. And I think when you do that, then you don’t care about eating chocolate or drinking alcohol or pleasing yourself in any way. It doesn’t matter because you are doing exactly what you want in every moment. And that thing that you want, it may be in the beginning a bit abstract. That’s where people go, you go into prayers or you go into certain kind of things. Of course, there are different levels of prayers. I understand that, but I’m talking in the regular way. We go into these routines until you find that, until you had this moment of, and then, you know, yeah, this is it. And this, this thing wasn’t caused by anything. The reason why meditation brings this up is because you didn’t do anything. That’s what is a causeless bliss. That’s what is, you’re getting closer to this, this release of pain and suffering and just resting in this state of recognition of something that is there, let’s say, and in that resting, you find everything you want, which is the most ironic thing, because you find everything you want by letting go of everything you want, apparently, as a person. You find the only thing you want, and the moment that hopefully people get to contact that, I think that’s the moment where they won’t stop meditating for the rest of their life.
Technology and Awakening
Rick: Did Shinzen ever tell you about that thing he was doing with Jeffery Martin, where they had some kind of device that was directing a very precise beam of magnetism to a certain part of the brain? Jeffery told me that Shinzen said he was having better experiences with that than he’d ever had with all of his Zen practice.
Ricard: Yeah, we never went into that. He didn’t come out of that.
Rick: You reminded me of it when you were talking about finding some new way of meditation, and we’ve been talking about science and all that kind of stuff. So, interesting. I don’t know what they’re doing with that now or what the long-term effects of that might be, but I just thought I’d–
Ricard: I think they’re still researching on that.
Rick: Yeah, I guess they were hoping that there could be something which would shortcut the whole process of awakening, you know, using some kind of device.
Ricard: But he also mentioned something like, I think it’s in his book, he says something like, “Yeah, I’m talking about this way of not hacking, but supporting,” but yeah. He’s not saying, I’m not so deluded to think that it’s gonna get you to enlightenment. He made some statement in the book about that, I think. Like, it’s not like–
Rick: Yeah, but there could be things which would be like a catalyst. They’d be conducive to speeding things up, you know?
Ricard: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: I mean, some people think psychedelics will do that, and sometimes I think they do, but they could also be problematic.
Ricard: Yeah, I think most people–
Rick: Well, that’s stuff you have to be careful.
Ricard: You may tell me, you probably have talked to everyone about this, but in my experience, and everyone I know, and again, I’m thinking about Ram Dass because I hear, people stop, when they go a certain level, they stop doing that. Right? They started using psychedelics in order to reach that state. That’s certainly psychedelics. I mean, I did, I did have some big experiences with it, but I just drop it because honestly, I was a kid. I went crazy. I thought that I went crazy. I was seriously worried. I went to go into psychologists. I went to nuns and monks. I went everywhere, like trying to find, and people were worried about me. But because suddenly from one single experience, my mind stopped, like it stopped radically, completely. Like it was immersed into, I don’t know how to describe it. Of course, the experience was, but what I’m saying is it was a very meaningful experience. And yet it was just, for some of us, seems to you have this glimpses, you could have it with psychedelics or with anything. You can make it trances in so many ways. And some people don’t need trances, they just take one step at a time. But in my case, I have to confess that, that for me was instrumental in my process to have that “pack!” And it kind of created an opening. And after that, I think it’s like, it will happen with regular drugs. You’re using an external element to create something. So you’re getting a temporary pass, let’s say. So that can be very powerful in the sense of showing you what is in there for you to experience if you were a bit more open-minded. But in the end of it, you’re paying the price of losing normality, of the health of your body, of course, in different ways. So I had, at some point, I had one teacher, one non-dual teacher, Cesar, from Advaita Vedanta, he’s from Colombia, very nice guy. And he told me, “Don’t you ever do that again.” He said, “You’re too sensitive to that. You’re gonna screw yourself if you do that again.” And I said, “Okay, I really believe him.” And now, you know, like 20 years later, I think, yeah, he was absolutely right. And so people approach me now, because as you know, there’s these psychedelics trends and I think it’s valuable. And I hear some of the people I’m working with, they, and it depends on their meditation, but then we are, we are meeting again the situation that, yeah, but you still need to deal with your life. So, okay. It’s really cool that you get some extra boost of nitro, like, and you can get a bit farther than that you would do otherwise. But is that really freedom when you need something?
Psychedelics and Spiritual Practice
Rick: Some people think they can damage the subtle body and even though you have some profound experience, it can take a long time to repair that. And so it’s not a long-term strategy and as Alan Watts put it, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” You don’t need to. There’s some good research with it and it’s helping a lot of people, you know, alcoholics and various people. It’s not a long-term strategy and unfortunately, I think a lot of people are using it as such and doing it over and over and over again. And I don’t think the outcome of that is going to be good. But anyway, we’re getting sort of towards the end of our time and I’m wondering if there’s anything that, we’ve covered a lot of ground, but is there anything that you feel is important that we haven’t touched upon?
Ricard: Not really.
Rick: Okay, well we did cover a lot. So tell us, like, you know, you live in Germany but you probably talk to people all over the world and you have a kind of a coaching thing which people can see on your website, which I will link to on your page on Batgap. Is there anything you want to say about that?
Ricard: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I started with that because I feel more comfortable in one-to-one, actually, but I realized that there’s a strong limitation with that because I don’t want to stop being a musician just to get into this new business. So I have a limited time for that. I realized, okay, in this way, I cannot really serve people. So, okay, I have to up my game. And so I start going on YouTube and things like that. But most importantly, I started, I created this community and I’m trying to put in the resources. So I say this because just, it’s not about the money. It’s not about that. And actually I’m trying to kind of detach these things and create an environment. What I know this is very powerful and I hope if anyone is meditating alone and hear this and all that, of course I’m offering this space for people to interact and to talk. And you know, I think that can be very nice. That’s a project that I’m building. And of course I want to, I have some courses in there to do and everything of course is free and so on. Well, I have some little groups that we’re working together. It’s a different business, but I just want to throw in there a lot of content and a lot of tools for people to freely access and interact with other people in the same path. So that’s the project.
Rick: One final question is, is there a YouTube channel or something for your band? I’d like to watch some videos of your band playing.
Ricard: It’s not a band. It’s a solo project.
Rick: Oh, solo. Anyway, send me some info about your music.
Ricard: I will. I will. Thank you. But only, only if you send me some stuff of you playing drums.
Rick: Okay. I have an old video and some photos and the video doesn’t even have audio. It was filmed with a super eight camera back in 1970. So anyway, or ’69, maybe.
Ricard: You’re wearing long hair or something.
Rick: Oh yes. Long hair. And we almost went to Woodstock, but we didn’t leave on time. And it wasn’t possible to get anywhere near the place if you didn’t leave early, you know, cause the New York state throughway was a parking lot.
Ricard: Almost famous.
Rick: Almost famous. Alrighty. Well, thanks. I really enjoyed talking to you. We’ll be in touch.
Ricard: Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you for everything.
Rick: Yeah. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one.
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