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Rick Archer at the Open Circle Berkeley
Rick Archer: I mean, I see my picture here along with Adyashanti, and Rupert Spiro and Pamela Wilson, Ganga Ji and all these people. And, you know, I feel like, I hope you have no illusions that I’m some kind of a spiritual teacher, or luminary or anything like that I don’t purport to be. But I do feel like I have a role that I’m well suited for, and have spent most of my life preparing for not knowing that I was preparing for it. But I somehow stumbled into it. And it has been very fulfilling for me. And it seems to be beneficial for a lot of people. I was just down at the science and non duality conference, and I couldn’t walk 10 steps without somebody coming up to me say, saying, you know, this, your show has had such an effect on my life, you know, I, I mean, all kinds of stories, someone, one person said, This thing was happening to me, I had no idea what it was. And I did some searches on the internet. And, and I began to find out about this awakening thing or maintenance thing, and, and then I started checking out different teachers. And so it all began to make sense to me. And I realized I wasn’t going crazy and things like that. And other people, you know that? Well, you connected me by a teacher, I never would have known about so and so. And so I really, it’s very gratifying to have that sort of effect. I used to be a student of marshy, Mahesh Yogi and he wants told me that I was a connector and a collector. So I feel like I’m kind of doing that in a way. And it’s funny, because at the same time, I feel like I’m not doing it. And I know that sounds like a spiritual cliche. But once in a while, I’ll be looking at the website or something, all these hundreds of names of people that I’ve interviewed, and I think how in the heck is this happening? You know, I don’t, I don’t really feel like I’m doing anything, I’m just kind of going along from day to day, and this thing is happening somehow out of it. And it’s having all these ripples of effect all over the world. So I really do kind of feel like an instrument or a tool of the Divine. And it’s very gratifying to do that to be that. As I said, I just came from the science and non duality conference. And I always go to that conference. I’m interested in the interface of science and spirituality. I’m not a scientist. But I like to talk about some thoughts that I play with all the time have played with over the years and continue to refine as I think about them, and talk about them with people. The theme of the science non duality conference this year was on the edge of the unknown. And so I thought about that, and I thought will, will the unknown always have an edge? Or will we somehow reach an endpoint in which we actually do know everything? There are actually scientists who feel that at a certain point, science is going to have it all figured out. And most people who feel that way already feel that spirituality and mysticism and all that has been rendered obsolete by science. And that sight, the tools of objective science are going to answer all the questions. Now, I don’t think most scientists feel that way. But there are some I think, even Stephen Hawking and what was his name Leonard Mlodinow, or something like that, wrote a book. And along those lines, and sort of announcing that science had finally already displaced all the religious myths of creation, and that we didn’t need those anymore. So there’s certain science is notorious for having a certain arrogance, you know about how advanced we are and how much we know. And yet look at what’s happening to the world. We’ve gained a lot of technological knowledge. And there’s very real possibility that human beings won’t exist in a couple of 100 years if things go the way they seem to be going. So obviously, we don’t know everything. There must be something more we could know that could allow our technologies to be more benign. and allow them to benefit us without destroying us. And I think that’s where spirituality comes in. Science without spirituality, it’s sort of like, you know, little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There isn’t necessarily any kind of moral or ethical compass, for technology, very powerful technologies can end up in the hands of people who are very greedy or small minded, and who really don’t care about the consequences of what they’re doing. And we’re basically looking at the bottom line of the next quarter and aren’t thinking about the next generation or seven generations or anything like that. So and who treat who who regard nature in a very mechanistic way, the Earth is an object, and it’s here for us to exploit. And one way of thinking about that is that science, scientific and technological advancements utilize certain laws of nature, we discover a law or principle. Even the way a jet plane flies, I mean, people studied birds for a long time trying to figure out how they did it. And you’ve seen those old films of early airplanes where they had things flap up and down and bounced all over the place and didn’t get anywhere. But they eventually figured out that the principle of the differentiation of the air pressure over a wing if the wing is shaped in a certain way, and how that created lift, and so they understood something about some law of nature. And that provided a valuable technology. But there are innumerable laws of nature, and very often technologies, harness are, are metal with certain laws of nature, without really knowing the ramifications of that, without really knowing the implications of what we might do if we tinker with this or tinker with that, and often their disastrous consequences. I mean, genetic engineering is a potentially disastrous thing where we’re monkeying around at the level of the genome. And we, we, you know, we, we don’t really know exactly what effect we’re going to have. But, again, there’s a financial incentive to do this thing and a lot of money has been invested in research and so they want to get the product out there to recoup their investment. But it’s it’s dangerous because we don’t harness the the intelligence of nature, rather, we’re meddling with it. And I would suggest there’s a there’s a verse from Rigveda, which goes rich Oh, Akshay. Param, Avi Oman, Yasmin VEDA, Yasmin Deva, Adi Vish Vedas che do, and it goes on a bit more. But what it says basically is that all the the impulses of intelligence which give rise to and govern the manifest universe, in other words, we can say laws of nature, because I think nature, the laws of nature are not just mechanistic and dumb. They’re actually impulses of intelligence governed by intelligence. All those laws of nature reside says this first, in the transcendental Akasha and the transcendental field. And then it goes on to say that if you don’t know that field, then what can those impulses of intelligence do for you? What can those laws do for you, but if you do know that field, and then you, you come into alignment with natural law with all the laws of nature, and you function in such a way as to not create harm, unwittingly, by doing a specific thing, and then unknowingly violating other things. I think people who are deeply attuned to the transcendent to their, to their true nature, have found that in their personal lives, this is very often the case that you move much more gently and sensitively in the world much more wisely, you don’t blunder about, you know, creating problems for yourselves and for yourself and others. And we can envision the potential of the possibility of a society in which everyone was functioning that way. And I think that if we had such a society, we wouldn’t have so many problems by a longshot, you know, so many, I would posit that every problem that sets us as a society is the reflection of the collective consciousness of all the individuals in the world. And if most of the individuals in the world have sort of incoherent, very partial grasp of of the totality, then their collective influence is going to be, you know, some extent positive to some extent negative and you can get To gauge by the degree of harmful or positive technologies and situations with the environment and all that, how the collective consciousness fares at the moment, it could definitely use some upliftment. You may have heard that just in the last week or two, it was announced that through the use of the Hubble telescope, it has been determined that there are about 10 times more galaxies in the known universe than we realized that used to used to be hundreds of billions now it’s about 2 trillion or something. And that’s just the known universe. And according to both physicists and some ancient cosmologies, there may be innumerable universes. But let’s just stick with one. If there are 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe, and if there isn’t, a spiritually or technologically or both advanced civilization in in each of those universes is only one that would be 2 trillion such civilizations. But you know, we know from the Kepler telescope that, at least in our neighborhood, most stars have planets around them, it seems and I My hunch is that the universe is teeming with life of all sorts, and that there are uncountable civilizations that are far more advanced than ours, both technologically and spiritually. So I think that’s just a good thought to ponder. Because there, there tends to be a bit of hubris, both in scientific and spiritual circles about how much we know and how advanced we are, and so on. I think it’s kind of good to stay humble. And some of the some of the teachers, spiritual teachers I respect most talk that way themselves, like Adyashanti. For instances, I’m always a beginner. I just had a nice interview with him yesterday, that I’ll be posting pretty soon. And he was saying, you know, 100, couple 100 years from now, they might look if they remember me at all, they might say, Boy, that guy was a real, you know, duffer, he or they knew anything. And, you know, that might be the, the average man on the street is as wise as the type of people we now consider to be spiritual luminaries, so to speak. Alright, that was a little bit of an aside, but I just wanted to throw that out there and let you speak for a minute about how science and spirituality might help each other. I spoke a bit about how spirituality might help science if spirituality, in fact, is capable of tuning people more deeply to the to nature’s intelligence, if it’s capable of enlivening moral or ethical values and people making them more sensitive, more caring, more loving, things like that, then I think that that could, you know, make these powerful tools that technology has given us it would put them in safer hands. But let’s do it the other way around? How can how can science help spirituality? I think it’s really important that my, when I use the word spirituality, I’m not implying faith or belief or anything of that nature. I’m talking about experience. And I think most of you probably have that orientation shown, you know, given the teachers I see on this flyer here, we’re not satisfied with being told that something is such and such, and then just spending our lives believing that and hoping that that will do us any good. We probably we might have thought of it this way. But most of us probably regard the, the, the so called Faith statements of spiritual traditions as working hypotheses that we might test. You know, if the Upanishad say something about the ultimate nature of reality, or, you know, some Buddhist scriptures, or Christian scriptures or something else, we want to experience that. I don’t think that Jesus or Buddha, or any of those great teachers really cared what we believed, even though they’re often translated as saying that they cared what we experienced. They wanted us to experience what they were experiencing. And they did their best to say things that would align people with their and provide practices and teachings and so on that would enable people to do that. And those practices attended, you know, many of them, I think, tended to have a scientific nature to them, you know, a teacher would say, well, there’s this, that and the other. They might say, for instance, there’s a transcendental field and it’s deep within you and you could access it. Now. Here’s the technique. Check it out, try it, see if it works. See if you do find that. And then the students might say Yeah, well, I had this experience and then the teacher might say something to clarify their experience. So the point here is that it’s really healthy to observe and to question and hypothesize and experiment and analyze. And before reaching conclusions, those are the basic steps of science, and spirituality, if we include religion, and the word spirituality has really not had that kind of attitude for most of its historical existence, I mean, hundreds of millions of people have been killed and tortured in the name of what really actually represents the most sublime experience a human being can have. But it’s been so distorted and misunderstood and so entrenched in dogma and rigidity that people have been killing each other over these things. I think that, you know, these, the founders of most religions would be rolling in the graves, if they saw what ended up happening to their teachings. I think understanding is really important. on the spiritual path, and for a couple of different reasons. One is that it’s a motivator. It’s, it’s inspiring. If if we actually understood what the possibilities were, we’d be very excited about realizing those possibilities. When you drive around the city here, you see a lot of people walking around for whom life seems very difficult, rather bleak. And when you look at the news, you know, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are having a really tough time of it, who probably think that life is meaningless, it’s a struggle, it’s it’s suffering, it’s, you know, life sucks, then you die is the saying. And I think that’s, it’s a shame, because I think that we’re in a sense, we’re all like, multimillionaires, who have forgotten that we have a bank account with all that wealth in it. And we’re just sort of pinching pennies and begging on street corners trying to get by. But if we had access to our bank account, so to speak, well, even even if somebody came, told us about the bank account, most most wouldn’t believe it, they’d say, Wow, I know, my life’s really tough and this bank account seems rather, you know, far fetched and far away, but if a means could be provided to people to enable them to access, the tremendous wealth of, of energy, intelligence, creativity, happiness sought Chetananda that lie within them, then they begin to bring that forth, and sure enough, you know, that their lives would improve. So somehow or other, I hope, that the the knowledge it’s happening, that the knowledge that there’s more to life than meets the eye, and is is proliferating, and more and more people are, you know, becoming inspired to discover it and to wake up, that’s definitely happening. So that’s one reason it’s a motivator. You Upanishad state that all happiness that we derive from any external experience, is actually just a reflection of inner happiness. Just as the light of the moon is a reflection of the light of the sun. So you could in a sense, if that’s true, you could say that everybody’s chasing Enlightenment, whether you know, they’re going after the new car, or the new job, or the the new relationship or whatever they’re looking for, they’re looking for happiness, they’re looking for fulfillment. And according to the Upanishads, and many other scriptures, ultimately fulfillment is found is found in sort of oceanic amounts, at the very core of our existence, the very core of our being. Now, that is not to say that we should just ignore or lose interest in an external pursuits. But if, if that inner happiness can be really discovered and experienced and stabilized in our awareness, then it’s it can be tremendously enriching to all of our, our experiences, whatever you’re doing can be so much more enjoyable, I mean, think of a relationship for instance, you know, relationships can be very difficult and can sort of lose their luster and there can be all sorts of problems and people are sort of full of, you know, stress and pent up frustrations and so on that you know, kind of ruin the potential enjoyment of the relationship. But if that stuff could be worked out if and if if the People could realize experientially that they’re actually one with one another, at the most fundamental level, then a deep level of harmony could characterize the relationship that is kind of rare in most relationships. So that’s just one example. There are many more. Um, another reason I think, knowledge of the path, or knowledge of the spiritual landscape is important. And I’ll elaborate a bit more what I mean by knowledge and a bit is that so many weird things have come down in the name of spirituality. You know, I mean, both throughout history, and contemporarily, there, there just there have been so many cults and strange situations that people have gotten involved in, in which they’ve wasted money and time and, you know, suffered all kinds of heartbreaks and difficulties. And, you know, so many spiritual teachers are have appeared to be very inspiring and worthy of of our attention, and then have crashed and burned in one way or another. And disillusioned, a lot of people have perhaps heard a lot of people in the process. So I think if we had we as individuals, and we, as a spiritual, larger spiritual community, had a clearer understanding of what awakening really looks like, so to speak. We as the who said, We Won’t Get Fooled Again, you know, there will be a greater sort of discernment in choosing a teacher choosing a path, not staying with someone who is abusive, or trying to take all your money or trying to take you to bed or whatever else these teachers have, have tried to do. And many of whom have given spirituality, bad name in a way. So it safeguards the path.
Speaker 2: What is it that you mean, when you say awakening and spirituality? I came in a little late, maybe
Rick Archer: Good question. My understanding is, and that’s a very good question. Because I hear I hear so many people say, Well, I had my awakening, and all right, woke in 19, whatever. And, and I often wonder what they’re talking about, or they say, are you awake, you know. And different traditions approach this differently. I’ve heard, you know, Zen monk say, Well, I’ve had many awakenings, some minor, some major, some, some say, seem to see it is a watershed moment, you know, that you cross and it’s like breaking the sound barrier or something very or something. And once you’re on the other side, it’s completely different. And that may be many people’s experience. Others that it’s a progressive thing, that there are stages and stages and stages and stages. And maybe both are true. But my sense of it is that there is we can draw the line and define the term however we want, but the way I would customarily use it is that, you know, we do have a sort of a true nature, we can say pure awareness, we usually read, it’s not a we have it, that’s it’s it gets tricky to talk about it. But most people regard themselves as being their body and the things they’re interested in, in their politics, that if you ask them who they are, they begin to tell you what they’d like and where they work and that kind of stuff, then that’s the really not that what we actually are, where we are something much more fundamental than that. And the various scriptures and traditions describe it as being unbounded pure awareness, that’s not limited to any individual body, much like the ocean, whereas individual bodies might be more like the wave. And some people, most people feel like I am this wave, and I’m separate from that wave and all the other waves, and I’m vulnerable, because the wind could blow me over and I could cease to exist or something, or I could crash up against the rocks and be gone. But what the traditions tell us is that, yeah, your wave, but more significantly, and more fundamentally, you’re the ocean which gives rise to all waves, and therefore thereby you are indestructible, eternal and never ending. There’s a verse from the Bhagavad Gita which says, The Unreal has no being the real never ceases to be. So spirituality of the type I’m talking about or awakening as I use the word is with reference to awareness, waking up to itself as that on bounded fundamental Pure Consciousness.
Speaker 2: Having talked to younger postdoc age scientists, I don’t know if it’s because they were raised by baby boomers. But that divide that hard as if there is a line doesn’t. They don’t seem to be the old fashion scientists, I noticed they they have a wider or deeper or a different perspective. I’ve noticed. So that, which is what that you can expand your perspective to encompass your experience your consciousness. Great. Oh, that there’s not such the duality. Yeah. So the scientists you speak about? I don’t know. Maybe it’s generational? Or maybe. Yeah, could be. I mean, you’ll see with such heavy contrasts now in the politics, you know, there’s a cultural thing like he’s woke, she’s woke. Yeah, meaning, there’s a certain consciousness, you know, that’s, again, that’s awakening where younger people and different cultures are using that term meaning this awareness? Yeah. And I just find that sometimes the scientists label isn’t what it used to be. It doesn’t define people that it used to.
Rick Archer: Yeah, so there’s a couple of good points there. One. One is that it’s not fair to paint all scientists with the same brush. And that it could be that there’s sort of a, it might, there might be a generational thing where the the older folks are a little bit more stuck in their ways. And younger people are more open minded, it usually works that way. They someone I forget who said that science progresses by a series of funerals. Because guys, people get so you know, they’re entrenched, they’re stuck to their paradigms, and they’re resistant to change. And so they die, often new paradigms, you know, come into vogue.
Speaker 2: And it might even be the feminine.
Rick Archer: That two, very important. Yeah, absolutely. But another point that your question triggers in me is, is this, this sort of like, Oh, he’s awake, you know, she woke up or something like that. I don’t know that. I get a little uncomfortable when people say that, because I just don’t know exactly what they’re referring to. And that leads into a whole section of my talk that I’d like to, it relates to this thing about knowledge, I think that it would be really valuable. Well, if we, you know, when Lewis and Clark explored North America, they had a real fuzzy idea of what was out there. And then in the what they were getting into, and how big it was, or where, where certain mountain, There even were certain mountain ranges and things like that. And they had all sorts of difficulties because of that lack of knowledge. These days, of course, with satellite technology, and everything else, we have the whole continent, the whole world mapped out to the centimeter probably, you know, GPS gets us exactly where we want to go. I think that using the map metaphor, it would be really valuable. And I think this will be a project of hundreds of yours, if not 1000s, to have a clear map of the spiritual territory, the full range of potential spiritual experience. And it’s almost silly to refer to experience spiritual experience, because we’re really talking about understanding the nature of reality. In its, and its depth. Let me let me back up a second. When you say spiritual experience to that to many people’s minds, that denotes a kind of a subjective thing, you have this inner bliss, or you have this vision or something else. And there’s no indication that what you’re experiencing has any objective reality. It’s kind of like, if we were all sleeping, and we were hooked up to the appropriate apparatus. Scientists could tell if they’re in the next room reading the meters, that we were dreaming, when we dreamt, they could tell Okay, now that person is dreaming, but they couldn’t tell what we’re dreaming. And we could wake up and describe our dreams to them. But most of those dreams and thus, we give some credence to the notion of, you know, shamanistic visions or some kind of cognition or something that might sometimes happen in the dream state. Most of those dreams are probably just sort of mental fabrications that don’t have any any counterpart in the quote unquote, real world. But I feel that that the spiritual quest is, is not something to merely indulge Jin, in subjective experiences, that may be gratifying. But it’s actually an exploration of the full nature of reality. And the full nature of reality would include not only pure consciousness, which we’re talking about a minute ago, you know, the ocean. But if we want to keep with the ocean metaphor, it would include the full depth of the ocean and all the fish that might live there, at different levels. So in other words, there, there is not only this sort of absolute foundation to things which physicists might call the unified field, but there are many strata of creation subtle to gross or gross to subtle. And many spiritual traditions have talked about these things. He can read books, like The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or, you know, Jesus said, In my Father’s house, there are many mansions. And I’m sure he could find references to this sort of thing in every tradition, I feel that it would be really valuable. And a very, it would be for starters, it would be a really interesting PhD thesis for something to do to take all the traditional maps and try to match them up and see where there’s agreement. And try to find out if if there, take the ancient wisdom and see to what extent it can give us a sense of the full range of reality that spirituality is capable of exploring. But I think that won’t be the end of it, I think, in a way, that’ll just be the start. And different, that is not to say that everybody is going to become kind of uniform in their experience, we’re all or that they should. I think we’re all wired differently, and different people are going to have different cognitions and different, different experiences. Even the ancient Vedic rishis different ones would cognize different hymns of the Veda they weren’t, they weren’t wired to cognize them all this, this particular lineage would cognize this one and this particular lineage would come cognize that one, and it’s kind of like if you take the map metaphor, again, there are many maps of North America, there are weather maps there, you know, topographical maps, there are maps for aviation, their maps of oil deposits, I mean, and their roadmaps, obviously, maps of railroads, all these different things are of the same territory, they all refer to the same territory, but they have sort of different purposes, and different uses for different people for different needs. So I think that a really well mapped out a really mature map of the full of the spiritual realm, which even that word is just too simple, but of the full nature of reality that human beings are capable of experiencing. Would have different variations, some might, and people would gravitate toward different aspects of it, while still in agreement with uncomfortable with the fact that others experiences although different than theirs, were equally valid, that this person is qualified to experience. This way this person leans more toward that. We’re all getting pieces. We’re all feeling the same elephant. You know, that metaphor. Anyway, I’m rambling a bit. So any feedback on what I’ve said just now, from anybody?
Anand: Yeah, just strikes me.
Speaker 3: Oh, yes, sir. Okay. Well, I just wanted to, you know, we talked about Jesus and Buddha, like they actually exist and I think the only one that was really kind of taking that on as Jack Kornfield. And when he goes he say, when he gives a talk on this on the radio, not even Dharma talk, he was talking about the Buddha myth of the mustard seed, the Buddha myth of us the Buddha myth,
Rick Archer: that he didn’t really exist.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Rick Archer: Maybe Tim Freke talks about the Jesus myth book with Peter Gandi that Jesus didn’t actually exist that’s just a sort of a recurring mythology that comes up in different cultures and so on.
Speaker 3: Exactly. And also they went to the O in glitter want to get too hung up on this in the Caesars Christ. They went in the way Caesars Christ as a
Rick Archer: Caesars Christ.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And they decide, you know, they the Caesars are they actually the ones that created the Jesus myth, because you know, it’s very expensive to go all the way to Israel. With all these troops and everything, so you know a few someone hits you turn the other cheek. And, you know, if you walk, you know, a mile with a woman asked you to walk a mile with his bag, walk another one and all. Yeah, so you know, the whole thing? I don’t want to get hung up. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Well, I would say that even if it’s true, and I’m, I’m no scholar of that of such things, even if it’s true that some of these great historical figures were either, you know, totally fabricated, or at least embellished the things they did. You know, there could have been a lot of exaggeration over time. We don’t need to resort to ancient records, to feel comfortable that spiritual Enlightenment is a possibility, because they’re contemporary examples, you know, in both recent and current times.
Speaker 3: Well, if you say that, gee, you realize I’m not doing this, you know, I’ve heard this from a lot of people. And so hopefully, they’re new. But anyway, this is more of a concept than anything, anything, but there was this guy that died about two weeks ago, where we live. And just before he died, or the kiss this woman and got in all kinds of trouble, and the police were involved in this and that, and then that was like Tuesday and Wednesday. He got into a political argument, willing to fight the guy chose him out. And the guy, you know, back down and said, No, you’re my friend. I don’t want to fight. And then the next day, he was walking into a restaurant and you know, talking about Donald Trump. Oh, yeah, no, no. Next day, he died. Yeah, he leaned up against polio fell down. My question was, I guess, it’s probably half maybe half concept and no half. Anyway, was so source was doing all this things.
Rick Archer: Okay. That’s a good question. I can do something with that. There are people who say that, you know, there’s no free will. And everything is just genetics and conditioning. Ramesh balsa car was said that over and over if you’ve if you’ve heard of him I think that like many things, their truth is, is sort of multi layered. And there are different levels of reality which are true in their own right, but paradoxically opposed to one another. Let me just give you an example. So I get this model. Timothy Conway expresses this very clearly, he has written a nice article on it on his site, enlightened spirituality.org. But um, he has what he calls the threefold. Three, three fold. Paradoxically, true levels of reality are something the first one would be the gross, obvious level of the world that we’re all familiar with, where there are problems and difficulties and this and that. And, you know, we need to deal with those things on their own level, if there’s pollution, we need to clean it up, or stop contributing to it or whatever, you can’t just ignore it. A second level would be the divine level where everything is God, everything is divinely orchestrated, everything is absolutely perfect, just as it is including the pollution, there’s no mistakes in the universe, soul just running like clockwork, a deeper level would be the unmanifest level where nothing ever happened. There is no universe, nothing ever arose. You’ve probably heard statements like that from Ramana, Maharshi, and others. Each of those is true, actually. It’s just that knowledge is different at different levels of consciousness, different states of experience. And people tend to get stuck in one or the other of those levels. There might be people who are stuck on the level of we got to really do something about all the problems in the world and all this other stuff about you know, everything’s perfect, and there is no universe, it’s just a lot of nonsense. It’s not practical, it’s not going to help us. There are people who say, you know, I’ve heard people’s there was a, an interchange at the science and non duality conference four or five years ago, where David Loy, who was a Buddhist teacher got up and was challenging a speaker to say, Well, what about environmental problems, and then we need to do something we need to, you know, apply our spirituality in a practical way. And he was just saying, Whatever happens, it’s all perfect, just as it is, we don’t need to do anything. And you know, the world is a speck of dust if it disappears, whatever. And then, you know, I’ve also heard people talk that nothing ever happened. There is no universe there is no person there is no self. Each of those is true on its own level. But if you if you get stuck in one or the other of those levels, it’s lopsided, it doesn’t. It doesn’t do justice to the full range of possibilities. And I personally I think think that a mature spirituality is an embodiment of the full range of creation, in, in living in what in a living life. The word Brahman, which you may have heard, actually, is defined as the inclusion of the well, they talk of three levels are the, the Buddha, or the diver and Adhyatma. That’s the three levels I just described. And it includes all the full range of the relative, and the absolute, all wrapped up in one big package. And that’s the, the totality that’s the reality, not just this slice, or this slice or this slice.
Speaker 3: So that sounds Wow. I’m just you know, I went to this talk the other day and ended with there is no separate self. And that was sort of like a zinger,
Rick Archer: saying that in the talk somebody at the very
Speaker 3: end of the talk. And I thought, gee, no separate self. And then, you know, if they put something over my nose and mouth, I wouldn’t be around for three minutes
Rick Archer: be struggling. You see,
Speaker 3: I’d be struggling. And you know, the rain could have fallen, you know, yeah. Three months ago, and I’m drinking it now. And that’s in my blood. So I sort of get that a little bit. I don’t know if it’s a concept or not, but
Rick Archer: Well, my level, it’s my understanding. Well, my friend, Francis Bennett has a nice phrase that he likes to repeat a lot. And I think it even has it on the homepage of his website, he says, of course, you’re a person, you’re just not only a person, you know. So, you know, on some level, yeah, there’s no separate self, very true. Put your hand on a stove. And very quickly, there’s felt sense that there’s a separate self, at least most of us would feel that way. That and that separate self doesn’t like the pain that it’s experiencing wants to do something about it. And now, some people have the experience, if they’re deeply grounded in in the capitalist self and true nature, that they experience the pain. And yet they don’t experience it. At the same time. There’s there’s a dimension in their experience, which is beyond the reach of pain. I was a student of marshy Mahesh Yogi for a long time. And he was once doing an interview with on the BBC with an interview named Malcolm Muggeridge and Maharishi and the abbot of downside where we’re in this discussion with Malcolm Muggeridge and marshy like to shake people up. So he said it during some at some point during the Savior, Christ never suffered. And of course, the Adam, both Muggeridge, and the abbot of downside got little unnerved by that statement. But he went on to explain that, you know, he appeared to be suffering, and obviously, his body was going through something rather nasty, and there must have been pain and so on. But if he was really Christ, if he was really what he was cracked up to be, then the predominant subjective experience he must, he must have been so well established, and in being that he was untouched. That’s the world in which he dwelt primarily, there’s a phrase in, in Vedanta, which, which is called lesh avidya, which means faint remains of ignorance. And it said that there needs to be some lesh avidya, some faint remains of ignorance in order to function as a human being. And that, if not, if not for that, I mean, you think of Ramana Maharshi in the cave, or in the pit beneath the temple where he was being chewed by insects and so on, would have died if someone hadn’t dragged him out of there and cleaned them up. Maybe he was at a stage at that point where he was just so you know, beyond the world that he was oblivious to his body. But, you know, he came out of there, and he spent years in, in a cave, meditating and whatnot, and eventually came out and started speaking and teaching. And yet, on his when he was close to death, and you know, he’s suffering from cancer and actually screaming in pain at times, you know, people would ask him about what he was experiencing. And he made it very clear that although it appeared that he was suffering, he was really untouched by it. And they say, you know, please don’t die, please don’t leave us. Where could I go? You know? So, there’s this kind of, you got to take any statement that somebody says like that, and bring it back to this multi dimensional kind of perspective, where it’s not just this or that, excuse me. It’s both and, and the whole, the whole gamut. And don’t take your stead. Here’s a quote from the Bible do just said, for the birds have their nests and the foxes have their holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. And to me, that means you don’t take a fixed stance, you know, there’s no place to land there’s there’s just sort of this openness and way, lack of certainty, which is much more secure than taking a fixed it this way, because it’s never just this way, there was always the paradox and ambiguity take effect on shaky ground, because it can always be challenged or usurped or disrupted. So just to reiterate, I think spiritual evolution is a is a process of more and more inclusion, more and more expansion of the circumference of our awareness of our experience. To include all this, all this sort of diverse, diverse and paradoxical realities of existence within a totality that’s capable of harmonizing them all. And I really don’t think there’s any end to it. I was, I was speaking to a friend and spiritual teacher down at the sand conference. The first time we’d been in person, we’d been in touch for years, I interviewed him years ago, we, they exchanging political emails and other things ever since. And I mentioned this idea of there possibly not being any end to spiritual evolution. And it just goes on and on. And he said, Well, I feel like I’ve, I’m finished. I’m done. I’m complete, I said, Really? said, Well, if we, if we went back to the way you were experiencing things 10 years ago, if you could remember that, Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not close enough. If we went back to the way you were experiencing things 10 years ago, if you could remember that, and contrast that with the way you are experiencing things right now, would there be any difference whatsoever? And he said, Well, yeah. But you’re talking about the manifest, I’m talking about the, you know, my true nature, the absolute value. And so of course, that doesn’t change, and we’d be in big trouble if it did. But the degree to which pure True Nature can be integrated into the relative or relative life, to my mind has no and, and there’s think of the various faculties we have, as human beings, we have, you know, senses, we have an intellect, we have a heart. There have been some very brilliant intellects in this world, there have been some very huge hearts, incredibly compassionate people, there have been people with very, very refined senses, essentially, perceptual capabilities. So there’s the potential to refine all of our faculties, more and more and more. And I see that as kind of, you know, if we feel we’ve landed in, in the self, and that it’s never going to change, then there’s a kind of a coming back, and an infusion of that into our relative life. I was having a discussion about this topic again, just the other day, and someone was saying, it might have been audio was saying that you can hear there have been people who’ve sort of woken up to their true nature, but have been real jerks. You know, really, very poor and relating to people are dishonest in business relationships, or, you know, things like that. And obviously, there’s some room for improvement. There’s some room for enhancement. A friend of mine was debating me on this point, saying that, well, you know, spiritual awakening has nothing to do with behavior, you can be a jerk, and, and be enlightened, you’re just gonna be an enlightened jerk. And I beg to differ. I think that there’s, there’s a correlation. There’s a correlation. It may be a loose correlation, like a big stretchy rubber band. It’s not like if you’re awake to the self, you’re just going to be a saint like that. But I think that it has an influence. And in fact, it was saying if even over the past couple of years, he feels like he can feel changes taking place in his brain and his his sort of way of functioning. So it’s kind of like when, when the self is realized it starts working on the Wii. vehicle in which it has been realized, and keeps refining that vehicle. If you want to think of it in more sort of spiritual or godly terms the pure consciousness or pure true nature, self realization, as it’s often described, usually doesn’t have much of a divine connotation, it’s more more sounds like a plain vanilla kind of awareness that you realize. And but there’s no mention or, or suggestion of the vast intelligence that is permeating all of creation. And I’m very comfortable with using the word God although it it’s a very misunderstood word. And it’s kind of hard to use because people have so many connotations and perhaps even traumatic associations with it from their upbringing. But if we define it as the, the intelligence which so obviously permeates, and orchestrates every iota of creation, but I’ve got several thoughts here I want to develop. Let me let me illustrate that just for a minute. And, hopefully, I’ll come around, wrap up all these points. There are more stars in the galaxy in the universe, than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. And there are more atoms in a single grain of sand, than there are stars in the universe. And each one of those atoms is a perfectly functioning little thing that, you know, we’re, we still don’t understand. And it’s obviously not obviously hasn’t come into existence through some kind of random billiard ball effect of, you know, there’s there’s intelligence, to my understanding and others, there’s an intelligence there and intelligent laws of nature, orderly laws of nature, orchestrating it, and orchestrating it in coordination with all the other trillions of atoms in that grain of sand. And that’s just a grain of sand, go out from there bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, bigger out to the whole universe, you can’t find any spot in the entire universe, any cubic centimeter, which, if you analyze that closely, you would not see some sort of amazing phenomena that defy our understanding. And that illustrate or that display, vast intelligence, you could take a cubic centimeter way out in the middle of empty space someplace. And even there, there are, you know, gamma rays going through and light, you know, photons and so on, and all kinds of laws of nature. So, to me, with that kind of thinking, it seems that God is hiding in plain sight. And that I talked in the beginning about science, helping spirituality, I think science has given us a much clearer and deeper understanding of just how marvelous the creation is, and just how amazing God is. There’s a beautiful quote from Carl Sagan, where he says that, you know, hardly, for some reason, hardly any spiritual tradition, has looked at the findings of modern science and said, Wow, the universe is even more marvelous than we thought more sublime more, you know, more subtle, more beautiful. Instead, they usually most people usually say, oh, no, no, no, you know, our God is a little guy, and we want him to stay that way, you know, and we, we reject these findings of science and so, but to my view, science has and that’s why this whole science and spirituality thing fascinates me. It has kind of opened a window into the divine which hundreds and 1000s of years ago, we didn’t really have accessible it’s given us a deeper appreciation or the potential for one of just how profound the intelligence governing things actually is. All right now. If if that divine intelligence permeates all of creation, as I’ve just described, then it obviously permeates us to someone wants said God may be omnipotent, but the one thing he can’t do is remove himself from your heart. And if He permits us, and if he permeates everything I say he excuse me for saying that, you know what I mean? Then there really is nowhere, that God cannot be found. And again, by God, I mean this, this all pervading intelligence that we see evidence of if we look closely enough, but which we kind of take for granted and walk through our days, not not realizing what a miracle it is that we’re actually participating in. There is no place where that in that intelligence cannot be found. Look anywhere, look closely enough, there it is. So there if that is the case, then there really is nothing other than that. If there seems to be something that’s other than that look closely, and oh, sure enough, there it is also. Now, someone might say, Oh, I mean, did that really pervade Auschwitz? Or, you know, some? Is it prevail? Does it pervade a pile of dog poop? Or, you know, something that’s really not so? enjoyable? But yeah, if you look closely, at least, I mean, look, in the, in the cell in the skin of a guard in Auschwitz, and are a prisoner. And sure enough, that cell is more complicated than the city of Tokyo. And, you know, operating according to principles, which we hardly understand, there is a miracle taking place in every iota of creation, if we have the eyes to see it. Now is, is that, does that miracle have an agenda? Does that intelligence have a purpose? Or is it just sort of like, playing dice with the universe and, and, you know, there’s the good, the bad, and the Ugly, and, and it’s not necessarily going anywhere, it’s just sort of bouncing around, and there’s suffering here and happiness there, and, and so on, I would say that there is a sort of an evolutionary trajectory, or, or force or energy or intent, that is part of that intelligence. And if there weren’t, then I really don’t know that we’d have a universe. I’m probably I probably sound like a total fool right now to somebody who has a PhD in physics and, you know, has really studied this stuff scientifically. And I’m coming at it from the perspective of a high school dropout, who eventually kind of got his life together and, and moved on and devoted his life to spirituality has thought about this stuff for many years. And I have, you know, a tremendous amount to learn, and always will. I’m just kind of giving you sharing some perspectives and things that interest in inspire me. I feel like there, do you have a question? Yes, please. Yeah. Yeah.
Audience member: It seemed that that science says that the universe is expanding. So if if that’s the case, it would seem that the intelligence has a kind of expanding trajectory. Yeah. So. So I, I sort of agree with you. And also it occurred, it it just also occurred to me, not just occurred to me, but what I’ve thought about is, if the universe were one bit negative, it would immediately cease to exist. Yeah, it has to be somewhat positive.
Rick Archer: There’s a scientist named Robert Lanza, who has this thing that he calls biocentrism. And he’s written a book about it, which I haven’t read yet when I want to, and I would like to interview him. But basically, I talked at Sand a number of years ago, basically, the point is, and I think other sciences have made this true. There are a whole lot of variables that if they were just one little weensy beans a bit off, we wouldn’t have the universe, the Big Bang would would have fizzled or any number of other things wouldn’t have happened that had to happen in order for life as we know it to have appeared. So Now some say that, well it’s like the story of, you know, infant number of monkeys pounding on typewriters coming and eventually coming out with Shakespeare, that there there have been enough attempts. There, just sort of an infinite number of potential universes and somehow we live in one where you know it just by chance It came out right. And so we have it as it is. But again, I keep saying, I would say, Who am I to say, it’s just my opinion, my hunch my feeling that that it’s not there’s no such thing as randomness. And that, as you know, talking about intelligence a few minutes ago that even random things are permeated with intelligence. And there if there are laws of randomness, then the intelligence is responsive, that all permeating intelligence is responsible for those. And that there’s a sort of an evolutionary drive that has given rise to the universe. And that creates greater and greater and greater complexity. And you know, the whole story of how, you know, originally we just had hydrogen and helium and then the stars are formed and, and eventually stars died and exploded and heavier elements are created in the process of that and, and we’re all you know, Joni Mitchell song Woodstock. We’re all stardust. 40 million, billion year old carbon or whatever, 14 billion, we’re all the heavier, our bodies are completely made up of elements formed in exploding stars. And it’s, I kind of sense feel that the universe is one great big evolution machine. And by evolution, I mean, developing the capacity for God, Brahman, the ultimate reality, to become a living reality. Because there’s something more in that than there is in just unmanifest. State. It’s like, if you’re lying in the bathtub, you’ve been lying there for a while, the water doesn’t feel warm anymore, slosh around a little bit, it gets more enjoyable. So there’s, I mean, look, they use the word leela, in Sanskrit, the play of creation, there’s there seems to be something playful or creative and entertaining even in the whole marvelous universe that we see. Okay, talking too much question.
Audience member: Along the lines of what might be the evolution of the universe, and does God consciousness all Universal Intelligence is a guiding some evolution that we can know your exceptional person and having studied the the real self realizations of hundreds of people and spent hours with each of them, which is rather rare and no one else I know of has ever done that. And it would seem that you might have a very strong sense of how humanity not just individuals waking up, but how could she spoken to this about our species could be part of this evolution and awaking up as one, and none. So with all those three levels integrated in each of us and so forth, what do you see as possibly the trajectory of the awakening of, or the Enlightenment of, of our of the human species at this very pivotal time in human history?
Rick Archer: It’s good question. That again, it’s just my opinion, but it’s funny, because everybody’s talking about these questions. I, somebody will ask a question, or I’ll start to make a point. And I think I just had a conversation about that the other day, people, this kind of stuff is in the air, you know, people are thinking about these things. I kind of see that. The there seems to be some sort of epidemic of spiritual awakening taking place as far as I can tell. And that epidemic is being facilitated by technology and the internet and so on. If I kind of feel like the internet is not just sort of a technological breakthrough, it’s there’s a kind of a deeper, more cosmic or divine impetus for its for its creation as a tool through which awakening can propagate. And it’s critical that it do so. because I feel that it’s really the antidote to the the potentially dire problems that confront us. As I was saying earlier, I think all problems are just expressions of the collective consciousness of society. And collective consciousness means the aggregate of all the individual consciousnesses, if that’s a word, and if we have problems on the obvious levels of life, it’s because every single individual is either is contributing some influence, which taking collectively gives us these problems. It’s kind of like, if you have a forest and it’s you fly over it, and a plane, and it’s all gray and withered and dying. It’s because every individual tree is great, and weathered and dying, you’ll see that if you get down into the forest, and you see most trees dead in the streets, that, but if you want the forest to be green, then you can’t just work on the, you can’t spray painted or work on some, some broad, overall level, which doesn’t treat the health of each individual tree, each tree has to be nourished and made more green, by being watered, perhaps by being by being enabled to draw forth the nourishment that is in the ground that it’s rooted in, which it may somehow have lost contact with. So I kind of feel like, and hopefully, I’m not deviating from your question, but I feel like there’s an there’s a kind of a welling up from the most fundamental level of life awakening of consciousness. And I don’t know whether that’s being caused by human beings who are intentionally pursuing that, or whether it’s coming from the, from the side of consciousness from the side of the Divine, waking up from its slumber. And as it does, so, people are just sort of beginning to awake from their slumber, I get contacted by people all the time, who, you know, just somehow began to pop and they had no interest in spirituality, or they hadn’t done any practices or anything else. But, you know, they start to have experiences and get into it, and they start to have Kundalini things going on and whatnot, and they don’t know what it is. And so that just does seem to be this this epidemic of awakening. And I think its nature. It’s nature’s intelligence trying to reset the imbalance that has becomes kind of so dire. And we’ve got the pendulum has swung about as far as it can swing, without, you know, really catastrophic consequences. So it’s time for it to swing back. And it’s, yeah, so that wraps up the point, I shouldn’t keep talking. Yes.
Audience member: Would you think you? Would you say that it is swinging back? That’s your that? That’s, that’s
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. That’s my feeling. And it may be that as it swings, back, polarities will appear to be increasing, you know, they’ll be greater contention and political races, there’ll be greater violence here and there. And but I think that maybe that’s kind of like, possibly a purificatory mechanism that things have to come to the surface in order to, you know, if there’s a blood impurity or something, it has to come out as a boil and be lanced, and, or popped or something and then the blood impurity can be eliminated. There’s a lot of stuff. That’s what also just in terms of greater truth, read more revelation, there’s a lot of stuff that’s been hidden in the dark, that’s, that’s kind of coming to light more and more more transparency. So I really think that you know, the more fundamental level on which you can operate, the more powerful it is, the, the molecular level is more powerful than the mechanical, the atomic level is more powerful than than the molecular. And consciousness is sort of the most fundamental level of all. And if if consciousness is being enlivened, if we can operate from that level, and if we can help to participate in the live enlivenment of consciousness, then we’ve got a real pivotal position where we can really affect change, doing less than accomplishing more. It may seem kind of like hopeless at times that there are all these powerful corporations and political entities and so on and what can little old us do about them, and you can’t even seem to vote, to vote any kind of change to happen because the political system seems corrupt and so on. But I don’t know I, I kind of maybe I’m naive, but I, I kind of feel like this upwelling of consciousness that seems to be taking place in society. It’ll be a David and Goliath kind of situation where the power structures won’t be able to kind of survive the phase transition as as a more enlightened awareness, Don’s and humanity, if the power structures are corrupt and don’t dirt deserve to survive, maybe some of them aren’t and should survive. Yes, not.
Ask this pendulum that kind of get up and then it’s so out of whack. I mean, if we think there’s an intelligence that has no randomness, and no accidents, so even that has, yeah, cycles are natural. Yeah. So it’s like, maybe that’s what’s driving evolution, things have to get a little out of whack. Yeah, to push to the next level. I
Rick Archer: just, it could be I mean, it does seem that in all phases of life cycles are natural. There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna says, when, when Dharma is in decay, and dharma flourishes, I take birth, you know, which is not to say that Lord Krishna is going to show up anytime soon. But I think if we think of that, as the divine intelligence welling up again, in order to re establish a balance once the imbalance has reached, its its sort of extreme possibility. I think that’s the principle that was being stated there. Michael, if you have any thoughts as, as you sit there, just type in Michael Rodriguez was going to, I invited him to sit next to me tonight and goad me, because we had this great discussion in the car coming down today. And I was going through some of these points, and he kept, like, coming in with all these really great questions and points that made me think of things that I hadn’t thought of, and elaborate a lot more. And so I said, You got to come on stage at the end, just do that tonight. But he got hung up somehow, and didn’t get here a little while ago. But um, feel free to pipe up if anything occurs to you. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So one Dharma Dharma teacher said that life and God are one in the same Would you go over that? That what life and wife and God are one in the same?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I would say that, again. It’s doesn’t matter what I say, but in my opinion,
Speaker 3: well, it’s helpful and you seem like you’re
Rick Archer: kind of authority on anything, but in my wife, my way of seeing things, God is life and vice versa. And there is nothing but God ultimately, but you have to be careful when you say that to fall, not to fall into the trap of that, that levels thing that I was talking about where, you know, but still, if you think about it, if you think about what we’re actually interacting with, and what we actually are, but if you look closely enough, if you boil it down to its essence, there’s nothing but sort of this vast intelligence orchestrating every miniscule bit of, of creation.
Speaker 3: Okay, and how about Well, this was Ali Ashanti said that, that he said that, no, no, no, no, no, no, he didn’t say that. But this guy said he was I was too chickenshit to go to India. And because I was afraid to get hepatitis or amoebic dysentery, all that stuff. And he said that God has never made a mistake in the so called past he’s never made a mistake in the present. And he’s never made a mistake in the, in the so called Future.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And therefore he go to India. And if you get hepatitis, it’s not a mistake. Is that the
Speaker 3: Oh no, he just said, don’t worry about it. If you if you’re all upset that you didn’t go to India, God has never made a mistake. He probably didn’t send him Dannion Yeah, because he realized things were gonna get, you’re gonna get jacked up there or something. You know what I mean?
Rick Archer: Well, God helps those who help themselves and that’s kind of that that’s that three levels thing. On on a certain level, everything is divine, you can go to India and get leprosy and it’s all perfect. But, you know, it’s not perfect on the level of, you know, the obvious, you know, mundane level of your life.
Speaker 3: But just how about just the mistakes? I
Rick Archer: just don’t think there are any mistakes. I don’t think it’s possible. What is it? Well, again, it’s a level thing. There’s a certain level I wish there are no Miss takes nothing because everything is divine and perfect justice, it is an obvious level, you can make mistakes. And if you’re an if you take recourse, and I’ve seen examples of people who use as an alibi, the notion that everything is perfect, just as it is, to excuse egregious behavior, there’s no mistakes, I’m being a jerk. I know. But you know, hey, it’s not me doing it. So you just have to keep doing this thing where you, you don’t land, any fixed position of, it’s only this or it’s only that, or it’s only that it’s a mistake. It’s not a mistake, nothing ever happened. All three,
Audience member: to echo back to what we were talking about that. As I understand it, 600 million years ago, we were or life was largely single cells, and there was the Cambrian explosion. And here we are multicellular organisms. Because of as my friend Bruce Lipton says, the only way that cells could get any larger was to collaborate and come together as a multicellular. So now we have each other about 50 trillion human cells and about nine times as many bacterial cells. So there’s obviously been a lot of collaboration. And maybe that’s what’s going to happen with seven plus billion humans that were cells that the Earth and the universe created. And, and so what is it that cells realized and accomplished, that we’re learning to accomplish? And I really want to have numbers, I want to, I want to draw on your knowledge, so unique of listening to learning from 300 people who have all awoken to the state of grace, from many different pathways and different each in their own unique way. And so you’ve, you’ve availed yourself of that, and gone out and made this incredible record of Buddhism, Buddha at the Gas Pump, from your, your passion and creativity and service. So how do you feel that we can actually share a transpersonal? Collective already unified? Intelligence as a species? What does that look like? What?
Rick Archer: That’s a good question. And I don’t know if I can do justice to the answer, but I can take a shot at it. And I’m sure there could be wiser answers. But I do think that there’s it’s like, the, it’s natural for life to be diverse. And we wouldn’t want to eliminate diversity. And it almost seems like the more verdant and alive, something is like the rain forest, the more diverse it is, you know. So diversity is good. But without a kind of a, an underlying unity to stitch it together. Diversity is fragmented, and at odds with itself very often. So I think that as the underlying unity, wells up more and more, it won’t. It won’t make us sort of a monolithic culture worldwide, where we’ll all eat the same thing and believe the same thing and dress the same way. I think it may even, you know, result in a re Enlightenment or reemergence of ancient and traditional cultures, which really had a lot of wisdom and a lot to offer, but which have been kind of, you know, suppressed or wiped out by, you know, the modern culture. So I don’t know if it’s going to result in sort of, like a merging of countries where we would eventually have sort of One World Without separate country that I don’t know. But whether or not it does anything like that, I do think that there would be greater and greater harmony. The more that the more the unified value of life pervades the individual expressions of life, the more harmonized they will be with one another, just like in you know, in our own body, if there weren’t some kind of organizing intelligence which coordinated all the bio what is it called the bias biomes biomes. And, and all of our individual cells and organs and everything else, we would wouldn’t be able to function it has to be everything has to function in coordination with one another. And yet, a brain cell is not a liver cell and is not a skin cell and so on. We need the diverse Today in order to be a functioning unit, so I think that Well, I guess I kind of answered it. I don’t know if I need to elaborate anymore. The diversity should should be if you take like, you know, a garden, I interviewed David Spangler recently who was one of the original directors of Finn horn. And that interview will be going up in a couple of days when I get home. But Finn horn was this interesting place in Scotland where it was way up on the North Sea or something very inhospitable place near an airbase, and it was established in a trailer park. And one half of the trailer park was occupied by people who worked at the airbase. And the other half was this Findhorn community that started to develop. And the contrast was stark, the airbase place was just all the sandy drums, you know, scrappily soil and nothing much growing or anything else. The Finn horn was like this little garden of Eden with all this lush plants, and people even test, there was one guy who was skeptical of it all and brought some roses that he knew couldn’t survive in that environment, and gave them to rose plants and gave them to the people at Finn horn, he came back a year later, and these roses were thriving, and that made a believer out of them. And there is the reason the whole thing worked, is that it was founded by people who were in tune with all the subtle intelligence is of nature, the Dave is in the fairies and so on that, that helped to rule the plant kingdom. And they worked in collaboration with those entities, and made this really beautiful, lush thing, in a very inhospitable place. So, you know, that could be a little bit of a example for what the world might become if we were more deeply attuned to nature’s intelligence. And when I say nature’s intelligence, I don’t mean just the sort of universal intelligence that we kind of sense underlies everything. And we also see it, you know, pervading things if we look at this glass on a microscopic level, we see the oldest sort of intelligence structure things happening. But the it’s their agencies and Kristin Kirk, who will be speaking well, she’s gonna be up in watching, we’ll call it, Sandra fell. But she has experiences like this all the time, of the sort of subtler beings and subtler entities who which are responsible for which have roles to play functions to play, and in the governance of the universe, human beings can Can, can come to appreciate that and work in collaboration with that. So I kind of I guess I’m saying here, that in my estimation, and enlightened society to be with a society, one in which we’re actually not only harmonized with each other as human beings, and with the animals and the plants and everything else that we ordinarily see in this world, but that the world is teeming with life. Beneath the surface, so to speak, if we regard the surface as the gross level of ordinary perception, there are subtle realms, subtler and subtler and subtler realms, and there are more beings living in those subtler realms than there are on the gross level of the world. And some people are aware of them some quite routinely, I have friends who just if they were in this room right now, they would see angels and devas and so on. And these are very normal people. They’re not like, we will cookie folks, that it’s just their normal, everyday reality, that stuff exists. And it very much concerns and influences our human existence. But most of us are oblivious to it, I kind of see an enlightened society and as one in which we have joined that that subtler brotherhood in a collaborative way. And with tremendous benefit to all of us, they must be sort of shuttering and cringing all the time with the things that we do, you know, to nature and so on. And if we were living in harmony and cooperation with them, we could really have like a global Findhorn situation. Hey, somebody new asking a question. Given the mic.
I want to speak to the question that you just asked about the cells and how cells can form to create greater and more complex organisms and what are we missing? Right as humans to get that, and the diversity and I thought of cells aren’t biased. molecules don’t have thoughts about what they should join with or they shouldn’t and that we have all these ideas and concepts about what is and what is such as you Well, science tells us apart, right? Or science denotes our spirituality. So therefore, version to the scientific institutions or like, regions, business, politics, we feel, oh, what can little me do? They are terrible, they’re destroying our environment, they’re bad. And as a spiritual book, we tend to be more attuned to the subtle realms, you know, we, we ought to be more attuned to the spirits and, and, and those that we can’t necessarily see with our eyes. But I feel like it’s also important to embrace without bias, the, the bureaucracy and the corporations. And I have a group that I’m close to that is Buddhist, and there is an infiltration happening of big corporations. Yeah. And so we, for example, I have a friend who worked her way up the ranks and Facebook, and started a Facebook compassion program is planting seeds of goodness and Facebook. So they do a suicide watch. And if people are flagged for being at suicide risk, especially teenagers on Facebook, from things they post, they run Facebook now runs feeds, that have been shown to have to improve psychological states. So planting seeds of goodness in places we might initially find adversity. So more than just the spirits, we have to embrace the corporations, we have to embrace the politics. And let’s see what we can do there to join without bias.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s not going to just sort of happen miraculously, that the corporation is going to wake up one day and say, oh, let’s change our ways, you know, people are going to have to sort of be in those corporations who would have such, you know, intentions. Anybody ever go to the Bioneers? Conference? Yeah. I mean, that’s such a cool thing. And at the end of the conference, or a certain stage, they have this big long list that scrolls down the screen of all these amazing organizations in the world that are doing all these amazing things that we’ve never heard of, but there’s really a lot of cool stuff happening in the world. And, and, you know, so I guess, it’s a great point you’re making, it’s not like, you know, we’re just gonna have more and more people sitting around in the lotus posture in experiencing Samadhi. And everything’s gonna change. I think that, you know, all kinds of organizations and efforts and individuals within existing organizations are going to just be getting more and more and more active and, you know, helping to change things. Yeah, Kristen.
Kristin Kirk: This sort of just came up to share when you initially asked your question, it’s stirring things.
Rick Archer: This is Kristin Kirk, by the way, she’ll be speaking up in San Rafael tomorrow night.
Kristin Kirk: I just wanted to just simply say in terms of that, that waking up and recognizing that you’re not separate from anything else, then you care about everything on the outside the way you care about everything on the inside, so that in terms of that movement of an awake world, right, all of these things would be happening, because there wouldn’t be Separation from you in a corporation, there wouldn’t be separation from You, and the health of the water, there wouldn’t be separation from anything. And so that the the, you know, I had never thought about well, what if, what if? What if we all rest in that your question, because that’s also where the power is. Because we are all that truth. And to rest in the power of that openness, and wonder and creativity and positivity feels like it totally helps support that come into fruition.
Rick Archer: So in other words, if you’re really genuinely feeling one with everything, then you know, Whatsoever you do unto the least of these you do unto me, as Jesus said, you feel you know, if, if the environment is being decimated in some way, or animals or animals are being mistreated, or anything is happening, it’s it’s happening to you, it’s not just happening to something that’s separate from you.
Kristin Kirk: Exactly. Feel it that way, and you recognize it that way.
Rick Archer: You feel it. So I really appreciate you having me here. And it’s been a joy to talk to you. I feel like I’ve kind of over the course of the evening, some sometimes gotten pretty clear. Sometimes God had a hard time really articulating what I was trying to say and sort of zooming in and out as I went along. But, you know, I’m a work in progress. And my thinking about all these things is definitely a work in progress, which will continue the rest of my life undoubtedly, but I just love exploring all these sorts of thoughts and ideas and trying to get more and more clear about them and, and, you know, not only in terms of individual evolution, Enlightenment, but in terms of the planetary implications, because I think that’s really important. And I think there are definitely implications. It’s not just, sometimes people accuse spiritual people of just being self indulgent or narcissistic or something like that. It’s all About Me, me, me. But I think that a true spirituality is as relevant to the the world as it is to the individual who is, you know, exploring it. And I think we’re all in a position to really have an influence and so we really want to maximize that and you know, make hay while the sun shines Oh, thanks again. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
