Robert Augustus Masters Interview

Summary:

 Core Concepts

• Spiritual Bypassing: Using spiritual practices to avoid dealing with unresolved emotional issues, trauma, or psychological pain.
• Root Cause: Often stems from a desire to avoid pain and discomfort.
• True Healing: Requires turning toward pain with compassion and awareness, not away from it.

Psychological & Spiritual Integration

• Masters emphasizes an integral approach: honoring the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal equally.
• Therapy + Spirituality: Spiritual practices alone are often insufficient; deep psychological work is essential for full embodiment.
• Emotional Literacy: Understanding and naming emotions (like shame, fear, anger) is key to transformation.

Pain as a Portal

• Pain, when consciously entered, can lead to profound healing and spiritual openings.
• Avoiding pain (via meditation, drugs, or spiritual ideologies) often leads to stagnation or deeper suffering.
• “If you want the treasure, you have to face the dragon.”

Critique of Modern Spirituality

• Many spiritual teachers and traditions promote dissociation under the guise of non-duality or transcendence.
• Masters critiques the idea of “no person, no pain” as a spiritualized denial of human experience.
• He warns against false transcendence and premature detachment.

Intimate Relationship as Spiritual Path

• Masters sees intimate relationship as the “ashram of the 21st century.”
• Mature monogamy is a crucible for awakening—requiring vulnerability, honesty, and mutual growth.
• Relationship brings up unresolved issues, offering a chance for deep healing.

Embodiment & Shadow Work

• True spirituality involves embodying all aspects of self, including the shadow.
• Masters encourages intimacy with all parts of ourselves, even the ones we fear or dislike.
• He uses bodywork, breathwork, and intuitive psychotherapy to help clients access and release stored trauma.

Psychedelics & Caution

• He had a traumatic experience with 5-MeO-DMT, which catalyzed a deep transformation.
• Warns against overuse of psychedelics without integration—many seekers chase experiences without grounding.

Writing & Teaching Style

• Known for “holy poetics”—writing that blends prose and poetry to convey paradox and depth.
• Advocates for customized spiritual practices tailored to each individual’s needs and history.

Full interview, edited for readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Robert Augustus Masters. And you’ll notice that there’s three of me today, and that’s because my friends here, Fax and Sharon Gilbert, are somewhat expert in the work of Robert Augustus Masters, having led a book discussion group here in Fairfield, Iowa, on his book Spiritual Bypassing, When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters. And it’s funny because I thought about the three of us sitting here and it kind of reminded me of the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys. And that kind of segues nicely with the title of your book. [Laughter] And the theme of it. So, Robert, perhaps you could just start by giving us a brief sketch of your credentials. What your professional and spiritual backgrounds are and how you came to write this book and what you mean by spiritual bypassing.

Robert: Well, I’ve been working on myself since the ’70s. I began working as a psychotherapist in ’78 combining body work, gestalt, psychotherapy techniques, dream work in a very intuitive, eclectic manner. It became more and more integrative as the time went on. So, I’ve been doing the work for 33 years. And along the way, of course, I’ve seen many, many signs of spiritual bypass, which I did not name as such when I was much younger, because I was doing it.

Rick: You were bypassing yourself?

Robert: When you’re in it. Like I was very ambitious spiritually when I was younger. I really wanted to get to the big E, and I’d sit all night and strain and made, had all kinds of amazing state experiences, which kind of made my spiritual resumé very thick, which had a real downside as I discovered later. But I learned in my 40s, right to my core, that I was not going to get away from certain things in myself that I was hoping to transcend or dissolve or get past. So, I made a huge shift, which was to relating to them instead of from them. So I became intimate–more and more intimate with all these qualities that constitute what I call me. High and low, dark and light, dying and undying. I worked with all of it. And along the way, I saw more and more people using their spirituality to get away from things that seem very, very real to me. And I looked at their lack of development in certain areas. Instead of, for example, doing some high quality psychotherapy on certain issues, they’d meditate more deeply. They’d do more chanting. They’d become more obedient to the guru’s teachings. And there was a, and they would get stuck. Then they would blame themselves for being stuck. Never faulting a teacher or the teachings to any significant depth, but driving themselves into deeper and deeper layers of shame through this. I saw this more and more. And then a few years ago, a friend of mine said, “You’ve written a number of pieces on spiritual bypassing. There’s no book on it. Why don’t you put them together?” So I did that. And I was so happy to put it all together.

Rick: Did you call it just Spiritual Bypassing?

Robert: No, John Welwood coined it in 1984. And I was going to call my book The Many Faces of Spiritual Bypassing, but the publisher had the last say in the title. Because spiritual bypassing has all kinds of permutations. It can appear in our sexuality, our relationships, our emotional difficulties, and what I call blind compassion. There’s so many areas where it enters into, and I’ve seen how pervasive it is. Wherever you see places where there’s a lot of spirituality, like where you guys are in Ashland, Boulder, Hawaii, California, there’s a huge amount of spiritual bypassing, usually not named as such.

Rick: What do you think, if you had to distill it down to the ultimate core reason why people bypass spiritually, what would you say it is?

Robert: Avoidance of pain. To put it very simply. If you want the treasure, you have to face the dragon. We all know that on many levels, but there’s such a temptation when things are painful, difficult, to find something that eases us, helps us rise above it. It could be pharmaceutical, it could be sexual, it could be meditative. But what we’re doing is getting away from something that is calling to us. And the irony is when you go toward your pain, enter it consciously, step by step, you’ll find a very deep healing. And out of that, often as a byproduct, there’ll be profound spiritual openings. We just did a group for the past week here with a dozen people. Deep, deep psychotherapy, very primal work. But there was a lot of breakthrough moments where spirituality just was in the room, so thick and so real. It emerged from the work people did, not because of some meditative technique. By going to the core of our pain, to where it’s not so much pain anymore, it’s just intense, difficult sensation. And not just discharging it, but actually working with it. I’ll explain that later, what I mean by that. The opening was profound. And if I’d had these people who just trusted me the last week to work with them, doing spiritual techniques when they were in agony recalling certain things, or they were really upset, I’d be doing them a disservice. I could have done something very sweet, done some loving kindness practice, but I found it more loving in a very fierce sense to skillfully help them go to the core of what was troubling them. And the more they did that, the safer they felt. The more at home they felt. That was a funny blip on the screen.

Rick: Don’t worry about it.

Robert: I just got distracted because you just moved sideways faster than a human can move.

Rick: Well, we’re kind of special here right now.

Robert: Lateral limitation.

Rick: Sort of like Spider-Man or something.

Fax: How is it possible, by going into our personal stuff, the stuff that we fear, the stuff that we kind of subliminally avoid, the stuff that we might meditate a lot to get away from, what’s the mechanism that allows for greater ownership of who we are just by going into those limitations?

Robert: Well, it depends how you go into them. If someone goes into them too quickly, they may just get overwhelmed, and it may be a negative experience. If you go into it skillfully, ideally with really good help, you become more intimate with the qualities of it. So say you have an issue with, say, anger from childhood that still tends to infect your current relationships, I wouldn’t just have you blow off some steam or teach you how to repress anger. I’d want to help you connect the dots. And that means getting intimate with your history without emotion, family dynamics, and also cultivating enough spiritual focus so you can keep the whole thing in perspective. That’s the value. Spirituality is essential to this work, but it’s not enough. In psychotherapy, if it’s only psychological or emotionally based, it’s not enough either, because we can get stuck in our personal stuff, and the personal becomes overly important. In my work, to say in a very short form, I’d say the work is to honor the personal, the interpersonal, and the transpersonal equally. In other words, the personal, the relational, and the spiritual. Honor them all. And see, implicit in that is an integral approach, an integrative approach, where you have to work with shadow, body, mind, spirituality, social factors, collective factors. It’s all there. And I find most people know this intuitively, that everything has to be taken into account, otherwise we become lopsided in our development.

Fax: So that by using the psychotherapeutic methods that you have, some space is created around whatever it is that’s feared or avoided. And in that space, there’s greater relaxation into an identity with who we are as consciousness?

Robert: No, it’s not that simple. See, that’s part of it, is to have enough space around it, but most people put too much space between them and what’s happening. If something’s very painful, we want to keep a real distance from it, and the further away we are from something, the less data we will pick up from it. So when I’m doing very deep work with a client who’s really having a hellish time, I get very close to what’s going on. I’m empathetic, I pick up all kinds of signals because I’m in very close, but I keep enough distance so I can keep my focus. It’s the same as if you have a child and the child’s very hurt, your heart goes out to your child and is really hurting badly, but you also remain capable of calling 911, doing first aid. So it’s an art. When we go into our own painful areas, we want to proceed at a pace that works for us. Some people try and go there too fast, they’re so ambitious to get through it, and they end up getting burnt by the fire, so to speak, and not warmed by it and illumined by it, enlightened by it. So it’s a journey that’s unique to each person, so it’s not like I have a set formula. When I work, I work intuitively the whole time. If you watch me work with a group, there’s no set plan, but the structure emerges organically as people open up. And I often say to them, “I’m leading”, but in effect, what’s really happening, I’m being led by what I’m picking up. And I’m also being guided by the group’s intuition, so it’s a very organic process. And I wouldn’t just call it psychotherapy, it’s much more than that. But it does involve taking that kind of heroic journey into one’s underground–one’s difficult areas– and not just settling for oneness. I’ve said recently on Facebook, I put, “Don’t settle for oneness, go for intimacy.” Go for intimacy. Oneness is a given, of course it’s all one, but that’s the beginning to me of spiritual life and awakened life, not the end result. What comes after that is very interesting. What do you do with what surfaces? What do you do when you’ve had a profound spiritual opening and you still are being reactive with your husband or wife? And you don’t want to admit it because you’ve got some spiritual pride. It happens. It’s a very humbling process. We emphasize relationship a lot in our work because in a good relationship, everything that’s neurotic about you will be brought to the surface, which is both heaven and hell. But once it’s brought to the surface, you can work with it.

Rick: Of course, you’d probably agree that it’s sort of human and instinctual to want to avoid pain. I mean, we naturally recoil from it. But as I understand you, what you’re saying is if you manage to sort of use spirituality as a sort of drug to blot it out or sidestep it without really resolving it, then you’re not really… It’s still going to be lingering down there in the basement.

Robert: It’s still there.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s still going to hobnob you at some point. It’s still going to hamstring you at some point. It’s going to come up and trip you. And you’re not suggesting that people sort of go into their pain and wallow there indefinitely. I sense that you’re saying if you approach this properly, there will be a resolution. And whatever it is that is causing the pain can eventually be genuinely eliminated rather than suppressed.

Robert: Yeah, first step is to be aware of it. And second step is to name it. For example, we all have an inner critic. And many people are tortured by their inner critic. And once you name it, say you might call it… some people might call it dad. There’s all kinds of names. Whatever it is. Then you’re relating to it. Then you can see that it’s a quality of mind that you don’t have to identify with. And once you cease identifying with it, you see its roots more clearly. You see where it came from. And you realize that it will always occupy a place in your psyche. But it doesn’t have to be in the front row running the show. It can be in the back bleaches of your mind or in the outbacks of your mind. But that begins with actually naming it for what it is. Once you’ve named something that’s very difficult and painful, then you can move toward it. That means taking your attention step by conscious step into it, which is an inherently emotional journey. It means you probably will feel deep sorrow. You may grieve. You may rage. You may feel great shame. You may feel great joy and exaltation. All at the same time sometimes. So it’s like birth. It’s an inherently messy process. But something beautiful emerges. There’s no paint by numbers. I don’t trust any paint by numbers approaches. Here’s the five steps to this. Here’s the seven steps to that. I think our journeys are much more circuitous and winding than we would like to have them be–at least in our minds.

Fax: The mantra for Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, that book came out a while ago, was “Transcend, Purify, Glorious.” Why do you think that just transcendence by itself wouldn’t be transformative enough to enable us to recognize the totality of who we are, not just who we are as consciousness?

Robert: You know what? Real transcendence is transformative. But most of what’s called transcendence, in my view, is premature or false transcendence. It’s people using methodologies that can help them lift out of themselves, so to speak, before they’re ready, before they’ve gotten grounded, before they’ve embodied their humanity. And I sometimes say intimacy transcends transcendence. I mean, when we get intimate with what we are, we’re more whole. I think the deepest spiritual path is to be intimate with everything. It doesn’t mean you have to become it. But you develop such a compassion through that, because you see everyone’s agony, pain, suffering, joys, and you’re not removed from it from a safe distance. You’re actually in close where your heart can be wounded. I think the more advanced we are spiritually, the more sensitive we are emotionally. We don’t–just like we see anger, for example, is present at every level of development. I mean, Jesus got royally pissed off. All kinds of teachers have, and sometimes for better or for worse. But emotions don’t go away as we evolve. In other words, we’re not here to transcend our humanity. We’re to live it fully.

Rick: Yeah. Sharon, do you want to say anything?

Sharon: No, I was actually going to ask, along these lines. Fax has been reading another book of yours, Darkness Shining Wild. He’s told me a little about that–your journey some years ago, where you had experienced these dark regions of the psyche and so on. I wonder if that really fed a lot into your understanding of– when I say understanding, I don’t mean intellectual understanding, but your cognition of the wholeness of life as so inclusive of paradox.

Robert: I would never have chosen that experience or wished it on anybody. It was pure hell, but I was forced to become profoundly intimate with not just our everyday fear, but pure terror. Transpersonal terror. And I had no escape from it. I wanted an escape. I already was an advanced meditator, did tons of work on myself. I had all the tools, and I almost didn’t make it. I’d had seizures. I was pretty messed up. And I knew it, and I knew there was no escape from it. So I was forced to stay with it, but gradually I found myself sometimes sitting all night in terror, and I began to develop a compassion for the terrified me, even though it wasn’t even a me. It was just pure terror. My skill in working with people at a very deep level intensified. So I became extremely capable of working with very dark states. And I had more and more people sent to me from the spiritual emergency networks throughout Canada and the United States who had psychotic breaks that had spiritual features. I felt very at home with that. So I was kept in that state of terror and hell for almost nine months. When I emerged, I could not return to who I’d been before, which was the fierce grace of it. It was totally fierce grace, and I felt like a different person. I was humbled. And the arrogance I’d had before had gone. Spiritually I’d led many people, and I was quite well known at that time for spiritual reasons. And I felt myself happily embracing anonymity. I felt my humbleness. And the work I did changed. And I thought, “What an incredible gift,” but what it took was astonishing. I called it “darkness shining wild” because it was absolute darkness, but it was shining, and it was totally wild. There was no sense of meaning. I could not attribute meaning to anything. My sense of familiarity was shed completely for a while. So I was naked as a newborn in a way, but I also had a lot of my adult faculties still on tap. It was a very unusual time.

Rick: What forced you into that, or precipitated that?

Robert: I had taken a few psychedelics in the ’70s. Great experiences. Then I went into deep, deep meditation to access the same states without psychedelics. In 1993, someone gave me some ayahuasca. I took it. I had a gigantic dose of it. It was very powerful, but I was back to the old me in a day or two. Then I found out that within ayahuasca, the most powerful ingredient was called dimethyltryptamine, which is a drug that’s produced by the pineal gland. And I’ve heard it had a cousin called 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine, 5-MEO it was called, which is still legal, which is amazing, which is even stronger. It’s probably the strongest psychedelic on the earth. It’s not very popular because it can be very frightening. So some students of mine told me about it and said, “You can just take it between sessions. It lasts 10 minutes.” I took it and I almost died. I was completely unconscious physically. I was completely aware of myself. I was about to die. I didn’t breathe for two or three minutes a couple of times in a row. I almost did die. It scared the hell out of everyone around me and myself. I thought I’d be fine in a couple of days. I wasn’t. I was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t resurrect my old self. I couldn’t sleep. It was an enormous turning point. Of course, at this point, I’m very grateful for the experience, but at the time, it was unrelentingly hellish for a while.

Rick: It’s interesting. There’s a theme in many of the people I’ve interviewed where they’ve gone through a really intense fear phase in different ways for different causes and so on, apparently, but they come out the other side of it in a very profound, unitive state. There’s a verse in the Upanishads which says, “Certainly all fear is born of duality.” It almost seems like passing through that membrane of fear, you arrive at a point where you’ve kind of reached a more unified level of things, which is not to say that you can’t continue to explore and embrace.

Robert: You know fear can be present in a non-dual state too, but the key here… what I’ve taught people, is to adopt a non-problematic orientation toward fear. The arising of fear does not mean there’s a problem. It just means here’s fear. I often say to people, “Fear is excitement in drag.” When you expand the container, the fear mutates into excitement, life energy, for better or for worse, anger, joy, sexuality. And I think we tend to see the arising of fear as a problematic thing. We’ve got to medicate it. We’ve got to rise above it. Let’s try and get rid of it, maybe through sexual means. There’s such a reluctance to stay with it. And when we do, we tend to encounter a very young part of ourselves, like we call a little boy or a little girl in us, that is frightened. And instead of pushing that away or being embarrassed that we have a part of ourselves that’s vulnerable and scared and insecure, we bring that part of ourselves into our heart protectively, and then we move forward as a full adult, but we are in touch with our childlike side, our vulnerability, our tenderness. And that often shows up as fear in our system. And I think when we explore fear, we find enormous gifts in it–enormous gifts. And if I sit with fear–I’m pretty used to it now–it mutates very quickly. I don’t mind it. I almost welcome it in a way because it’s like an old friend– a somewhat unwelcome guest at times, but it’s not a problem.

Fax: How do you sit with your fear?

Robert: First of all, I sit with it, not on it. Many of us think we’re sitting with an emotion, we’re actually on it. We’re suppressing our anger, fear, or shame. By sitting with it, I hold it close, and I notice the sensations in my body, the quality of mind it generates, and I just watch it move. Other times, I’ll do something more overt. If I have to do something quickly, I’ll do a workout. And I’ll feel it move through my system very quickly, but I’m not trying to get rid of it. When I was younger, I was motivated to get rid of it, and I didn’t know it very well. I didn’t know my anger very well or my shame. Now I have a lot of emotional literacy, and we’re teaching that to a lot of people now– how to know our emotions inside out. One emotion we touched on earlier indirectly was shame, so if you’re, say, with a spiritual teacher, and you’re not where you think you should be, and the teacher agrees with you, he may inadvertently or perhaps deliberately sometimes use shame to try and put you in your place, to try and propel you into greater efforts. But what I’ve seen, it backfires if we use shame as an opening tool to try and get people to open up more.

Fax: Yes, shame is a pretty deep emotion. Pretty deep. And in my experience, it provides a lot of opening and intimacy and poignancy when you get to it, but getting to it is…

Robert: Well, here’s the trick. If you want to get to shame, you have to keep your peripheral vision really wide because shame mutates into other states very quickly. So, say, if one of us was ashamed right now, even in a subtle way, we would probably either get a little aggressive with another person nearby or with ourselves, or we’d dissociate, we’d withdraw, we might shut down, we might pull out of the room. In other words, we want to get away from shame because it’s a very unpleasant feeling. There’s a sense of wanting to dig a hole in the ground and disappear, like being caught in public with your clothes off all of a sudden. And no one likes shame, but the thing is if you stay with it just for a few seconds, then you feel your conscience is kind of activated, you may make amends if, say, you’ve hurt someone close to you. Say you’re sorry. And the shame moves through your system quickly. But when we don’t honor it and work with it skillfully, it often mutates into the states I mentioned plus guilt. I think that when you mix shame and fear, you get a toxic state called guilt that emerges from it.

Fax: It’s a kind of death, isn’t it, shame? It seems like it’s a kind of– it’s a part of us we don’t really want to look at because it’s almost like you have to die to get to it.

Robert: Well, hence the word “mortifying.”

Sharon: Right, yeah.

Robert: More French for you. It is mortifying, and there’s a type of shame that is toxic. There are people who are shamed in a way that doesn’t serve their wellbeing at all. It just crushes them. They grow up and they’re carrying it around. It’s hellish. But it’s not the shame’s fault, so to speak. It’s more like “what have we done with our shame?” We’ve tended to bury it. When a lot of men, for example, feel shame– it’s for women too, but more for men– I’ve seen it in men’s groups a lot. They turn the shame into aggression very quickly. They’ll find fault with the person that is maybe criticizing them, very quickly. I’ve seen many women do something that’s the opposite, which is to find fault with themselves–to take that and turn it back on themselves. But neither of those cases has to happen if we see shame for what it is. And that doesn’t happen if we don’t value our emotional life. If we devalue emotion–I think it’s kind of a lower level of us compared to what we are spiritually–we won’t get to know our emotions very well. And I think that emotion implicates us as a totality. That means it involves physiology–it’s feeling, cognition, social factors, even spirituality. It involves all of them. So if you study an emotion in great depth, you end up studying more than emotion. You study many things, including the very sense of a self that has the emotion. It gets very subtle.

Fax: So when you’re doing your work with somebody, you’re creating a safe space where they feel comfortable in just bringing up whatever is there. And it’s not like you sit down and say, “Well, today we’re going to work on shame,” or “Today we’re going to work on–.”

Robert: No, it’s organic.

Fax: Very organic.

Robert: So like our last group we did, maybe after people introduced themselves, someone’s really upset, I have them come to the middle of the room, and within 15 minutes they’ve opened up deeply, moved some emotions, had a lot of insight, and they look different. People see that. They feel safer. And within an hour or two of every time we do a group, there’s a sense of community. It’s like sacred community. Within that circle, people feel an incredible trust to go very, very deep. It’s not just because of me and Diane. It’s also because the people in the groups– I interview everyone who comes. I give them sessions on the phone or in person beforehand, so we make sure everyone is capable of the intensity that can happen in a deep group. But after a while, it feels very safe. Everyone’s safe to take their masks off, to be who they are, to be emotional, to come forward with maybe an upsetting dream, Knowing that even though it’s kind of scary to bring forward, it will be worked through. There’s a sense that every situation is workable. That’s a wonderful thing when we get in our heart of hearts, that every situation is workable.

Sharon: Right. Right.

Fax: Sharon and I are also teachers in the Waking Down work, and we have groups called sittings, and it’s a very similar process. We’re not trained in probably any of the ways that you’ve been trained in, but there’s a collective process that when people get to trust each other and there’s no particular goal that’s tried to be formulated. That things just sort of arise on their own, just the way you were saying.

Robert: Yeah, we feel a strong spiritual resonance with Saniel and Linda. We know them.

Sharon: Well they were the ones that recommended your book in fact.

Robert: Yeah, and we’ve had Waking Down teachers come and do psychotherapy with us. So there’s a lot of crossover.

Sharon: Yes, right.

Robert: Yeah.

Rick: We’re in Fairfield, Iowa, as you know, and a lot of people here practice Transcendental Meditation and have been doing that for decades. My shows are actually played on the local public access TV station, so people may be seeing them. There are a couple of sort of aphorisms that were popular in the TM movement. One was, that to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life. And so the emphasis was always: don’t put your attention on anything negative. You’re just going to reinforce it and make it stronger. And then the second principle was, water the root to enjoy the fruit. In other words, if you transcend, then there’s this automatic enrichment and nourishment and healing of all the manifest aspects of life, and so you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. In fact, if people wanted to go to some kind of therapist or whatnot, they were often debarred from going on courses and all.

Robert: I’ve heard that.

Rick: Yeah. But after decades of adhering to those teachings, many people began to think, “Well, things haven’t really quite worked themselves out as much as I would like, and maybe I ought to look into this or look into that and see if it could help me.”

Robert: Yeah, exactly. There’s such a desire to have our method for getting away from pain be absolutely successful. It’s like this fantasy we carry around of it is possible to have that, but take anyone who’s claiming to achieve that, put them in a relationship, and you certainly see things shift very quickly. I remember Pema Chödrön saying, a famous Buddhist teacher, a while ago she spent a weekend with one of her grandkids, and she realized very quickly she was not nearly as far along as she thought. It’s easy to achieve certain states when we’re in the meditation hall or we’re just doing a mantra, but when you’re in a relationship and the reactivity kicks in big time, that’s the real test. Can you then apply your spiritual eye to that and step into what you’re doing that’s so reactive and stop it? Usually not. It takes a lot of practice. It takes courage, too. And yet if we don’t wake up in the midst of it, our relationships are doomed to be quite shallow. And I see–I’m jumping around here a little bit– I see relationship, intimate relationship, as the ashram of the 21st century. Here’s the opportunity to finally use intimate relationship as a means of awakening. It’s not like a lesser undertaking, like here’s the householder and then here’s the person going off into the jungle to reach enlightenment. No, now we have the opportunity to go very, very deep through relationship. And that’s what I’m living with my wife, Diane, who I’m extremely close with, and I have a book about relationship called Transformation Through Intimacy that’s coming out in revised edition next year. I honor people like Saniel and Linda who are doing really deep intimate relationship as a path. It’s very honorable. It’s very difficult in many ways. But to me it’s absolutely worthwhile.

Sharon: Yeah, I’m reading–I’ve just started reading Transformation Through Intimacy on my Kindle. But I’m going to buy the book so both of us can read it. We got such value out of reading Spiritual Bypassing and it seems like what I’ve read of your newsletter and also the books that I’ve looked into, there’s always this, I would say, the core teaching that I’ve picked up from these different sources is a turning toward that which is uncomfortable. That if you’re uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It’s just something to become more intimate with.

Robert: Well put. Exactly. Yeah, and I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. And if you can have a partner you can do that with, what a lovely thing. Like I’ve often said to our groups, the most depth and growth in me I’ve had in my life has been the last five or six years with Diane. We have a very easy loving relationship, but neither of us can get away with anything. As far as I would like to, but there’s no escape. She’s my peer and she sees right through me. She recognizes all the different layers of my neuroses–all of that. So when I am stressed or tired and something kicks in that’s not so mature– if I don’t catch it right away, she is guaranteed to catch it. My job is to cut through the pride that doesn’t want to admit that, come clean, and get on with it. And the more you do that, the easier it gets.

Sharon: Yeah, I really can relate to what you said about not getting away with anything. It’s getting more and more like that with us too. There are times when I’d really like to be sincerely passive-aggressive and get away with it, but I can’t anymore. I get the look.

Robert: And then we get to blow the whistle on ourselves. What a wonderful thing to blow the whistle on ourselves, and to see our egoity–that dreaded thing spiritual circles often tend to put down, to see it with compassion. Here’s this aspect of me that I would call like a cult of one. That’s what I call ego. But it’s part of us. And to look at it with compassion. I’m like, I have to get rid of this, but I don’t want to identify with it. I don’t want to let it run the show. But it has its place in our psyche. Just like the child has a place in your psyche, the inner critic does, the spiritually ambitious part of you, the spiritual bypasser too. We all have a spiritual bypasser in us. That was one of the things I did when I reworked my book with the aid of a good editor, was I made sure that I made the point again and again and again that we all have that tendency. It’s not just a few New Age people or a few Vipassana experts or people atop the TM pyramid. It’s we all have that. And then the question becomes, what do we do with that tendency? If we pretend it’s not there, we’re in trouble. If we can say, it is here, here it is now, then we see something painful and we take that slow conscious step toward it. We turn toward it. So in a way, the mantra really would be no more turning away, or what am I avoiding?

Sharon: Yeah, I’ve noticed all of your books too, like in particular, Spiritual Bypassing, like the wince factor could have been there a whole lot more, except for the compassion and the inclusiveness that you wrote into it. So that never did anyone feel like, oh my God, I feel so ashamed because I’m doing this.

Robert: Well, the wince factor was there in books I wrote before I had that experience in 1994. Afterwards, the wince factor was eradicated from my system to the point where I could not reanimate it. I realized, because I’ve seen people who, somebody’s in a session, if they just simply can just say a phrase with a slightly raised tone, it’s a major step, because they were suppressed so much as a child. They raised their voice, there was an incredible danger. I’ve learned to, in other words, take into account each person’s capacity for how far they can go. Some people are ready to go right to the primal core of their deepest wounds very quickly. Other people need to inch their way in. And what we do is we teach people to become more knowing of their resistance to the process without shaming them for having resistance. We all have resistance. If we didn’t have it, we’d all be absolutely enlightened. We have that, and there’s a reason we have it. I think we’re here to honor that.

Fax: The other aspect of your teaching is just your writing skills themselves. You talk about holy poetics. Just the ability of language to actually transcend itself and to not so much explain, but reveal something deeper than the language on the surfaces that’s there. It just takes you to a feeling and an understanding of paradox, which most writers just hit on occasionally, but you seem to have it in every chapter.

Robert: I feel it a lot, so it’s natural. And what it is, I feel like I’m downloading. I write very quickly. First draft is off. I don’t have to change it that much. And I love poetry. I began writing poetry spontaneously when I was 21 years old doing a PhD in biochemistry, which is the wrong path for me, but I was good at it. So I was being pressured into it. But I wrote poetry in secret in the libraries where I was studying these extremely arcane biochemistry texts and doing my doctoral work. And I began writing poetry then and began torturing my housemates with renditions, but I would insist on reading it, sharing it. So I love poetry. So when I’m writing prose, if the poetic wants to come through, I let it. And I find, like you were alluding to, that paradox is more easily transmitted through that. If you say it logically and dryly, the words don’t carry it enough. And of course, what’s needed here too is someone has to read it with the receptive ear.

Fax: Well, I find that you’re writing, it’s not just the poetry, but the prose itself has those holy poetics that transcend and enable to fall into a paradox of one subject or another. It’s the prose itself.

Robert: Yep.

Fax: In fact, I get more from the prose than I do from the poetry. The poetry is a little bit too inclusive for me. I can’t hold it all.

Robert: I like poetic prose. Yeah.

Rick: One thing that’s taken me a long time to adjust to is the fact that apparently the correlation between higher consciousness and morality or behavioral perfection is not as tight as I once believed it was.

Robert: It sure isn’t.

Rick: It’s puzzling. That was an explicit teaching in the TM. It almost seems like it’s very hard to find an exception to the rule that apparently very high spiritual beings still screw up pretty badly sometimes–famous teachers and so on.

Robert: Well, it’s happening more and more. I mean, more and more teachers are being caught with pants and halos down. It’s just happening left, right and center, which I think is really good. It’s been exposed and it’s not like what I see as lopsided development. Spiritual achievement of high spiritual states, cognitive levels off the map sometimes, but the moral development is often quite low. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the sexual line of development is often not touched. Everything else has been worked on. For example, in the integral model, sexuality is usually not considered to any depth. So we used to give talks in Boulder. We’d bring that up and say, you know what, a lot of our sexuality is really an eroticizing of unresolved wounds. It’s not really healthy sex. It’s something quite different. But that was often met, wasn’t received that well in many quarters because it means here’s this feel good thing we have. Why jeopardize it? And yet, if you really want to look at your life closely, you have to include your sexuality. And teachers that haven’t or that have justified being sexual students, so many words perhaps saying, well, this is the dharma, this is a great teaching, look what I’m giving you. When in fact they’re just acting out their lust with someone who’s looking up to them and doesn’t have their own capacity to say no front and center. I do hold people responsible who get into that trouble with teachers, but I hold the teachers more responsible. And it’s very, very common.

Rick: Yeah, and of course many times these teachers were brought up in ashrams in India or in monastic situations where they never had to deal with anything like that. And then all of a sudden they’re in the West with all these pretty young girls looking at them. Brings up things they didn’t realize they had.

Robert: And a lot of Western teachers are doing it who don’t have that excuse.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Robert: And what’s frightening is to look at what some of the students will say when these things happen. They’ll say things like, “This is maybe a great teaching, how do I know this isn’t crazy wisdom, who am I to judge?” And I think even the most immature of us still has a bullshit detector. If we’re around someone who’s more developed, who misbehaves, we know in our heart of hearts something’s off, but we may be a little frightened to say because that person has more authority. So I think a healthy teacher encourages students to have access to their own innate autonomy and authority right from the very beginning, which means he or she will get questioned more, but it makes things healthier. It makes the possibility that this thing will turn into a cult less likely. But that’s uncommon, unfortunately.

Fax: The idea.

Sharon: Go ahead.

Sharon: I just wanted to ask one question after you.

Fax: Yeah, go ahead. Well, I noticed in your writing and speaking now and also in your newsletter, that you speak from a deep level of integration of opposites, obviously. And I haven’t read this autobiographical book that Fax is reading right now, but I wonder if you could speak a little bit about–did you have a spiritual awakening, daytime place kind of thing, or did you gradually emerge into this understanding of the paradoxical wholeness of life?

Robert: Well I felt it as a young child. I felt incredibly open to the mystery, so to speak. I had astonishing experiences, but there was no context for it. My parents didn’t understand it, so it kind of–it left me once I started school. And I was extremely good at school, so that kind of obscured that more mystical time in my life. And then I was 22 or so, I had my first psychedelic experience. The gates blew open. I discovered Ramana Maharshi. I read him. I thought, wow. I just looked at his eyes, and I felt a seed of awakening spread in me. I was just very young. I was immature, but it hit me. And I was in a very painful relationship at the same time, which was so painful, I had to go to therapy. I was not going to go to therapy. I was a hyper-masculine guy. I don’t do that type of thing. But I had to do therapy at the same time I was doing this other practice–more spiritual practices, and doing yoga. And as I did more of that, I had more and more deep openings, and I became capable of being conscious of my dreams quite often. So I worked on myself in my dreams. I would meet spiritual teachers. I would die. I had hundreds of unusual experiences. I did it until I got sick of the novelty of it. But I enjoyed the state experiences of bodiless consciousness–being aware in a lucid dream of the dreamer, and watching the whole dream dissolve. And yet I found none of that altered who I was in daily life or in relational life. I was still the same person, despite this incredible number of experiences. And I still didn’t get it then that that was not what it was about. As I said earlier, when I hit my 40s, I began to become intimate with all these qualities of myself, and I started to really grow and get more grounded. And I had a lot of openings along the way. I still do, but I’m not enamored of the states like I once was. So what? I mean it’s…

Sharon: They come and go.

Robert: They come and go. But something else doesn’t come and go, and I find that far more fascinating.

Rick: So was there a time, perhaps as a result of that ayahuasca-related drug, that something else which doesn’t come and go, ceased to go? A lot of people speak of a somewhat dramatic turning point. Not necessarily flashy, but sort of irreversible.

Robert: Well, I had my dramatic turning points when I was much younger. Like when I was much younger, for example, I had the experience of who and what I truly am, where it just hit me like a sledgehammer, and I was completely aware of who and what I am. And all I could say for a day was “I am,” and it was ringing through every cell. I had that when I was much younger. I had experiences like that. The 5-methoxy DMT journey exposed me to what I would call the dark side of the big picture. I felt what I would call transpersonal terror. It was so powerful. It was so uncanny. It was so… Even for me, who loves language, I could not find language for it. I attempted to when I wrote the book, but it’s pretty much impossible. And I would feel myself flung into–I would call it a non-dual state. Then things would arise that could pull or not pull. The fear was so strong. It wasn’t just like it was ordinary emotional fear. It was physiological. I’d had seizures. My whole system would be jerked by it. And I found it more skillful to flow with that than to try and pull back from a distance and witness it. So my witnessing became inseparable from my experience of these things directly.

Sharon: Right. So I would call it full-blooded witnessing. There was no escape, which I hated at the time, but after a while I realized this is wonderful. This is a witnessing that requires no separation from the object.

Sharon: Yes.

Robert: Then the witness would dissolve and there just was pure being.

Sharon: Yes.

Robert: And that would come and go. At that point, then silence kicks in. There’s not much more you can say.

Rick: I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a whole crop of teachers out there who would consider most of this discussion to be a frivolous distraction of some kind, because they feel like there is no person. Therefore, who is there to feel pain? And who is there to…? In other words, rather than going into all that, why not just ask the basic question of “Who is it that experiences this? ” And therefore they tend to brush it all off as a story. And they would consider this to just be some sort of indulgent entertainment going around and around in a never-ending sort of a…

Robert: What I would say to them is that they are suffering from dissociation and spiritual robes. They’re caught in that. And the test would be, can they be in a relationship? Can they be into another human being? Can they be authentic in relationship? And that’s part of the test. It’s so easy to rationalize, and spiritually rationalize dissociation from the difficult, from the painful. As if somehow that’s not part of the plan. Somehow that’s an error in the system. I mean, it’s here for a reason. Suffering can be grace. In fact, it should be grace. And I think our real work is let’s not turn our pain into suffering. Let’s not dramatize it and get lost in it, but let’s honor the pain. If you’re in a lot of pain, say just pure physical pain, agonizing back pain, and I’m with you, I’m going to teach you to go into that pain so deeply that you don’t mind it, even though it hurts like hell. If you were dissociated, separate from it, you would feel it less intensely. You’d learn less because you’re too removed from it. I think dissociation goes on at every stage of development.

Rick: What would you say to a non-dual teacher who said, “Yeah, my relationship is fine. I have a good marriage, ” but there really is no person who has this marriage because there is no one here. You know, it’s just an apparent person going through the motions, and yet it’s a fine relationship.

Robert: I’d say stop hiding in those concepts. Just get in there, get real, get messy, get involved, and you’ll find a deeper spirituality. I mean, it’s a valid thing to ask–inquire into who it is who’s having the experience, but you don’t want to let that inquiry separate you. See, it can get very subtle. Someone can be a very advanced meditator and use these methods to stand apart from life a little too far. It’s like that famous line in a James Joyce novel where he said, “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” I think a lot of non-dual teachers are missing something. Some aren’t. Some are really getting it. Like when Scott interviewed me, I could tell he was getting it. But a lot are not really sinking in.

Rick: Scott is considered a heretic, incidentally, in some non-dual circles.

Sharon: Scott?

Rick: Scott Kiloby. He’s this guy.

Robert: And Adyashanti has to be considered a heretic too, because he’s actually talking about a lot of things I’m talking about without probably going into them as deeply, but it’s getting how important it is to have a raw heart, to have an open heart. Even to have a broken heart, because a broken heart is actually a broken open heart. And if you stay too far from life, you don’t get that. And you also can get–people get so lost in the sense that this is all an illusion, except for, of course, their statement that it’s all an illusion. To me, this is very real. I mean, the four of us are showing up here. We’re all expressions of something profoundly mysterious and wonderful and everlasting. But here we are, each unique and each having our own peculiar paths to follow. And to try to trivialize that or to push it aside to me is dehumanizing. I feel angry sometimes at the teachers who I feel are dehumanizing the process of being human through cleverly using concepts that come from non-dual teachings.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a Tibetan proverb that I’m getting a lot of mileage out of these days, which is, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization. Don’t mistake realization for liberation.”

Robert: Yes, and then there’s Nagarjuna saying he feels so–in my own words, he says he feels so sorry for those who are clinging to emptiness. Getting attached to non-attachment. I mean, you know what? Without attachment, there’s no compassion. And I am profoundly attached to Diane. I mean, if she died tomorrow, I’d be devastated. But I’m not practicing being detached. I prefer to get–it’s not addictive, but to get so attached, there’s no escape. There’s no escape. And I find that more growthful. It keeps myself removed so I don’t have to get too involved. And I’m kind of a little removed from life. I’d rather get right in there, keep my eyes open, of course, and live it.

Rick: I’ll ask one more thing, and let you guys have a turn. But I think that in proper understanding of spirituality, detachment doesn’t mean some kind of emotional blandness or some such thing. Because it’s not the individuality that’s detached. It’s some deeper level that sort of has its independent status regardless of what’s happening in the relative. But the individuality can, for all appearances, be completely attached, completely involved, completely care about situations, even though there might be some deeper dimension of life that’s unruffled by those situations.

Robert: I think it’s so important to not make a problem out of attachment.

Rick: Right.

Robert: Like we have to stop demonizing it and looking down upon those who have it. Now, when it mutates into addiction, there’s a real problem. And then we have codependency. Like when I look at relationships, very briefly, I see four stages. One of the first is me-centered. That’s where two people are very selfish. There’s like two cults of one trying to get it on. It does not work at all. It’s very messy. It’s reactive. It’s unconscious. Then we go to we-centered codependent. That’s where attachment gets very unhealthy–what you’re alluding to. The next stage for me is we-centered co-independent. That means the people are close, but they’ve got their autonomy. Trouble is they’ve got too much autonomy. But it’s a necessary step. You have to have autonomy to have a good relationship. Otherwise you get fused. People get too close, and they can’t see each other clearly. The fourth stage to me is–I call it being-centered. It’s centered by pure awareness, but it’s not a dissociative awareness. It also could be called mature monogamy. And that’s, I think, what couples that are really going for it end up practicing. And when you practice that, you realize that the earlier stages are still within you. Any being-centered couple can still regress to an egocentric level. But they don’t stay stuck there.

Sharon: Right.

Robert: But implicit in that model, you see, attachment is neurotic in the beginning. It’s neurotic in stage two, stage three. Being-centered, the attachment is not neurotic. It’s part of life. And the more attached we are, I think, the more deeply we feel. And I think a lot of people who are lost in the spiritual bypassing we’re talking about, don’t feel fully. And I feel for them because they’re missing something. They don’t feel their relationship passionately. In nature, they don’t feel it fully. And to feel something fully, you have to open the body. You have to be undefended. And if you’re undefended, you’re going to get hurt. But you’re also going to feel things more fully. So that’s why I make such a strong case for feeling fully, passionately. Responsibly, too, but not to repress it. And if it is repressed, to get help to unrepress.

Fax: Yeah. Just to see if I understand what you just said. I think what you’re saying is that being has its own integrity. But part of that integrity is that it has no problem with identification, or attachment. It’s part of, you could say, what, the essence of what it is. It’s separate and yet at the same time attached.

Robert: Yeah. It’s separate yet at the same time feels and experiences pleasure, pain.

Robert: Yes, and at that stage, paradox is not a problem.

Fax: Right.

Robert: And see, at that stage, the mystery appears as paradox to the mind, but as truth to the heart.

Fax: Yes.

Robert: And this is not an intellectual understanding. You get it right down to your core, right to your marrow.

Fax: Right.

Robert: And then you just sense the inherent paradoxicalness of life when you go into it at a very deep level. And you don’t mind it. And at the same time, you still have your moral integrity on hand. You can…you know when something’s off and you can speak up. You have the capacity to say no. You have the firm enough boundaries that if someone crosses them, you can step in and not just say, “Well, that must just be your karma,” or “I don’t want to hurt you.” Sometimes you have to say no. We see many people on spiritual paths who have not learned how to say the simple word no from their guts. So they get walked on. They get hurt. They become too nice. They get attached to being nice–left, right, and center. It’s so important to have the capacity to say no–and that means your anger has to be on tap. Not to overuse it, but if you cannot say a strong, authentic no, life is more difficult. And then your yes becomes anemic. People won’t believe it as much. By the way, I want to say I appreciate the energy I feel from all three of you. I’m really enjoying sitting here doing this. This is my first time doing this, but it’s a pleasure.

Sharon: Well, thank you.

Rick: First time doing it with three people you mean?

Robert: No, doing this. I always do my phone things. I like to have my eyes closed so I can really focus.

Rick: Oh yeah, yeah.

Sharon: Right, yeah.

Robert: I do therapy over that way, and my interviews have all been phone.

Rick: Oh, I see.

Robert: Or more in person.

Robert: I like doing it with videos because it opens up a whole new channel. A lot of people like to watch it, and I can put it on YouTube and everything.

Robert: Yeah, yeah.

Sharon: I’m curious. When you do work with people and you say to be with them very closely as they go step by step, as they’re ready into these more difficult places–and naming it is a part of it– it reminds me a little of—and I learned how to do focusing, interrelationship focusing. Is it similar to that kind of a procedure?

Robert: It’s some, but we work with detail. So if I work with a new person in a group or a session, and I hear a little bit of history– I hear about a current situation that’s difficult, then I hear some early history, connect the dots usually very quickly because usually they’re pretty easy to do. Then I have that person shift to a more feeling level, so they feel what was going on that was difficult originally, and it’s connected to what’s going on now, and we’re not talking at this point. Maybe they’re on a bodywork mat. I’m doing some bodywork in their neck, their throat. As I give them sentences to finish, they’re directly tied into their particular story, and inevitably there’s release and there’s insight and there’s more balance. It’s not all done in one session, but that opens the door very quickly. And I have to involve the body because

Sharon: Yes.

Robert: almost everything that’s difficult is in the body. So if we could talk forever about your difficulty, we would say, “It’s a shame.” But if I cannot get a chance to work on your neck

Sharon: Yes

Robert: or jaw, we may not touch it very deeply. Or if, say, your breathing is locked up across your diaphragm and I’m releasing that and you’re saying certain things to certain people as that happens– see, I call that connected catharsis. It means there’s an opening and release, but it’s connected to specific events.

Sharon: Right, yes, yes.

Robert: It looks like therapy, but sometimes it feels more like a shamanic.

Sharon: Ah ha, yes.

Robert: It has a ritualistic feeling to it. It often makes the hair raise up on your arm sometimes, and it’s very deep work. And we often work with people who have had extreme abuse histories, so we have to go in there very carefully and very intuitively. And I’m doing that, and Diane’s doing it too, so we have both–she’s very intuitive. So we both are going in there with that person and holding them. How can I put it? It’s like we’re being–we’re providing them with a crucible and a sanctuary at the same time. At the same time, the crucible supplies the necessary heat to do the melting down of some resistance and blockages, and the sanctuary so they feel safe enough to do that. Then if they feel the tears come, they can let themselves flow. And the emotion flows freely. There’s such a spiritual ease afterwards.

Sharon: A cleansing, yeah.

Robert: A cleansing.

Sharon: Yeah.

Robert: Yeah.

Sharon: Yeah.

Sharon: You could…

Fax: A lot of people have been involved with spiritual bypassing, different paths and spiritual teachers for quite a while now.

Robert: Yeah.

Fax: Would you say that there’s an increasing interest in your work? Have you noticed like in the last year or two years there’s been more

Robert: Yes.

Fax: well received, more people coming, and so on?

Robert: Yeah, yeah. And I like to–there’s been more people who I’ve described as New Age who are going, “Oh my God, oh my God, that’s me!” And it’s like 10 years ago they weren’t ready for it. Now they can hear it, and instead of defending the secret or whatever to me, they want to talk about some things they’ve hidden from others because they were embarrassed to admit them. That they’ve actually had doubts that they are creating their reality or that they aren’t manifesting money just because of the way they’re thinking. They’re seeing through that type of magical thinking, and they’re relieved to talk with me. And inevitably, most of them end up doing therapy on the phone, and then I often say, “If this is good, come to Ashton for a three-day intensive with us. Just do like five, six hours of face-to-face therapy, spiritual work, body work.” And that’s all the time we usually need to take it pretty far. And that’s what happens. So more of that’s been happening since the book came out.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah. That’s…

Robert: Yeah.

Fax: Are your groups like a moderate size, say 10 and 15 or smaller?

Robert: I’m lowering them. I used to do groups of 45 or 50 people, and I could do a lot of work. I’ve had a lot of methods, and I’m pretty fast. But in the last number of years, I’ve narrowed that down. So our last group was a one-week group for just 12 people. And we’re going to limit our groups to 12 people now because I can get around to each person three or four times in a group. And things deepen with a small group. No one gets left out. Everyone is worthy of being there. And our favorite group, other than the bigger week-long ones, is a couple. We love doing couples work because that’s a group. Watching the energy between two people, working with that. And individual work is a pleasure too. And every session is different, so we have no plan, so we get to be creative each time. It’s a new therapy for each person each time.

Rick: In listening to recordings of you and reading your books, I kind of got the impression that you feel that therapy is almost obligatory on the spiritual path, that there is no real spiritual path in the marketplace that could be adequate to bring a person all the way, if there is such a thing as all the way, without therapy as an adjunct.

Robert: Yeah.

Rick: Do you agree with that?

Robert: Yep. I think so. I think it’s… It doesn’t mean you have to be really, really damaged. Sometimes the therapy, at its best, is for those who are already doing really well but want to do even better. We often get people who have done a lot of work on themselves, are very mature, and they want to take it even deeper.

Rick: So what about the whole history of spirituality prior to, let’s say, and people just did spiritual practices? Do you feel like somehow they never achieved the sort of fullness of development that is possible now?

Robert: I think with very rare exceptions that could have happened. I really do. I think it can still happen with very rare exceptions, but I think those people, in a way, are entering the realms that therapy would take them into spontaneously rather than bypassing them. Like Ramana went into a place of pure terror when he was 16, and he was already a rare being. It blew him open, and it wasn’t just a state experience. It was a stage. He stayed there, as far as I can tell. He stayed there. But I think a lot of teachers get lopsided. Even when like Ramana, they were not able to teach about the psychological and emotional dimensions of life. They were really… He was very adept at teaching about the big picture stuff, the inquiry process, wonderful stuff, but to me it’s a partial path. It’s not truly integral. I think we’re in the age now where we can actually be integral in our work on ourselves. So I think an enlightenment is possible now that is more full-blooded, full-bodied, involves the whole being. And it involves getting right down into our, round down to our toes, where we’re so embodied, we’re so here, we’re so relational, and we’re also absolutely relational with the divine. And it’s all happening at once. So the beloved is sitting across from you, and the beloved is also pervading you. And it happens all at the same time. And after a while it becomes quite ordinary that that’s occurring. Not like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.”

Sharon: It’s not a state, as you say it.

Robert: No.

Sharon: It becomes a permanent…

Robert: It is. It’s like a clearing we step into, and after you step into it, it’s really hard to step back.

Rick: So you must resonate with Andrew Cohen and some of these evolutionary enlightenment people who feel that the whole world of spirituality itself is breaking new ground.

Robert: I do and I don’t. Because, say, with his system, the lack of emphasis on psychological and personal work is a real shortcoming. Also, to me, I think the age of the guru is coming to an end. So there’s still a few around like him and a few others, but I think the… I’ve always liked what Thich Nhat Hanh said a long time ago about the next… Buddha will not be a person but a community. And implicit in that is a community of peers.

Fax: Right.

Robert: So, who have worked on themselves enough, there’s no spiritual pride there, no spiritualized egoity or narcissism. There’s true health and there’s accountability. Without that, you know… I just think the age of the guru is done. I mean, it had its time, and I think it’s not fitting now.

Sharon: Years ago, Arjuna Ardagh wrote a book called Relaxing into Clear Seeing. And he had a thing in there that really stuck with me, which is talking about who would the next Buddha be. And the traditions say he’ll be called Maitreya Buddha.

Robert: Yes.

Sharon: And Arjuna said, “Maitreya means friend.” And so he postulated that our teachers, our gurus, would be our mutual groups, our friends, that were somewhere in deep mutuality.

Robert: Yes. It’s just like every ship needs a captain, but if the captain thinks he or she is better though than the deckhand, there’s a problem. And also, if there’s too much egalitarianism, there’s a problem. If everyone… Actually, everyone is at the same level, there’s a problem. You have to honor those that are more mature without getting down on your knees and looking up at them like they have all the power and authority.

Robert: But see, this all requires a certain maturity. It does, and I think that’s why authentic community is a very rare thing, because it takes very mature people to do it. Not that many people who are capable of it would actually want to do it. For most of us, the community of just being with a partner is enough. That takes… as you both know, it takes… how long have you been together?

Sharon: 35 or so, maybe almost 40 years now.

Robert: Wow.

Rick: And I’m in my 24th or something.

Robert: Wow. But that takes something just to maintain that and have that.

Sharon: And we’ve been through all the stages that you listed there of relationship and still find ourselves falling into all of them several times a day.

Fax: True.

Robert: Isn’t it funny though? One thing we do, Diane and myself, if one of us is reactive, we’ll have that one exaggerate it. It becomes hilarious very quickly, because there we are taking ourselves so seriously. Like, “Look, look what he just said,” or “what she just said.” And we can get so caught in that despite all our spiritual knowledge and maturity. But when we exaggerate it, it becomes so obvious what we’re doing. It’s like high-class melodrama. Or we also sometimes have people have what I call a conscious rant. You have a really hard day, you’re tired, you come home, you give the context, say, “Here’s what’s going on. I’m going to have a conscious rant.” You go nuts for three or four minutes, and it’s observed by a compassionate partner. Then it’s done, which sure beats getting into a fight or being in a bad mood for hours.

Sharon: “Yeah, yeah. I would say I would agree with you in the beginning of that book on relationship… That relationship–intimate relationship–with a committed partner in a monogamous relationship where you’re both aiming at that mature level of mutual realization, that is a crucible for awakening, which is, I think it compares with any cave that a yogi would sit in for generations.

Robert: It is a very hot cave.

Sharon: It is, yes.

Robert: And in that, I think we realize more and more that there is transformation possible through intimacy. And there’s also freedom through limitation. We realize the limitations of our relationship actually are liberating us because we’re being held–we have to go very deep within a fairly narrow confines, and that we’re not allowed to distract ourselves or leave the container of the relationship and stray elsewhere, so it deepens our focus. I think that’s a wonderful thing. And in that, we have to really say, “I have to protect the integrity of this relationship, this container, and so does my partner.” It’s a sacred thing.

Rick: It’s true. I was on a monastic program for many years called Purusha in the TM movement, and, you know, living with a bunch of single guys. And if somebody started to rub you the wrong way, you could just kind of gravitate off in some other direction, hang out with somebody else. And it was interesting to see how idiosyncratic many people became– myself included to a great extent. You know, when I got married, I transitioned quite abruptly from Purusha to being married. And, boy, the shit really hit the fan, you know, because I wasn’t used to sort of being with one person, and you can’t just walk away if there’s some kind of friction. You have to actually work through it.

Robert: Then you discover what’s right about what’s wrong. In other words, you take what’s not working in the relationship, and it becomes kind of a compost for more growth– assuming that both people are willing to work with it.

Rick: Yeah, it took me a while to realize that. And I struggled and resisted, and tou know…

Robert: You know, something you said just a moment ago struck me about the idiosyncratic quality. And I think it’s so important to honor our individuality. We’re each a unique flowering. There’s never been another one exactly like us. And to not honor that in the name of some bigger picture, I think it’s a discredit to our humanity.

Rick: I was maybe obsessive. This might have been a better word. In my case, it was possible to become really sort of kooky and obsessive and off balance without the sort of counterbalancing quality of a close relationship. And maybe that was just me. I mean, I’m not saying that happens.

Robert: It might have been you just were going from one extreme to the other.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Robert: Yeah, that often happens.

Rick: Anything?

Sharon: Not at the moment. I’m still…

Rick: Here’s one for you. Do you feel that a person could sort of spiritually bypass all their lives and never break out of it? That they could somehow just get stuck in that groove? Or do you feel that there’s some kind of force of nature or something that’s eventually going to shake them loose and make them progress?

Robert: I’d say both. But there are people who could do this their entire lives. They might have done a spiritual path their whole lives, and they get older and they get kind of rigid in their ways, and they stick with it. And they stick with it, and what’s unresolved in them does not get resolved just because they’re dying. When they die, of course, they may go into a very deep, transcendent state, but they have not completed something. I think ideally each of us would complete all our unresolved issues before we die. And to do that, we have to be willing to dig down deep and see what they are. There are some things we may not even know that are in us until we dig down. But once you dig down, it all surfaces. And once it surfaces, you can work with it. And then it becomes just more you. It’s like another piece of you. Another piece of Rick has now been reclaimed, so you become an even fuller human being.

Fax: I’m pretty full.

Rick: Got you full human beings here.

Sharon: I just wanted to say you how much I honor your orientation to actually use a person’s story as a gateway toward their more full embodiment of consciousness.

Robert: Yes.

Sharon: Because that’s such an angle that has become popular in the last 10, 20 years with some teachers, particularly in the West, is that’s just your story and don’t get into your story. And in some way, the story of a person’s suffering is considered to be irrelevant.

Robert: It’s totally relevant. To me, the teachers that do that are actually dangerous and deluded. Those are strong words, but I really mean them. Because if you have students around and you tell them it’s just your story, or that’s just your story, and they’re looking up to you, they may then feel like they are not allowed to go in there and look at that, and they may find what is unresolved. Of course, it’s going to keep on polluting their current life. If they haven’t dealt with, say, a difficult time with their father when they were a kid, how would—say it’s a woman—how would she deal with her husband’s guilt? She isn’t. And if the teacher says, “That’s just your story,” that invites an incredible amount of bypassing. And it makes people feel ashamed for having a story, for having a… it dishonors it. And like you said, each of our stories are essential. If I want to know someone’s… the way to their liberation, I find their story is an essential part of it. Because each person has a unique set of circumstances that have shaped them as they are. Once we tease that apart, we can see the dynamics that have made them the way they are. It’s so liberating. And I think… yeah.

Sharon: It’s so liberating in a non-generic way, too. It’s a very specific path for that person.

Robert: And it requires… it means that you have to have a specific practice uniquely tailored for that person that is psychotherapeutic, spiritual, somatic, psychological… you know, it crosses the board, but it’s uniquely suited for them. So when I teach people meditative practices, I try and find something that works uniquely for that person. I don’t say, “Okay, everyone has to just do a Zen method or a Vipassana or whatever.” Maybe someone’s method is to dance. Or for me, I like to work out a lot. So if I’m at the gym, I’m doing meditative practice while I’m doing the weights. It’s a perfect time to work with my breath. Or if I’m doing an aerobic workout, to be aware of every sensation I can feel in, say, one leg, the other leg, my hips, my breathing. So I’m getting a massive workout, and I’m also paying attention the whole time.

Fax: Do you ever work with people where you don’t give them a regimen of different things to do? And just…

Robert: Yeah.

Fax: Other than just maybe talk?

Robert: Yep. For some people, just to talk is enough. There are people who’ve never had their story heard. When that happens, Diane and I become just extremely receptive listeners, and that’s all we do. But at a certain point with them, there’ll be a little crack. We’ll step in, ask them to close their eyes, guide them into a deeper sense of themselves, do some other practice, and then the work deepens. But they mean to talk for a while before that happens. Other people don’t want to talk. It’d be wrong to talk with them because they’re so full of tears and grief or anger. It’s important to start with that. Then they can talk once that’s been opened up. Then the insights will emerge. So it’s not one size fits all.

Sharon: So it could be a better process?

Robert: Not at all. It can’t be.

Rick: I guess these teachers who say it’s just your story, I guess what they’re trying to do is break one’s myopic absorption in personality and individuality and point to something more universal or transcendent. I guess that’s their motivation.

Robert: There’s too much of a rush to get to the universal. I think what you want to do is get to the universal without trampling over the personal to get there, and you’re rushed to have it. And sometimes people can get lost in your story. Say in standard psychotherapy, there are people who’ve gone to a therapist two or three times a week for years. We meet them, and we see in a sense no growth because they’ve had a codependent relationship with a therapist. Therapist gets some more income. They get a person that listens to them. That gives therapy a bad name.

Fax: On the other hand, putting the whole thing with Ramana Maharshi and the procedures that came out of his teaching, to turn back and to investigate who am I? Can provide spiritual recognitions which can form a basis for doing the work that you’re speaking of. It provides more of a platform and more of a foundation to go into those areas. In other words, it’s like a prerequisite.

Robert: It is. It is. So if someone’s doing very deep work on their abuse history, we want them to have some capacity for mindfulness, some capacity for true awareness. Because when they get in there, I want them to be able to still hear what we’re saying, to not get completely lost in it. Or if they do get lost in it, if I give them a signal, they can come out. It’s like a thread. You know, the Minotaur myth where the hero carries a thread all the way down to meet the Minotaur. There has to be that thread of connection. So if someone has an abuse history, we will see them leave their body, so to speak, during the work. I’ll sense where they are. We call them back in. Without shaming them, just say, “Okay, where did you leave? Where are you coming back in? What was happening for you right before that happened?” There’s a tracking of it. And there’s a sense of inviting them to be a co-witness of the process with us, even though 95% of them is completely involved in the extreme pain of it. So you’re right. There has to be that cultivation of a spiritual perspective.

Fax: Yeah.

Robert: And the courage to go into these places, these zones of ourselves that are very uncomfortable and dark. But I like to say again and again, here’s the treasure. We all want the treasure, whatever it is. And there’s a dragon there. And we can’t bribe or seduce the dragon. We have to face it. We have to get into it. We have to somehow become intimate enough with it that we can get past it. And that’s not easy. And yet that very process–here’s the beautiful part–that process of facing the dragon prepares us. It readies us to make wise use of the treasure. If you got the treasure too fast, you wouldn’t know what the hell to do with it. You’d abuse it, you’d spend it all, you’d fortify your egoity through it. But once you’ve been sufficiently prepared by your encounter with the dragon, then you can use it well.

Fax: Right. I mean, I’ve worked with people that have come into greater recognition of themselves in both ways. They’ve come in by facing the dragon and then finding the treasure. And in a sense, they’ve found a treasure that prepared them to face the dragon in terms of their identity with consciousness. It provided a foundation for their courage to go into facing the dragon.

Robert: Exactly. Or even intuiting. Intuiting that makes a huge difference.

Fax: Right, right.

Sharon: Yes.

Rick: There’s another theme I’m reminded of, and that is that it seems to be quite common these days that people read a few books or go to a few satsangs, and they get an intuitive sense of what’s being taught, and they somehow come to, and they hear teachers saying to them, “Give up the search.” You don’t really need to do anything. Practices are only going to reinforce the sense of a doer. And so they kind of get into this intellectual mood that they have arrived already. And that is, to my mind, is spiritual bypassing big time, because they’ve actually bypassed the entire… I mean, they haven’t actually bypassed it, because they haven’t really begun it, but in their mind they think they’ve completed it. And yet, there could be, like, you know, miles to go before I sleep, so to speak.

Robert: I remember a story about the Dalai Lama years ago, where a man from the audience said, asked, “How can I get to enlightenment more quickly?” And apparently the Dalai Lama, all he did, he sat there, and he started to weep. And then he spoke and he said he felt so sad for this man. This man must be in such pain that he’d want to get there in such a hurry. There’s that spiritual ambition we have to address in ourselves. We want to get there too fast. And we live in a fast food culture, so of course we want our spirituality really fast. Here’s a weekend–suddenly there you are, you’re doing satsang. Suddenly there you are, you’re calling yourself a teacher, without having gone through what you needed to go through to be a really good teacher.

Rick: Yeah, I actually talked to somebody who used to attend a lot of satsang, and he said it was quite common to hear people speaking among themselves, “I can’t wait until I get awakened because I want to quit my job and become a spiritual teacher. It seems so much fun.”

Robert: But we can spiritualize anything.

Rick: Personally I…

Robert: But then I think life brings us back to our humanity again and again and again.

Rick: Personally, I prefer to… I don’t try to figure out where I’m at, so to speak, but if I had to err on one way or the other, I’d much rather err on the side of thinking myself to be much less advanced than I actually am, rather than much more. It seems like it’s a more productive perspective to take.

Robert: Yeah, I think after a while we stop evaluating how far along we are. If you’re on track, what’s beautiful, once you get on track, you know you’re on track. You intuit it. it doesn’t matter how long it takes as you know you’re on track.

Rick: Right.

Robert: You just sense it. When you get off a little bit, you get back on. But there’s a sense of being on the path that really works for you. And once that happens, I think there’s a real ease in us. We just know. Then the ambition to get there in a hurry, it just isn’t there.

Rick: Yep.

Fax: Yep.

Robert: And what you’re talking about too is what I would call spiritual greed. There’s a greed to have it. So the New Age people talk about having it all, but that can pervade all layers of spirituality– like wanting to get somewhere before we’ve been there.

Rick: Yeah.

Robert: I had a guy once say to me–he was a psychic–many years ago. He was about 400 pounds. I remember this. He said, “I’d love to be where you are, but I would not want to go through what you went through to get there.”

Rick: Ah, interesting.

Robert: And he went further to say he didn’t want to go through anything to get there. But we all have our suffering we have to go through. And it’s not like we wish it on each other, but it’s there.

Rick: To a certain extent, maybe the zeal of youth–you know, we’re in our 20s and we’re just gung-ho and adamant, and now we’re in our 50s, 60s, and we kind of mellow out a bit, you know?

Robert: Well, I find I enjoy each decade more. I mean, I’m almost 60–I’ll be 64 this year–and I’m enjoying my 60s a lot. I liked my 50s, but it gets better. I mean, the body is behaving quite as well. I mean, I get hurt a little more when I’m working out. I can feel the aging effects. I have prostate cancer–which is going really well, actually, the way I’m dealing with it. But I find myself enjoying it as I go along more. And I feel more and more intimate with my own mortality, my own death.

Sharon: Yeah.

Robert: And I had that experience. I came very close to death, and I’ve had… Many times I’ve come close to death, and I feel quite close to it. It doesn’t feel like a–to me, it’s just like the opposite isn’t life, it’s birth. Here’s birth, the door swings one way. Here’s death, swings the other way. And my sense of what happens after death is what’s happening right now. I feel more at home with it as I get older. I thought about it when I was younger, but I was going to live forever, of course.

Fax: Well, being close to death must give you a greater passion for life.

Robert: It does. Yeah, I think when we avoid death, like we do in our culture, it kind of deadens us. And the irony is when we get close to death, we become intimate with it, we’re more enlivened. We live brighter. If you’re aware of each other’s mortality, then your time together becomes even more precious. I’m sure you both feel that. You’re just aware of this as you age. Wow, look what we have, and how sad it will be when we part, but how grateful I am for having had this. It’s that mixture, isn’t it?

Sharon: Yes, always.

Robert: Sadness of the separation, and yet, my God, if we didn’t–weren’t mortal, we had to go on forever, we wouldn’t be as close.

Sharon: That’s right. That’s right.

Robert: Yeah.

Fax: I would say that my most profound spiritual experiences are the ones where both powerful witness and limitation are both there together.

Robert: Yeah.

Fax: There’s a…

Robert: When you feel the limitation and you feel the infinite expanse of our deepest being at the same time.

Fax: Yes, there’s a poignancy that’s just so alive and full.

Robert: A beautiful poignancy. It’s a poignancy of the particular. And what a lovely thing. How unique each flower is, each person. And aching to be known before its demise.

Fax: Right.

Robert: And then if we know it well, I think we have a good death. We can really open ourselves to the mystery of death more fully.

Rick: Woody Allen had a spiritual bypassing joke. He said, “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Robert: I remember that one.

Fax: It’s in his book.

Rick: Oh, it’s one of the books?

Fax: Yeah, it’s in his book.

Rick: Ah, I love it.

Robert: But that’s a bit like spiritual bypassing in general, isn’t it? I don’t want to be there…

Rick: Right.

Robert: when the pain is there. Let me be somewhere else. Maybe full of pharmaceuticals or having an orgasm or being overworking or watching a bunch of TV or doing meditative ascension practices. Let me be away from it. And there’s our fear calling to us. Not just our fear, but all the pain. And if we don’t turn it into suffering, it’s not really a terrible thing.

Rick: That’s an interesting… go ahead, I’m sorry.

Robert: And most of us grow the most when we had our difficult times. I mean, when a couple is really flying high, usually they don’t grow that much. They enjoy the role. But when the difficulty is encountered and they work it through, they become much closer and more capable the following time when difficulty emerges. And yet most of us have to be hit pretty hard to really turn the corners we have to turn. I mean, my experience in ’94 was like a cosmic two by four. Okay, I’m not getting something, so here it comes and there’s no way of avoiding it. And part of my story I didn’t mention is when I took my first puff of this substance, which I knew in the literature knocks people out completely, I was still able to sit there. And in my arrogance, my chutzpah, I said, “Give me another puff.” That was it. That was the peak of my chutzpah. And I got nailed.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah.

Robert: I thought I could take it. I realized, my God afterwards, I couldn’t. There’s a breaking point.

Rick: Interesting. One of these days I’ll probably end up interviewing an ayahuasca person just because I kind of run the whole gamut of spiritual trips in this interview series.

Robert: Well, we’ve worked with many, many people who’ve done a lot of ayahuasca. I have many people who’ve had bad drug trips. But the ayahuasca phenomenon is a little scary because there’s many people who take it hundreds of times. The door opens and they want to go through the same door again and again and again. It’s encouraged culturally. That’s how they do it in the Amazon. So what I primarily see with people who have done a lot of it is not only no growth but no integration. And when they open up, they realize they’re desperate. They cannot integrate some of the things they’ve seen. They’ve seen so many incredible things, but they have no capacity to integrate it because so much is happening in a short time. So people ask, “Do I recommend psychedelics?” I say, “Well, it’s a crapshoot.” So I never say to people, “Do that.”

Rick: Yeah, and I mean, from what you said, you respect the correlation between mind and body. And a lot of this stuff can really fry the neurons and probably cause damage that is difficult to repair.

Robert: It shakes up the whole system. And if you have a blissful time. Like I remember back in the ’50s, I think… Adelle Davis took acid before she died. She had profound openings. She died beautifully. At a similar time, Jean-Paul Sartre probably had one of the highest IQs on the planet–the French existentialist writer. He was given something similar. It was mescaline, pure mescaline. He had a horrifying time, and he was convinced for months afterwards there were giant lobsters pursuing him through the streets of Paris. And he could not… it was that great mind that could not push aside this visceral sense of being pursued by these monsters. So it’s heaven or hell, and you don’t know which one you’re going to get.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Yeah.

Robert: Whereas in deep meditation, it’s grounded. You can turn it on or off. I mean, I’ve had very big openings through just sitting for a long time.

Rick: Good. So you’re not encouraging people to experiment with this stuff in a…

Robert: No, I’ll tell you one other thing I found interesting

Rick: capricious way.

Robert: Here’s an interesting side note I just thought of. When I practiced lucid dreaming for all those years, I had maybe 500 times of experimenting in that state. A point came where I thought, “What would happen if I took a psychedelic in the dream state?” So I did, and I had full-blown psychedelic experiences while I was in the dream state. Just in the suggestion, because the brain already has these chemicals in it. I did that a few times, and I thought, “My God, I don’t need to take something external. It’s already in here.” And with the suggestion, and being in that unusual state of consciousness, it all happened.

Rick: Interesting. I’ve done that with meditation. I’ve had times when I’m sitting up in Lotus and having this wonderful samadhi, and then I eventually realize I’m flat on the bed asleep.

Robert: It’s lovely to meditate in the awakened dream state, and then inquire, “Okay, if everything in the dream is part of me, then the role that I’m identified with in the dream, that’s also part of me.” And then your sense of identity just gets blown wide open. But as I said earlier, I did that when I was much younger, and even having had that awakening, I still was the same person in my daily relational activities.

Rick: Right, right.

Sharon: That’s right. And actually, in a certain way, I remember years ago when I was taking LSD in particular, that it’s like walking out of the theater after seeing a really great fancy movie like Star Wars or something. You walk out. Everything really looks pretty flat after that. And I noticed that with the LSD experience, it was so rich and so deep. It could be like you say, heaven or hell. It could be like unity or actually lobsters chasing you down the street. But…

Robert: Yeah, yeah.

Sharon: But the intensity of it is so much greater than ordinary life, once you come back to your ordinary consciousness or your ordinary state. That’s flat.

Robert: Unless in your ordinary state, your sense of familiarity with things gets shed. And once it’s shed, then you look at something–you don’t sense the name of it, you just simply

Sharon: Yes.

Robert: sense the mystery of it.

Sharon: The essence of it

Robert: You can’t just say tree

Sharon: Right.

Robert: or person or name.

Sharon: Right.

Robert: Then we’re in touch with the mystery again. It isn’t as spectacular as on say on acid usually–in terms of colors and visuals, but it’s the same context. And I’ve had the most brilliant colors I’ve ever seen were when I’ve been in lucid dreaming. Not taking a drug internally, but just walking down the street and looking at the colors. And when I’ve done deep meditation for extended periods and I’ve maybe come out of it with my eyes–opening my eyes in nature, the colors are way brighter. Everything is hyper vivid and I’m not yet organized in reality according to names and structures. It’s more just like this overall naked sense of it.

Sharon: Yes, right.

Robert: Like I had as a boy and I still have access to. And that’s wonderful.

Sharon: Yeah, that’s beautifully put. It’s that then you’re seeing that our essence is being seen and recognized.

Robert: Yeah, you’ve resonate with the essence of something. Like a work of art or nature, or you look in your partner’s eyes for an extended period. And suddenly you just…everything just drops away and it’s just a sense of pure being. And yet it’s also mysteriously individuated at the same time. You look in his eyes, yet it transcends gender, transcends him as an individual. At the same time there he is as an individual and you’re marveling at that too. It’s such a lovely thing. We get to do both at the same time.

Sharon: How long have you and Diane been married?

Robert: Centuries. Five years going on six. It was the relationship for us. Neither one of us was looking for another relationship. We were content to be alone and she found my poetry online. She saw one of them was called Sacred Hymn. She said, “I know the words to that song.” She emailed me and said, “I’d love to set this to music.” I said, “Sure, but let’s talk first.” We had our first conversation and it lasted a couple of hours and it was remarkably easy. I loved talking with her and her with me, but it was nothing romantic. We were doing collaboration on poetry and music. I love writing, she loves music, she’s a great singer. And after a while…three weeks later, I met her. Flew down to where she was in California– I was in Vancouver, British Columbia–and we met. And a few days later we were so connected. We could not be apart after that. We both had a sense of wanting to be with someone through whom we could serve in a higher good than we could on our own. And that’s what happened. We now work together. We do all our sessions together, all our trainings, all our groups. Never tire of each other’s company. And we’re each other’s dearest friend, intimate partner in all things. And it’s easy. At the same time, there’s no getting away with anything. So I’m very grateful

Rick: Very lucky, yeah.

Robert: to have a partner like that who I can share this work with. So I don’t have to go and say, “Here’s what happened in this group.”

Sharon: Yes. She’s there and she sees it.

Sharon: Right, right.

Robert: And she brings a powerful feminine presence. So if someone has difficulty, who’s had an abuse history with a man–brother or father–I’m there. They’re going to project some of that onto me. With Diane there, it makes it very safe. So I can do the body work–the psychotherapeutic work. She can do something that parallels that and complements it.

Sharon: Yeah.

Robert: So now our passion is doing intensives for couples, individuals–private intensives. And also doing these one-week groups.

Sharon: Yeah.

Robert: And we get to do it together.

Sharon: That’s great.

Robert: It’s so lovely.

Sharon: That’s great when you can share your passion that way with the person you’re most passionately in love with.

Robert: Exactly, exactly. So I had to write Transformation Through Intimacy.

Sharon: Yes, right. We’re going to read that together. I’ve read some of it to Fax already.

Robert: Many couples have found that it’s lovely to read it together, just read a chapter together, and just kind of reflect on it and sink into what is in there. Also know that I’m going to revise it this fall. North Atlantic Books is going to publish it and have Random House Distribute it next spring. So I’m going to have to rework it. I have a very tough editor. Thank God. So I’ve improved a lot.

Sharon: So would you recommend waiting to get the book?

Robert: No. No. I’d say dive in. You’re ready. You can dive in. And plus you’ve done a lot of spiritual work, so you’re going to be able to get it at a deeper level. Because it was written with that pervading it, but it’s not made overt. Because I address things like pornography and conflict and commitment. All those things that are part of a relationship you have to look at deeply.

Sharon: It’s refreshing to go deeply into those considerations of a relationship, in particular like sexual relationship, in a spiritual context. In other words, the context of being, holding, all of these permutations of relationship.

Robert: One of the key areas we address is so-called Tantra. We’ve seen so many people being hurt through that, misunderstanding it, using it to avoid pain, spiritualizing their sexuality. Because what we’re teaching is the opposite. We’re not teaching people techniques to get closer sexually. We’re teaching them how to connect more deeply. So that when they’re deeply connected at the heart and through the body, sex happens organically and naturally. You don’t need a tantric manual or some gimmickry. Aphrodisiac then is your love and your connection with each other. That’s enough. You don’t have to breathe in some special pattern or wiggle your tongues together. It’s not needed. And we’ve seen a lot of women who’ve actually had sexual abuse in their girls who are now trying to be tantric goddesses. There’s a lot of it. Like they’re sexualizing these old wounds and acting things out that are psychological and emotional primarily and only secondarily sexual. So we’re pretty critical of the whole tantric movement. We’re much more into just like deepen the connection and realize you can’t separate sex from the rest of your relationship. Whatever you’re doing sexually is going to reflect what you’re doing in the rest of the relationship.

Rick: Probably the original masters of tantra would be pretty critical of the whole tantric movement too. I’m not sure that

Robert: I think so.

Rick: contemporary tantric movement really reflects what they had in mind.

Robert: Yeah. And it can pay lip service to what we’re talking about. So they’ll use everything as part of the path but it often is interpreted as, “Okay, here’s a chance to indulge.”

Rick: And do whatever the heck you want.

Robert: And just screw the boundaries. Okay, if you see someone else is attractive, go off and be with them because it’s all love and what the hell cares. It doesn’t honor the integrity of our boundaries. It presumes that we…I mean, yeah, when I see people mature, it’s not like they constrict themselves into monogamy. It’s the natural choice. And I’ve argued a lot–you see it in the book a little bit–around the polyamory movement. It’s big in parts of Northern California. And I’ve never seen anyone make it work.

Rick: That means sort of like free love, everybody’s…

Robert: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Or be like if you’re like, say you brought another couple in and you’re with them all the time and it’s no boundaries. I’ve said to people, it’s hard enough to be truly intimate with one person. Imagine a third person coming in and having to give them just as much time and energy. You’d be used up pretty fast. I often say that immature monogamy is one side of the coin, and the other side of the coin is polyamory or open relationship. Once you go past that, you have a possibility for mature monogamy, which is not… Like immature monogamy makes us feel trapped. Mature monogamy liberates us. Such a difference. See, we have so many jokes in our culture about men getting trapped when they enter monogamy. Like it’s a trap. It’s like the poor little sperm dissolves in the ovum and there’s no escape. And the man becomes sexless. He develops a beard. He’s like the TV husband. He’s very unattractive. And the single guy–the one who’s not married–seems like he’s more of a stud. He still has sexual energy. We have that kind of stereotype in our culture. And yet there’s something beyond that. I think that’s what we’re called to do, is to go beyond that and to resist… I don’t want to say that part. Just to go beyond it.

Sharon: I liked…there was a… I think it was in…yeah, it was in the book on relationship, that freedom has no problem with chains.

Rick: Change?

Sharon: Chains.

Rick: Oh, chains.

Sharon: Yes, yeah.

Robert: Put another way, freedom doesn’t mind its chains.

Sharon: Oh thank you. It doesn’t mind its chains.

Robert: And to me, real freedom is kind of paradoxical. Real freedom to me in part means not needing to have a choice. It’s almost like necessity–the inherent–necessity of a situation calls forth a response from us. And we don’t even have to choose that. We just do it. That’s what they mean when they say the sage does nothing and everything gets done. There’s a sense that the doing is happening but there’s no one clinging to that identity, with that. And there’s such freedom in… Like when people have too many choices, often they feel less free. You put someone in front of a hundred different types of cornflakes, I mean they’re like, “Oh my god, what do I do?” Give them one choice, there’s only one type. Okay, it’s simple.

Sharon: Right.

Robert: Yeah.

Sharon: So true.

Rick: Yeah. Anything? Okay. Well, I’m sure we can just sit here and continue to think of things to talk about and entertaining ourselves. I’m not sure if we entertain our listeners much more than the two-hour point. So we should probably conclude. Is there anything you’d like to say as a synopsis? Some thought you’d like to leave people with?

Robert: Let me see. I think what we’ve been speaking about the whole time is our relationship to pain. When the painful or the difficulty merges, turn toward it with compassion. And when you slip, look at yourself with compassion without making excuses for yourself. We didn’t talk about blind compassion. We’ll do that some other time. But I think it’s so important to have compassion for ourselves, but still to hold ourselves to a certain standard. Then we have our integrity. And if we have our integrity–even if it means we have to give up a lot of things–it feels so good to have that.

Sharon: That’s right.

Fax: That’s what character is.

Robert: Yep.

Fax: Turning toward discomfort. Turning toward difficulty. Facing it.

Robert: Yep. And the essential courage that asks for really matures us. I’ve often said to men who wonder what they need to do in terms of personal work. I use the imagery of what I would call the warrior of intimacy or vulnerability. I like to say, so it’s a heroic journey. It’s not like, okay, you have to turn toward your pain. The warrior in a man takes that as a fitting challenge. Here’s this difficult, scary thing. I’m going to face it. And I think the warrior in us, male or female, actually almost enjoys that process. So I’d say, the last thing I’d say is cultivate intimacy with everything that you are. Everything. Ask yourself what you don’t want to be intimate with in yourself and then go toward it a little bit at a time. Just see what’s there. It’s worth it.

Sharon: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a very profound teaching. Thank you very much.

Fax: Thank you so much.

Rick: Yeah, thank you.

Robert: Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed this.

Rick: Yeah, it’s been great. So in summary, we’ve been talking with Robert Augustus Masters, who has written 11 books, and we’ve primarily been focusing on his book, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters. And also it’s worth reading the sub-subtitle, Learning to Recognize and Transform the Obstacles that Keep Us from Living Life Fully. Depending on how you are listening to this recording–you might be listening to an audio of it, but there’s a website where this and all the other interviews that I do are archived. It’s www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. And if you go there, you can subscribe to an email so that each time a new interview is posted, you’ll get an email notifying you of that. There are also discussion groups. Usually with each…when I post each interview, people get into discussing in a chat group about that interview, so you can participate in that if you like. That about covers it. Incidentally, Fax and Sharon were probably, I think, the second or third guests in this whole series. I’ve done 80 of them. They were number two or three. So if you’d like to hear more about their story, you can look them up. I think it says the Gilberts, way down. On the right-hand side there’s a list of all the people I’ve interviewed. There’s also a page of upcoming interviews on the site, and you can see who’s scheduled. If you’d like to recommend that I interview someone in particular, there’s a form there you can fill out, or you can just send me an email. I kind of try to prioritize people according to demand. So, thank you for listening and watching. Thank you, Robert, for your time. We really enjoyed this.

Robert: Thank you.

Sharon: Thank you. All the best.