Roger Housden Interview

Roger Housden Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Roger Housden. Roger has written a book, has written a lot of books, but his publisher contacted me and said he had written one called, “Keeping the Faith Without a Religion.” She initially said when she contacted me that this book distinguishes between faith and belief, and talks about people who say they’re spiritual but not religious, which is a common term these days. I thought, “Wait a minute, to my mind, faith and belief are kind of in the same bucket and experience contrasts with those, so why isn’t he contrasting faith and belief with experience as opposed to contrasting faith with belief?” She said, “Well, you can ask him that when you interview him.” So, that’s what I’m going to do, among many other things. Roger, it will interest you to know that while reading your book, I’ve been interspersing it with reading one of Sam Harris’s books and listening to a lot of his recordings, and it’s a very interesting juxtaposition. But let’s hear a little bit about you, your background, and how you came to write this book.

Roger: Well, first, Rick, thanks for us spending some time together. I always love conversations like this.

Rick: Me too.

Roger: How did I come to write this book? Well, I suppose really the last 40 years of my life have conspired to come together into this book. it’s really a question that has been with me pretty much all my life, because I’ve not been someone who’s been thoroughly and totally immersed in any one tradition. I’ve involved myself in various traditions around the world and spent different kinds of experiences in different contexts, but I’ve never really been a joiner. So I’ve never really signed up, if you like. For me, it’s always been more of an individual inquiry, assisted by various individuals in different traditions, and with no tradition. So the first book I wrote was in 1990, I think, yeah, 1990, and it was called “Fire in the Heart–Everyday Life as Spiritual Practice.” At that time, that was the very first book I wrote, and it was for me an attempt to organize my own thinking and clarify for myself where I felt I was in the world and where I felt I was in myself as a human being. So it’s called “Everyday Life as Spiritual Practice” because really for me, at that time, Rather than spending months in meditation or retreat or what have you, the circumstances and situations that I was given every day by life seemed to me a wonderful mirror if I was both willing and courageous enough to look.

Rick: Had you ever spent months in meditation and retreat?

Roger: No, not months. I mean I spent…

Rick: Weeks or days?

Roger: Yeah, of course. Yes, I spent quite a lot of time. Pilgrimage, you know, for me has always been, that is travel has always been, for me, a significant part of my journey, you know, the external journey in some way mirroring the internal journey. So those travels took me to various weird and wonderful places and through various weird and wonderful experiences, both solitary ones and ones in groups. So you know, retreats, yes, I mean I’ve spent time on my own in the middle of the Sahara. I’ve spent time in the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, which you may know of, although many people won’t. And of course a lot of time in India. I wrote a book on India actually later.

Rick: Did you live in some ashrams or study with some specific teachers over there?

Roger: Yeah, I did. I was one of the first people to meet Poonja, that is H.W.L. Poonja, known as Papaji, and I spent quite a bit of time with him and also in the area, like so many other people, of Ramanashram, Tiruvannamalai. But I was really first drawn to India. Actually I was not especially attracted to India at all until I read Ram Dass’s book on Neem Karoli Baba, “Miracle of Love,” and that was a really extraordinary experience for me. I mean actually when I finished the book I fell on the ground weeping.

Rick: Wow, I should read it.

Roger: Well, it may not be the same for you, but I actually really felt the presence of that man in the room, and actually I felt that he was pushing my head to the floor. I actually felt deeply grateful to Ram Dass for writing that book and for introducing me to Neem Karoli Baba, and although I had no particular interest in going to India before that time, my interest and my involvement before then in England was with the Gurdjieff movement and the Gurdjieff world. That book, however, got me on a plane and I just wanted to go to his ashram, Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram. It wasn alive anymore, this was 1984-5, but I just wanted to go there and pay my respects and essentially express my gratitude for the connection that I felt. So that was my first trip to India, but without going into the whole story, that did actually result in my meeting Ram Dass and then for the next, what, 12 years, 13 years, bringing Ram Dass to Europe a couple of times a year. So Ram Dass and I got very close and got to know each other very well. So that book, to return to that “Fire in the Heart–Everyday Life as Spiritual Practice”, was my attempt to draw together my different experiences and understand. Okay, what is my ashram, if you like? And you know, Ram Dass used to speak of “the ashram without walls” and that’s exactly the ashram I felt I belonged to, where there were individuals around the world with an affinity and yet not necessarily in the same geographical place. What united us was simply daily living from moment to moment. So I inquired in that book into my relationship with work, my relationship with nature, with beauty, with meditation, etc. And this book now, 20 odd years later “Keeping the Faith Without a Religion”, is almost like revisiting “Okay, now where am I now?” And essentially, there’s a lot of similarity. I mean, you know, the chapter titles in “Keeping the Faith Without a Religion” are “Trust the Knowing,” “Trust the Mystery,” “Trust the Changes,” “Trust the Dark.” You know, trust, in other words, trust the imperfections.

Rick: I was thinking later in the interview we might actually use each of those chapter titles as little springboards to discuss this chapter, discuss this chapter, because there’s a lot of nice stuff in each one.

Roger: Yeah, and so each one of those is essentially a dimension of our being human, our imperfections, our darkness, our joy is another one of those. So again, taken from a different perspective, I’m using the grist of what we have every- day, to forge a faith without needing, or to deepen or ground a faith without needing the context of a religion. And maybe that leads on to your question about faith and belief and experience.

Rick: It probably does. Just that when I think of the word “faith,” it’s like, here’s my hand, right? It would be absurd to say, “I believe my hand is here,” I mean, here it is, you know? It would also be a little absurd to say, “I have faith that my hand is here,” because here it is. I’m experiencing it. So there’s something concrete about experience, something tangible, that you don’t usually associate with the words “faith” and “belief.” I believe, there’s the word “belief,” that ultimately that’s what spiritual experience should come down to. Someone like Neem Karoli Baba, for instance, probably didn’t believe in God or have faith in God the way billions of people do around the world. For him, God was probably a very tangible experience on some very, very deep level. So that’s why, to me, the words “faith” and “belief,” when I first hear them, I kind of put them in the same basket and put experience in a different, much deeper basket. But I understood as I read your book that you were defining “belief” as something that’s more in the head, you know, “I believe this because this book said it,” or “this teacher said it,” or so on, whereas faith is a little bit more in the heart, something more intuitive, something actually more experiential. Is that a fair assessment?

Roger: I’d say that’s a fair assessment, Rick. So the word “belief” comes from the Latin “opinor,” which is “opinor/opinare,” which is the root of our word “opinion.” So “belief” has to do with concept. It has to do with the opinions that we have about anything or everything. Faith, as you said, does indeed come from a different dimension. It comes from the heart. Now, when I speak of faith, I mean a knowing faith, a wordless faith, not a faith in something or someone, but an experienced, in the moment faith. So for me I would say that true experience and faith are one and the same. And trusting that knowing which arises from the heart, and by the heart again I mean a felt experience which is actually grounded in a bodily sensation. So there’s a knowing that is beyond words that we have no doubt of and in many ways can’t explain. And I’m not really quite talking about intuition either, because we might describe intuition like that. But something even distinct from that, something that I’m reminded of those lines by Mary Oliver in her poem “The Journey,” “One day you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice.” So that kind of knowing where the action just comes from the knowing, you just know that’s what you have to do. you’re not sitting there thinking about it, or should I or shouldn’t I? Finally you get it. And by faith I mean the faith in that knowing.

Rick: Yeah. So let’s try to take some examples. So you just said that the sort of faith you’re talking about is not faith in a person or even a thing. And speaking of things, for instance, I don’t know, black holes. I have faith that black holes exist, and I believe they exist, because scientists whom I trust, even though I’ve never met them, have figured out they exist. And they’ve all scrutinized each other’s research and there’s pretty much universal agreement that black holes exist. But then you take something like God, or angels, or some sort of more mystical or spiritual reality, and you leave the scientists behind because they don’t feel that their instrumentation is capable of approaching it. But then you have a whole world of mystics, and a whole world of yogis and sages and saints, and people who say that, “Yes, my experience has actually verified the existence of these things or this thing, you know, God.” Not that God is a thing, but there’s a level of intelligence which people refer to as God, which I am experientially open to. Whereas some people might just believe it intellectually or have a sort of intuitive feel for it. I think that there have been individuals in this world and again, Neem Karoli Baba might be an example, and Papaji and many others where it’s gone beyond just a sort of a knowing sensation in the body, as you put it, you did reference the body, to something on a much deeper level altogether.

Roger: Yeah, absolutely. So that kind of knowing, for example, well two things I can give as examples from my own life, which are quite different. One morning about 15 years ago I woke up in Bath, where I lived in England, and I just knew, and it was not really a thought, I knew that I was going to move to America. I was writing a book on America at the time, but I was in a really good relationship with what a dozen years or so. We had a house in Bath, but our lives were beginning to move in different directions, not because we no longer loved each other, but because really of our work. I was in a relationship with a singer, with Chloe Goodchild. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her, with a singer whose work was taking her all over Europe, and I was spending more and more time in the United States because of what I was doing, because of the book I was writing. But that came out of nowhere, but there was a quietness in it. There was this quietness which had a kind of certainty about it, and that kind of knowing was instant. Of course, it took time for that to… Within four or five months I was on a plane to New York, and I’ve been here ever since. So there’s that kind of expression of that knowing, but then the deeper levels that you’re speaking of. For example, when I was in India in the mid-90s, I was in Tiruvannamalai, and I was in the cave that Ramana Maharshi spent many years in. I loved that cave, and I would go there every day, but one day I was sitting there for maybe a couple of hours, and I was on my own, which was unusual, and it was deeply silent and I felt deeply silent. Yet suddenly there was a voice that was both inside me and outside me at the same time that said, “Just rest.” Now I thought I was already resting, but the moment that that voice said, “Just rest,” I was aware that there was a ripple in my consciousness the whole time. There was this subtle observer that was aware of my being there. And in that moment of the voice saying, “Just rest,” that ripple disappeared, and it was as if the mountain moved through me. There was awareness, aliveness, but there was no one being alive, there was no one being aware. There was simply this awareness in which there was everything connected, of which I was a part and yet it wasn’t the I that I normally take myself to be. So that’s a knowing, there was a knowing there, but not a personal knowing. That again is the kind of, if you like, a taste of the faith or the knowing faith that I’m speaking of, like that.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I think you know that first or second verse in the Yoga Sutras, “Yogas chitta vritti nirodha,” yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. For everybody, there’s always a buzz going on, there’s always this undercurrent of fluctuation. Sometimes it’s really cacophonous, sometimes it’s less so, but even in our quietest moments sitting in a cave, it’s there. In fact, you might notice it more in those quiet moments because all the external noise has subsided, right? Then you found you kind of shifted down a notch, kind of reminds me of electrons, you know, being in a certain level of excitation and then shifting down to a different orbit. And I’m going to turn this into a question, but I think what you’re on to here is that the degree of excitation has an influence on our spiritual cognitive ability, if you will. That somebody like, again quoting somebody like Neem Karoli Baba or Papaji or somebody like that, has established themselves consciously at a level beyond mental excitation. It’s not that they don’t have a mind and the mind doesn’t get active when they’re speaking or talking or thinking or something, but they’re able to function from a state that’s prior to those excitations and therefore they have available to them a sort of knowingness that most of us might acquire in glimpses, you know, little insight here, little insight there. That becomes their modus operandi.

Roger: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. You know, as you probably know, as you know I’m sure, that if you’re open to that and you happen to be in the presence of someone like that, you catch that.

Rick: Big time.

Roger: Yeah, and so that has happened for me as it has for you I’m sure many times, but that too, it’s a grace. it’s a deepening process that the more that, how can I say, the more that that imprints itself in one’s being, the more available one becomes to that knowingness beyond a ripple.

Rick: Yep, and the more stabilized and integrated it can become.

Roger: Stabilized is what I mean, exactly.

Rick: Because, I mean, practically everybody, you know, what’s that survey, the Gallup has done surveys of people who have had, it seems like most of the population has had some sort of spiritual experience, some sort of intuitive insight of the nature that you just described, you know, I’m moving to the US, everybody has glimpses. So perhaps everyone can relate to this discussion in terms of their own experience, knowing that such a thing exists, but what about the possibility of having it be one’s all-time reality rather than just an occasional glimpse?

Roger: Well, what about it? Absolutely.

Rick: Yeah, I mean that’s the name of the game as far as I’m concerned.

Roger: Yeah, you know, and I think that’s to do with one’s attraction to that. The more one becomes magnetized to that or attracted to that, the more I think it gradually descends or takes hold. So, the more one is able to put oneself in situations where you’re available to it or it’s available to you, yeah, the more that will increase. So all of that is what I mean by “that’s the knowing we’re speaking of.”

Rick: Yeah, great. Now that’s an interesting thing you just said the more one is able to put oneself in situations and that sort of implies being with Papaji or in Ramana’s cave or in some kind of spiritual situation where you can really stop the excitation much more effectively. But then you had written a book called “Everyday Life” being the grist for the mill of, you know, what was the title of that book?

Roger: It was called “Fire in the Heart–Everyday Life as Spiritual Practice.”

Rick: Yeah.

Roger: I know where you’re going. And that’s exactly what this is. Is it necessary to always go and sit in the vicinity of someone who lives in that knowing? Well, it’s very helpful. Let’s be clear. Well, certainly it has been for me, extremely helpful. But the main help, I think, for me in that, in being with someone like that, is that it creates a frequency or an accessibility that I know that if I’m quick enough to catch the possibility in the moment that I can bring that into whatever moment I happen to be in. So, for example, right now, sitting here with you, here we are, you and I, and we can be completely immersed in the conversation, the words going backwards and forwards. Or, at the same time, we can just fall, or I can fall back. It’s the only way I can really describe it, fall back or open out to the field within which all this is happening. And it’s all going on at the same time. So here we are playing with words, and here we are being the being. And for many people…

Rick: Go ahead.

Roger: But it’s a moment-by-moment choice of awareness or willingness to notice that opportunity. Some events in life actually make it more easy, and those events very often are the more difficult ones. For example, big changes in our life, or deep suffering, they can crack us open because they’re cracking our habitual or normal way of being in the world, and opening the door to the possibility of feeling that or becoming aware of that greater field of awareness. So because we’re human, we do get the opportunities frequently in our lives through change, through a sudden awareness of our imperfections. We’ve only got to be in relationship with someone to become aware of our imperfections. And so, you know, that is again a mirror, an opportunity. If that frequency is alive enough in us, and that we actually are attracted to it enough, we know that that’s where we’re going to want to go, if we can. Speaking for myself, sometimes I don’t and sometimes I can’t. I’m not there. But at other times I am, but my intention is there. And so, with my intention there, gradually I trust that the more and more I can reside in that rest that the voice spoke to me of in Ramana’s cave. Because actually, I think the word “rest” is fundamental.

Rick: “Come to me, you who are burdened and heavy laden, and I shall give you rest.” Because there’s a bunch of things in what you said. What comes to mind in terms of the overall concept, the overall package of what you just said is that, well first of all, this being in the field or as the field, as you put it, I don’t see it so much as a moment-to-moment choice, as a degree of development that one has naturally or does not. So in other words, in any given moment, you can’t necessarily ramp up your field to the point where Papaji’s field was or something, but you can culture it over time, and that culturing becomes more and more stable and integrated, so that it’s less and less likely to be shakable or overshadowed by anything. But I think anybody, regardless of how high a being they are, still has their challenges. I mean, Christ had his moment on the cross there, where according to the account, seems to have lost it for a bit, and then regained it.

Roger: So it’s very nuanced, isn’t it? Because when we speak, or when I speak of the word “choice,” I’m not speaking of the personal will. So it’s not, Oh, I’ve got a choice here. I know I can go into the field of awareness. Well no, it’s something about resting back. This is all so difficult to put into words, but something about resting back, as a knowing that that is already available, not that it’s not something you’re trying to create.

Rick: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Roger: it’s already available, and it is that resting back that is available to us, you know, in that. As I said before, there are moments or there are situations, sometimes, and often crisis situations, that can put us into that, you know, or open the door to that, and suddenly there we are. You know, sometimes when people, I’ve actually, I’ve not had a car accident, but people who’ve had car accidents have told me, you know, how everything suddenly slows, and they’re in this deep awareness, and they’re not afraid, even though they can see themselves careening towards the edge of a cliff or another car. You know that? We know that. And there’s another, suddenly another dimension of awareness or being is simply there. I experienced that in a very different way, actually, in Iran about three years ago. I wrote a book on Iran four years ago called “Saved by Beauty.” And I went to Iran because I wanted to give a human face to the culture that was being called the Axis of Evil. All my life, you know, Iran, from my early 20s, from being involved in the Gurdjieff work and Sufi groups in London, Iran had always represented for me a culture which drew together Heaven and Earth. Drew together, you know, embraced as one the sensual, sensuous experience of being human and the deep divine. And I felt that, rightly or wrongly, through the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz, this is 40 years ago, through the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz, through the music which I loved while everybody was listening to Dylan and The Beatles, I was listening to the music of Iran, mostly Iran, of the Middle East. So I had this whole notion. You know, I mean, our word “paradise” comes from the Persian. Originally, it means an enclosed garden. And again, you know, the whole notion of a garden in Iran, traditionally and they still have them in Shiraz, they’ve been there for hundreds of years where it’s an idea of perfection on earth, you know, the closest you can get. So anyway, that was my whole idea of Iran. So I wanted to show, give a human face to this culture and also to see if my fantasies were real. So I went there four years ago. They were real. I met, you know, remarkable Sufis in Kurdistan and all of that stuff. Wonderful. And as I was leaving, I was taken by the intelligence services. As I left the airport, I was going to leave the airport, they took me back to Tehran and they interrogated me for three days, being convinced that I was a spy. They hacked into my email address, they listened to every phone call. So they had the whole skinny on me. At the end of three days, they said, “Okay, you’re very fortunate, we’re going to give you a choice. You can spend five years in Evin Prison or you can work for us.” Well, that wasn’t a difficult choice for me. So I said, “I’d be delighted to work for you. And what do you want me to do?” They said, “Well, we want you to just tell us about non-governmental agencies in the States and England who have interests in Iran. And so you think about that and we’re going to go out now and we’ll come back in five minutes.” So an hour and a half later, they still hadn’t come back. And in that hour and a half, actually, they gave me a great gift. Because I could feel the whole story of my life as I knew it falling away. Roger, the writer, living in San Francisco, you know, he’s done this, done that, got all his friends, family, all of that story of who I considered myself to be, I could see was provisional. That at any moment, that story could change. It could turn into Roger in an Evin prison wrongfully convicted for five years. It could turn into anything. I saw that there would always be a story until I died. Whatever it was, it would be a story. And I saw in that moment that the story was not who I was. But you know, again, we read this in books all the time, but there was this visceral experience of aliveness, of a condition of being that was completely independent of that story and that it actually didn’t matter which way the story went, because that aliveness will continue to be. In that moment, I felt a deep sense of freedom, even though I was locked in a room in Tehran.

Rick: So, what happened when they finally came back in the room?

Roger: And so, it’s not that I didn’t want to leave Iran. Of course I did. it’s not that I didn’t care or didn’t have preferences, but I was curious. Now it was interesting to know which way the story was going to go. So they did eventually come back to the room, and I’m sitting here talking to you. So clearly, you know, I did eventually get on a plane. They put me on a plane with the agreement that I would be working for them, and they took photographs of me with the head of security, and they said, “You know, if you go back on your word, then we’re going to cause trouble for you with the CIA.” So I went back to America. Actually I went to India very briefly, and then I realized I had to get back to America and clear my name. So through various contacts, I was set up in Washington, D.C. immediately with an FBI agent, and I was told to sit in a hotel room in D.C. and wait for this guy to come and knock on the door. So he came and he knocked on the door, and it was just exactly like being in Iran. It was the same thing. He sat down, he started asking me all these questions. He basically was debriefing me. Just before I met him, I got this email from the Iranian intelligence service saying, “Glad you’re on board with us. Just let us know you’ve arrived in the States,” etc. And I told the guy, “I’ve just got this email.” He paused for a moment and said, “Would you be willing to reply and play along with them?”

Rick: Sounds like “Homeland,” if you’ve watched that series.

Roger: No. And so essentially he was asking me to be a double agent. Look, I write books. that’s what I do. I mean, it would kill me to… The whole notion of being something on the inside that is completely and utterly different from… So, anyway, I’m not working for the Iranian security services, as you may imagine.

Rick: I spent three months there myself. Got out a few days before the Shah did.

Roger: The point of that was that that crisis, that unexpected event, like a car crash, catapulted me into that profound awareness of a stream of aliveness that actually was beyond life and death.

Rick: Yeah, and the larger point, even, in my mind, as I heard you tell the story, reminds me of something you said in your book. It was on page 128. You were talking about a new Earth and you were referencing Eckhart Tolle’s book by that title. And you addressed the issue of intelligence versus randomness. It brought to my mind the notion that, in my opinion, there is no such thing as randomness. Even that which is random is permeated by intelligence. Let’s say you have the asteroid field, where asteroids are going around and they’re bumping into each other, apparently, randomly. Still every particle of creation is permeated by intelligence. There are laws of nature governing Newtonian physics, governing their interactions. There are atomic laws and subatomic laws and all sorts of things going on, but it’s all orchestrated by all-pervading intelligence. In the context of your story, I would say that you’re talking about everyday experiences being lessons for us, being triggers to teach us something. I would say that’s not random. that’s orchestrated too. there’s an overall trajectory to life in the direction of greater evolution. Apparently, random mundane circumstances are perfectly orchestrated to facilitate the evolution of each individual. Every little thing that happens stubbing your toe or whatever it’s all orchestrated.

Roger: I couldn’t agree more, except I wouldn’t use the word “orchestrated”, because orchestrated implies a conductor.

Rick: Who is separate from the orchestra.

Roger: Yeah, and I don’t see it like that. So, the intelligence is inherent in everything, and so there’s nothing orchestrating anything from the outside.

Rick: Well, it’s sort of from the outside. it’s orchestrating within itself, you could say.

Roger: Yeah, just as this conversation in this very moment is orchestrating itself.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, I’m good with that. Yeah, I mean, and it’s an important point you bring up actually, because the very notion of God is usually framed in the sense of some being on high looking down, you know, like a puppeteer orchestrating the course of human events. And I don’t mean it that way.

Roger: No, I’m sure you don’t. it’s just a natural consequence of our language, because our language is constructed in a subject-object linear way. And so, it’s natural for our minds to think in a subject-object linear fashion, even when we’re attempting to articulate or describe things that are obviously beyond that paradigm of object-subject.

Rick: Yeah. So, I guess to try to parse it out more delicately, I would say, you know, every iota of creation from the smallest to the largest is … well, here, let’s put it another way. God is in everything and everything is within God. You know, it’s just this all-comprehensive mass of intelligence. Everything we see, everything we experience, we’re looking at it. we’re seeing that intelligence interacting within itself, and we are that. You know, Muktananda always used to say, “God dwells within you as you.” So, I don’t mean to be preachy here. I mean, sometimes I’m more in question mode, and sometimes I’m pontificating a bit, but you know, it’s kind of the way it’s rolling. we’re just sort of bouncing things back and forth here. And that harkens back to what I was trying to get at earlier in the interview, where I’m fully comfortable and enthusiastic about the idea of there being God-realized beings like Neem Karoli Baba or people like that, who consciously appreciate that reality that we’re trying to describe here as viscerally, as clearly, as constantly, as we see birds and walls and trees and computers. it’s just their ongoing reality.

Roger: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Good. So, here’s some notes from your book, and maybe it’ll shut me up a bit and let you talk more. You talked towards the beginning, I think, of individualism versus individuation. You described individualism as “my happiness regardless of yours,” and individuation as a “maturing authenticity that enables you to feel not separate from, but intimately connected to others and the collective good.” The latter is growing, the former diminishing. That actually relates to what I was just saying. there’s this sort of oneness with everything that I would regard as, you know, well, that you just described as individuation. But it’s also a universalization, isn’t it? I mean, you realize that as an individual, that which you are is inseparable from a vast wholeness or oneness.

Roger: Yes, I mean, yeah, inseparable from, and yet at the same time paradoxically unique within.

Rick: Yes, yes. Both and.

Roger: Yeah.

Rick: Do you see political implications to what I just said? You know, individualism versus individuation? It seems like in this country one political party would be better described by my happiness regardless of yours, whereas the other is maturing authenticity that enables you to feel connected to all and dedicated to the common good.

Roger: Right, and those two paradigms have been competing with each other for the last couple of hundred years, not just in America, but throughout the West. So yes, I mean it’s a little too easy to make it black and white like that. Maybe underneath your question is, do we think that there is some evolutionary movement towards this greater wholeness and away from the atomization or fragmentation of both society and of the individual? So is the individual and indeed society gradually moving towards a process of deeper integration? And you know, when it comes to questions like that, Rick, quite honestly for me, I can only go you know truly I can have an opinion, and here we are but my opinions are not really worth a great deal. they’re opinions. So I can only really just bow to that and say, I honestly don’t know.

Rick: Yeah, maybe it becomes wishful thinking.

Roger: Yeah, and there’s a lot of that. You know, there are so many ways in which we could see that this world is moving towards disaster, and there are so many ways in which we can see this world is moving towards this deeper, greater integration without the necessity for disaster to encourage it necessarily. So there are many voices Eckhart Tolle is one of them, “The New World,” which voices who say, you know, that we really are moving towards this new world, really, which is going to require a deeper state of consciousness and awareness. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Rick: Yeah. I hope we are.

Roger: Well, hope and…

Rick: We seem to be.

Roger: Yeah, T.S. Eliot, “Hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”

Rick: What did he mean by that?

Roger: He means that on the other side of hope is despair, and between hope and despair is a narrow gate, and that narrow gate is the eye of the needle. And so you bolster your life with hope in the same way that you may weigh your life down with despair. Either one is not going to lead us through that narrow gate. So my personal preference is absolute wonder and fascination, curiosity with what’s going to happen next. And by that I don’t mean, you know, I don’t mean it’s getting lost in the movie, but it’s an extraordinary time that we are in, and I think it’s hard for any of us, anyone, to have conclusions yet about where we are, where we’re moving. But we’ll see.

Rick: Yeah, no, I agree with this, what they call the Chinese curse, “May you be born in interesting times.”

Roger: But you see, I’ve always wondered whether anyone at any moment in history thinks, “Oh wow, may we be born in interesting times, we’re living it.” Has there ever been a period where times have not been interesting? We think this is especially interesting just because we happen to be here right now. But what about somebody in 1066? They probably felt the same thing.

Rick: They probably did, but in 1066 if you were so bold as to speculate about what the stars actually are, you could be tortured to death. And here we live in a time where we actually have a pretty good idea of what the stars are and there’s this proliferation of knowledge at an ever-accelerating pace that we don’t see in recorded human history.

Roger: Yeah, absolutely, this is true.

Rick: Yeah, but there’s also, you know, the Antarctic is melting and CO2 is higher than it’s been in hundreds of millions of years. So we just, you know, there’s all these…

Roger: Yeah, we are in a unique situation, it seems.

Rick: Seems like there’s a quickening, there’s an acceleration on all fronts.

Roger: Yeah, and then the technocrats would say, “Yes, but we have the potential solutions.”

Rick: Yeah, and those solutions, but the technocrats also say, “Oh boy, the ice is melting, we can explore for oil more.”

Roger: Exactly.

Rick: Places we haven’t been able to before.

Roger: Exactly, how wonderful, you know, the ice is melting, weve got all these extra resources suddenly.

Rick: Yeah, I was just listening to a recording this morning by, I think it was, oh I forget the show, but the guy was reminding us of the Native American thing of thinking in terms of seven generations, and he’s talking about how politicians are so much with their finger in the air, just seeing which way the wind is blowing and going that way, thinking immediately of the moment of the $20,000 they have to raise every day in order to get re-elected, you know, of getting re-elected in two years’ time or something like that. there’s this kind of short-term thinking that’s very entrenched in our society, and it’s, to my way of seeing things, quite the opposite of what we need in order to really have a happy outcome to this whole thing.

Roger: I couldn’t agree more.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s not to say that we shouldn’t be in the now, you know, all glory to Eckhart Tolle, but you can be in the now and also think seven generations. there’s a beautiful quote from some Buddhist guy, he said, “Even though my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.”

Roger: Mmm, beautiful. Yeah, absolutely. Again, it’s both/and, isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah.

Roger: You know, we’re only ever here where we are, and we do have this wonderful capacity to look forward to possible outcomes in seven generations. We actually, and that that awareness can affect our decisions and actions in the now.

Rick: Exactly.

Roger: You know? So yes, absolutely, both. Yeah. Well, yeah, as the one word, karma.

Rick: there’s another thing that I picked up from your book here, which relates back to that thing I was trying to say a little while ago about, you know, being one with God, knowing yourself to be that experientially, not just a belief. It was this fellow Al-Halaj, he said, “I am the truth. There is nothing wrapped in my turban but God,” and he insisted on saying that as they dismembered him, I guess on the town square or something. But his experiential conviction, you know, it must have been experiential, you can’t hold on to a belief while you’re having your arms and legs cut off. His experiential belief or his experiential conviction was so deep that he maintained that until his dying breath.

Roger: Yeah, yeah. He was decapitated in the town square of Baghdad.

Rick: Lovely.

Roger: And they’re still doing it.

Rick: Yeah. That’s an interesting thing. I mean, this comes back to the whole thing of your book, you know, spiritual but not religious. Why is it that in the name of what should be the most sublime experience people can have, you know, spiritual awakening, enlightenment, revelation of God and so on, how does it always end up that the traditions that people who have had such experiences spawn end up being so brutal and murderous and bigoted and narrow-minded and so on? Got an answer for that?

Roger: Well, it’s the question that has been asked again for hundreds and hundreds of years, all right? So it’s the age-old question. I mean, more recently, not hundreds of years ago, but you know, Jung said the last thing he would ever want to join is the Jung Society because it becomes like your mother. Once something is brought into form, it’s almost law-abiding. You know, it’s not wrong in a sense, it’s almost the way it inevitably is that as an inspiration or a vision or an insight comes into form, it begins to concretize according to the social conditions and constraints that surround it, according to the concepts that people begin to build around it, and then according, of course, to the power needs of those people involved. Because we’re all imperfect, and you know, you may want to exclude a few people from that, but in general, most of us and certainly followers, those who actually build the church, who build the religion, are unsure, very well-meaning individuals, but they’re imperfect. And being imperfect means, you know, that their own beliefs, their own ideas of the world, their own power drives affect and dominate their particular positions and decisions. And so, the original inspiration starts to be colored with and affected by everything that makes us human. And so, any tradition, it’s not just religion, but anything, a political party, you know, a non-governmental organization, you’ll see dysfunction in any organization. And that’s got to show us something, and surely it’s just showing us that there’s something inevitable about that because of our imperfections. Now, does it have to be governed by that? I don’t know. It doesn’t. If there’s enough willingness to step beyond, you know, individual concerns, if there’s enough aliveness and clarity and insight in that organization, then those imperfections can be managed. And it’s been a hard hasn’t it been sort of this constant to-and-fro over generations, you know, in any of these traditions. And then the whole question of money, not to mention sex, comes in.

Rick: Kind of reminds me of a joke where God and the devil are walking down the street and God says, “I have this great idea,” and the devil says, “Oh, okay, let me organize it for you.”

Roger: “You got it! that’s it! There you go!” And both of those are who I am. So the devil is not somewhere else. He’s me.

Rick: Yeah, your Jung quote also reminded me of a Groucho Marx quote. He said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any organization that would allow me as a member.”

Roger: Yeah, that’s great. Right, exactly.

Rick: Let’s take a few minutes. Let’s take the chapter titles of your book and use them as little sutras to elicit some responses from you. Just a riff on the thoughts that each of these titles evoke and what you had in mind when you wrote those chapters. The Spirit of Now was your introduction. Anything on that?

Roger: So the Spirit of Now, I really do think, is the movement or the development of a spirituality without religion. That more and more people, and this is being showed by Gallup polls, so it’s not just an idea, but that more and more people in this country consider themselves spiritual but not religious. So I would call that the Spirit of Now.

Rick: Good. “Trust the Knowing.”

Roger: We’ve been speaking of that for the first half an hour or so of this program, which is really trusting that knowing which lies beyond words, that knowing faith which comes from the heart and not from the head.

Rick: And the word “trust” actually is the first word of every one of these chapters, and it’s sort of like, I like the way you use the word, but it kind of brings to my mind that you can distrust it, but you have to learn to sort of trust it. And the more you can learn to trust it, the more it will guide you, all these things.

Roger: Yes, yes, yes.

Rick: So the next one is “Trust the Mystery.”

Roger: Yes, the mystery, because essentially our life itself is mystery. Life in the grand sense, but also our individual life is mystery. We really, I really simply do not know fundamentally a single thing is what it feels like. that’s the underlying ground. it’s like what that invokes in me or evokes is a kind of bowing to life as it appears and manifests from day to day, a bowing, an opening to life. What an incredible process we’re living through. That sense of awe is at the heart of Trust The Mystery.” The mystery not of, the mystery of this now, the mystery of this life that we’re feeling moving through us at this very instant, and even this situation. What is this for? I don’t know.

Rick: And also the mystery of every little thing. I mean, this book, it’s actually, if you get right down, we take things for granted, you know?

Roger: Absolutely.

Rick: You know, we just sort of, we’re walking through this mystery taking it for, oh, I know what that is, it’s a book. But actually look closely enough and what have we got going on here? I mean, there’s this molecular level to this thing, this atomic level, subatomic level, quarks and leptons and Higgs-Bosons or whatever the heck is going on. And it’s a reality that we can’t even comprehend and we’re swimming in that reality all the time, mistaking it for something other than what it actually is.

Roger: That was part of a tree, wasn’t it?

Rick: It was at one point, yeah.

Roger: Yeah. So yes, Trust the Mystery.” And Trust the Dark.”

Rick: Yeah, the dark, you know, the suffering that seems to be inevitable with being human. And again, by the word ‘trust,” if something happens and seems to recur, like the experience of suffering, like the experience of change, then I trust that it’s there for a reason, that I trust that it’s part, an intrinsic part, of my life as I am meant to be experiencing it. It’s one of the colors in the tapestry of my life. And so trusting the dark is the allowing of that experience to be part of my life without pushing it away, or indeed without losing myself in it to the degree that I lose sight of everything else. But underlying whatever is happening, trusting the fact that this is part of a process that I do not know the outcome of, again, we’re back to mystery. I don’t know in any one moment necessarily what this means, if it means anything. I don’t know what this is for, but that I trust that it is an intrinsic part of my life experience and so needs to be embraced, acknowledged, and allowed.

Rick: Yeah, a lot of times when people hear that phrase, “things happen for a reason,” they think in terms of a reason that can be sort of clearly explained, or a human reason. “Oh, this must be happening because three years from now that’s going to happen,” or something like that. But it goes far beyond human intellect.

Roger: No, it goes to what we were speaking about earlier, which is the intelligence that permeates and pervades every single living thing here and everywhere in the universe, and that everything is part of that infinite web of life. And it’s that, that it’s not that it’s a linear reason, but that it does have, because it’s existing, it is playing a part in that intrinsic web of life. that’s what I mean. And if we experience suffering, which we do, that surely, like everything else, like joy, is part of it.

Rick: Yeah, nothing’s happening capriciously or arbitrarily, it’s all as well and wisely put. And speaking of joy, that’s your next chapter “Trust The Joy.”

Roger: Well, both the dark and the joy are doorways, again, that can invite us into this greater field of experience or awareness or being. When we’re in joy, usually we’ve forgotten ourselves. We forget ourselves. And in that moment of forgetting ourselves, we’re remembering something larger, not something outside of ourselves, but the larger we that we are. So in joy we forget ourselves, and in suffering or in the dark, we also have the potential to fall through to that larger sense of remembering, remembering that we are not just this suffering that is happening at this moment. That we are larger, more than that. So both are doorways.

Rick: The next one is “Trust The Changes.”

Roger: Yeah, which I”d mentioned already. Change happens, that’s inevitable. And the more we fight that, just as the more we fight the dark, but the more we fight changes, the more difficult we’re going to find our life to be, because it’s intrinsic to our life. If it’s intrinsic to life, then surely we’re being asked by life to flow with it. “Pour yourself like a fountain,” Rilke said. “One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next a star.” Rilke.

Rick: Nice. The next one is “Trust The Imperfection.”

Roger: Yeah, well I think everybody knows about that. But this is again, and I love using poetry for, they’re like pith teachings, these few lines you know from poems. that’s the value of a poem, that it gets to the heart of a question very quickly with a few words. So the Spanish poet Machado says in one of his poems, “the golden bees are making white combs and sweet honey from all my old failures.” Which again is to illustrate what we were saying earlier about the way in which everything is a color in our carpet. Everything goes toward making the honey that is our life.

Rick: And I would say, even if I hadn’t read the book and I would just read this title, “Trust the Imperfection,” that you can trust it because ultimately it’s not imperfect, everything is ultimately perfect. If you’re not seeing it as such, then you’re just not seeing it clearly or deeply enough. With that knowledge you can trust what appears to be imperfect because in fact ultimately all is well and wisely put, again.

Roger: Yeah, yeah. In Japan they have this whole movement, aesthetic movement called “wabi-sabi,” which actually values the imperfect. For example, a pot maker, a potter would encourage or allow the stains in the clay to remain there because it’s an expression of the way life actually really is. And that’s true in the Middle East as well where they always do something in the design of a carpet which is out of alignment with everything else. it’s essentially acknowledging that the imperfection is part of the perfection.

Rick: Interesting. And yet Christ said, “Be ye therefore perfect.” What do you think he meant by that?

Roger: Did he say that?

Rick: Yeah, apparently so.

Roger: Really?

Rick: “Be ye perfect.” To me it just means, bring your awareness, be established in that level of life, of God, which is, I mean the whole thing is perfect, but be consciously aware of that perfect intelligence which infuses everything, which permeates everything. And you as an individual are always going to have your imperfections, but if you apprehend the divine intelligence that permeates your individuality as well as everything else, then you see the perfection in everything.

Roger: I’m not sure that the, yeah, I mean absolutely, I agree with you. In Christianity there’s the whole dualism of pure and impure, and not only Christianity of course, but almost any tradition. And what interests me is, well really what you’ve just said is how both the pure and the impure can be understood as part of the whole picture of who we are, which of course is Tantra.

Rick: Right. Yeah, they’re both part of the whole picture. it’s not like one’s good, one’s bad. it’s like both are part of a larger wholeness which subsumes or incorporates them both.

Roger: And you know, it’s also acknowledging the reality of our humanity, which is all of it and both of it. However much the Cathars wanted to be pure and perfect, you know, they called themselves The Perfect, we’re not. we’re simply not. The Cathars were, or at least The Perfect, who were the upper echelons of the Cathars, the sect, the Gnostics of the 12th, 13th century in France. They were too pure to actually touch the earth, to actually grow food and do anything like that. But of course somebody had to do it.

Rick: Right.

Roger: And so they had all these people doing that and feeding them.

Rick: So yeah, what a setup. Yeah, I don’t think that’s the way in which perfection is going to be lived or found. I mean they still had the poop, right?

Roger: Exactly. “Trust the Letting Go.”

Roger: Yeah. Which, which means for me I think, you know, trust that you actually, first of all you can fall back from whatever particular drama is happening in your life at this moment, fall back into that, or rest back into that larger field that encompasses everything. And you know, a tendency, or the tendency of the mind is to get completely immersed. For example in this conversation, or in whatever it is that’s going on at any one moment. So the invitation to let go is the invitation not to push away whatever is happening at all, but to rest back into that larger sense of presence that we always are.

Rick: Good advice.

Roger: The stillness, yeah.

Rick: “Keep Faith With Beauty.”

Roger: Yeah, for me beauty has really been a doorway, a key, and it has been for many people, or it is for many people I’m sure. And the first thought that comes to mind when one thinks of beauty is probably nature, but the sight of a glorious sunset of course, or a beautiful tree or a flower, but also the sight of someone’s face or someone’s eyes, or even as I say in that chapter, seeing someone like Roger Federer playing a perfect game of tennis, there’s something of deep beauty there, you know, that somehow in that moment everything is in place, everything is absolutely in place. there’s a sense of perfection actually about that. And that for me is a moment of beauty. It actually returns to the idea of stillness. The French novelist Stendhal had all his characters, main characters, searching for what he called moments of beauty. And for him, for them, a moment of beauty amid all the ambition that was normally driving their lives, a moment of beauty was just a moment of self-forgetting when everything was in its place. They were maybe sitting in a garden watching a butterfly, or something as simple or apparently as mundane as that, but keeping faith with the fact that the world is offering its beauty to us all the time. You know, I remember, can I just, just remember the movie “American Beauty,” and everybody who’s seen that movie remembers one particular scene where you’ve got these two young guys looking up at this plastic bag floating in the wind. Did you see that movie?

Rick: I did, yeah.

Roger: Do you remember that?

Rick: Well, it was years ago, but I remember it because you talked about it in your book. I remembered it when you mentioned it.

Roger: Yeah, that, you know, the plastic bag floating in the air and these two young guys looking up and going, “Wow, how wonderful, how beautiful.”

Rick: Kind of sounds like somebody on LSD.

Roger: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: Whoa, look at this rock, man.

Roger: Right, right, yeah.

Rick: “Keep Faith With Kindness and Love.”

Roger: I’m not sure there’s too much more to say about that, is there? I’ve already kind of gotten into it. You know, yeah, well, I mean kindness is actually a beautiful, deep expression of love. I mean, and yet it’s so simple. How simple? How can we be kind today?

Rick: Yeah, well, I’m inclined to say something here, which is that just that over time I think a greater and greater gentleness develops in us. And it’s not only that we love our neighbor as ourself, but we love everything as ourself, or if you don’t like to put it that way, it’s very difficult to inflict any sort of harm or injury on anything, whether it’s a bug in your house that you can’t just swat it, you have to put it out, or just nature at large. It is just a reticence to desecrate it in any way because it’s intrinsically divine.

Roger: Yeah, yeah, that kind of kindness. Also kindness towards oneself.

Rick: Yeah, maybe that’s where it begins. And the final chapter, “Keep Faith with The Human Spirit.

Roger: Yeah, you know, I start that chapter with a quote from Diane Ackerman, the writer, and she said, “It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” Yeah, well, that savage and beautiful country is our life. And so, in spite of the 24-hour news cycle, in spite of all the tragedies and dramas and terrible things we hear about all the time, there is so much in this world and in this life and in our life to actually give us, to give faith in the human spirit itself. This is back to the question of evolution, the movement of the human spirit. And yeah, I do trust in that.

Rick: Great. Well, now everybody knows what the book is about so they don’t have to buy it.

Roger: Yeah, that’s true.

Rick: I’m kidding. That was just sort of a nice little overview, but it’s a very enjoyable book. I started this interview mentioning that I was interspersing your book with Sam Harris. I don’t know if you know who Sam Harris is.

Roger: I do.

Rick: Okay, good. But, you know, so far I find, despite the fact that he’s this famous atheist, he’s almost like a brother from another mother because he just essentially wants, he feels that people shouldn’t believe in things that they don’t know and that they can’t experience. And I think there’s a limit to the way he conceptualizes all that, but I think that’s a very fair suggestion because so much crazy stuff has happened from people believing in things that they didn’t really experience or know, and thereby not walking their talk, or inflicting great harm on others. And I think this whole thing of spiritual but not religious that you’ve been referring to is a move in the direction of experiencing things rather than just being told them, you know, not accepting a canon of laws and beliefs because it’s in an old book, but wanting to know for oneself experientially what’s true. And anyway, there’s a kind of a, I even listened to an interview with him and Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and some other guy, and I thought, these guys are really sensible. I mean, you know, it’s like they would be amazed that somebody who’s not in the least an atheist was appreciating their conversation so much.

Roger: My only, I mean, people like Christopher Hitchens, he’s not alive anymore, but he was an absolutely brilliant man. But for me anyway, the difference is that he, and I haven’t actually read Sam Harris, but I imagine he’s in the same kind of camp or Richard Dawkins, their world is fundamentally materialist, it seems to me. So that when, if you take what he’s saying to its extreme, when he says that, “Okay, we can’t believe in anything, we can only trust exactly what we know,” what he means I think is what we can see and hear with our own senses.

Rick: Or that the scientific method can bring it.

Roger: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Through extending our senses.

Roger: Yeah, yeah. So there is no room really for the kind of knowing faith that I was speaking to at the beginning of our talk, which is not an experience that comes through the senses or comes through the scientific method. So I’m proposing or suggesting, as so many other people are, that there’s another organ of perception in us that is beyond our ordinary everyday sensory experience, and that is the knowing faith of the heart. And you can’t convince anybody else of that.

Rick: No, you have to do the experiment yourself.

Roger: Yeah, so there’s no scientific method that you can apply that I’m aware of that you can replicate in someone just because, you know, it’s a process that arises from the inside that is not implanted from the outside. So that’s where I would differ with the atheists. But I really do trust that there is a world beyond my own ego. There is a world, that is, there is a dimension of being and knowing that is not dependent or contingent upon my conceptual sense of self. So everything they are speaking to, for me anyway, refers back to that conscious sense of self. Roger, Sam, you know, what Sam can know or doesn’t know, what Roger can know or doesn’t know.

Rick: As if the universe were sort of dependent upon our ability to know in order for it to do what it does, are you saying?

Roger: Yeah, it’s like taking the personal experience of just being this conceptual entity within the head and extrapolating that out into the world and saying, “Well, this is just how the world is. The world is no different to this, you know, this concrete factual thing. The world itself is simply a material manifestation.” So for me, or for you probably, there is a domain of knowing silence that is not contingent on Roger, the personality. And that domain of knowing silence is not just mine, in fact it isn’t mine at all. It is the intelligence that permeates the world, the living world. Well that for them is, they would say, “Well, show me, prove it.”

Rick: And there, what I would say to Sam, and Sam is actually a practicing Buddhist meditator believe it or not.

Roger: No, I believe it because, yeah.

Rick: He’s done a lot of serious meditation. There what I would say is, it can be proven, and it actually can be proven by the scientific method if we regard the human nervous system as a scientific instrument. And a single cell in our body is actually more complex than the large Hadron Collider, you know, and we have trillions of them. And put together and used properly, the nervous system is an instrument capable of providing experiential access to the ground of being, to the most fundamental reality of the universe. Maybe or maybe that may or may not be the same reality that physicists allude to when they talk about the unified field, there’s a lot of controversy about that. But we are that fundamental reality, everything is, a coffee cup is essentially, but the coffee cup doesn’t have the nervous system to experience it, we do. And so I would say to Sam, “Keep doing the experiment, man, you’re already on it. There may come a time, you know, 20 years from now in which you are no longer an atheist because you have so deeply experienced and begun to appreciate that ocean of intelligence that we all swim in, that you can no longer say that such a reality doesn’t exist.”

Roger: Right, yeah, yeah. Well, there’s another Buddhist, Stephen Batchelor, who wrote a book called “Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Roger: Which, yeah, I can see how it can go that way. Yeah.

Rick: But anyway, there’s a certain honesty about their approach, you know, kind of a show-me attitude that…

Roger: A rigor.

Rick: Yeah, it’s commendable. I mean… It is. It’s better in my book than a lot of the bs that’s been put down by religion in terms of believing all kinds of things and, you know, punishing people severely if they don’t believe them and nobody actually experiencing those things, taking it all on some pie-in-the-sky faith. Yeah, it’s interesting.

Roger: Well, you know, Stephen Batchelor, who I appreciate a lot in his book “Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist,” he speaks about being several years in a Tibetan monastery, you know, and working within that system very diligently, but then gradually realizing that he was not allowed to step outside the expected experiences that you’re meant to get from a particular meditation practice. So, you know, you go to the teacher and you say, “Okay, what’s your experiences?” “No, that’s not it.” And so there are very specific expectations or preconceptions about what a particular practice is meant to do. And if you don’t experience those, then not only are you not on the right path, you know, you’re almost on the edge of being a heretic.

Rick: Interesting.

Roger: And so he really got that. And what he says in that book is he realized he was being indoctrinated. He was being indoctrinated into a particular worldview and point of view that had a very specific end in mind, that was wanting to lead you there. And if you didn’t go that way, then there was something wrong.

Rick: Yeah, so it really wasn’t…

Roger: So he left.

Rick: Yeah, well, three cheers for him. I mean, you know, ultimately I think what we really, what this whole spirituality game ultimately was meant to be is a realization of truth, and not somebody’s truth, but truth as it is in and of itself. Exactly. And unfortunately it always ends up morphing into somebody’s truth, you know, by basically as we were talking earlier, by people who aren’t actually experiencing it and formulate a whole structure around the accounts of somebody else’s experience. Right. And so I think one thing that is happening in the world today, and in keeping with your whole spiritual but not religious theme, is that there’s a kind of a demand for honesty and for direct experience, not taking things through an intermediary or believing things just because some tradition says they’re true, but knowing it or rejecting it based on our own direct experience.

Roger: And the experience we have is, as has been said for centuries and not just by Eckhart, is of this moment. I mean, this is basically all we have.

Rick: Yeah. And this, and this. Yeah. Great. Well, this has been a lively conversation. Anything else you want to throw in before we wrap it up?

Roger: Perhaps the people can see more about what I do or more of what I’ve done on my website.

Rick: Oh yeah, I’ll be linking to that.

Roger: You’re going to be talking about that or mentioning that?

Rick: I will.

Roger: And if people … I’ve done quite a lot of books on poetry, because poetry again has been another doorway for me. So the “10 Poems to Change Your Life” series, you know, that series of books?

Rick: Yeah, I went on a spiritual retreat a couple of months ago and they had a bunch of books on a table and there were two or three of your books.

Roger: Yeah. So, someone who signs up for my mailing list, they get a poem every week with a little commentary, you know. it’s like a pith teaching, not from me, but from whoever it is that the poem is written by. Right. So, yeah, other than that, that’s it really.

Rick: Good. Well, let me make some wrap-up points. First of all, thanks a lot, Roger. Really enjoyed the opportunity to speak with you like this. You’ve written a number of books and I’ll be listing them actually on my page, on your page on www.batgap.com. I’ll list this one and your others and links to the Amazon pages where people can purchase them. This is a Sounds True book, I might link to the Sounds True page where people can purchase them and link to your website. And there are a number of other things of a general nature there that I always like to bring to people’s attention. One is that each interview has its own little discussion area in a forum, so there’ll be one for Roger, and you’ll see a link to that. There are several ways in which all the interviews I’ve done have been indexed, alphabetical, chronological, by topic, by geography even, we’re working on that one, in terms of where the teacher is located. There is a “Donate” button, which I appreciate people clicking if they have the means and donating. there’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, you’ll see that on the top menu someplace. And there’s a link to an audio podcast, so you can subscribe on iTunes and just listen to this in audio, not have to sit in front of your computer. So go to www.batgap.com. You can also subscribe on the YouTube channel if you prefer to do that, subscribe to the channel and then YouTube notifies you each time a new video is posted. So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Next week’s one is going to be a panel discussion with 4 or 5 participants about refined perception, celestial perception, which many people are beginning to experience. And it’s something which I think is interesting, I mean the iconography and scriptures of every spiritual tradition depict halos and angels and all kinds of subtle realities, and there are people who actually experience that stuff on a daily basis. And I’ve collected 4 or 5 such people, we’re going to have a panel discussion, so that’ll be next week’s show. So thanks for listening or watching, thanks again Roger.

Roger: Great pleasure.

Rick: Yeah, we’ll see you next week.

Roger: Bye.