Sally Kempton Transcript

Sally Kempton Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Sally Kempton. Sally, would you like me to read your little canned bio here or do you want to just tell us, off the cuff, a little bit about yourself?

Sally: Hi, Rick.

Rick: Hi.

Sally: Totally nice to be with you. So, I’m a teacher of meditation, spiritual wisdom, of what I call contemplative Tantra. And from a Hindu tradition, I’ve been practicing and teaching for about 40 years. I was a longtime student of Swami Muktananda whom Rick and I were just talking about and was a swami, a monk, for a number of years until the early 2000s. And I’ve been teaching and writing, so to speak, as a lay person since about 2003. And I’ve written a couple of books which hopefully we’ll talk about called “Meditation for the Love of It” and “Awakening Shakti.” And I, hopefully we’re going to also talk about my new audio program which is called “Doorways to the Infinite” which is a series of Tantric meditation practices from an amazing Sanskrit text called the Vijnana Bhairava or “The wisdom of the fiery form of the divine.” So that’s my basic bio. Oh, and I used to write a column called “Wisdom” for Yoga Journal for a number of years.

Rick: Great. Yeah, and incidentally at the end, we’ll give the details of this but you’re going to be teaching a telecourse starting like the night that this interview comes out. It’ll probably come out Monday or Tuesday morning or something. And so if people don’t listen through to the very end, you might want to go to Sally’s website sallykempton.com and check that out or listen through the very end. We’ll get more details about it.

Sally: It’s actually on the Shift Network and it’s called the Wisdom Goddess Empowerment, so you can look it up, you can go to shiftnetwork.com and look it up or through my website.

Rick: Okay, great. So I had the time during the past week to listen to your entire audiobook, Doorways to the Infinite, The Art and Practice of Tantric Meditation. I really enjoyed it. And I also read a good portion of your book Awakening Shakti, The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga. I really enjoyed that too. In fact, I just really enjoyed preparing for this interview. And I don’t know how to do this, but I want to spend a couple minutes just kind of laying out some thoughts and questions that were about things that I think about pretty much all the time anyway, being a spiritual nerd. But listening and reading your stuff really enlivened and amplified and filled in some gaps for me. So I’d like to just kind of lay that out and it’ll probably give a summary of what we’re going to talk about in this interview, although I’m sure we’ll veer off into other topics as well. So I think all these little questions could be summed up in the question, “What’s actually going on?” And the first part of it is what I would call the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness. We’ve all heard the term non-duality and Advaita and we’ve heard people say things like, “Oh, I was one with the tree” and things like that. So let’s say I’m looking at a tree, right? What is that noise? A car?

Sally: It’s a helicopter.

Rick: Okay, so let’s say I’m looking at a tree. Now, the Vedic literature says that ultimately it’s all consciousness. I am that, thou art that, all this is that. There’s nothing but that. And so what’s actually going on if I’m looking at a tree? If the tree ultimately is nothing but consciousness and I, my brain, my eye, not only the innermost eye, but my brain, my eyes, my perceptual apparatus, the sun which is providing light by which to see the tree, if all that is ultimately nothing but consciousness, then really consciousness is kind of just interacting with itself, within itself. It’s looking at itself, so to speak. So that’s what we mean by the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness. So we’ll talk about that, that’s one point. Next point is the fascinating thing of the veiling of this, the veiling of our fundamental oneness. If it’s really only consciousness, why do we see it as flesh and bone and wood and so on, when it’s ultimately, actually consciousness? How is it that we lose the vision of the essential nature of things? So that’s another point. Third point would be the sort of the infinite energy and potential inherent in every iota of creation. I was looking at a talk by a physicist last night, Nassim Haramein, and he was talking about how within every cubic centimeter of empty space there is more latent or potential energy than there is in the entire expressed, manifest universe. So there’s just like this incredibly dense powerful energy in every iota of creation or of the fundamental field from which creation arises. So I want to talk about that. And then another thing is the idea of intelligence. And this one, I think, is the one which people take for granted even the most. Because if you think about it, there’s something utterly miraculous going on right before our very eyes. In every cell of our bodies, there are over billions of atoms. And each atom in itself is a little miracle. And the cell in itself is more complex than a major metropolitan city. And we only understand one percent maybe, of what’s going on in the cell. And then we have trillions of them, and they’re all coordinated perfectly to produce this miracle called life. And then there are billions of us and billions of trillions of planets, and on which there are other forms of life. I mean, there’s this incredible display going on in the universe which makes it hard for me to understand how anybody could be an atheist. But there’s this kind of like cloud that veils our vision of what’s actually going on. So I’d like to talk about intelligence. And your books address all these points, I think, and they personalize it. They don’t portray intelligence as merely some kind of impersonal oceanic field, but they discuss the expressions of intelligence and the hierarchy of intelligence that governs and structures the universe. So that to me is all very fascinating, and those are some of the things I’d like to talk to you about.

Sally: Yeah, the basic issues, the fundamental issues are embodied and disembodied life.

Rick: Yeah. So maybe we should start with consciousness. I mean, it might be a stretch for some people to say that everything is fundamentally consciousness. Who says it is? How can we help to explain that it might be if somebody doesn’t quite see how it could be?

Sally: I think for one thing we need to talk about how we define consciousness, because, which of course science apparently has not succeeded in doing. But as far as I can tell, there are several basic views in contemporary science of what consciousness is. And then there’s the view of Eastern spirituality, which is of course the one that I hold and that we’re talking from. But there’s a view in neuroscience that, and I actually heard on NPR a woman, a Canadian woman scientist, expounding on this view with utter absolute certainty. There is no such thing as consciousness outside the brain. And it’s consciousness, in other words, is an epiphenomenon of brain processes. And that’s essentially what I guess we would call the reductionist neuro-physiological view. There’s another view that, that’s kind of psychological view that consciousness is sort of like the press office in the Obama administration. You know, that decisions are made elsewhere and consciousness observes and reports on the processes of the physical body and the pre-existing physical universe. And the view that I hold and that I’m pretty sure you hold, is that when we talk about consciousness we’re talking about a fundamental intelligent energy which has the nature of awareness and which is the ground, the absolute ground of all that exists. So that consciousness, if we define consciousness like this, it’s inside and outside everything. So the intelligence of the cell, the power of the breath, of course, everything that goes on in the brain is underlaid by this foundational ground, Beingness. Which is aware and intelligent and filled with creative power which is, I would say, the the contribution of the Tantric approach to looking at what the world consists of. So that, so we’re talking about consciousness as pure being which has the nature of light and intelligence and also is fundamentally creative. And one of the texts of the Kashmir Shaiva Tantra which I love, which is called self-recognition, the heart of the doctrine of self-recognition, that is the doctrine that says you are embodied pure divine consciousness and your task in life is to see that in yourself. One of the things that it says is that if the heart of reality were not creative it would be, this is their words, it would be something like a pot or a jar. It would be inert and that’s obviously impossible. So power, creativity, is essential in consciousness and that’s part of, I think, why we are what we are and why we’re so allured by this understanding of the world as, as you said earlier, is a dance of consciousness in communication with itself in all these different forms.

Rick: And creativity just seems so explosive, so prolific. I mean, just look at the world. And even if you go to a dead part of the world, go to Death Valley and get down with a microscope and start looking microscopically at what’s going on and particles of sand or something, and you see this kind of marvelous orderliness and all kinds of microorganisms. You know, and each of them is a complex little world unto itself. And so it’s like there’s this kind of creativity which pervades everything.

Sally: Yeah, pervades matter as well as sentient creatures. I think that’s the thing that’s so radical about this view. That this understanding and which I know is quantum physics, but that the table is not inert. The table is constantly, it’s a dance of molecules interacting with itself. And there are these moments which we do spiritual practice for the sake of and which sometimes just arise spontaneously of actually seeing that this is the case. That the world suddenly the incredible aliveness of the world reveals itself.

Rick: And for some people it’s not moments, it’s more or less their normal condition.

Sally: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Now, speaking of the table now. On the level of the atoms, the table is 99.999999 percent empty space. And if you look at the little teeny bit that’s not empty space and start looking at it more closely, it’s not material either. You know it’s, there’s this sort of fluctuations of the vacuum state or whatever. You probably saw John Hagman’s talk out at the SAND conference and you can boil it right down to understanding that everything is kind of just this universal field. Unified field they call it, which is just interacting within itself, self-referral.

Sally: Self-referential. It’s an extraordinary vision that, that arises as you contemplate this.

Rick: And that’s what I mean by the question “what’s actually going on.” Because we see a table. We take it for granted it’s a table and has a certain practical utility. And we we treat it as a table. But if we could actually look closely enough, we could see there’s no table there. It’s just this field of pure potentiality, sort of apparently arising in the form of a table. But it’s just that’s only from a certain relative perspective that we are neurologically equipped to have. Otherwise, there’s nothing there but pure potentiality just sort of percolating.

Sally: Yeah and what one of the ways that Advaita of course, describes it is as a dream. You know, that even though it feels completely real and solid to us that in other states of consciousness, it doesn’t exist at all. And the thing that’s kind of extraordinary about it is that the underlying viewpoint about the creativity of consciousness is that it’s all coming from inside. And that by inside, we mean our brain. But we also mean that which is behind our brain. So in a certain sense, on the inside of the inside, the creative process is manifesting worlds and fields and universes which, which we are equipped to, to experience as being external to ourselves because of of the way we’re wired. But which if our wiring were to be tweaked just a little bit, which is what meditation and and other modalities that open the doors of perception are all about, we can actually see that the table is appearing as a solid table. But actually arising and subsiding inside this kind of energetic field in which the particles come together and separate even while in our normal vision, we are seeing something solid.

Rick: Yeah, and you wouldn’t want to not see it as a table or as a wall or this. Because you wouldn’t be able to function.

Sally: Exactly.

Rick: I don’t know about Kashmir Shaivism. But I’ve heard the term Lesha Vidya. I’m not sure if Kashmir Shaivism has that term. But it’s faint remains of ignorance in which your predominant vision of the table is this is my own self. This is pure consciousness. Secondarily, okay, yeah, I see it’s a table. There’s some greasy surface of like, that’s the analogy, is that you take a butterball in your hand and then you throw it off and there’s some greasy surface left. So we wouldn’t if enlightenment were a state in which all there was, was consciousness and objects couldn’t be distinguished. It wouldn’t be able to be a living reality.

Sally: Yeah, and I think that the enlightened awareness that my tradition celebrates, which my guru used to say, that when people would ask him what do you see, he would say, “Well when I look at something I see the light of consciousness.” Because he saw the world as, as light. And then I see the object rising inside it. But there’s always that initial perception of the light field out of which everything, everything is being manifested. So what he would say is that, in fact, in his perception everything that’s arising, is arising from light and is made of light. And what we call particles of matter and energy appear as light particles. So, in a certain sense, the enlightened vision is literally enlightened. It’s a vision in which you actually see the foundational light inside everything.

Rick: That’s great. That’s exactly what I was trying to describe. So beautiful. So then the question, well, let’s just see, have we really covered it for the for the truth? We’re never going to convince hardcore skeptics like that woman you saw, you heard on NPR. Because they really have to have the experience. But is there anything else we can dig out of here in terms of consciousness being the fundamental reality and everything arising from that rather than consciousness merely being an epiphenomenon of brain functioning?

Sally: Well, I think one of the, one of the really, convincing arguments of quantum physics is simply that that when a consciousness interacts with any object in the quantum world, it transforms the field. Because there is a constant interaction between the observer and the field that is apparently being observed but which is actually in constant communication with what we consider the observer. So and I, I know that people say that you can’t really prove consciousness in the spiritual sense from quantum physics. And a lot of quantum physicists get kind of impatient and annoyed when people like us start citing physics as a, as the proof of the existence of this non-dual subtle field. But on the other hand, I do know, and we all know physicists who, who follow that perception to its source and are actually able to realize that when we talk about a quantum field we’re talking about something that is microscopically visible but actually points to the presence of a much subtler underlying reality that’s even subtler than the quantum world. Which is what we would call the foundational light world or the foundational consciousness. I also think it’s very interesting to talk about this whole process as the process that begins to unfold as we begin to understand the way the neurological system works to create differentiation in what we see. Because, I mean, we actually do go through a… I read recently about a an experiment that was done where they put goggles on people that, that distorted their vision. So they saw everything upside down. So the goggles would actually make you, they would actually give you the sight of the tree. I’m looking at a tree and at your bookcase as upside down. But they said that within three to four minutes, the brain would perform an operation where it turned it right side up. Because the brain knows that the tree is not growing out of the, out of the sky. It’s growing out of the ground. So it would just, uh, yes, it would just correct perception. And that seems to be what the brain does. It, it’s like our neurological wiring is set up to give us the experience of a perceiver that’s separate from what’s perceived. And no matter what, you know, when we’re in our ordinary state of consciousness and we haven’t taken a psychedelic drug or something that actually shifts perception physically, we are constantly being given the experience of you there and me here and the computer in between us and etc. So I actually think that something has to shift inside the human field of perception in order for a human being to be able to see directly what reality is. And of course, in our generation for that shift, the first shift, those first shifts of perceptions actually happened through psychoactive drugs. Because we were able to take a pill and suddenly look into reality and see that there was light that manifesting us as objects. And, but of course, the more skillful and more lasting and more profound way of doing this is, it’s through meditation. And I want to say one more thing which is really the basis of the Tantric teaching that I, that I was trained in and that I espouse and that has been my experience. Which is that the creative power that actually wires us the way we are wired actually has to rewire us. In other words, it’s not something that a human being does on our own. Almost it’s kind of invited. They say the eye can’t look at the eye. It’s impossible to, for the eyeball to screw itself around and see itself except in a mirror of course. And it’s in the same way, it’s not a human operation to rewire our perception so that we can see the unity underlying everything. And the way this happens according to the Tantra is that the foundational energy that has actually manifested all this from the time of the big bang, it begins to wake us up to shift our perception, to reprogram our physical and subtle body so that we are actually able to perceive reality as unity and as what’s sometimes called, duality and unity as we were saying. The table appearing inside a field of consciousness without the sense of fundamental separation, that’s our our ordinary experience. So the whole, the whole process that I’m concerned with in my own practice and that has been the basis of my practice is really to invoke the foundational power within consciousness such that it will, you know, reframe my perceptions. And that process, of course, is called the awakening of kundalini. Which is the activation of this very subtle, let’s call it, enlightening or evolutionary quality in consciousness that is spontaneously and naturally able to shift our awareness so that we can have that experience. So did I leap? Did I cut right to the…

Rick: Well, there’s a lot in there we could like just, yeah, unpack that for the rest of the interview. But let me take a stab at it. Firstly, we’re still coming back to this point of, is consciousness the most fundamental reality? I don’t know about Muktananda. But I know Nityananda was fabled to have, you know, been seen levitating, rising up to the top of some building he was in. And as I recall when I read Play of Consciousness. There are, of course, numerous other accounts of things like that happening, none that we’ve been able to verify in our contemporary society. But let’s say that were to happen and that there was somebody who could replicate that reliably and it wasn’t David Copperfield or Chris Angel or one of those guys. Then it seems to me if they were honest, physicists would really have to scramble to explain how that could be possible.

Sally: Right.

Rick: What laws of nature would enable something like that to happen? And the kind of more enlightened physicists that you and I have been alluding to would say, “Well, consciousness is all pervading and there are certain laws that reside, all laws of nature reside within it. And someone like Nityananda has learned to master those laws such that he if he wants to rise up and talk to the ceiling or whatever, he can do that.” Of course, there are Christian examples of that, too. So that’s one point. Another point is this idea about, whether… You were mentioning how some physicists get kind of pissed off because New Agey types, spiritual types co-opt their theories and their explanations as a means of sort of supporting their own perspectives. And, saying that consciousness is the same as a unified field and so on. But I’d like to throw in the idea that the human nervous system, and I think Kashmir Shaivism has a lot to say about this, is such an amazing instrument, far more intricate and capable of exploring certain realities than any machinery that human beings have been able to create. I mean Hubble telescope has its capabilities which our nervous system does not. And maybe the Large Hadron Collider has its. But there’s the human nervous system actually has the delicacy of functioning the refinement of it in its structure to be able to ground one experientially in the sort of the ground state of creation and unified field pure consciousness, whatever we want to call it. So it’s really the ultimate scientific instrument and it’s just a matter of learning how to use it.

Sally: Yeah, Rick that’s beautifully said. I like the way Ken Wilber formulates that, actually. You know, that given, that there are different levels of reality inside the human nervous system, there are certain realities that we see with the physical eyes. There are certain realities that we can conceive of with the mind and imagination. And there’s certain realities that can only be seen by a deeper intuitive awareness which traditionally has been called “The Eye of the Heart.” So our nervous system actually does have the capacity to experientially see into the heart of the universe in a way that perhaps no other, certainly nothing we make, seems to have been able to do.

Rick: We can’t make a house fly, I mean even…

Sally: Exactly, exactly. Despite all the interesting claims of the AI people the artificial intelligence people so far we haven’t been able to make a house fly. So, and so far we haven’t been able to replicate or to create a a machine or a computer that actually can experience the depths of reality directly. And who knows as if, in fact, the evolutionary process of enlightenment does unfold in the way that some people think it will, maybe we will have enough of that awareness ourselves to be able to to create something that can give it to other people mechanically. But I doubt it. It’s, I think it’s, it is the miracle of life of human consciousness that we are. We seem to be built in such a way that with enough work on ourselves and with enough opening to what’s available, we actually can recognize ourselves as the wholeness. That’s an extraordinary miracle. That in a certain, and I would say more than that, we can recognize ourselves as the wholeness and actually embody that awareness inside a normal life. Which I would say is perhaps the holy grail of spiritual practice. How we bring that awareness into our relationships, into our planet, into our world.

Rick: And some would argue that if properly developed, if our full potential is unfolded, we could actually replicate the kinds of things that the Hubble telescope or the Large Hadron Collider can do. We could actually in our, with our inner yogic vision see a distant galaxy or explore subatomic particles. But putting that aside…

Sally: Well, but we can, I mean, I know lots of people and I’ve had a few experiences myself of actually seeing into the body, seeing into my own body, seeing the blood flowing, seeing what’s having a a glimpse of the complexity that’s going on. That is a capacity that really does develop through deep meditation.

Rick: Yeah and Patanjali talks about a lot of that stuff, you know.

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: But putting that aside, it’s actually, they say that the Large Hadron Collider uses like half the electricity of Geneva or something when it’s running at full capacity. And physicists even now understand that there are deeper levels of reality that you need a machine as big as the universe to actually probe that. That you just couldn’t go any deeper in terms of a physical physical machine that they can conceive of building. But what we’re suggesting is that the human nervous system has the capacity to go deeper without being, without using half the power of Geneva. It just has a certain delicacy in its structure, certain capability in its design. That, if we can kind of tap into that and unfold that, will enable us to get right down to the the real nitty-gritty, right down to the foundation of the universe and recognize that as what we essentially are.

Sally: Yeah and it’s one of the really wild and “experience-able” truths that the yoga, that the text of the Yoga Tantra and that yoga, is all about is this recognition. That the human body, inside the human body, the entire universe, the structures of the universe, the physical structures and also the subtler structures are completely replicated and therefore completely “experience-able.” And that there’s, that you do in deep meditation experience places on the planet and places in the universe that are real, that exist outside, you can experience them inside. And more interesting to me actually if we’re talking about inner sightseeing, inner tourism, is that it is actually possible to see worlds, see light worlds, subtle worlds, beings who we never would see in the physical universe in the subtle world. The world, that’s the world of dream as it were, the world we enter in dream but the subtle world that we enter in meditation as you probably know is, it’s real in a way that dream doesn’t appear. You know, that just as in dream images come, that can be very strange and interesting and powerful and transformative. As the yogins tell us, there is another level where we, which we enter in meditation in which we enter a subtle world where the colors are brighter than they are in the physical world, where where wisdom is given to us that’s way beyond the wisdom we can read in books. And one of the things that the yogic sages tell us is that real, genuinely-innovative knowledge, I believe a lot of the knowledge that has led to the technological innovations that that pop into consciousness at different moments, really can be experienced, actually as down-loaded from these subtle worlds which many people, many enlightened sages who have traveled extensively in those realms, will tell us are actually the source of the innovative wisdom that comes through human consciousness and is then manifested in the physical world. Almost as though they’re blueprints at subtler levels of consciousness that are the underlying energies behind our physical experience.

Rick: Yeah. Not only kind of scientific types of discoveries but I’ve heard that I think it might have been Mozart who said he would cognize a symphony in just a second and then it would just take a while to write it out. But the whole thing would just come in as a complete package.

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: And I often feel like you watch some great movie which you feel is just really having an enlightening impact on society, you think “Whoa, where did that come from?” It’s like there’s really some kind of divine wisdom that really wanted to come through and get out to the masses.

Sally: Yeah, yeah, and a lot of what people like you do is, in a certain sense it’s a little bit of a debased word but, “channel” that wisdom. It’s in a certain sense, the more clear one becomes, the more open one is to that coming through.

Rick: Yeah, one time I was teaching a course for people who were training to become TM teachers and I was finding that somebody would ask a question I wouldn’t really know the answer. But I just start to say a word or two and then the whole thing would just come and I’d be able to answer it. And I asked Maharishi about that and he said “Yeah. that’s exactly right.” So that’s the way I do it.

Sally: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so let’s see. So there’s some real nice stuff here that we’re going to expand on. First of all, this whole idea of subtle worlds. I mean, in a way, we were just sort of jumping from the gross to the transcendent, tables and then unified field. But there’s a whole… My wife just passed me a note. “Are you letting her talk enough?” Yep, I’m letting her talk enough. We’re going back and forth here. Gross to the transcendent, there’s a whole range in between. And you talk and we’re going to talk about that in this interview. And you talk about it in your books. But there are all sorts of subtle strata, are there not? Where, in which hordes of life beings reside, light beings and life beings and that cannot only be cognized in meditation. But like most things that are experienced in meditation, it can be stabilized and become an ordinary walking, waking state experience.

Sally: Yeah, and so I want to talk a little bit about the ways in which we might experience subtle realms in the waking state. Because to me that’s the most interesting aspect of the way the subtle worlds interact with us. In Vedanta, as in the yoga tradition, they divide reality in various ways. But essentially there’s physical reality, gross reality, then there’s the subtle world reality which is vast, as you were saying. And then there’s what’s sometimes called the causal reality which is where forms kind of start to dissolve into formlessness. And beyond that is the transcendent realm. So in a certain sense, you could say that as we start to access the subtle realms and the causal realms through meditation and through practice, what we start to realize is that that we experience them in different ways. I know there are people who experience them very visually. I have actually a number of students who have quite remarkable visual entries into subtle worlds. And my guru, he traveled extensively and he recorded his travels as did Yogananda Paramahamsa and other teachers. Some of the teachers who really set the Western world on fire were teachers who had very, very visual experience of these higher subtle worlds and of deities, beings who live in bodies made of light and have a kind of elemental effect on the physical world and the goddesses who I speak about in my book Awakening Shakti which hopefully we’ll talk about later. But my experience of the subtle world has always been energetic. It’s been a kind of recognition of subtle, very distinct energy fields that become recognizable as you practice, as having different degrees of subtlety and density. So, when we talk about let’s say dark energies or dense vibrations or heavy vibrations as lots of New Age people do, we are actually talking about genuine energetic fields that are present in this universe. And at the same time, what we begin to be able to be aware of is these very light, very powerful, very intelligent subtle energies that have actually distinct personal energy signatures as distinct as yours. That we can begin to recognize that the nature of being alive is to have a particular energetic personality that we actually recognize when we let ourselves tune into it. For example, if there’s someone you’re really intimate with like your wife or your mother or your best friend you actually recognize them by the energetic signature that they manifest. So that if you think about your wife, you experience a certain energy that’s very different I assume than when you think about your mother or your cat. Because in that sense we are all energy beings and the subtle realms, the subtle worlds are full of literally teeming with these energy beings who seem to have a capacity, according to the texts and I’ve actually noticed it myself in my practice, these energy beings seem to have a capacity to shape shift in ways that are much more difficult for you and I in our physical bodies. So in other words, they can appear as light forms. They can appear in these forms that people often see in meditation and paint. As you know, when we call the forms of gods and goddesses or angels or demonic forces that is there, they take forms that people have recorded, that are let’s say, mediated through the imagination but that we come to realize are not imaginary in the sense of being unreal. So the ways in which the human mind, intelligence, imagination can interact with subtle worlds by opening to them, by invoking them, by imagining them, by using mantras or sound forms or dialogue to to interact with them has been the stuff of yoga and shamanism and and deep religious transformative practice ever since I think human beings came onto the planet. Because the atmosphere around us literally teams with subtle energies and forces who are in my experience, very, very willing, very, very, almost offering themselves as helpers, as inspirers. As you know, and all we really have to do is take them seriously and be willing to invoke them.

Rick: Yeah, that last point was good because, as you were speaking, I was thinking. Okay. Some people are going to wonder what’s the utility of this and should this be something I seek out and, I think you know, maybe not. For instance, I have a friend who sees subtle beings routinely. I don’t know whether they’re angels or what. And shortly after he divulged to me that he had this experience. I was very curious, of course. I said, “Are there any here, are there any here,” and we were in an elevator at San Francisco airport. And I whispered to him, small crowded elevator, I said, “Are there any in the elevator?” And he just kind of smiled and he got out and he said “Oops, they just said to me ‘Don’t point us out to people if they’re meant to see us, they’ll see us.’” And then he said there were three. But I think maybe it could be a misalignment of priorities. And one can get kind of preoccupied with trying to develop subtle perceptions and see auras. And without having, Maharishi used to use the analogy of “capturing the fort which commands the territory.” If you capture the fort, then you’re free to roam about and explore the whole territory. But don’t get hung up going after this gold mine over here or this diamond mine over there. Capture the fort first.

Sally: Well, Yes, right on. And here’s what I would say about it, again in my experience. That it’s very important in capturing the fort as Maharishi beautifully calls it, to actually have…you can’t do it with human effort. In other words, human effort will only take you so far and you need empowerment. You need grace, you need help. So this is really the utility of understanding and recognizing subtle beings. That even, that most of us who’ve had some experience in spiritual life understand that certain teachers have the capacity to empower you spiritually. You were with such a teacher. I was with such a teacher. So we understand that they’re human beings who can be of profound help, not just as teachers of skills but also of being able to transmit to us an understanding or an awareness or a state. So I think that it’s also important to understand that there are beings in the energy field in the cosmos whose, let’s call it, job, whose gift is to be able to empower our spiritual awareness. And the usefulness, I would say, of being able to invoke subtle energies is for the purpose of help in the process of enlightenment. And, of course, again it’s not a new idea. It’s been the basis of mystical practice for I would say since the beginning. But that we don’t, we don’t break through the veils without some sort of recognition of the need for this kind of subtle help and what’s sometimes called grace. Or in the in the tantric tradition, there’s a kind of a basic understanding about conscious, the powers of consciousness. That consciousness, this subtle force that we’ve been talking about, is constantly creating forms, maintaining them for a while and then dissolving them. I mean that’s the nature of life energy. It brings things into being. It keeps them in stasis as a table and then the table will eventually, one way or another, dissolve and decay. And, of course, that’s happening in our body on the cellular level. it’s happening constantly in the mind. But what Tantra says is that there are two other cosmic processes which are always at play and one of them is, you were mentioning earlier, the concealment process. Where the unity behind everything is just simply veiled by our nervous system, by whatever forces in reality are bent on concealing these subtle beings, that don’t want to be pointed out by your friend or our fundamental oneness with each other. And there’s another force in the universe which is in Sanskrit it’s called Anudraha which literally means “that which grabs the individual and shows it, reveals reality to it” which in English we call that grace. And the whole Tantric project is based on the understanding you absolutely cannot take one foot into subtle awareness unless consciousness gives you that grace, unless consciousness in fact seizes your individual consciousness and starts to open the veils for you. So asking for the help of those energies which can awaken us is a tremendously powerful practice, which combined with your own work your own meditative and psychological effort is what’s going to make that awakening possible.

Rick: Yeah. I’ll talk for a minute and let you get a drink of water. But yeah. I was noticing in my notes, I think you said in your book we’re talking about the veiling of our fundamental oneness and you’re talking about Shakti as Mahamaya. And you said that which would be a great illusion but Shakti created the illusion and she has to free us from it. And it’s interesting. It seems to me that, I don’t know in my way of understanding and which is of course subject to revision, there had to be a veiling in order for there to be a universe. It’s like, and in the earth even, if we take the traditional cosmological understanding of how the universe evolved for the first few billion years at least, there couldn’t have been any beings that were at least gross biological beings that were evolved enough, sophisticated enough in their functioning to have a conversation like this or to talk about transcending and experiencing the source of creation or anything like that. And first stars had to form and then stars had to explode and that had to happen quite a few times before there were enough heavy elements to form worlds and have beings on them. And it all took billions of years. So it’s almost like, and yet all that sometimes people say, “Well, the universe doesn’t exist unless someone’s perceiving it.” But then things just come into existence as they are perceived. But I never understood that because it seemed to me that the universe was evolving for several billion years before there could have been anyone to perceive it. And then eventually life began to form and began to evolve and got to the point where we could have yogis. We could have conversations like this, people seeking to know and understand and experience the ultimate reality.

Sally: Yeah, and of course, the the view of Yoga is that the universe is inherently sentient so that there was always a perceiver.

Rick: Not necessarily human perceiver.

Sally: Not necessarily a human perceiver but there’s the consciousness, is conscious sentient so that sentiency is all… I mean, that it is not a scientific view of it but it’s the View. I think that makes sense of that in a certain sense. That if you really do believe that the perceiver creates what is perceived, then you have to assume that there is a perceiver who is present at the creation, as it were.

Rick: Yeah, and as you were saying, all these subtle beings who have jobs and those jobs have to do with creation.

Sally: Yeah exactly.

Rick: We can talk more about that and if there’s a star then that star is, there’s a consciousness associated with that star.

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: The Indian tradition calls our sun Surya and that it’s meant to imply some great being that resides in the body of that star. And Westerners talk about Gaia with regard to the earth.

Sally: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the idea that everything in the universe actually has a soul as it were, has a presence, has an aware consciousness. And, of course, the Indian tradition is so unbelievably skilled at mapping these and pointing out to us why planets have an effect on our psychological consciousness and what that all has to do with. So yeah, I mean there are just certain things that are not explained, that cannot be explained with physical science. And although I am totally fascinated by the ways in which physical science explains reality and enhances our understanding of reality and kind of explodes myths about how things came into being. I don’t feel that…Oone of the really fascinating things to me about the current excitement in the cosmological world about how they’ve actually have been able to to see with their telescopes the moment when this infinitesimal seed arose out of the big bang and then expanded from that creating space as it expanded, that they’ve proved that the universe is expanding.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t think they visually see that but they get with the radio telescope they get the sort of background noise of the big bang.

Sally: Right.

Rick: And also they can tell due to blue shift now the Doppler effect that all the galaxies are moving apart from each other, so like pennies on a balloon that’s being inflated so they do see that expansion. Yeah.

Sally: Well, there’s, have you, did you read the the pieces in The Times earlier this year? Apparently through, I think, mathematical formulations coming from from those telescopes, they actually were able to pinpoint the moment when the universe kind of exploded out of whatever it came out of and…

Rick: Vishnu’s navel no doubt.

Sally: Yeah, Vishnu’s navel, exactly. The great Mahasunya, the great, boy, and it wasn’t in fact tiny. It was, then it expanded and the thing I love is what they say is that it created space to occupy. So, and that was a recognition of physics, of of cosmology. And I’m not familiar enough with the science to be able to tell you what it was but there are about three articles in the New York Times about it because it was so exciting. It was apparently something they’d been working on for years of understanding what actually happened after the big bang.

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: And there was a story on NPR about when this first became publicized. A graduate student of one of the original scientists of this theory knocked on his door at three in the morning with a bottle of champagne, woke him up and they danced and toasted each other. So it was a big deal.

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: That I wish I could wish I could remember the proportions that they describe. But it’s worth looking at.

Rick: Yeah and what you said a minute ago was really cool, too. Did you watch Neil de Grasse Tyson’s Cosmos series by any chance?

Sally: I didn’t but I’ve heard it’s really interesting.

Rick: It’s wonderful but one thing it illustrates, something you just said which is that science has served a very useful function in dispelling a lot of goofy notions that people have come up with about how the universe works. And insisting that those are true because of their interpretation of some book that was written a couple thousand years ago and torturing and killing people who disagreed with them and so on. So I think Carl Sagan said that if it hadn’t been for the the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, that we would have landed on the moon a thousand years sooner or something.

Sally: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: But in any case, there are a lot of scientists who are atheists but still science has played such a valuable role in in culturing us in the habit of systematic thinking and insisting on experience. One thing I like about Sam Harris, he says that so much harm has come from believing in things that we can’t actually experience.

Sally: Totally, totally.

Rick: So experience is the crux of it.

Sally: Experience is the crux of it and I think that the thing is that you have to have a system for making the experiment. And the scientific systems are profoundly instructive in that way. And at the same time, this, the systems that have arisen from experimenting inside the human laboratory also have an awful lot to teach us and not about belief but about what the possibilities are

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: As you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the human mind, into the human field of experience.

Rick: Yeah, you talk about these in your book “Doorways to the Internet.” I mean, you took one particular text as a good case in point but there’s so many texts like that in ancient traditions that say if you do this, you’ll experience this and that kind of meets at least some of the criterion of the scientific method. It’s repeatable, anybody can try the experiment.

Sally: Exactly, and it’s repeatable. It takes seriousness. It’s not like you push a button and you get the experience. You actually have to to do the work. You have to go to high school and graduate school in inner experience. But if you do it, it’s there, it’s there to be revealed. It kind of blows my mind because I have been at this for a long time and I’m not particularly gifted, spiritually gifted. I consider myself quite a slow learner in this respect. And all of the experience I have had of the truth of what these sages have told us has really come about through years and years of practice. And it’s always been a surprise. It’s like “Oh my god, oh my god, that actually thought is, I’m just going to give you a very, a very simple example. Thought is constantly being produced in an endless cycle and and it’s always going to go on. And if I don’t identify myself as the thinker, the thoughts can be going on and I can move deeper and deeper and deeper into a a world of vastness and calm where it’s as though I’m floating in a sky of awareness that includes all that is. Oh, my god. That’s actually and I’m completely conscious and sentient and in my body and not hallucinating. It’s a natural development. So you know, it’s, we really do have, just as I can’t understand physics except in a very bare bones way because I haven’t done my homework, I haven’t studied it in the same way to really get what the human being is on what we call the spiritual level. We just we need to, we need to go there. We need to do it. Yeah.

Rick: Important point.

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: And it’s not enough to just read a few books and get it. Get an intuitional sort of sense of what Ramana Maharshi was talking about and jump to the conclusion that you’ve got it.

Sally: Exactly, exactly. And it’s sort of like instant awakenings disappear instantly, and yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And some people don’t like that notion. They feel it’s a sort of you’re chasing an endless carrot on a stick if you’re, if you have this orientation. That there’s always going to be more and that you you haven’t reached any kind of final realization. Why don’t you just accept, who is it Sailor Bob Adamson said, “there’s what’s wrong with right now unless you think about it.”

Sally: Beautiful, yes. Well, exactly there’s nothing wrong with right now.

Rick: But there’s a but because the average persons right now even the average spiritual persons right now is not necessarily the ultimate realization that that person could have.

Sally: Yeah and I guess from my own experience “right now” can be opaque or it can have the taste of eternity. And when you, when you’ve managed to sort of open the “now” to the recognition to the real experiential recognition of its eternality, then your experience walking around is going to be completely different than if your your “now” is opaque and there. The thing I love about the contemporary spiritual world is that we’re given so many modalities. We’re given so many ways to make our daily life experience deeper and more enjoyable and more subtle. That it’s also, but it’s also makes it very easy to just stay with that, to stay with an initial experience of peace or sweetness or fullness. Because life is so full and is so distracting and we have so many agendas. So I think now as always the journey, there’s many, many ways we can take the journey. And if you decide that this is what life is about, that what you really want in life is to know as much of the reality of human embodiment as as is possible on the subtlest level, then it’s going to take you a while and it’s going to be, but it’s totally engaging and fascinating. And I don’t think you have to be so goal-oriented. I think it’s more a matter of allowing yourself to be drawn through the journey.

Rick: It’s kind of a balance. I think. I mean if you look back 10 years, 20 years, what you were experiencing at those various stages, I reckon you would say that there has been a pretty significant…I mean if you could jump instantly from now to 10 years ago, 10 years ago to 20, you’d experience pretty shocking contrasts. But yeah, and so on the one hand, there has been this and will continue to be this continual progression which implies journey. There’s something you’re going somewhere but on the other hand, there’s always contentment in the present moment, at least a certain degree of it. And if you pass over that, if you ignore that for the sake of pining for something you might be experiencing 20 years from now, then you miss out on life now.

Sally: Yeah and I think that those two, these two attitudes that you’re alluding to are actually correctives for each other. Right? You know that, I know, when a lot of people in our generation came into the spiritual world with the idea that we were going to get high, we were going to get enlightened and it was going to be blissful. And then, of course, we discovered that it’s not quite like that. That it is actually a journey, that there are dark spots, dark nights and that the dark nights are as important as the light spots. And then it seems to me there was this kind of recognition in the students our age who then became teachers and they all started saying, “Well, enlightenment. What’s that about? That’s just a kind of a myth, let’s let’s talk about spiritual maturity where we’re able to really be in the moment and be with our pain and and life is good enough and let’s do our family thing and our work thing and get it together.” And it was, I always felt it was a corrective to that kind of naive running after experience that that a lot of us started out with. And what I’ve noticed is that it goes in cycles. So right now, I think is one of those cycles when people are really interested in in what we might call flashy spiritual experience almost as a corrective to the more mundane “what’s wrong with now’ attitude that was prevalent or the idea that so many of the teachers of what we call Direct Path Spirituality will say “Well, just realize it’s all already happened, you’re already awake, everything is perfect, just relax and let everything be as it is.” And I love that teaching. It’s incredibly sweet and empowering and relaxing, teaching and there’s more.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, so it’s like the infomercial but wait there’s more.

Sally: Yeah exactly, Exactly, So it’s very salutary to go “Okay, there’s nothing to strive for.” I am already that, let me just be present and can I let it be all right that my stomach hurts, there’s that. Let’s deeply accept who we are in this moment, it’s great. But somehow by truly accepting where we are in this moment, we can’t let ourselves get stuck, complacent and believe that that that’s all our life is about. So I think that to really consider metaphysics and to consider what the great beings have experienced and to realize that this is within our capacity as well is hugely important.

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: I think there’s something to grow. There’s something to go into even as we grow up, even as we become kinder and more accepting and more loving and have better relationships and just become better stewards of the planet and have a more caring global world-centric view. At the same time, we can go deeper and go into the subtle elements of the universe. I think it’s all necessary and all and complimentary.

Rick: Do you need to get more water or do you have some in your glass?

Sally: I have some.

Rick: Okay, good. To my mind, the whole enlightenment game is, it’s never only this or only that. It’s all-inclusive and you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water. I mean, yeah, you have to get it together and definitely there have been times in my life where I have not had it together in the least. On the relative level, needed all kinds of integration in this area, in that area. But personally, I’ve never lost sight of the fact that there is something on a distant horizon that is grand and that is marvelous and that is worth pursuing and striving for. Which is again, not to deny the necessity of dealing with and living in the present and living that as fully and responsibly as possible. It just doesn’t have to be an either-or situation. It’s all, it’s both-and. It’s the whole package.

Sally: Totally, and I actually think spiritual maturity is the recognition of the paradox.

Rick: I had a t-shirt on today. It said “Paradox.” And I changed it for this interview. Go ahead, I’m sorry.

Sally: Well, just that. You know, the recognition that it’s all here and yet there’s more and the recognition that there’s, that we are as the New Age cliche has it. We are spiritual beings having a human experience and we’re also human beings having a spiritual experience. It’s all of it. And I do think that Scott Fitzgerald said that the sign of true intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. And I think that’s very true.

Rick: While drinking a martini.

Sally: While drinking a martini, right. While drinking a martini and ruining his life. But obviously in some way, Oh, look at that little being over there.

Rick: Yeah

Sally: You’ve got some little being.

Rick: My little bits

Sally: Oh, it’s a dog.

Rick: Whenever you see me open my door, it’s to let my dog in and out. Thought you were seeing angels or something.

Sally: No, no, no. I was seeing what looks like a pug or…

Rick: Blue heeler mix.

Sally: Oh, okay. One of those esoteric small dogs.

Rick: Well, earlier on, half an hour ago or so, we were talking about all these levels of creation, the gross and the subtle and the transcendent and I think there’s a tendency to try to kind of glom on to one or another to the exclusion of the other. I’ve really got to get my act together in the relative here and become an integrated person, improve my relationships, get a job, all that stuff. But that need not exclude also enlivening, diving into the transcendent and enlivening that. You can kind of juggle all the balls at the same time. And in fact, if you do that, you actually become more successful at any point in those different strata than you are if you focus on one or another exclusively.

Sally: Yeah, true. True, and I would also say that we are gifted in certain areas of life naturally, most of us, and not so gifted in others. And so just as when you go to school you might have to work harder in geometry than you do in English, at least in my case, or vice versa. I think in life, that’s also true. So there are people who are very talented spiritually, very motivated spiritually, and really not so good in the relative. And often for those people, a lot of spiritual practice is about getting it together psychologically and getting life together. And then vice versa, so I think we’re always balancing, aren’t we? We’re always trying to carry those and we’re always we’re trying to really get our priorities balanced and it’s a constant practice of error correction. Is it not? Yeah.

Rick: Let’s get back into some of the stuff you talked about in your book, your books. We’ve dwelt a bit on this idea that Shakti created the illusion and she has to free us from it. And you were talking about grace. Anugraha was it?

Sally: Anugraha, yeah.

Rick: So that’s an interesting thing in and of itself that, I mean, some spiritual teachers say “Don’t do practices because you’re making individual effort, and individual effort only concretizes the individuality.” It makes the ego even more bound. But I think there’s an art to doing practice which you can elaborate on. Which is, there’s a phrase in the Vedas someplace which says, “Be easy to us with gentle effort.”

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: So there’s kind of a balancing point between effort and total “blah,” which bears fruit.

Sally: Yeah, there’s a famous saying “Effort and grace are two wings of the bird.” You know, you have to flap them both. So one of them you’re flapping, the other one is I guess being flapped for you. But yeah, I think again it’s the teaching, that you shouldn’t make individual effort, is a very good corrective for the striving spiritual personality who’s always looking for it, looking for it, looking for it. On the other hand, if you don’t make effort…

Rick: Yeah, and you know, some people like Adyashanti for instance, had big breakthroughs after years of making effort and then just sort of said, “Screw it, I’m just going to relax.” And then boom something happened.

Sally: Yeah, and I find in meditation practice that for years that would be my experience. I would be sitting there trying to concentrate in sitting in a good posture and then after an hour, I would…it would be the end of the meditation and I would relax my posture and I just sit there. And that would be when the opening would occur. So one of the things that I discovered is that, as these teachers say, if you can relax in the beginning, if you can learn how to make a…, I call it, “soft focus” where you’re kind of intending your practice and I have a very… very specific concentrative practice that I always start meditation with, because it’s the way I’ve known…I know I can collect my mind from its various distractions and worldly pursuits and sort of make it one-pointed. But the real depth in meditation happens when that concentrative practice kind of lets go. It’s… So I think that everyone who meditates discovers that that you tighten the focus and then you and that’s when you actually let yourself… one word is “drift” but, or sink or expand.

Rick: Did Muktananda advocate concentration?

Sally: He advocated both. He… Yes, he advocated concentration but he essentially taught meditation is a spontaneous process that catches you. So everything that you do, all the effort that you make, is actually to align you so that you can be caught by the meditation current as I call it. So that you can enter the bandwidth. But, so in other words, I think, as you know, we were both trained in the same type of tradition. If you understand that meditation… Meditation is a…I call it a bandwidth. It’s a dimension of consciousness and the practices are doors. So, for instance, in the Vijnana Bhairava practices, that Doorways to the Infinite is about, that text gives 108 very often, very surprising doorways. One of which is remembering a moment of love and then letting yourself just enter into the love aspect of consciousness through that doorway. Or one of my favorites is meditating in the void in the armpits. You actually let your arms get a little bit loose and you bring your awareness into the space in the armpits. You close your eyes and you realize that there is actually this empty space in the armpits which can be a doorway into open spaciousness. So I love that idea that any concentration technique you do is like standing at the portal into what’s behind it.

Rick: Yeah, I found that some of those things that you said in those verses in the Vijnana Bhairava were things I was actually doing without knowing that they were techniques or anything. It’s like, “Oh yeah, do that.”

Sally: Yeah. Because, Rick, consciousness will teach you what is the best doorway for you at any given moment to go into the deeper self. And it’s… I think that texts like that were kind of discovered or seen in meditation. That this insight, “Oh let me imagine my head is the sky,” which of course is a very popular practice in Dzogchen Buddhism and is in the Vijnana Bhairava. And it’s also an experience that happens spontaneously sometimes. So and someone, people write them down and teach them to their disciples and they become techniques. And then we get to explore them but they’re all just about opening the door or inviting the door to open.

Rick: I have a technique. Try this the next time you’re at a swimming pool. Go to the deep end of the swimming pool, presuming you know how to swim, and hold your nose and bend from the waist and just keep bending until you just fall into the water head first. And let yourself just somersault slowly underwater like that, holding your nose and with your eyes closed. Whenever I do that, it’s like kind of instant unbounded bliss. It’s like, kind of all loss of spatial orientation and awareness just goes “zoom” like that. And then I can’t do it again, at least not for immediately. Somehow it’s had its effect. But that’s the Rick Archer Bhairava. Just try it next time you’re at that.

Sally: That’s beautiful, that’s beautiful. And it happens in the ocean like when you let yourself dive into, when there’s a big wave and you dive into the center of the wave and the wave kind of grabs you.

Rick: Yeah, and you just sort of… yeah, it’s like your awareness kind of expands. It’s the most interesting thing.

Sally: Yeah, yeah, and leading us to the conclusion that there’s no experience in the world that can’t be a doorway into open awareness, if you can just enter it.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed a guy a couple of years ago named Takuan Minamoto. And he was crossing a parking lot in Boston and all of a sudden the car came screeching and almost hit him but came screeching to a halt. And the shock of that kicked him into a state of realization and he never lost it.

Sally: Wow.

Rick: And he wasn’t even like some kind of ardent spiritual practitioner or anything. It was just like this totally… he had to like figure out later on what it was he was living in. Because he wasn’t really familiar with all the terminology of realization and awakening and all.

Sally: Yeah, it’s like Tony Parsons who tells us that he was just walking across Green Park in London. Although I think Tony Parsons…

Rick: He had already done a bunch of practice.

Sally: He had already done a lot of practice. Yeah, or Suzanne… what’s her name?

Rick: Segal.

Sally: Segal. Who had also done a bunch of practice.

Rick: Who had also done a lot. Yeah, she was a TM person and done a lot of long meditation courses and all. Collision with the Infinite, we’re alluding to for people not familiar with that. Very interesting book.

Sally: Very interesting book.

Rick: Hard to get these days. Now, you’re talking earlier about needing the grace of something in order to get out of the gross into the subtle. Often a mantra is used for that obviously. And mantras, most mantras that you and I would be familiar with contain, they’re called bija sounds, which are said to represent or embody some God or other, some impulse of intelligence. And that using the mantra in a certain way… maybe you take it from here, explain the mechanics of how using a mantra in a particular way would elicit some kind of transcendental experience because of the intelligence behind the sound of that mantra.

Sally: Well, the deepest recognition of that is in the Tantras and it is that everything in this universe arises out of vibration. So vibration sound is inherently creative and these seed syllables, these bija mantras that we use in meditation are considered to be the fundamental sound form of a particular energy. So if you… in the Indian tradition, in the Vedic tradition, the priests who would traditionally create, they would make the fire leap out of wood by reciting the bija mantra for fire which is a drum. Which supposedly if you’re really adept at it you can kindle fire just by reciting the syllable. I know guys who claim they can do that. I’ve never actually seen it.

Rick: Somehow or other Christ did the loaves and fishes.

Sally: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the Balsham Tov, the great Hasidic master, actually he actually taught the word as the center of manifestation of changing reality and there are a lot of stories. He was actually, his name means the master of the name. So this science of using sound to transform reality is really embedded in most of the mystical traditions, very strong in Jewish mysticism actually. But in deity practice, the seed mantras that you’re talking about which I will say out loud in my bad Sanskrit. So like Ayim, which is the mantra that holds the energy of divine creativity or the goddess Saraswati who is the goddess of speech and eloquence and creativity. Or the mantra Hreem, which is said to hold the full creative power of the goddess in all of her forms. That in Tantric tradition, these mantras completely incarnate the full energy of this sacred energy, this sacred force. And therefore, when you really let that mantra cook inside you it’s going to open you up to that energy in a very natural way. You know, just kind of by itself, just by letting it sink into your consciousness which is I know the way TM meditation is done. You work with a seed mantra and you just let it…

Rick: It’s effortless and it follows. It uses what Maharishi used to call the natural tendency of the mind to seek a field of greater happiness. And these deeper levels are inherently more charming and so it’s like diving, take a correct angle, let go and the rest is automatic.

Sally: Yeah, and it’s true. I mean, mantra practice for that reason is unbelievably effective and especially when know the moment to let go of the mantra and to let the energy that has opened up in you take over.

Rick: Well, if you’re not making an effort to think it in the first place, then it lets go of its own accord as it becomes more subtle. It just kind of fades and disappears and there you are.

Sally: Right, right, unless you try to grab it.

Rick: Yeah, which would actually be counter-indicated, at least in TM.

Sally: Yeah, but and I’ve noticed though that one of, the art of meditation is really learning not to grab..

Rick: Right.

Sally: not to grab an experience, not to grab a thought, not to grab hold of the technique but to actually let yourself just continue to be carried and you’re right.

Rick: Yeah, because if you’re grabbing, you’re interjecting more physical, you’re interjecting individual effort which is only going to get in the way.

Sally: Right, right, right, yeah.

Rick: It’s like we could think of nature as an invincible source or a “vengeable” power. And it’s like you’re riding on an airplane and you think “I’m going to help this airplane by walking down the aisle and getting a little, going a little faster.” But you’re actually not going to get you to your destination faster. You might interfere with the flight attendants or something.

Sally: Yeah, and how about this one? When you think, which I did when I went through a period when I would get on a plane and I would feel that I had to concentrate intensely to keep the plane in the air. Yeah, that was how I took…

Rick: Pulling up on your seat arms.

Sally: Yeah, exactly. It was a way of maintaining control because I was afraid of flying and the interesting thing was about that is that, at one point, I started flying on a lot of small planes. And I would sit in the cockpit with the pilot and I would viscerally experience how thermodynamics and the motor and the pilot skill get the plane into the air and keep it there. So I no longer felt like I had to keep the plane in the air and I think that’s true when you, as you allow yourself to fall into meditation, to as meditation sort of rises up to take you then you have the confidence that you don’t have to keep grabbing to make something happen. You can just let what happens happens. And that experience that we call surrender which we so misunderstand begins to happen spontaneously.

Rick: And if the bija mantra again is some kind of name of God or some kind or, well, the terminology is so clunky, if it’s an impulse, if it represents a fundamental primordial impulse of intelligence which arises from the unified field, from the ground state, from the transcendent, then that sound kind of has its roots there and can be used as a vehicle to take you all the way down.

Sally: Yeah, you ride it, you ride it back to the source. Yeah, yeah, and it’s also true that the mantra, mantras have to be empowered. And here again, we come back to touching into the source, what is the power source for spiritual experience. Mantra is a vehicle through which an empowerment occurs but the empowerment actually comes from someplace much subtler. So, and this is actually what got me really fascinated with the Tantric view of goddesses. You know, that goddesses as actually personifications or vortexes of these natural forces in the universe which appear in nature, in weather, in our bodies, in our personalities and which also have have a liberating or enlightening quality to them, aspect to them. And because I found that as you begin to become aware of the forces behind mantras, for instance, if you’re practicing a mantra, let’s say you’re practicing the mantra Ayim for the sake of argument. And you begin to become aware that, along with whatever natural subtle experiences you may be having, that you don’t have any words for any particular way of understanding. That if you can recognize that, inside that mantra, there is a very specific empowering, enlightening, creative force that it actually, it adds an element to your practice. It adds, which it adds, a devotional element to your practice. It adds a love quality to your practice which is immensely satisfying. So it sort of takes it out of the the kind of scientific, psychological, mechanical quality and makes you just open up to relationship and love and a kind of juicy dance with subtle forces.

Rick: I’d say that if you don’t recognize it initially, you’ll recognize it eventually. Because the fruits of it will begin to appear in your life and you’ll wonder where are these blessings coming from.

Sally: Totally, totally. And again in my experience of the goddesses, I think I started working with them, practicing with them, I’ve been practicing for 25 or They reveal themselves, as it were, they began becoming apparent. So and I always believe that we can start by recognizing the possibilities of deity. Or we can wait until deity reveals herself and both work. But if we can start by recognizing the possibility, it just, it kind of allows a kind of juiciness and devotional quality in our practice that’s very delightful right from the beginning. And this sounds strange but, for me, recognizing deity has really allowed me to recognize my own independence from, let’s say, other human teachers and writings and and texts. Because as you start to connect yourself to these subtle deity forces, you really begin to recognize how they’re teaching you from inside and the difference between, let’s call it, an enlightened download from a higher level of consciousness and the downloads that are arising in your own mind. In other words, there’s a lot of stuff that comes up in the mind when we go inside that is, that may or may not be reliable, often really isn’t. But when you tune into one of these subtle deity forces and really tune in and really begin to discern, then it actually helps you recognize the difference between your own higher intelligence speaking to you and through you and the stuff that you’re making up. And it’s astonishing to me how much stuff spiritual teachers actually make up or…

Rick: Yeah. Several interesting points in that. I mean, a practical example of what you just said was like when I first conceived of this show. I thought of it as something I would do on the little local radio station here in town which has like a 10 mile radius. And I was getting all this resistance to the idea from the radio people. I thought this is such a perfect fit for Fairfield. Everybody will love this. Why can’t I do this? And finally kind of got it through my thick skull that I should go out to a larger audience. My friends were telling me. But, you know, looking back on it I feel like there’s been a lot of grace, a lot of divine guidance with this whole thing, and all sorts of opportunities and support and guidance to do it in such a way that it’s really having some kind of valuable impact for large numbers of people. Whereas in my little mind, I was thinking “Oh yeah, local, local thing here in Fairfield.” So some people might just say “Well, that’s silly. That doesn’t mean there’s any kind of deity involved or anything.” But I sort of feel like there’s deity involved in and we’ll have to, we owe it to our listeners to define more carefully what we mean by these terms. But I feel like there’s that involved in the fall of every leaf and the crash of every wave. There, the divine is operative in everything. Yeah, what to say if human endeavors…

Sally: Yeah, yeah. And the thing is the thing about recognizing and actually learning to discern when divine forces are trying to get something through to you which takes a while because we are thick and because the ego is naturally limiting even when the ego is grandiose, it’s limiting. So it does really require stepping outside your egoic personal agendas at some point to really be able to receive deity. It’s not something that, it’s not an energy that can be manipulated or used, even though human beings are constantly trying to get God to favor their football team. It’s, it actually requires, as you know, a very deep surrender to higher intelligence to start to recognize when you’re being, really being guided from the center of the universe.

Rick: Good point. And there can be such a strong individual desire to have it a particular way. But there’s this kind of quieter sense of no, despite this strong individual desire, there’s a deep sense that it should go that way and I’m going to go with that.

Sally: Yeah, and sometimes it actually means that you give up thinking about how you’re going to do it. Yeah, and let it Happen, much as you were saying about meditation. Just letting the vehicle take you deeper. It’s a very radical way to live and scary until you until you you actually learn that there’s something holding you. And that I think, I mean, let’s… This is why I do think that a personal relationship with the deity forces, and when I when I use the word deity, I’m talking about specific, very specific vortexes of energy of sacred energy that have been personified over the years, over the centuries in in particular forms. And that as we begin to tune into the energetic substratum of the deeper mind or of the we start to realize that that they are present in the cosmos, present in the air and as you said, every wave, every blink of the eye, of the eyes, every activity of the body, if you look at from a certain point of view is actually being orchestrated by this divine intelligence, this underlying intelligence. And yet rather than being one, it, just as Rick has certain actions and attitudes that you perform as an individual vortex of energy and I have certain attitudes and actions that I embody and perform, in the same way on the subtler level, there are many different energies which act in our bodies and in our lives and in the world itself. So one of my favorite teachers who’s a very passionate colleague, who’s a very passionate teacher of deity energy is Andrew Harvey who who talks a lot about the forces that are really rampaging through the world today. Which anyone who’s very deeply embedded in in Indian culture will recognize as the forces of the goddess Kali, the goddess whose cosmic action is the destruction of structures in order for something utterly new and different to be born. And you can look around the world and see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world and the destruction of the planet. And so much that’s horrific, and see it as in a lot of individual horrific happenings. Or you can you can recognize it as the action of the goddess Kali who’s waking us up by showing us that the incredible destruction that the human ego is capable of performing in, against other human beings and against the earth. So that it’s almost as though this energy gets set loose in the world and she begins to dance. And you think this is as bad as it gets. No, no, it can get this bad. It can get even this bad until the moment when you’re actually able to look into the face of that aspect of reality and say “Okay, what is it that I need to learn? What is it that I need to let go of?” And it’s a, that’s a very deep radical goddess message that most of us would prefer to avoid. Yeah, but there are many ways your experience of realizing that your work, your creative work, your radio show could actually needed to be manifested on a wider, more inclusive level. It’s an example of what we could call the obviously benign forces of the cosmos giving you a message, giving you a teaching, so. But the message is always “make your effort in alignment with this truth. What is your role to play in what is actually the movement of a a much larger cosmic force which we hope is the awakening of more and more human beings.

Rick: Yeah, so if we acknowledge as I think we haven’t totally nailed it down to the, as best we possibly can, that we’re swimming in an ocean of intelligence, that every every bit of creation is contained within this vast ocean of intelligence and is conducted and orchestrated by that. Then I think a lot of people would find it hard to, I mean, a lot of people reject the notion of God because they say how could God allow the holocaust and many other examples of things that happen. But what you’re saying is that everything- all the world wars, the plagues, all the terrible things that have happened as well as all the wonderful things that have happened- are just sort of a dynamics with within this vast intelligence. And just to throw in one quick point and I’ll give it back to you. It seems to me if we’re going to have a relative creation then if we’re going to have hot we have to have cold. If we’re going to have fast, we have to have slow. If we’re going to have big, we have to have small. Otherwise, if you try to just have one side of the polarity the whole thing wouldn’t work. It’d be lopsided. So if there’s going to be happiness, there has to be suffering. If there’s going to be help, there has to be sickness and everything has its mirror opposite. So, but I think maybe some people would have a hard time accepting that ISIS beheading people and the Ebola virus and some of these things that are really hot items in the news today are really teaching anybody anything. How is it that those are fostering a more enlightened world?

Sally: Well I have a hard time accepting ISIS beheading people myself. And I would say that the way that I find this understandable and explainable is that, first of all, there’s the overall non-dual recognition that there is really nothing that’s outside of consciousness. There’s nothing that’s not imbued with divine consciousness. And to recognize this, you really do have to see that divine consciousness is, let’s say, neutral. You know, it contains it all. It contains the light and the dark. Now on the level of relative reality which is where we’re obviously operating, I find that understanding of structures of consciousness, levels of consciousness, the fact that human beings and societies grow from childhood to adolescence to some degree of maturity, that there is such a thing as cultural evolution helps to explain some of this. So when you have people who are at a tribal level of culture, who are deeply oppressed in their societies and have no way to find meaning in their lives and their level of consciousness is at a let’s call it, a childhood or adolescent stage of development, then what you’re going to have is is violence, terrorism, the attempt of the strong to oppress the weak. Because that’s the, that’s how five-year-olds are, that’s how ten-year-olds are.

Rick: They’re bullies on the playground.

Sally: Bullies on the playground, bullies and victims. And it’s, as we grow older and as we get civilized, when we make rules and we realize that what we do to others comes back to us. And we grow up so we are in a place in the world now where there are some very highly evolved beings on this planet and there are some people who seem to be at fairly primitive levels of consciousness. And it’s tremendously, and because of community, we were able to see it all, we’re able to, where we know what’s going on, we have this amazing media presence that lets us go into the village and watch watch what’s happening. We’re somehow being forced to consider how to deal with it. I don’t think we’re dealing with it all that intelligently. But that’s the crisis that we face today, is how do we grow up human beings on the planet quickly enough to save us? It’s a real dilemma. It’s a serious crisis on every level.

Rick: Yeah, and anybody who thinks it’s easy to solve on a superficial level with this policy or that policy, try being president for… They say it’s like drinking from a fire hose. There’s so much coming at you. And it’s easy to criticize but personally, I think that the kind of stuff we’re talking about is far more fundamentally influential than… I mean, things need to be done on technological and political and economic levels. But if we can affect deep and profound shifts in the collective consciousness through our own awakening and through the awakening of others, then that’s gonna probably have far more impact than just tinkering with the surface mechanisms.

Sally: I believe so. My life is based on that premise and it’s the ability to live in the relative world and live in the subtle world and really learn the lessons of the relative world. And one of my friends says “Deal with the problem on the level of the problem.” So obviously we have to deal with with the problem of terrorism on the level of the problem. But you’re right. If we don’t have an overarching viewpoint that lets us put it in perspective, we’re never going to grow up as a species.

Rick: Yeah, I think maybe you need to do both. I mean, on the one hand, I don’t have a problem with, you know, bombing some of these ISIS guys that are causing all this trouble and stopping them from exploding the Mosul Dam and things like that. But on the other hand, if that’s the only level on which we’re going to deal with such problems, then problems will never end. Maybe they won’t anyway but you have to kind of get to the source of a thing to really bring it… I mean, Maharishi always used to say, “If you just water the leaves of the tree, you’re not going to help the tree much. Go ahead and water the root and that’s going to enable the whole tree to flourish.”

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: So there’s some kind of deeper root level to what’s going on in the world. And we need to attend to the surface things. You have to go treat the Ebola virus with doctors and do all the things we need to do. But there also needs to be a much more profound awakening in in collective consciousness for all these symptoms to really subside once and for all.

Sally: Yeah, for sure, and I guess the question is: Can we reach a tipping point in awakenings such that it’s going to make a, it’s going to save us from the rapidly escalating effects of climate change, etc.?

Rick: I mean, which has its own tipping points.

Sally: Which has its own tipping points, exactly. So in a certain sense, it’s very important to avoid believing that we can just change our subtle consciousness and affect it, the whole. And it’s very important to believe that we can affect anything without changing our subtle consciousness. So we’re back with the paradox.

Rick: Back with the both-and.

Sally: Yeah, yeah, back with both-and. And I do, that I do believe that recognizing the non-dual nature of everything, recognizing that it is all fundamentally happening within a single field, it’s terribly counterintuitive when things are falling apart. And it should never be an excuse for inaction, appropriate action. We need to take appropriate action. And yet… I sat, years ago, I sat on a plane next to General Wesley Clark who, and it was in 2004, he was if you remember, he was briefly considered as the as a candidate for president. So we got in a conversation and I told him I was a meditation teacher.

Rick: Either you were in first class or he was in coach.

Sally: No, it was a shuttle plane between Monterey and Phoenix which is a one-class plane. It’s a little regional jet which there’s 16 rows. Everybody sits together. So we started talking and he said “Let me tell you this story.” He’s, and it was right before the Kosovo War which for those of you who don’t remember, the Kosovo War, Wesley Clark at that time was the general in command of the NATO forces that actually won the military part of that war. So he was in Maine, he’s sitting in the church that his wife’s family went to. His wife was a Catholic and he was sitting there during the sermon, he was, or Mass, or whatever. It was kind of bored. he looked up at the window and there was a stained glass window with, that represented Saint George and the dragon and the spear of Saint George suddenly turned into light and entered his heart. And he said and he saw everything that was going to happen. He actually, he saw that they were going to win and that he would be fired from his command immediately after the win. And he said that it all happened. It was like he had seen the script, he’d seen the movie, and he was just acting out his part in the movie. And I can imagine, he didn’t say this. But that getting fired from his command two days after having commanded the forces that won the war was probably a great deal less painful for him because he had seen it coming. So and he’s not a, at least he said, he’s not a religious guy. He’s not a mystic. He just had one of those experiences that comes to us sometimes in moments of crisis that just show us the pattern.

Rick: Yeah. Talk about getting zapped by some kind of divine intelligence.

Sally: Yeah. I know it’s a wild story, isn’t it?

Rick: That’s really cool.

Sally: Yeah. I thought so, too. I thought it was really cool. And in a certain way, it just reveals how, how understanding the pattern, just having a glimpse of the pattern is so important in our process, in our growth process, that we don’t suffer in the same way if we have a sense that it’s part of a pattern. That it’s how it’s meant to be, that it’s destined, it allows a kind of surrender that’s I think one of the most profound cures for for normal human suffering that there is.

Rick: Yeah. If our dogs could only understand that cutting their nails is good for them.

Sally: Yeah, exactly. Cats do.

Rick: Yeah, they do. Cats don’t mind so much. But the dogs, it’s like this big trauma because they don’t understand.

Sally: Well, it’s about, it’s sort of about growing up. I, when I was a kid, I would have to have shots or,

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: blood tests and I would freak out.  I would run around I would say “no, no, not…” and then, of course, you grow up and you go “Okay, I need this. Okay, it’s going to hurt for a minute.” It’s just, it’s all about perspective and and the maturation of consciousness and it’s, the world is doing that also.

Rick: Yeah. Interesting. One thing I want to make sure we cover is if a person were to buy your book and they’d see the Durga on the cover and they’d flip through and see pictures of Lakshmi and all that…

Sally: It’s Lakshmi on the cover

Rick: Oh, is it Lakshmi, and so okay. And so some people might think, “Well, what’s going on? I mean, this is Hindu gods, they have forearms. They’re carrying all these spears, coins are dripping out of their hands. I mean, is she really suggesting that on some deep level beings that look like that exist? Or are we really talking, are those just sort of mythological representations or artistic representations of much, kind of more fundamental forces of nature that are really universal in scope, that might operate throughout the entire universe with all of its galaxies? And that, you’re not, if you get right down there, you’re not going to find a lady with forearms? But those somehow just symbolically represent the qualities of a deep force of nature that is, in part, governing the universe.

Sally: I would say it’s both-and. So, I mean, if you, again I like very much Ken Wilber’s way of explaining this. He taught, he talks about four quadrants of reality and one of the quadrants is our subjective experience, our, what goes on in our mind and imagination. And then there’s the second quadrant is our physical experience, the brain, the body, our actual physical biology. And then there’s another sphere of experience which is the space of culture, the inter- relationships among living creatures. And then there’s the physical experience of the collective. You know, the city. the planet, the family, the tribe, the city, the planet. In other words, we’re always dealing in multiple realities. There’s our subjective experience which occurs on different levels of consciousness- waking state, dream state, meditative state, and the transcendent state, and probably others in between. And then, so for example, if you look at consciousness, it is obviously, there’s consciousness acting through the brain, through the body. There’s a physical brain that mediates our nervous system, our impulses. And then there’s the purely subjective, subtle experience of of individuality and of, what it’s like to be us inside, inside a human body having different levels of experience. And in the same way, we have a subtle, unquantifiable experience of what’s going on between us, behind the words or through the words that’s our, “we experience.” And we have our societies. So in other words, everything is happening on an interior level and also on a physical level. And how this applies to goddesses is that there’s, that on the subjective level- these beings are “experience-able” in the subtle realm of dream and meditation as four-armed beings made of light whose figures, whose clothes, whose iconography actually expresses the qualities of a particular energy. So for example, Lakshmi who’s always pictured as very beautiful and she has has gold coins coming out of one of her hands and another hand is in this gesture which says “Don’t be afraid.” And she carries fully blooming lotuses. So Lakshmi is the goddess of the principle of abundance and fertility and wealth and beauty in the world. And this is obviously a subtle principle that runs through cultures and runs through it. It’s apparent in the earth. Certain parts of the earth are fertile and certain parts of the earth are desert. So you could say that the figure of Lakshmi that appears in meditation as a beautiful woman with gold coins coming out of her arm is a symbolic representation of this force in nature and in culture. And at the same time, on it, when you see or feel the presence of the goddess Lakshmi in meditation or as an energy in your field, you’re very sure that she’s a very specific presence, a subtle person. So both are true in that subtle level of dream and meditation.

Rick: So for instance, I mean Native American culture, Chinese culture, South American, South African, all those other cultures might have deities. They might understand the same principle. But they would depict that in that expression of intelligence in an entirely different way. Maybe similar in the sense of benign and not threatening and a source of abundance but not necessarily forearms and not not necessarily wearing an Indian sari and all that stuff, So you’re just saying that in the Indian culture, it’s depicted this way. Off on Alpha Centauri, if there’s an inhabited planet there, that very same principle might be some green lady with tentacles or something because that’s the way they look there. And then they’re just depicting that as abundance and and blessing.

Sally: Yeah, we can say that. That the human imagination invents deities that we can recognize. We could also say that energies appear in personified forms that the human beings who they appear to can recognize. So it’s so, yeah, as we always say, “The ant god probably looks like a big ant.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sally: But who’s to say, I mean, again. Once you start having experiences of deity energies that clearly don’t come from your mind, I mean, I’ve known so many people who have… For example, my first experience of the presence of a deity energy. I don’t know if I can explain this in a way that a skeptic can get but… A friend of mine who was an ex-Catholic who had always loved the Virgin Mary gave me this book that’s published by a Catholic press about the appearances of the Virgin Mary in modern times. You know, Fatima and Medjugorje and and Guadalupe. And I’m reading the book mostly because my friend wanted me to read it. And I start reading the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe which I won’t go into. But it’s a very beautiful story about an Indian peasant who was on his way to work one day and he saw this young girl standing in the snow. And she told him to go to the church and tell them that this was the Virgin Mary who’d come to bless them. And it goes on but, and there’s a huge shrine in Mexico City which has a picture of her and the cloak that she gave him which has her image which was imprinted on it. And it’s a, it’s a very powerful miracle working shrine for Mexicans and for people in the Western United States. So I’m reading this and all of a sudden in the room, in the air, there, this energy appears. I suddenly find myself crying tears of love and I hear from inside this presence saying to me “I am she and I am your mother and I’m here for you. You can ask me for help.” And this presence just stayed around me for about three days and I was, I’m not a Catholic. I’m not a Christian. I was very involved in a Hindu tradition at the time. It was a totally spontaneous, very, very powerful manifestation. Where did that come from? I didn’t make it up. I was just reading a book. You know what I mean.

Rick: That’s nice.

Sally: Yeah, so that experience and subsequent experiences really helped me understand that deity, that these subtle presences are, they’re actually, they’re actually energy manifestations that have really, their own reality and their own power. So, you know, people who’ve never heard of Hindu deities could and can have visions of Hindu deities. And I’m sure that in your tradition, there have been a lot of people who had these kind of spontaneous visions that weren’t imagined, that weren’t coaxed, that you didn’t, you weren’t trying to have. So they have their own subtle reality and they’re also forces in nature who appear in different forms in different cultures.

Rick: Yeah, but I think, I’m kind of the key point, which is maybe the main point of this interview is that… It’s not just that there’s this sort of impersonal non-dual reality and we are that and that’s it and that’s the end of story. That there’s as much richness and diversity and variety and intelligent, hate to use the word intelligent design, but intelligent play and display going on at all sorts of subtle realms of creation that are beyond our ordinary perception as there are on the surface level of perception. If you watch the Discovery Channel and look at shows about undersea life or the Amazonian jungle and you see, “Wow, life is so amazing and rich and full of different expressions and creative explosion.” That’s only one dimension. There’s a whole vertical dimension and many, many, many, many strata as you progress through that vertical dimension. And the whole hierarchy is one kind of coordinated phenomena that we’re capable of traversing consciously and experientially and that is a very worthwhile field for exploration.

Sally: Yeah, well said, well said. Yeah, it’s that. And I think that that’s the thing. That just as that you to recognize the incredible richness of the subtle world so enriches your experience, it’s and it so enriches your sense of who you are.

Rick: Refines your heart among other things.

Sally: You find your heart, yeah. And you find the heart that’s,

Rick: Yeah, it refines the heart.

Sally: And it also, but it also lets you find the heart in the world, you know. Not because often we think that love is something that happens between human beings. But in fact it’s love pervades everything and when as you start to recognize how much love is coming to you in very specific ways from forces in the universe that you can you can communicate with, it just opens your awareness and your your heart so magnificently. So I just, I think…

Rick: Do you also find even as you walk down the street, let’s say, and you’re just seeing grass and the telephone poles and the people and this and that, do you also find that you kind of have this recognition as you’re going along that you’re kind of seeing the divine? You’re kind of seeing God in all these forms?

Sally: Yeah, there’s a wonderful way of discussing this that love is recognizing the same consciousness in others is in yourself. You know, that connection that’s formed as you start to see the subtle just kind of rolling through everything and everyone is. And that it is the sort of the essence of what’s sometimes called Shakta Consciousness. You know, this recognition that everything that’s, that exists in this world is a manifestation of the goddess taking form as all of us. So you can really fall in love with the world as goddess as well as fall in love with the world as Rick or as you know my cat Leo. So it’s just, it just adds so much dimensionality to our daily experience. It “de-mundane-izes” life. It re-enchants your sense of life.

Rick: Yeah, that verse from the Bible comes to mind: “That whatsoever you do unto the least of these you do unto me.” You know, it’s like whatever you’re doing to the world, you’re doing to the body of God whether in the form of a person or an animal or a tree or anything. You’re doing it to the body of God.

Sally: Yeah, and how conscious that makes you when you have that recognition. Yeah, so I always say to people in this midst of this conversation. So just take it, take this understanding and just look at your own body with that recognition. That its every single part of your body is an aspect of divine Shakti, of sacred intelligence, of the sacred feminine just manifesting as you. And feel that your breath is you’re being breathed by this Shakti, this goddess. And just let yourself actually experience yourself as kind of a mass of “goddessness” of Shakti and notice the state that that practice engenders in you.

Rick: Yeah. And it’s not what I would call mood-making either. Because there’s really something real about that. And it becomes more palpable over time as you continue to do your spiritual practice. It becomes more. It’s not just an imagination, that you’re actually tuning into something which is a fact, which is a reality.

Sally: Right, exactly. And it’s like you notice it. So our attention is so there’s so much that we don’t notice.

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: So when we bring our attention to it, it starts to reveal how true it is, how real it is.

Rick: Yes, like I said the beginning of this interview. I asked the question “What’s actually going on?”

Sally: Yeah

Rick: And what’s actually going on is, well, we’ve been talking about it there. You’re just, no need to add any more words to it. I think we’ve kind of gone at it every which way. But it’s, have you, did you ever have a time in your life where the world seemed gray and dead and flat and lifeless?

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: Like maybe 50 years ago or something. And

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: I can remember that and I know that’s probably the way a lot of people still experience the world.

Sally: Yeah.

Rick: And you hear people describing who are suffering from depression that that’s the way the world looks at all. And there’s such a very different way of perceiving the world. And I think anything that people can do to realize that that’s possible and to actually experience it that way is so valuable.

Sally: Yes, it is. And I do think that that is the action. It’s the action of grace that allows you that really transforms your perception so that you can begin to see the world as utterly completely alive. And you know, it’s such a, it’s so important for us to recognize the possibility because that’s what really allows us to open to to the truth that’s kind of staring us in the face.

Rick: Yeah.

Sally: Yeah

Rick: And it just keeps getting better, so as Robert Crumb said, “Keep on trucking.”

Sally: Keep on trucking. Thank you so much, Rick. This is a totally delightful conversation.

Rick: Yeah. Before we conclude, tell people how they can connect with you, what you’re offering that they can plug into.

Sally: Yes, I have a website which is www.sallykempton.com which has a lot of resources on it including CD meditations, a lot of articles that I’ve written and the most imminent thing that I’m doing is a course on the Shift Network called the Wisdom Goddess Empowerment: Opening the Transpersonal Gateways to Your Powers of Desire, Insight and Action. And it really is exactly that. It’s about learning how to allow the goddess energies, the the divine sacred energies that that are present in the universe to start revealing themselves to us through our own mind and heart. And it’s on the Shift Network, actually. I’m going to tell you the link which I…

Rick: I’ll also link to it from your page on Batgap and it starts Tuesday, August 26th

Sally: It’s a seven-week class that’s every Tuesday night through October 2nd.

Rick: Over the telephone or on the internet?

Sally: It’s both. You can call in to a number or you can do it as a webinar. And everything is downloadable. You also get transcripts and there will be discussion groups, a forum, you know just a community experience, a supportive community experience.

Rick: And you do that kind of thing from time to time, don’t you? So if people miss this one…

Sally: Yeah, I do that pretty much every month. My own class is which you can find out about through my website by going to the resource to the… There’s actually a tab at the top of my website that says “events” and “telecourses.” And I’ll start my own telecourses again in November. And they’re on different topics. So yeah, the next one’s on Doorways to the Infinite. And I do classes on different aspects of spiritual life, meditation, the practical sadhana, you know.

Rick: Yeah, so in other words if somebody doesn’t have any kind of practice and they want to learn something they can do on a daily basis, then you have things you can teach them.

Sally: I have many things I can teach them and I give different levels of meditation practice, different levels of daily life practice. I also teach meditation on the internet site yogaglo.com which is a yoga site where I appear regularly. There’s a new meditation every week on yogaglo.com from me.

Rick: Cool. Well…

Sally: And I just want to say, even though we’re talking on a very high metaphysical level, my basic orientation to spiritual practice is very practical. So you know, how do you apply it to your family life? How do you apply it to your work life? How do you apply it to your mental states, to your moods? I really do believe that to transform us any practice we do has to be applicable in all moments of life.

Rick: Oh yeah, I mean everything we’ve talked about today which, as you say, a lot of it has been a very high metaphysical level but it’s kind of subtle mechanics of the universe stuff but the rubber really does meet the road. I mean if you can really live this stuff experientially, it enriches ordinary, so-called ordinary life so profoundly. So it has practical implications. It’s not just like, you know, airy-fairy kind of…

Sally: It has practical implications and practical applications as well.

Rick: Yes, applications is a better word. Alrighty, well, let me just make a couple of concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Sally Kempton. You know pretty well by this time who she is. There will be a page on batgap.com dedicated to this interview which will have links to the various things Sally has been mentioning. It will also have a link to an audio podcast if you’d like to listen to this and other interviews in audio. There’s a discussion group that has its own little section for each interview so there’ll be a link to that. There’s a donate button which I rely on people clicking in order to make this whole thing possible and Batgap is a non-profit organization 501c3. There’s a link to click on to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. So feel free to click on that and probably a few other things. Explore the menus. There’s a past interviews menu which has like all the previous interviews indexed in about four different ways so you can explore that. And upcoming interviews are announced on another page. So thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you next week with a young fellow named Chris Grosso. Thanks, Sally.

Sally: Thank you so much Rick, it was a pleasure.

Rick: Yeah it was fun.

Sally: Have a great week.

Rick: I will.