Sally Kempton Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Questions this interview answers

What is the true nature of consciousness and is it the fundamental reality?
Why do we perceive separation and materiality if everything is consciousness?
How can spiritual practice shift our perception to experience unity?
What role does creativity and intelligence play in the manifestation of the universe?

Key takeaways

Consciousness is described as the fundamental, intelligent ground of all existence.
Our perception of separation and materiality is shaped by neurological wiring and conditioning.
Spiritual practices, especially meditation, can rewire perception to reveal underlying unity.
Creativity and intelligence are inherent qualities of consciousness, manifesting as the universe.
The process of awakening involves the activation of subtle energies like kundalini.
Direct experience, not just intellectual understanding, is essential for realizing unity.

Transcript

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.

✨ What is Consciousness?

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.

Creativity is essential in consciousness and that’s part of why we are what we are.

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.

The Nature of Reality and Perception

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 the way we’re wired. But which if our wiring were to be tweaked just a little bit, which is what meditation 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.

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?

✨ Consciousness and Quantum Physics

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’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…

The Human Nervous System as a Scientific Instrument

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.

The human nervous system is the ultimate scientific instrument.

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. And so far we haven’t been able to replicate or to create a machine or a computer that actually can experience the depths of reality directly. And who knows, 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 create something that can give it to other people mechanically. But I doubt it. I think 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.

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.

Exploring Subtle Worlds and Inner Experience

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, 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, having 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 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 using half the power of Geneva. It just has a certain delicacy in its structure, certain capability in its design. If we can kind of tap into that and unfold that, it will enable us to get right down to 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 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 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. 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 real in a way that dream doesn’t appear. 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 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 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 pop into consciousness at different moments—really can be experienced, actually as downloaded 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.

Real, genuinely-innovative knowledge can be experienced as downloaded from these subtle worlds.

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. 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’d 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.

Subtle Realms and Their Utility

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 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, 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 interact with them has been the stuff of yoga and shamanism and deep religious transformative practice ever since I think human beings came onto the planet.

Because the atmosphere around us literally teems with subtle energies and forces who are, in my experience, very, very willing, very, very, almost offering themselves as helpers, as inspirers. And all we really have to do is take them seriously and be willing to invoke them.

The atmosphere around us literally teems with subtle energies and forces who are very willing to help.

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, 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 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 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… One of the really fascinating things to me about the current excitement in the cosmological world about how they’ve actually have been able 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.

🕊️ Science, Experience, and Spirituality

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 pieces in The Times earlier this year? Apparently through, I think, mathematical formulations coming 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Experience is the crux of it… you have to have a system for making the experiment.

🛤️ Balancing Spiritual Journey and the Present Moment

So, 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 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 have this orientation. That there’s always going to be more and that 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 person’s right now, even the average spiritual person’s 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’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 “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. 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 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 talk about spiritual maturity where we’re able to really be in the moment and be with our pain 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 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 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.

Spiritual maturity is the recognition of the paradox.

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 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 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, it would be the end of the meditation and I would relax my posture and 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 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.

So I think that everyone who meditates discovers that you tighten the focus and then you actually let yourself… one word is “drift” but, or sink or expand.

Rick: Did Muktananda advocate concentration?

Sally: He advocated both. 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.

Consciousness will teach you what is the best doorway for you at any given moment.

Rick: 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 you 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.

The art of meditation is really learning not to grab.

The Reality and Universality of Deities

Rick: 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 talks about four quadrants of reality and one of the quadrants is our subjective experience, what goes on in our mind and imagination. And then 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

Once you start having experiences of deity energies that clearly don’t come from your mind… you realize their own reality and power.

Living the Divine in Everyday Life

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 as 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.

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 it’s so important for us to recognize the possibility because that’s what really allows us to open 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.

Resources and Offerings

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 divine sacred energies 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, 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 classes, 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.

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.

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 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.