Salvadore Poe Interview

Summary

The conversation explores a journey from addiction and intense spiritual seeking to recognizing that freedom was already present. It also examines the limits of mystical experiences, the role of meditation and teachers, and why old conditioning can continue after realization.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual seeking come to an end?
• What is the difference between mystical experiences and lasting realization?
• Why do thoughts, emotions, and old conditioning continue after awakening?
• Are meditation and spiritual teachers necessary for liberation?

Key takeaways

• Mystical experiences can come and go without ending the sense of lack.
• Liberation is recognizing that one’s essential nature is already free.
• Conditioning may continue after realization, like a fan slowing after its power is cut.
• Each person may need different experiences before direct recognition becomes possible.
• Freedom does not require becoming special, extraordinary, or different from oneself.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. My guest today may take exception to that term because he is talking about people being “finished,” and awakening implies there’s more to go, but we will discuss that.

If you haven’t watched any of these yet and would like to see others, there are well over 300 of them now. Go to www.batgap.com and look at the “Past Interviews” menu, and you will see them categorized in various ways. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners, and so there is a “Donate” button there on the site, if you care to click it.

My guest today is Salvadore Poe. At the moment, he is in Tiruvannamalai, India, which is where Ramana Maharshi’s Ashram is. In fact, he can see Mount Arunachala out of his window. He just informed me that he has a very nice little house there that he only has to pay $1,100 a year for. I’m sure there’s going to be a real estate rush in India after I announce that.

Sal, rather than me just reading your bio, which would be kind of boring, why don’t you just tell it to us—the kind of stuff you sent me by way of biographical information?

Salvadore: Well, I could start reading it if you want me to.

Rick: Just get you going.

Salvadore: Well, I don’t know. You’d have to refresh my memory because I don’t think I…

Rick: Well, yeah, I’ll get you started. “Sal was a successful musician from New York, making records, touring, having videos on MTV, and doing film scores, when in 1997 he had a life-changing experience that propelled him on a single-pointed inquiry in search of enlightenment.” Take it from there, Sal.

🛤️ From addiction to spiritual seeking

Salvadore: Okay. Well, let me just say that I was born into a Catholic family and went to Catholic school in my younger years, but I never found something in there for myself of interest; it never struck me. When I was a teenager, I just sort of dropped all the spiritual thing completely because I didn’t feel any connection whatsoever.

Then, being a musician and rebellious youth and a rock ’n’ roller and everything, I just went on about 25 years of rock ’n’ rolling and partying, taking drugs, and drinking. That was my life, and I had literally no thoughts of any kind of spirituality or meditation or anything of that nature. I was strictly living the life of a musician.

By the time I was in my late 30s, I had had some success with a couple of albums on MCA Records and some videos on MTV, and then some film scores and stuff like that. But I also had been doing a lot of drugs, including heroin and freebase cocaine, and all of it. It was part of that whole scene and lifestyle for me.

So, in my late 30s, I had a night of excess, you could say. I found myself wide awake all night, and then at noon I was still awake. I lived on Avenue A in the East Village of New York City, and it was probably a very nice February morning, with the sun streaming in my window at noon. I knew in that moment that I had completely destroyed my life.

With the amount of amphetamines or drugs, or whatever I had in my body, there would be no way I could have fallen asleep. Something in that moment just thrust me down to my knees for a plea for help. But I had no belief in God or anything like that; that was so foreign to my consciousness. So I just pleaded for help, and somehow, miraculously, I fell asleep in that moment.

Something in that moment just thrust me down to my knees for a plea for help.

Rick: Okay, I just want to interject here that that kind of story is not uncommon. I’ve talked to a number of other people who, in a moment of desperation, pleaded for help—to whom, they knew not—and then amazing things happened. It’s just once that intention is there…

Salvadore: Exactly. That’s the way I see it. Whatever happened in my own mind, this intention planted itself. There’s no “doer,” so it just “did.” That intention—I fell asleep, and three hours later I just somehow knew what to do.

I woke up and went to a bookshop in St. Mark’s Place because I recalled this section of Eastern spirituality or something. I looked at those books and recognized three teachers: Osho, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Krishnamurti. So I bought those books and took them home. From that moment on, all the drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes were finished completely, with no effort and no struggle at all.

It was a real life-changing moment, and from then on I became a spiritual seeker on the path. I started meditating, or trying to meditate a little bit, and reading every book I could possibly get my hands on. It was a very, very clear-cut change in the flow of my life.

A glimpse of continuity

Rick: Yeah, you mentioned in your book, which I intend to hold up—I forgot to take it off the shelf behind me—that you had a very interesting and strange experience. You were on a bus and spontaneously began going back in time through your life. At each point along the way, progressing backward to when you were a very young child, you experienced your life’s circumstances as if you were there then, seeing out of the eyes of the person you were at that time. Want to talk about that a little bit?

Salvadore: Yeah, I was actually on a bus coming back from Lenox, Massachusetts. Well, that’s another story. The first spiritual teacher I ever heard of was a friend of mine named Rob, who was a bookseller in front of my house. He used to turn me on to books like I Am That and all this. He told me there was a spiritual teacher named Andrew Cohen coming.

So I said, “Great, never met one of those before.” I went and saw him speak, and he said, “If you want to get to know me better, you can get to know me.” And I said, “Really? That’s it?” So the next day I went up to his place in Lenox.

Anyway, on the way back from that two-day trip, on the bus on the way home, I had this strange experience that would have seemed very peculiar to me at the time. As you said, I just started going back through my life experiences, very visually seeing or placing myself in these circumstances as I got younger and younger.

I noticed in each one, seeing out of these eyes, that everything around me had been changing and changed constantly, and my body was completely different each time, and yet I had not changed at all—not even an iota. I went way back, to my earliest possible memories. It just happened spontaneously.

Then it fast-forwarded into the future, until I was 70, 80, and 90 years old. I noticed the same thing, looking out of a very old, decrepit body: I had not changed one iota.

I didn’t know what that meant at the time because I had just begun reading and meditating. I just thought it was a strange experience. What it was really pointing to, I didn’t come to know until years and years later, after I had my last teacher, when I finally recognized some truths.

Rick: There’s a line from a Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Boxer”: “After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.”

Salvadore: Yes, that’s true, isn’t it? We’re exactly the same.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so Andrew Cohen, hmm? Well, that’s a whole other story. Then you say that in 1998 you went to India for the first time on a spiritual retreat.

Salvadore: That was an Andrew Cohen retreat. That was about a year after I started meditating. I heard that he was giving a retreat, and the way I am in my life generally, if something interests me, I just go. I’m, in a way, kind of fearless that way. I just get up and go and make a move, and so I decide things quite quickly. So I just was gone, and I was in India, and that was my first spiritual retreat.

He was never my teacher, but I did go on a few retreats with him, and they were always very amazing. I had unbelievable mystical experiences and things that I had no idea could even possibly happen. Even with all the drugs I had taken—psychedelics and everything—none of them could even remotely touch these experiences that I had.

That was very interesting, but of course it gave me this concept that there was going to be an experience that would blow my head off and that I would be enlightened forever, you know? It took me years to realize that that’s actually not true.

Rick: But even at this stage, after a year or two or whatever of not taking drugs and meditating and going on retreats, you must have felt a lot better in many respects—mentally clearer, physically healthier, that kind of thing?

Salvadore: Absolutely. I felt then—not that I believed there was any purpose to life—but there was that feeling that there’s purpose in this moment because I really knew there was something for me to discover, or at least inquire into. I was very one-pointed with that, very dedicated to it, and so it really gave me something.

And yes, of course, I was totally clean from all kinds of drugs and alcohol, so in that way, yeah, it was good.

Rick: In fact, you look remarkably good. You must be in your 50s now?

Salvadore: 58. I’ll be 59.

Rick: It’s amazing! You look fantastic for 58 or 59, especially considering the 25 years of debauchery!

Salvadore: I highly recommend it!

Rick: Okay, so then you went through a series of teachers: U. G. Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding, Toni Packer, and so on. What else is noteworthy along the journey that you’d like to bring up?

Salvadore: I went on a bunch of retreats—Vipassana retreats and Zen meditation retreats, Toni Packer retreats. I believed meditation was the path for me, and I meditated eight or ten hours a day for months and months at a time. Often, that was what I considered “the way there,” you know?

Rick: And did you find it relatively easy and enjoyable to do that, or did it take sheer discipline to sit there?

Salvadore: Yes, in a way. I don’t judge it like this anymore, but I don’t think of myself as a particularly good meditator, whereas some people can sit down and be in some kind of blissful state. For me, it wasn’t like that, although those moments came. For me, it was just learning to be there with whatever was appearing.

I found the different techniques, like mindfulness and focusing on different things, but those all went away because what ended up being my meditation was just to sit there and do nothing. Whatever appeared appeared, and whatever left left.

So for me, that was my meditation. Even though I think I thought at the time that I should be coming into some kind of state, although it happened fleetingly, overall it was mostly just sitting there as the nonsensical floated by.

Rick: Okay. As I’m mentioning these things, I’m looking at his book,

Liberation IS: The End of the Spiritual Path . I didn’t have it at my fingertips when I first started the interview, but I just wanted to mention that.

Okay, so then you ended up visiting a sage named Ajja in southern India and stayed with that person for a couple of years, it looks like?

Salvadore: Yes, I had heard of him and read about him in What Is Enlightenment? magazine a couple of years previously. So I went back to India, looked him up, and went down to visit him.

He didn’t speak English, and he didn’t like Westerners, so the first few days I couldn’t get any connection with him at all. I was meditating as usual, and then one day some Westerners came from Ananda Ashram, which is another ashram that he liked, and he let them ask questions. So I thought, “This is my big opportunity to connect.”

After they asked some questions, I said, “Ajja, I have a question,” which I really didn’t. But he looked me up and down and said, “You don’t have any questions.”

And I said, “Yes, yes I do,” because I wanted to connect with this master who obviously—I mean, Ajja was obviously an incredible jnani. There’s no doubt; no one can doubt it.

Salvadore: And so I asked some silly question about liberation or something like that, and then he looked me up and down and said, “Don’t worry, the light is going to come for you.” Then I just started meditating there, which is what I did, and I meditated a lot. I was either meditating or sweeping the mandir or something, and I think he liked that, so he invited me to stay there. I had a room next to his for most of the next two years, although I was going back to the West sometimes. For the most part, I was there for a couple of years, meditating.

Rick: And after that, let’s see … you did that for quite a while, and then Shiva Shakti—some teacher you went and stayed with—and then … we’re making a long story short here. I guess eventually the most significant thing that ultimately happened was Delano.

🛤️ The recognition that seeking is over

Salvadore: Yeah, I was living with Shiva Shakti here in Tiruvannamalai, and she’s a beautiful, silent sage. When I first saw her, I went reluctantly because by the time I got to Tiruvannamalai, I was finished seeing teachers. I just wanted to meditate. Someone told me about her, and I reluctantly went. I could see right away that she was another authentic sage.

So I meditated for a few days, and then I asked her son if I could move in there. I did; I moved into the room next to hers. For nine or ten months, I lived there, meditating as well. There were all kinds of mystical experiences going on.

What happens to me then is that after all these years of meditation and so many mystical experiences of all kinds—some lasting a minute, an hour, a week, or a month—they all came and they all went. I was wondering, when is the one going to come that lasts forever?

I learned this in the school of hard knocks: There’s no such thing as that. There is no one experience that’s going to come and last forever, but I had to learn it by experience. I was getting very frustrated toward the end of my time there and thinking, “This is not working. All these experiences are coming and going, and where is this thing called liberation? Why am I the same?”

So then I decided, “I think I just really have to go to the Himalayas or something and find a cave and meditate forever there, in solitude.” Just at that moment, someone passing through who had just been to Delano told me about this teacher named Delano. Something with the name resonated right away. I don’t know why. Then I looked on her website and saw the words “The Last Satsang,” and I just had tears in my eyes. I just knew … how bold, the last satsang!

I was there two weeks later, in Pune, sitting with her in her satsang. On the first day of that satsang, I recognized my essential nature as free and always having been free. I also realized, in that experience of going back through my life, that I am always the same; I haven’t changed at all.

On the first day of that satsang, I recognized my essential nature as free and always having been free.

So now, after eight years had passed, I knew what that experience had meant, even though that recognition was very clear and very life-changing, in a very definitive moment in time when there was a change for me. There was relief and gratitude for months.

Still, it took a couple of years after that before I just knew it was over. There was nothing I needed to do anymore—I was just myself; there was no problem there.

It wasn’t over; it was over in that moment because the truth is already the truth. But as I tell the people that I work with, there’s a momentum of conditioning and thoughts and beliefs and many ideas—spiritual ideas on the path—that we’ve had our whole life, and this momentum has a bit of force. To expect a simple recognition of your essential nature to end that momentum is not realistic, and I don’t think it is for anyone, actually. Maybe in one in a million persons.

Rick: Yeah, I would agree. And so, all in all, you spent about eight years going to various teachers and meditating and all that stuff between stopping the drugs and Delano, right?

Salvadore: Yes, about that, yes.

Rick: Now looking back, would you say that you could have theoretically gone to Delano on day one and had the same result, or did you somehow need to go through those eight years of all that other stuff before she could really be fruitful for you?

Salvadore: Great question. I would say, definitely no, I would not have been able to at the time. The way I see it, and the way I speak with the people that I work with, is that it’s different for everyone. For some people it doesn’t take a lot, but for some people it takes 40 years of seeking. Whatever you need to go through yourself, experience, and investigate is what you need, and I needed what I did.

I needed to get to the point where I was frustrated with all those experiences, as amazing as they were, because what I wanted to know was the truth—what’s true? What’s this thing called liberation? Had I not been frustrated enough and still had some faith that these experiences meant something, I wouldn’t have been ready to be this simple and be nothing, essentially.

Rick: So if people, let’s say, who talk to you felt like going and being with some teacher or meditating eight hours a day, or doing any of the things you did, would you discourage them or in any way even subtly belittle the significance of doing such a thing, or would you say, “Go for it”? What would your attitude be?

Salvadore: I never tell anyone what to do. There’s no way. I’m nowhere near arrogant enough to think I know what someone else should do. I don’t even know what I should do, to be honest with you.

What I say to people is that the work that I do—and this is only speaking from my view; I don’t have any proclamations—is that, from where I see it, in the work that I do, you can be finished with seeking. You can be, but I say one has to be ready for that.

If you feel that you need to go meditate, then you go meditate—no problem. When I’m working with someone, I ask that during the period we’re working together—I request and suggest that you don’t meditate and don’t read any other books because it just confuses the mind. You start comparing what I say to what someone else says, and you start having philosophical debates.

What I’m showing is so simple and nothing. It takes no mentation whatsoever; it’s just seeing something directly. So I do request that if someone is working with me, they don’t, in that time period, do anything else. If they want to, of course, that’s their business.

The fan of conditioning

Rick: Okay. When you were with Delano and you had that recognition of your true nature and tears were streaming down your face and all that, can you elaborate a bit on exactly what your experience was? I know it’s not “an experience,” but can you elaborate on what actually happened in your subjective perspective?

Salvadore: Well, I can just say I had this feeling like it’s over. It’s over. Like you say, there is no “thing.” I didn’t discover something new or have some experience; I had all the experiences before. It wasn’t an experience in that way. It was kind of a moment of shifting from this seeker being here to this knowing that it’s finished. For me, it’s just over; there’s nothing more to seek.

There was this enormous amount of relief. I literally felt waves of relief coming off of my body. That’s not like the incredible mystical, transcendental experiences I had before, which were very visceral, very ecstatic, and very physical. This was not like that; it was just more relief flowing from this body. I could feel that. That’s the only experiential aspect I would say that I had.

Rick: And how many years ago was that now?

Salvadore: That was at the end of 2004, so very early 2005.

Rick: So about 12 years or so.

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: You say it took about two years to kind of integrate that or stabilize it.

Salvadore: I know those words, and I don’t really quite say it that way, but I understand. It’s hard to use words, but I would say—

Rick: For the conditioning to wind down.

Salvadore: Yeah. Ramana speaks about this fan. When you turn the electricity off to a big ceiling fan like this—those are big fan blades up there—there’s no more power going to that fan, but the blades still spin for a while.

Now, the blades are not thinking, because I still have thoughts, and the blades are not emoting, because I still have emotions. The blades, I say anyway—that fan that slows down and eventually stops—is the belief that there’s something I need to transcend here, or that there’s something I’m lacking as far as a sense of wholeness, or that I’m lower or higher than anyone else, or there’s something more for me to attain, or some other experience.

Those beliefs just finish. But as I say, they’re very insidious, and they have a lot of momentum because we’ve heard a lot of nonsense about ideas about this and that that we’ve taken for granted. So they keep playing for a while until, the more and more you come to know this doubtlessly—that you lack nothing, that already you are fine as you are, ordinary, unspecial—eventually, I say, and it was just in hindsight for me, there’s no moment. I just remembered looking back and going, “Oh yeah, that’s over.” It had already passed.

Rick: So you say it took a couple of years for the fan blades to stop spinning for you?

Salvadore: Yes, at least a couple of years, I would say.

Rick: But still, that was almost a decade ago, and so do you feel like there’s really nothing much that has changed in your subjective experience over the past decade since the fan blade stopped spinning, or is there still, in some sense, some kind of maturation or something taking place?

Salvadore: Well, I’m sure there’s something. We’re always learning, first of all. When I say the end of the spiritual pathway, I don’t mean at all that there’s no more to learn about life, or whatever. But I just say the end of the spiritual path, at the end of seeking, is knowing that there’s nothing more for me to attain. I’m just myself.

I don’t need—there’s no need in me any longer to seek anything other than what I am now. That need is no longer here.

Rick: And you don’t even have to seek that, because you are that.

Salvadore: Yeah, I don’t seek it. I just know that’s the truth. Right. And for better or worse, I’m a human being. I’m imperfect like everyone else. I just know there’s no need for me to seek to attain something greater than what I am already, here and now, you see.

Rick: And so when you refer to just being what you are, what you already are, what are you actually referring to? Are you referring to Salvadore Poe, the individual?

Salvadore: Yeah, that’s right.

Rick: The individual guy, or are you referring to some deeper, more universal dimension—you know, the Self with a capital “S” kind of thing—or what?

Salvadore: Well, the whole package. How I share it is this: When we start off in life as seekers, we start off believing, “I am this body-mind organism, this exclusive body,” exclusively, and the content of my mind is the story of self, which has to do with time—which we can also talk about—which is a complete myth.

Well, we believe this exclusivity is who I am. And then some of us get on this spiritual path, and we come to some recognition that awareness, which is just the essence—as some people maybe call it the substratum—

And then some people get stuck there and think, “I am not the body. I am awareness.” And I say that’s halfway around the picture myself, you know.

Beyond the absolute and the relative

Rick: Yeah, I was reading that in your book just last night and finding myself enthusiastically agreeing. I mean, there are these people that sort of glom onto the absolute, or possibly even just a concept of the absolute—I don’t know—but it’s their actual experience, and they kind of dismiss the relative world as illusory or insignificant.

You told that story in your book about this guy who had an infection on his toe, and it started to spread and spread to the point where he was going to have to have a leg amputated. He just kept saying, “Oh, oh, oh, I’m not the body. It doesn’t matter,” and whatnot. And the doctor is saying, “Take antibiotics. You’re going to die, dude.” And finally—

Salvadore: True story.

Rick: Finally, he took some antibiotics. Yeah.

Salvadore: Yeah, yeah. True story. So that’s halfway there. I say, “I am the body,” and the spiritual people can tell me I’m going to hell for that. I have a body. Yes, I am, of course, because I’ve come full circle.

I’m Sal. I’m not going to deny it. It’s just a philosophical concept, I think, to deny that. But now I know something a little different about myself than I knew from the beginning. I’m not just exclusively this. I know my essential nature is free, here and now, and so I no longer need to feel transcendent of life as it is, ordinary life as it is.

I say it’s freedom, and there was a lot of support in the scriptures as well for this. You know, the Hindus say Shiva, which is the unmanifest, and Shakti, the manifest—Shiva-Shakti, one word. And Buddha says, “Emptiness equals form and form equals emptiness.” You don’t say there’s emptiness and there’s form. You say this is one word.

And Jesus too—guess what?—was a non-dualist, because “I and my Father,” the Absolute, “are One,” he says.

Rick: Yeah. And you probably know that Upanishadic saying—what is it? “Purnamadah, purnamidam, purnat purnamudachyate, purnasya…” The whole thing that goes on: “This is full, that is full, both are full. Take fullness from fullness and fullness remains.” So it doesn’t—it’s sort of, you know—

Salvadore: Right.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: That’s very true. And so the way I see it now, everything that we seekers try to do is transcend our humanity. You know, because we’re dissatisfied with ourselves, because we feel we lack something. We don’t like many of our experiences, which were unpleasant, which still can be unpleasant for me as well sometimes.

Well, we don’t like those, so we think we have to transcend and get to some nirvanic state of transcendence. But I say this is not a really mature attitude. I say the true attitude is, “This is the transcendence, right here. This is it. There’s nothing further. There’s nothing behind the curtain. This is it.”

And once that’s really recognized and reconciled, then what more is there to seek?

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: This is it, you see.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: Life goes on. Ordinary, very ordinary. I’m human. I have no claims of specialness whatsoever, you know. I just am at ease with who I am. You see?

This is the transcendence, right here. This is it.

Rick: Yeah. It’s Carly Simon saying, “These are the good old days.”

Salvadore: (Laughs.) That’s great, isn’t it? Beautiful.

Rick: Yeah. I would throw in one proviso, which is that some—well, first of all, let me just say I don’t know how tuned in you are to what other spiritual teachers are doing these days, but there has definitely been a shift, in my observation, from a set of overemphasis—a kind of a chorus of teachers singing the tune of neo-Advaita, which is, you know, “You’re the Absolute. Relative—you’re not the body, you’re not the person,” all that stuff—to teachers talking about embodiment and kind of integrating the spiritual dimension into our actual human lives.

So a lot of people are talking about that these days, and I think out of need, because a lot of people felt dissatisfied with this disembodied “You are the Absolute” message.

Salvadore: I have a little—I don’t know exactly what that means, to be honest with you, but for me it feels a little bit still like a bit of a psychological game.

Rick: (Inaudible, as both men are talking at the same time.)

Salvadore: This embodiment thing. I’m not even sure exactly what it means, but what I can say is that I feel—and the work that I do is—that when one is ready to be finished, you just jump, and there’s nothing to embody. You recognize that you are already what you’ve been seeking.

And then, as I say, it does take some time for it all to become reconciled, which is really just doubts, you know, which are doubts. Because when I hear the word “embodiment,” I don’t know—maybe I’m mistaken by this word—I get this sense of a moralistic thing, like you should look in a particular way or behave in a particular way.

Rick: I don’t think that’s the way they mean it, at least the people I’ve been talking to. It’s more like people who have tried to hide out in the transcendent, or teachers who have espoused that sort of thing. It’s kind of an antidote to that: You’re not just the transcendent, you’re also the imminent, you’re the manifest, you’ve got a life, you know, and you need to sort of integrate both dimensions.

Salvadore: Okay, that makes sense. In that sense, I’d say that’s basically what I’m saying as well. I’m not sure—as you said, I’ve heard of a lot of modern teachers. I know a little bit, at least the flavor of some of them, but I don’t really know anyone else that’s worked so much these days. But that does sound similar to what I’m saying. I don’t know what their approaches to making that happen are—

Rick: Yeah, no, it’s different people doing it in different ways, I guess.

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: And another thing I just want to mention, based on what you said a minute ago, is that one thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit sometimes when I hear people say it is there’s a sort of a dumbing down, in a way, of what realization is when people just insist that who you are, what this is, your ordinary perception as it is—that’s it. Don’t look for anything more.

I don’t think that’s quite what you’re saying—correct me if I’m wrong—but—

Salvadore: Because—

Rick: ’Cause you had said that to everybody in the world, and then you’d find that everybody in the world—

Salvadore: Yes.

Rick: —is enlightened. You know, Idi Amin was enlightened, and Adolf Hitler was enlightened. He’s experiencing what they experienced. You know, it does a disservice to what we’re talking about.

Salvadore: I totally hear exactly what you’re saying, but there are two parts of it, because that is true, and I speak again for my view. My ordinary consciousness now, after I’ve done all the drug consciousness, all the mystical-experience consciousness, all of these altered states of consciousness and states, I say this ordinary consciousness, to me, is the ultimate. There’s nothing more.

Okay, so in one sense, what I said is true, but you can’t just tell someone that and have them be finished. Someone really needs to see it for themselves—the implications of what that’s pointing to. I have to be willing and able to realize truly that they’re complete and whole as they are, and notice that their essential being is free, freely aware. It’s a real recognition, you see, and in a sense, a realization.

It just can’t be said and then you say Idi Amin is enlightened, because of course it’s not.

Rick: Right.

Salvadore: But I’m not enlightened either. There’s no enlightened person, but there’s a recognition that happened in this body-mind that I am the source and not separate from the source itself. And that doesn’t make me extraordinary, though. It still makes this consciousness just as ordinary.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: Is that…?

Rick: That makes sense. I think you’re saying it, and I think that Ramana Maharshi or the Buddha and all those people could have said, “Yeah, hey, this is my ordinary consciousness and it’s completely natural. Although there’s nothing extraordinary or super-duper about it, this is just natural life.”

And yet, if the average person were to suddenly somehow jump into their shoes, so to speak, and see the world through their eyes, it would probably seem rather extraordinary compared to what that person had been accustomed to experiencing. And yet, once one is living that way, it’s the most natural thing. I mean, it probably seems extraordinary largely because, like you said earlier, of the tremendous relief that one would experience.

Salvadore: (Laughs.) Maybe. To be honest, I really have no idea what would happen if they… Of course, what you just described—someone going and seeing through Ramana’s eyes—could happen. I actually don’t know if there would be any surprise. I’m not saying they wouldn’t be surprised, but I don’t know if they would be either.

But it could be what you say. Could it be just this unbelievable feeling of relief? Because I don’t know Ramana’s experience, but I do hear what these people say, and they say, “I’m not different from you. I’ve just come to know something.” They say, “I am ordinary,” and I believe they’re telling the truth, to be honest with you.

Knowing rather than experience

Rick: Yeah. I was a student of Maharishi Yogi for many years, and he often used to say that so-called enlightened consciousness is normal. That’s the normal state, and anything less than that is, we could say, subnormal or something. But there’s nothing extraordinary about it. It’s just the normal, natural state that everyone should be living.

Salvadore: I agree, but I would say definitely it’s the natural state. I would not say it’s the normal state, because the normal state is… (becomes unclear because he gets interrupted by Rick)

Rick: No, no, yeah, right. If by normal we mean average and typical—

Salvadore: Yeah, yes—

Rick: —I agree.

Salvadore: I’d say it’s the natural human state. I also call it the natural human state. It’s free, it is. When you come out of the womb, before all the pathologies start getting programmed into your brain, when you come out of the womb, I’d say this is the natural state of consciousness, but still very human and ordinary.

It just hasn’t been corrupted yet by the “original” (makes quotation marks with his hands) sin of separation and the pathology of thinking there’s something wrong with me for all these years.

Rick: Yeah. You often refer to the womb, and that’s a sort of tabula rasa view—what we are as babies. I don’t know; you may be right. I can’t entirely side with the notion of reincarnation, and that we come in with all sorts of impressions. Even though we seem very pristine as a baby, there is actually all kinds of baggage that we bring in with us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.

But who knows? That’s a philosophical debate that we don’t need to get into.

Salvadore: Yes, so I don’t… That is true, because I have no recollections of my past lives or future life, and so to me, that doesn’t even… I’m not denying it, because I really don’t know. I haven’t indulged in it, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: So I can’t deny it, but I don’t personally lean toward that kind of philosophical structure. And I never believed in reincarnation, honestly, until recently, when someone told me I was Julius Caesar in the past. I said, “Hey, that’s cool.”

Rick: (Laughing.) I’ll go for that. Although, I don’t know if he was such a good guy.

Salvadore: That’s true.

Rick: I saw a cartoon recently where there was a tombstone, and it said, “Reincarnating soon. Don’t touch my stuff.”

Salvadore: (Laughing.) That’s great.

So, as far as that kind of thing goes, with reincarnation or anything like that, I’m very simple. I honestly—and I mean this genuinely—the only thing I actually know is this here and now, this moment.

And that’s not even—I don’t mean I know anything about it, like what it means or anything like that—but there’s this knowing that’s here, that’s clearly aware, which I say is my essential being. The only thing I can actually know is now.

So my mind doesn’t even go to anything philosophical before or after life and that kind of thing. It also doesn’t deny it, because I just don’t know.

Rick: That’s totally fair. Personally, I think that people arguing, and even fighting, over things that they believe but don’t actually know through their experience has been one of the greatest follies of mankind throughout history.

Salvadore: You got that right. Absolutely. Isn’t it true? There’s an… Douglas Harding, who was such a beautiful guy—he was 93 years old—has my favorite saying of all: “Can’t you see I’m just space for you to be?”

Can’t you see I’m just space for you to be?

And what do we usually say to each other? “Can’t you see I’m just a psychological mess for you to deal with?” Or, “Can’t you see I’m a bundle of beliefs that, if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong and I have to kill you?”

Douglas Harding says, “Can’t you see I’m space for you to be?” This is the unknowing. This is not clinging to a self-structure and beliefs about me, me, me, all the time. This is such a beautiful saying that he has.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I concur. I mean, it’s not that I don’t believe things, but I just don’t hold them tightly, because if it’s something that I don’t actually know or experience, who knows? It sounds like an interesting theory. Maybe it’s true, but I’m not going to beat you up over it.

Salvadore: Yeah, I guess it’s the same for me, but honestly, I just don’t care to believe anything. I honestly don’t. My girlfriend is the first to tell you: I don’t believe in anything. I’m a skeptic, or I just don’t believe.

I don’t deny anything either, because I don’t know, but I’m not going to believe in things unless I see for myself, right here and now. And this here and now—I don’t have to believe this, do I? This is obviously true. In this moment, there’s no need for belief or thought or philosophy or anything for this knowing that’s here now.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: And so I’m very content with this.

Rick: That’s good. The difference between a skeptic and a cynic is that the skeptic takes everything as a possible theory: Who knows? It might be true; it might not. Whereas the cynic says, “It can’t be true. It doesn’t fit my worldview.”

Salvadore: Hopefully. I’m very accustomed to that viewpoint, for sure.

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a question that came in from a listener. It’s from Dan. He says: “Would it be fair to say that when you felt the ‘you’ that you were ‘finished,’ quote unquote, there was a transition from being the experience to being experience itself? Does that make sense? I could read it again if you want.”

Salvadore: You know, I think I’ve got the point. When that happened—what he just described, when I knew I was finished—it wasn’t even an experience at all. It was a knowing.

Another thing I often say is that what I share has literally nothing to do with experience in any way whatsoever. It’s said, “Know what’s true, and knowing what’s true will set you free.” This saying is not about experiencing something or bliss. That’s never been the saying.

So I call this a shift of knowing. In the moment when I recognized my essential nature with Delano, it also wasn’t an experience, other than the relief that poured off the body because of this shift. She doesn’t call it that; I call it a shift of knowing.

I now knew something different and essential about myself—not as knowledge, though, or any kind of philosophy, but very directly, just as I know this moment now. I knew that here I am, free.

And so when I say that, when that sort of recognition happened—“Oh, it’s over”—it was again another knowing of that sort.

Rick: Yeah. Perhaps you can riff a little bit on the distinction between knowledge and experience, as you’re alluding to it. Maybe I’ll just set you up for that by saying ordinary experience involves, “I am experiencing this.” I am experiencing an angel; I’m experiencing a football game; I’m experiencing something else. There’s this kind of three-part structure to it. I’m experiencing, there’s the process of experiencing, and there’s the object being experienced.

Even with regard to knowledge of some sort, I know a lot less about algebra now than I did in high school, when I was actually studying algebra. So there were these bits of information or knowledge that were more lively in my awareness then and are less so now.

But contrast what I was just saying with the kind of knowing that you’re actually referring to.

Salvadore: Okay, great. That’s a very good question. I’ll use my own life experience. When I had all those amazing experiences, I always thought that the experience was the thing that I was looking for.

Rick: Hoping that one of those amazing things would become twenty-four/seven?

Salvadore: (Nods his head in agreement.) Yes. But the experience was an object in my perception, whether a feeling perception, a visual perception, or whatever—some transcendental perception.

What I never realized in those moments was that I am aware of this.

Rick: Right.

Salvadore: I never turned it around to question who is aware of this incredible experience, which I believed would be enlightenment.

So what I say is—I don’t call it knowledge; I call it a knowing. This knowing—to use my word, I have a holiday now and see here and now—this knowing is self-evident. It doesn’t need another object other than itself, which is not an object.

This knowing is not an object. It’s just, “I know myself.” Not subject-object. You probably understand?

Rick: I’m following you, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a good point, because I am having this experience, I am having that experience, and it’s all about the experiences that I am having. But what about the “I” who is having those experiences?

Salvadore: Exactly right. And honestly, that’s why I feel we suffer unduly, hope and nostalgize, remember this, hope for the future, and suffer the things that come, because we put—not that experiences have no value; I say they do in a relative sense—but I think we human beings put a pathological amount of value on experiencing, on the experiences themselves.

It’s to the extent of overlooking who I am, you see, the essence of all experiences.

✨ Awareness and the movie of experience

Rick: Yeah. And that’s because, I think—well, we can bring in the famous movie-screen analogy, which Ramana and many others have used, and which I’m sure most listeners are familiar with.

The movies are projected onto the screen, and the movies are very obvious and interesting. They’re moving, and they’re fun, and they’re exciting, and they’re this and they’re that, but they totally overshadow the screen.

Obviously, all the sensory experiences overshadow consciousness. We identify with the experiences rather than knowing who we are. So maybe you could talk a bit about why you think that is and how to recognize the screen, as it were, underlying the changing experiences.

Salvadore: Well, I don’t really know the whys about things because I don’t really ask why, but I can see that all of us, almost probably without exception, have fallen into this some-young-age view—monster, whatever—this identification, a separate self. I think, in my view, when we come out of the womb, we’re just aware. We don’t know we have a head. How would we know we have a head? We don’t know that we’re separate and the mother is separate. We don’t know we have a name until after several months, or however long, of our mother calling our name.

Eventually, we make the original sin: “Ah, I am Sal.” And then, from there on, it’s just one misidentification after another piled on, and we’re not shown that this is not essentially true. It’s all taken for granted. So we just go through life taking it for granted because we haven’t been shown another way.

And why is it that? I don’t know why that is, but it seems to be the way it is. Will it always be this way? Maybe it will always be this way, but I do know it was certainly that way for me until I got to the point when I experienced everything that I could experience. I was tired of experiences, and then I just wanted to come to rest in something more essential, you know.

Rick: Mm. I can suggest why it might be, and that is that the senses, by their very nature, are designed to draw the attention outwards. And that which is out, so to speak, is concrete, or appears to be. It sort of grows, and the growth kind of overshadows the subtle, and so we never seem to take the 180-degree turnaround to recognize the core of the situation.

Salvadore: That sounds right to me. Absolutely, that sounds right to me, but I wouldn’t say that’s a “why.” We are recognizing how we actually function.

Rick: It’s the mechanics of it.

Salvadore: It’s the mechanics, the function. I’d say it’s totally true. The thoughts get very powerful—the emotions, the experiences, the sensory objects. They’re very alluring, aren’t they?

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Salvadore: Very alluring. And until we get to the point where we’re ready to—well, we’ve had enough, or whatever—well, something just shifts by itself, or somebody points out something. Until that happens, we just take it for granted. That’s just the way it is.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: And we overlook our essential nature.

Rick: And look at the extent to which we can get lost in it.

Salvadore: Oh yes.

Rick: We can be flying airplanes into buildings and doing all kinds of horrible things, you know, just because we’re so caught up by the movie.

Salvadore: Yes, exactly. And you know what? It’s no one’s fault. It’s the way it is, isn’t it? And that’s a whole other thing that I speak about, this thing about not being a doer here, no free will. But I see that I did not create myself. Why did that happen to me? It just happened. I was very lost in all of that until I was no longer.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: I didn’t create it either. It’s just what happened, you know. So the world is a mess because of human pathology, but there really is no one to blame for who created it all, you know what I mean? It’s just the way it is.

🛤️ Compassion and the question of free will

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting. I was reading that in your book last night, and you told the story about how some thieves broke into Rama’s ashram and beat him with a stick so severely that he actually had a limp, or a leg problem, for the rest of his life. But he told all his followers, “Don’t take any action against them. They’re just acting out of their karma. Just leave them alone. Let them go.” So…

Salvadore: And this is what Jesus said, too. Jesus said, “Forgive them…”

Rick: Yeah, turn the other cheek. Yeah, forgive them; they know not what they do.

Salvadore: Jesus knew there was no free will because Jesus was thinking, “I don’t know why I wanted to know truth. I have no idea. It’s just what happens for me. I don’t know why they wanted to know truth; it’s just what happens.” So he’s saying there’s no doer, and then compassion. Recognizing there’s no— I say the best reason to come to recognize that there is no free will, and there’s no chooser and no doer, is not to have some experience, but it’s the birth of your compassion: to see that I did not create myself, for good or bad, and if I didn’t create myself, then no one else did either. So who am I going to start condemning and judging and demonizing? You know what I mean?

Not to say that, as a society, we have to let people run crazy and run amok. We have to do something. But then again, the way our American culture is, we’re about revenge, we’re about vengeance, we’re about punishment, and we’re about incarceration. To me, that’s pathological as well. There’s no compassion there, is there?

Rick: No, and we’re particularly guilty of it in the United States, where, per capita, we have far more people incarcerated than any other country in the world, including Communist China and so on.

But on free will, as you will, let me play on this a little bit. I would have to say that in my experience and understanding, which admittedly is limited and is subject to revision, there’s a sense that there’s a certain—on the spectrum of possibilities of being completely unable to have any influence over your life, of having complete freedom to do whatever you want—there’s a certain little segment of that spectrum where you have some wiggle room, and you do seem to have discrimination and choice. You seem to be—at least I seem to be—able to say, “I don’t think I’ll do that; I’d rather do this.” And according to how you use that wiggle room, you kind of move your life in the direction of greater freedom or greater bondage. Does that resonate at all with your experience, or do you think that I’m kind of like…?

Salvadore: I hate to be a…

Rick: No, it’s all right. We can disagree.

Salvadore: I would have to say no, because there’s still a concept that there’s a doer in here as a separate self that is creating and choosing. I would say, humbly, that there is no such thing. There’s no such thing. Not only is there no chooser, there are no choices.

The thought “I want to have a hamburger” appears in your mind, and then the next thought is, “No, a hamburger’s not good for me.” And then you can say, “Well, I subtly move towards the hamburger,” but no, that’s just the thought that appeared, you see. And from that thought that appeared, whatever is the dominant thought in the moment, the action will follow.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: And it’s all just happening. There’s no one in here separate, like a mad scientist creating a [inaudible].

Both laugh.

Rick: No, I hear you. And there are plenty of scriptures that say that, and plenty of friends of mine who say that, and so on, but this is not totally my experience yet. It’s an interesting thing to play with.

Salvadore: Because I say these things can be easily rectified with proper inquiry, actually, and that is what I do. I do inquiry with people so that they can come to see for themselves. And if I’m telling a lie, they’ll see that I’m lying. But if they come to see for themselves, then they know for themselves, and who cares what I say? It doesn’t matter. They come to know for themselves, and that’s all that I care about and all that really matters, you know.

🛤️ The end of seeking and the “holiday”

Rick: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. This thing about—here’s something from your book. You said, “Whether you’re lost in the thoughts or not, the truth is you’re free.” You know this because the moment a holiday happens, you see that it is still true. Oh, is it? And your use of the word “holiday” is like to sort of take a little break from your usual engagement and activity…

Salvadore: Stop attending. Stop focusing for a moment. [The rest inaudible.]

Rick: Yeah, just sort of pause.

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: The Bee Gees wrote a great song called “Holiday.” You’ve got me singing it lately. It was back in the sixties. But in any case, the point here is: whether you’re lost in thoughts or not, the truth is you’re free. Yeah, but there’s a long way from reading that line and kind of understanding it to actually being really free. All too often, I see people who kind of take an intellectual understanding like that and either mistake it, or let it suffice for the actual reality of freedom, rather than taking the steps necessary to make that their living experience. You know what I mean?

Salvadore: Again, that last word you just said, I was just about to say it, because it goes back to what I say: it has nothing to do with an experience. I can be lost in so-called—lost attending to thoughts—for an hour. It doesn’t mean anything for me. I don’t care. I don’t think it means that I don’t know who I am.

And my metaphor is, you know, there’s no Santa Claus, right? If you see a Santa Claus in a Macy’s window, and you’re looking at that Santa Claus, do you have to say, “There’s no Santa Claus, there’s no Santa Claus, there’s no Santa Claus, there’s no Santa Claus”? No. You know it’s finished. You know there’s no Santa Claus. You can look at 500 Santa Clauses and you still know there’s no Santa Claus, right?

So what we do on a spiritual path is we believe we have to get into this state of awareness, and if I focus on thoughts, it means I’m not enlightened, because now I’m not knowing myself. So if I’m working on music twelve hours a day, I don’t know who I am; I’m working on music, you know?

Rick: No, I agree with you, and I’m not saying that freedom entails being constantly aware of some unbounded state or some such thing, or not letting yourself have thoughts. I think you can be, as you say, focusing on music twelve hours a day, or running through an airport, or doing any number of things. But there’s a difference between doing that in a state where the movie is totally overshadowing the screen and doing that in a state where the screen shines in its own integrity despite the intensity of the movie.

Salvadore: Well, you see, that sounds like separation to me, though, Rick, because it is…

Rick: Mmm. Go ahead.

Salvadore: Yeah? Because if there’s an intensive thought stream in my head, that’s what I’m focusing on. It could be a minute or ten minutes or whatever. And there’s not someone separate saying, “I am aware that I am focusing on these things.”

Rick: No, no, no. If you say “saying,” that muddies it up, you know, because I’m not saying it’s something you say or something you mentally—see, that would be just another mental activity you’re adding into the mix, where I have this mental recognition that I am diddly blah-blah-blah. I’m not saying it that way. I’m just saying that there’s a—well, let me ask you this…

Salvadore: Okay.

Rick: When you sleep at night, when Sal goes to bed, is that it for eight hours, total obliteration, or is there…?

Salvadore: Other than the dream state, in deep sleep I am not consciously aware, but I know I’m aware. Why? Because if you call my name, I’m going to wake up. So I must be aware, but I have no—personally, I have no memory of the deep sleep state. But it doesn’t mean I’m not aware. I must be, because if you call my name, I’m going to wake up.

Rick: Well, maybe calling your name shifts you into the waking state from the sleep state.

Salvadore: It has the state of awareness there because you hear that to wake it up, you see. Something has to be aware that it was called, and that shifts me into… So, okay, I make a slight delineation, which is kind of a subtle delineation, actually, between consciousness and awareness—and aware, not awareness. Aware is the deep, in my view—I say again, I make no proclamations here; I just speak in my own view. But in the deep sleep state, I am not conscious, I admit, but I am aware, because if you call my name, I’m going to become conscious, and then I’m going to become consciously aware.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: So that’s the delineation that I make there.

Rick: Okay. Well, the reason I brought it up is just to illustrate that perhaps there are degrees of awakening which are so well established that even the darkness of sleep won’t overshadow them. For instance, here is something from Nisargadatta. Someone said:

What do you do when asleep? He said: I am aware of being asleep. Is sleep not a state of unconsciousness? Yes, I am aware of being unconscious. And when awake or dreaming? I’m aware of being awake or dreaming. I do not catch you. What do you mean? Let me make my terms clear. By being asleep I mean unconscious; by being awake I mean conscious; by dreaming I mean conscious of one’s mind but not of one’s surroundings.

And then he says:

Well, it is about the same with me, yet there seems to be a difference. In each state you forget the other two, while to me there is but one state of being, including and transcending the three mental states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

I have a whole file, like dozens of quotes like this…

Salvadore: Yeah, from sages indicating that a time comes when aware—as you call it; you don’t like to make a noun of it—is so profoundly enlivened that it persists 24/7, regardless of whether you’re awake, asleep, or dreaming. I tried that, too. I’m skeptical because it’s not my experience, and I don’t know if it’s actually true or not. But I’ve also heard Ramana say that in deep sleep he doesn’t remember, or he says in general that you have no memory from deep sleep. I don’t know the quote, so…

Rick: That would make sense, because to have memory, you’d have to have some waking-state action going on. Your mind has to be working.

Salvadore: Yeah, I’d say you’d have to have some consciousness.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: So, to be honest with you, Rick, I don’t know. Maybe what Nisargadatta’s saying is true for him in his experience. Again, I can only speak about what I call freedom or liberation, and that’s just knowing here and now that I lack nothing. I’m fine as I am, perfectly normal and ordinary, you know. My seeking is finished.

I haven’t achieved some new state of consciousness, new level of awareness, or something like this. I’m not denying that those states may exist—perhaps they do—but to me they’re states and they’re experiences, and I’m not speaking about experience at all myself, you know.

Freedom in ordinary life

Rick: Right. Oh, well, I’ll let that one rest. Here’s something from a fellow in Brazil. He’s from São Paulo, named Felipe. He says:

When I come to the realization of the understanding you’re pointing to, at the point of crossing it, I feel fear of letting go. Working as a computer scientist, I feel like I will lose control over complex things. Is it possible to live a life with a lot of obligations and complex knowledge, such as programming and mathematics, et cetera, and also be in that space of total freedom?

Salvadore: Absolutely, and it’s not a space of total freedom anyway. It’s just a knowing that you’re free, and then you carry on living. I work on music on my computer, and it’s highly technical—highly technical programs I’m using—with completely ordinary consciousness. So, yes, I’d say definitely. I would also say that the fear is because there’s an idea somewhere in there that you will lose the ability to do those things, that you’re going to lose something.

But I say you’re not going to lose anything. You’re just going to know what’s true, and you’ll function much better, actually. I function better with music and everything else, actually, because I’m not busy being pathologically insane half the time. (Both laugh.)

Rick: Yeah. That’s a good point. I often like to bring up that there’s no reason why a neurosurgeon or an airline pilot couldn’t be an awakened being. It’s not that they’re going to be in some wishy-washy, dreamy state, unable to fly a plane or perform surgery.

Salvadore: And if you are in a wishy-washy, dreamy state, I say you haven’t really come full circle, personally. Full circle is very ordinary. Just finish.

Rick: Good. So I have more questions here, and I’m going to keep asking you, but if at any point something comes to your mind that you’d like to say and I’m not asking, just bring it out. Don’t hesitate.

Salvadore: Okay, thanks. Nothing’s come to my mind. You’re doing great, actually. I like that you bring up the questions; that’s good.

Rick: Good. One thing you say in your book is—I think this is more or less a direct quote—“They say you need to purify yourself so you’ll be ready to receive enlightenment or merge with the divine, to purify the mind of vasanas, tendencies, karmas, and all that. This mind is never going to be pure. How could it? It’s got a lifetime of billions of pieces of information. How are you going to get rid of them all?”

I’d like to suggest that the kind of impurities that are referred to as vasanas and so on are not bits of information. It’s not that you couldn’t be a very learned person and reach enlightenment or something. You could be full of information, but it’s more like the deeper impressions that get formed.

For instance, to take an extreme example, someone who’s suffering from PTSD or something: They’ve done MRI scans—magnetic resonance imaging of the brain—and found that they actually have functional holes in the brain. Not literal holes, but functional holes, where the stress has shut down certain parts of the brain, and that makes it difficult to function in everyday life, much less awaken to enlightenment or higher consciousness or something.

So this whole purification thing has to do with that. They have actually done MRI scans on long-term meditators and seen that those functional holes are healed or restored to their proper functioning. So I would suggest that all those years—eight years you did of meditation and this and that—had a very purificatory effect on you after the twenty-five years of drugs and so on. That made it conducive for you, or made you more likely, to undergo the sort of shift you did. So there is something to the purification thing, I’m trying to say, in a nutshell.

Salvadore: Okay, I think I hear what you’re saying, and first I’d like to say a couple of things about that. The things that we try to purify ourselves of, like greed, envy, comparison, and these kinds of things, are pretty much malignancies to ourselves and to others. We’ve tried that through the methods of psychology and everything, and I say there’s limited effect as long as we still believe we lack something.

There’s still something lacking. So if I feel that I lack something in some way, or I’m not complete and whole, then it’s very natural for greed or envy to appear, because I feel I lack something. So I say that, ultimately, when someone is ready to jump off and come to see for themselves that they actually, in truth, lack nothing—that they actually, in truth, are complete and whole already—then there’s really no soil for greed to appear, is there? Why would there be greed if you know you lack nothing?

If you know that you’re essentially the same as everyone, why would there be comparison and envy and that kind of thing? They just don’t really go together. It’s not trying to get rid of anything; it’s coming to see for yourself that you are free, you see.

So I speak to people who have done whatever work they’ve done but still have a sense of lack. Because of that sense of lack, those things are going to appear. But when you really come to see that you lack nothing, I say, for the most part, you’re much more benign, and those so-called “impurities,” for the most part, are not rearing their ugly heads.

Rick: Yeah. Well, when you had that sort of on-your-knees moment on Avenue A in the East Village, you probably did feel that you lacked something—

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: —and you went out and tried to find a solution to that lack, not by being greedy or avaricious or anything, but by genuinely seeking knowledge. You went through a purificatory period, I would say, for about eight years, where you worked out a lot of stuff that had encumbered you. Would you agree with that, or no?

Salvadore: I wouldn’t disagree with it because I… I wouldn’t maybe use those words or see it in that way, but I wouldn’t disagree with that either, because maybe that is what happened, you know.

Rick: Right. Or maybe they had been purified sufficiently to allow you to have that recognition.

Salvadore: Maybe. Okay, I’ll give you that one. (Both laugh.)

Rick: And I’m not just talking about purity in some kind of moral sense, or psychological sense, or anything like that. I’m actually talking about physiological transformation, which has been documented to a great extent. The nervous system itself gets sort of twisted and turned in different ways by life’s experiences, and those twists and turns can kind of be unwound and enable the nervous system to function in a way that I would say is more conducive to the kind of clarity that you’re pointing to.

Salvadore: Okay, that’s true. But let me speculate about something, because sometimes in the course of someone’s lifetime it happens that they have an “immediate”—let’s say “immediate,” instantaneous awakening.

Rick: Very true.

Salvadore: They have an…

Rick: Sometimes they’re drunk in a gutter or something, and they have that kind of awakening.

Salvadore: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: It happens.

Salvadore: And it happened on your purification, but that awakening makes them realize something: that they’re fine. And so then you can say, in that moment, those things have been purified. I think that’s very rare, but I’ve heard of stories like that.

So I don’t know if there’s a cause and effect like that, this purification process cause and effect. I sort of see it as whatever I did on the path, I had to do to come to see that it didn’t work.

Rick: Yeah. (Laughs.)

Salvadore: Then I just sort of gave it all up. That’s my personal experience, you know. But I’m not going to deny what you’re saying, because I’m not an expert.

Rick: That’s okay. I’m just playing sort of devil’s advocate a little bit because it makes it a more interesting interview than probably just sitting here, smiling and saying, “Okay.” I knew I had to play devil’s advocate.

On the point you just made, I would say it did work; it just didn’t work in the way you were expecting it to. You were expecting to achieve one of these flashy experiences perpetually, and that never happened and never would have happened. But somehow, rather in a roundabout way, everything you went through brought you to the point where something you hadn’t expected was able to happen.

Salvadore: Absolutely. In that sense, you’re absolutely right; I fully agree. I had to go through whatever I had to go through until I got to the point where I was just finished with doing it and, still dissatisfied, found someone who could show me something that’s very essential.

Inquiry, momentum, and one-pointed attention

Rick: Yeah. Aja Shanti is another case in point. You probably know him. He also said he was a pretty lousy meditator, but he really gave it his all for many years and he struggled (unclear)…

Salvadore:(Interrupts and says something unclear.)

Rick: Pardon?

Salvadore: Exactly, that’s like me.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore:(Unclear.)

Rick: Struggled and struggled, and finally he reached the point where he kind of gave up. Then something happened.

Salvadore: I think that’s very true for most of us. I don’t know how it happened for him, whether it was spontaneous or his teacher helped, but for me it was at the same point. Then someone came in and, very simply, at that point they can just push you over the edge of the cliff with a simple inquiry or something, which is what I do with people I’ve been working with. That can be helpful for you.

Rick: Yeah. Incidentally, we’re almost at a hundred online views. Oh, it just hit a hundred! That’s the highest number I’ve ever had of people watching live during the interviews. Congratulations.

Salvadore: You’re kidding! Wow. I’m shocked.

Rick: Folks who are watching, feel free to send in questions if you have any. There’s a form at the bottom of the upcoming interview stage.

Okay, let me see. I’ve got some other questions here.

Salvadore: These questions are great, Rick. I’m really happy to speak to you about these questions. Some of them are nice and challenging, too, because I don’t claim to know everything. I just don’t. So I’m happy that you bring up challenging questions as well. Let’s find out what’s true.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I kind of work that way. I also don’t claim to know everything, and I’m not afraid to appear ignorant and to sort of butt my ignorance up against somebody else’s knowledge, if that’s what it is, in order to help clarify it. I’d rather err on the side of feeling that I know less than I do rather than more than I actually may. You know what I mean?

Salvadore: That’s very genuine, I think, and I feel the same way, because when I was a seeker boy, I knew everything.

(Both laugh.)

I was never so arrogant as when I was a humble seeker, I’ll tell you that.

Rick: Yeah.

Here’s a point that I think you touched on earlier, but it wouldn’t hurt to dwell on it again. You said liberating this mind does take time because it is a habit, a whole lifetime of habit, so it’s not even natural for it to end immediately. Let’s dwell on that a little bit more, because some people might feel frustrated that they kind of understand what you’re saying here, but they just feel this nagging sense that they don’t totally get it.

Salvadore: Okay, and we did speak about it before. Many people have had so-called awakening experiences, maybe even recognized their essential nature, but have gone right back into ignorance, or whatever you want to call it, believing in self again—even believing in self with the work that I do.

When I’m working with someone, especially one-on-one, I’m able to help them have a recognition here and now that they’re essentially free. It really works, and most of them say they really can recognize this, and I can see that it’s true.

Then I give them the audio, and they go listen. They call me a week later and say, “Oh, I got lost during the week. All these doubts came up, and I forgot who I am. It’s not working.”

Again, the momentum of self-doubt, ideas, and spiritual concepts—it’s like a locomotive, basically. It’s just endless propulsion that needs to be seen through many times, I feel, and in my experience, before the knowing of my freedom is more convincing and doubtless than the power of the momentum of the doubts that can come in.

Rick: Yeah. So if the Super Bowl gave you the halftime show instead of Coldplay and Beyoncé, and you got up there and told half a billion people that they’re already free and so on, we wouldn’t necessarily have half a billion enlightened people out there all of a sudden.

Salvadore: No, no.

Rick: So, aside from that initial glimpse or recognition or understanding that you’re already free, what would you prescribe as a means of rooting out those doubts and stabilizing that certainty or that clarity?

Salvadore: First of all, I suggest that people dig one hole. If they feel that they’ve seen or recognized something true from what I share, then stick with this one hole. What we do as seekers is we dig a little hole five inches deep and get a little water. Then we don’t feel the gush of the big fountain of water, so we start digging a bunch of other holes, and we never get to the well, put it that way.

I say, if I’m working with someone and they recognize that this is true—and I can see that many of them do—then don’t read other things, don’t look at all these YouTube videos, and don’t meditate. Just do this. That’s the first thing I’d suggest, and I never tell anyone; I just suggest.

Then I say, keep coming to meet me and have some more sessions, because I go through eight or ten full inquiry sessions with people. It’s not just a one-time thing. It was until the book came out, anyway—eight or ten sessions.

After that, I also have groups that meet. A bunch of people who have finished the inquiries can get together, be together, even be on a holiday together, ask questions, further clarify doubts, and make it more and more doubtless.

I don’t want anyone hanging around for long. I want them to be finished with me. I also don’t want any followers or anything. I really want people to be finished, but I also want to be realistic and helpful, so I try to help them until they don’t need any help anymore.

Rick: And you do those groups as online webinars or something?

Salvadore: Yes, I do, on Skype. Unfortunately, in India my internet isn’t so great, so sometimes there are some Skype troubles, but yes, we usually have around eight people on those meetings—eight or ten. I may end up adding more meetings if it’s still working with more people. I don’t know yet.

Rick: Yeah. Regarding that metaphor of digging one deep hole—of course, that’s a popular metaphor—but I’ve also heard, and some people have said that for them it seems to work, to not dig ten holes but use ten tools to dig one deep hole. Maybe a trowel, a shovel, and a spade, a backhoe—you know, just try different tools.

Salvadore: If it works, it works.

Rick: Yeah, whatever works.

Salvadore: Whatever works. I’m all for that.

Rick: Yeah. Another thing you said in your book is—and again, this is a famous saying—if we want freedom as much as a drowning man wants air, here it is, always here.

Salvadore: Already here. It’s already here. If that’s your intention, then you can’t fail. It’s not possible, because you will recognize that it’s here. That’s what you want, and that’s where you’ll stay.

Already here. It’s already here.

Rick: Yeah, so…

Salvadore: It’s not doership, by the way. It’s not something you can choose to do. It’s just that it’s the overriding intention. Like any other overriding intention, if that’s the strongest intention, then that’s what will prevail.

Rick: Now, I think some people might wonder, “Well, okay, but how do you strengthen the intention?” I want it, but I’m kind of wishy-washy. I want a lot of other things. I’m not like the drowning man who wants air. I feel that my intentions are kind of dissipated or dispersed.

Salvadore: There’s no doer. I’m kind of stubborn about that. I don’t think there’s a way you can strengthen it. I think frustration, being fed up with suffering and confusion, and coming to the point where you just want to know what’s true because you are finished, for whatever reason—or if something happens, an illness or something, that just spontaneously happens to you—are what may bring it about.

I’m very serious in my view that there is no doer that can do something like strengthen their intention.

Rick: Just looking at my notes here. And again, feel free to bring up anything that comes to mind.

Salvadore: Yeah, I forget what we were talking about…

Rick: Oh, we were talking about free will and having choice and stuff like that, and wanting freedom as much as a drowning man wants air.

Salvadore: This thing about self—maybe let’s talk about this thing about self for a minute, because I think there are a bunch of misunderstandings about this. Maybe it’s obvious to you, I don’t know, and maybe obvious to some of your listeners. I’ll say it anyway because I know it’s not obvious to some people.

The idea that we have to transcend the self, or kill the self, or kill the ego or something—there is a basic presumption there that there is a self that has to be killed. I say there’s no such thing as transcending something that isn’t.

When you come to recognize your essential nature is free and also come to know, in a real way, that there’s only now—when I say there’s only now, it’s not a platitude—there’s only now. And if there’s only now, then there can’t be any self, because self is based on time: my past history, my future. So when we know there’s only now, then we see that there is actually no self.

We can see clearly for ourselves there is no self-story. This is only a myth, so self is a myth, just like Santa Claus is a myth. So I say the idea that you need to transcend or kill self is like me saying to you, “Rick, go kill Santa Claus.”

Rick: Yeah, so maybe killing the self—what that really means is kind of like breaking through the delusion that there is one.

Salvadore: Yes. Know what’s true and it will set you free.

Rick: I heard a story about a little girl who drew a picture of a monster, right, and she put it up on her bedroom wall. Then her father heard her crying when she was supposed to be sleeping, and he came in and said, “What’s the problem?” And she said, “I’m afraid of the monster.” (Laughs.) So the father said, “Let’s take it down.”

Salvadore: It’s a great metaphor. I use a symbol [unclear]. It’s absolutely true: You turn on the light and you see it’s just a guy with a sheet; it’s no ghost.

Turn on the light and you see there is no self, to speak of, scary demon or monster that we have to kill. It doesn’t exist because there’s only now—and where is it?

I say, let’s get real, let’s be serious and be mature, and jump off all of those beliefs. But it needs to be—I’m just speaking to you because I know you get this—but it needs to be seen clearly through inquiry, actually. I can’t just say it to someone. It has to be seen clearly through inquiry.

Rick: Right, and actually there is another good metaphor we could throw in here. It’s: How do you get rid of the darkness in a room? Do you analyze it, do you try to push it out the door or something like that, or do you just turn on the light and, poof, it’s gone?

Salvadore: Exactly. That’s exactly how it is. You didn’t get rid of darkness; you just turned on the light.

Rick: Add a second element, so to speak.

Salvadore: But see, I see that goes back to the pure—

Rick: Purification thing?

Salvadore: Yeah. If I’m—I get a little extreme, maybe, sometimes, but at the end of the day, that’s the truth of purifying yourself as well. At the end of the day, maybe you’re right: All those years, there’s some purification process. But at the end of the day, when it’s time to jump, you will see that you, essentially, here or now, are already pure. There’s no smudge or stain on you, actually.

Rick: Yeah. I think it’s one of those paradoxical things, you know. Ramana was fond of saying—and he didn’t coin the term—that it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. And there’s an old Zen saying which I’ve often quoted. Someone said, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.” (Both laugh.)

It’s like one of those things which ultimately may be meaningless or absurd or unnecessary, but it serves as a sort of transitional function for a great many people. For instance, in your book there, you say: “It takes a great maturity to recognize, but a far greater maturity to be finished.” So how does one actually become more mature?

Salvadore: You don’t. There’s no doer. It just happens when you’re frustrated.

See, I say the maturity I’m speaking about is not like the normal maturity we’re speaking of. The maturity I’m speaking about is you try to learn whatever it is, however much it is that you had to try and do.

For some people, it’s forty years of meditating. For some people—one person I worked with only read one book, The Power of Now, and was seeking in science, and he was just ready. That’s all he needed. He was ready to be finished.

So I just say—and he was just mature, as was someone who meditated forty years—it has nothing to do with age or anything like that. It’s just when one is ready to be finished, they’re ready. You get what you get when you get it. I have a friend online who says that, and it’s a beautiful thing. There’s no doer here.

Rick: Yeah, I’m going to say something now that you’re not going to like—

Salvadore: I don’t like it. (Laughs.)

Rick: —which is that, to my way of seeing, there is such a thing as—I know you’re—and I’m not advocating comparison here—but there is such a thing as levels of spiritual development or levels of maturity. We actually all come into this life at different levels and pick up where we left off, so to speak, and the Gita talks about that.

And so the guy who’s meditated forty years might not be as mature—in terms of the kind of way we’re using the term—as that guy who just picked up the book for the first time. He actually might be a much more advanced soul. So now you can try to pick that apart, because I know you don’t like what I’m speaking about.

Salvadore: No, I won’t pick it apart, because Ramana says the same thing, and I’ll just say I have no idea.

Rick: Right.

Salvadore: I only know this now. I don’t know anything about past lives or karma from past lives and everything. So I’m not going to deny it. If Ramana said that, you know, so—I don’t take everything Ramana says for granted, but he’s certainly very respected, and I also respect him.

Rick: Yeah, and he may have been speaking from his own actual cognition, or he may actually have been speaking on the shoulders of his tradition. Who knows?

Salvadore: Yeah, exactly. I would never deny someone else’s experience. If that’s their experience, that’s their experience, and if that’s their knowing, that’s their knowing. So, as I say, I can only speak for myself, and I have no knowing of that kind of thing.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: And my feeling is that—I really just don’t know why some people are ready or not. And I think it’s an easy—it’s an easy concept because our minds want something to understand, a philosophy to grasp onto, which says, “Well, because he was meditating in his former life, that’s why he was ready.” We want some explanation to know. We want to know. But I say, how about not knowing anything? How about just being in the unknown, and you just don’t know?

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: And that’s the—we talked about skepticism before, you know.

Rick: Yeah. As I said earlier, hold it lightly. If it’s an interesting theory, it kind of explains a lot of things, but do we really know?

Salvadore: Yeah, exactly. So if we’re honest—I say to you, even, I say to myself, if I’m honest, I really don’t know if that’s true or not. I’ve read it, but what does that mean to me?

So I always say to people I work with, “What do you know for yourself?” It doesn’t matter what I know, or Ramana, or anyone else. What do you know? And then be finished with me, you see.

🛤️ Finishing seeking without denying life

Rick: Well, then again, I don’t know that there are black holes, you know. I’ve never experienced one, and I don’t have the scientific knowledge to have proven it in any way. But I kind of trust the guys who—so many of them have said, “Yeah, there are; we know about them, and here is why,” and so on.

There were whole TV shows where little kids remembered, in remarkable detail, the details of their previous life, and they took the kid to that location and he named all kinds of things, you know. So there is a fair amount of evidence.

Salvadore: Yes, but there could be all kinds of explanations. The simplest explanation is reincarnation. Maybe—and I’m not saying this is true—but maybe that person has very psychic abilities and just got images of some things now, not in the past life, and recognizes them.

I’m not saying that’s true either. I’m saying, what about that? Maybe that’s another possibility. The simplest one we know of is reincarnation, so our minds go immediately to that as if we know something, but we don’t know if that’s true, actually either.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: It seems like it would be. I think it’s cool if it is.

Rick: I think it’s a good attitude. Let’s see—a couple of questions came in here. One second. Here’s one from a guy named John in Texas. He said, “Is it possible that the search is not really over, but that he found a comfort zone and just stopped looking?” That’s an interesting question.

Salvadore: Is there a difference?

Rick: I don’t know. (Salvadore laughing) Let’s see. I would say, if you’re asking me that question, that for me, in my own experience, I’ve just found it convenient to distinguish between the word—between seeking and kind of exploration.

Salvadore: Oh, yeah.

Rick: It’s like, during the seeking phase, there’s always this desperate, unfulfilled, got-to-get-it, you know—

Salvadore: Sure.

Rick: —oh, you just die for it, and then that somehow dissolved and dissipated and disappeared. And now it’s more like, “Wow, what an adventure!” You know, like, this is such a joy to just continue to—

Salvadore: Absolutely!

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: Yes. And if that’s what someone’s interest is, then that’s great. Mine is maybe music or something; I explore music, and you maybe explore other aspects, and other people explore another aspect.

So that’s certainly true, what you’re saying. But as far as whether there is an end to seeking, I have to say there is, you know. And I think that people close to me who know me, first of all, know that I’m human, I’m not perfect, but I am not seeking.

Rick: Right.

Salvadore: I am not trying to transcend this basic humanity. I don’t think there’s anything more transcendent than this right here. This is it. I’m home in my own knowing, in my own being, and I don’t think I’m lacking anything. I don’t think I’m incomplete or unwhole, and I don’t think anyone else is superior or inferior to me, either.

I just am at ease with who I am, and so I say there is no need for seeking any longer, you see, in that way.

Rick: Yeah. Well, let me play with that. You are superior to me as a guitar player.

Salvadore: Yes!

Rick: I once learned how to play “Gloria”—those three chords. Remember that song? But that’s about—

Salvadore: I don’t know those three chords.

Rick: But I’m probably superior to you as a drummer. I used to be a drummer in a rock band. (Both laugh) So, in a relative world, there are hierarchies, there are—

Salvadore: Of course.

Rick: —there are strengths and weaknesses—

Salvadore: Absolutely.

Rick: —all the rest.

Salvadore: Absolutely. But I can look at a guitar player like Tommy Emmanuel, who—I’m not even convinced that guy’s a human being, he’s so amazingly good—and in the past I would be envious, but I just revel in the beauty of this expression of incredible-ness, you know. But that doesn’t mean I believe I’m below him as a human being.

Rick: Not as a human being, but maybe as a guitar player.

Salvadore: Of course! As a guitar player, he’s a far better guitar player than I am.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: But it doesn’t make me feel inferior at all.

Rick: No. And I don’t think we should feel inferior to Ramana Maharshi or the Buddha. Inferiority is not useful, but that is not to say that they have not ascended to a more mature level of spiritual development than we have. I’m speaking for myself; I don’t know about you.

(While Rick is speaking, Salvadore is also interjecting with some unclear comments.)

Salvadore: Oh, I don’t compare myself in that way. I just know that my essential nature is free, and I think Ramana’s essential nature is free. He is one of the great spiritual sages of all time, and I’m not, and that’s fine with me.

(Both laugh.)

Rick: So that begs the question: Can you be more free? I mean, are there degrees of freedom?

Salvadore: Well, I think it’s pretty free to admit that and be completely at ease. That’s fine. This is the way I… I’m me. I’m Sal. Sal is never going to be Ramana Maharshi. He doesn’t care to be Ramana Maharshi; he’s just happy to be himself.

✨ Form, consciousness, and the absolute

Rick: Yeah. What you said a minute ago—there is no transcendent reality; this is it. Is that the way you put it? Here it is from your book. You said: “We read or heard that there is some transcendent phase like heaven, or some transcendent consciousness. We’ve read these things, but in truth, what we know is this: form, with its ordinary consciousness.”

Salvadore: Mm-hmm. That’s right. I always go back to the thing: I only know what I actually know here and now. The only thing I know is here and now. Here and now, what I know is this: aware consciousness with form, all at the same time. That’s all I actually know.

If there is some transcendence, it must be a thought in my mind that it’s going to happen sometime in the future or someplace else, but it has to be a fantasy, because here and now, what I know is this.

Rick: Yeah. Well, what I’d say is, look at what physics tells us. They tell us that the stuff which appears physical is actually ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine percent—

Salvadore: Space.

Rick: —empty space. So it’s not what it appears to be.

Salvadore: Right.

Rick: There are some physicists who say, well, ultimately, if you get right down to the bedrock, or the real nitty-gritty, ultimate reality is actually consciousness. They try to equate consciousness with the unified field and so on. So it’s not exactly true to say that what we know is this form with its ordinary consciousness—that this is what is real—because we’re actually only perceiving it through a lens, darkly, as the Bible says. We’re not necessarily apprehending the true nature of what we’re experiencing.

Salvadore: Yes, but we come to know something. You’re right; I use the example myself. If my eyeballs were electronic microscopes, what would I see? It’s nothing but space. I wouldn’t see an arm.

Rick: Right.

Salvadore: It’s just space. But the eyeballs themselves are not electronic microscopes. For whatever reason—I don’t know why—they perceive at a particular gross level.

Rick: Yes.

Salvadore: Because they perceive at a particular gross level, the brain puts together this space into apparent form. I know it’s not solid, and I know it’s mostly space, but I exist and I live in this play, in this Maya, the play of Lila. Whether it’s solid or not—which I know it’s not—this is my experience here and now.

That’s why I say the absolute and form are not separate. This form—under an electron microscope, with the scientist telling us that it’s actually consciousness as space—I agree. This form is actually space and consciousness itself, appearing as form because of the gross level of my human perceptions.

Rick: Right. But is your experience limited to your human perceptions?

Salvadore: Yes, I would say my experience is limited to my human perceptions, although I’ve had experiences that appear to be transcendent. But those experiences have come and gone, and as special as they’ve seemed during the time that they’ve come and gone, they can’t be that special because they happened to me and to others. So I don’t place as much value on anything that comes and goes anymore as I place in this moment right now.

Rick: But if you say you know your true nature, you’re not knowing it through your eyeballs. You’re not knowing it through any of your senses. You’re not even knowing it through your intellect. It’s knowing itself in a way, right?

Salvadore: Yes. The knowing itself is the essential—the knowing itself.

See, it’s very, very possible and obvious to come to this realization: I know, and knowing that it’s here and now is self-evident. Knowing itself is knowing, and this knowing is essentially my essential being. This knowing. Of course, that’s not using the senses; it’s using the knowing in which the senses appear.

Rick: Yes.

Salvadore: Does that make sense?

Rick: No, it does. In language, you have to be careful when you start talking about this stuff, because it’s easy to start saying, “Well, you’re experiencing,” and so on, and we’re not talking about that—which implies sensory engagement. We’re not talking about that.

But there is another—if you can pardon my use of the word—dimension to your experience other than what your senses can provide. It’s sort of… I don’t know if we want to use the word “transcendental,” but there is some faculty of knowing—maybe not even a faculty. The Self knows itself by itself, and somehow the instrumentality of you, of Salvadore Poe, has become capable of allowing that knowing to take place.

(Throughout Rick’s speech, Salvadore agrees by saying “Yeah.”)

Salvadore: I don’t think Salvadore Poe—

Rick: I knew I was getting in trouble there.

(Both laugh.)

Rick: No, I’m not saying he does. I’m saying the instrument—

Salvadore: To answer this question, I have to look into it myself.

Rick: Okay. Yeah, because if Salvadore Poe knew it, it wouldn’t make it an object.

Salvadore: But Poe is only an appearance. The play of Lila, the Maya—the self that is actually not actual, but that I fully embrace as the play, as if I were Romeo onstage, you see?

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Salvadore: I fully embrace this play called Salvadore, this story called Salvadore. I fully embrace it, knowing fully that it’s a myth, that it’s a play. So that possibly can’t know anything. The knowing itself knows that.

Rick: Yes, which is what all the scriptures say, you know—the Gita—

Salvadore: I guess.

Rick: The Self knows itself by itself. It’s not… because for Salvadore to know it, it would have to be a thing that’s separate from Salvadore.

Salvadore: For Salvadore to know it other than in the play—and there’s no real Romeo either, other than that there’s an actor playing Romeo. I’m the actor playing Salvadore, knowing the acting of Salvadore, whatever, but not denying it either. I’m just aware that this is something silly like this, you know.

I’m not denying it either because it’s apparent. I’m not saying it’s solid and real and empirically true, but it’s apparently true, isn’t it? So why deny it? Why deny the experience that’s right here and now?

Rick: Yeah. The thing you said about the eyeballs a little while ago, just being so designed as to register gross impressions, the gross creation and so on—I would like to suggest to you, not as anything we can resolve right now but as a possible direction for future growth, that many spiritual explorers have said that this limitation eventually begins to get refined, and the senses begin to experience not just the gross, but more refined and refined and refined levels of creation. Eventually, one experiences—

Salvadore: Oh, okay.

Rick: —the finest relative, a celestial realm, and then even experiences the absolute nature of things. We were just talking about how this arm is not really an arm; it’s actually space. Somehow, the senses arrive at a level where everything is experienced in terms of the Self, in terms of its absolute nature.

So that might possibly be a direction in which one might grow after initially knowing oneself.

Salvadore: Yeah, could be, absolutely. I don’t particularly have an interest in doing that, and I think it’s a very worthy thing. It sounds kind of yogic to me, a meditational thing. I’ve had experiences where I really just perceive myself as this… I don’t know. It’s very subtle, a very subtle particularity. I don’t know how to put words to it—like, not solid.

I’ve had experiences like that, but to me it’s not a practical way to live, so I don’t aspire toward that or something like that.

Rick: Yeah, I wouldn’t say one needs to aspire to it, but some of my best friends are yogic.

(Laughs.)

Rick: What I mean to say is, I have a friend, for instance, who basically realized herself fifty years ago and has found that, in her experience over the decades, there’s been this continuing refinement along the lines of what I was just describing, and much more.

The reason I find that interesting is that I think it’s good to paint a picture of possibilities for the full range of human development and never limit it to just this or just this. There’s—

Salvadore: I like that. That’s great, Rick. That’s good. That sounds great to me. I fully concur, yup. I really have no idea what will happen in my experience in the coming years.

Rick: Yeah, you never know.

Salvadore: Yeah, no, I don’t close off the possibility. I just say that I’m not seeking anything other than what is, and whatever may change in my experience, I think anything like that is very possible.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: Who knows?

✨ Awakening and human conduct

Rick: And obviously you’ve made a pact with the Devil, because at fifty-eight you look like you’re thirty, so you’ve got plenty of time to explore all this.

(Both laugh.)

Salvadore: Well, thank you.

Rick: A question came in. This is from Geoberto in São Paulo, Brazil. We’re getting a lot of questions from Brazil today.

“If enlightenment does not change anything in you—if you are still the same person and did not become an even more relaxed person physically and mentally, which this person feels through the simple practice of zazen—then what is the meaning of writing books and telling the world about it if you continue to be the same?”

In other words, I guess he’s saying, if it doesn’t make you better in some way, then what’s the value of it?

Salvadore: I never said it doesn’t make it better. It makes it a lot better, a lot more relaxed, a lot more at ease. As I said before, when I first recognized the relief that poured off my body, it was untold relief. And so my experience of living is much better than it was before, much more at ease. Of course, there are moments of whatever can appear, but overall, much more at ease.

You see, it’s more than just my experience, my sort of sensorial experience like that. What am I…? Before we wake up, there’s a lot of pathology in our minds and there’s a lot of malignancy. Look at the shape of the world. But a person who comes to know their essential nature is free and is lacking nothing, is completely whole, is, for the most part—and I never make absolutes—for the most part, much more benign as a person. A much more benign expression in this world.

So even to say that “enlightenment”—so-called, because I don’t use the word, so use it anyway—or “awakening,” whatever you want to say, to me, it’s given me a lot of relaxation and made me much happier overall; no more seeking, much more at ease. But more than that, it’s taken a lot of malignancy out of the world, so really it’s better for sure for others, not least myself, you know.

It’s taken a lot of malignancy out of the world.

Rick: I think that’s a great point, because you hear a lot of people saying, “Well, if you’re an asshole, you’re going to be an enlightened asshole.”

Salvadore: I don’t think…

Rick: Right. I really think it does have an impact on your personality and your behavior.

Salvadore: It does. It absolutely does, but that doesn’t mean I’m perfect, you know.

Rick: No.

Salvadore: I can sometimes say something stupid, you know. But for the most part, I always say I’m much more benign than I used to be, much less malignant in my presentation to this world than I used to be, and I think it’s true for everyone who wakes up, you know.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that concurred with what Jesus said: “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” They knew not what they were doing because they knew not what they were, you know. But then, if you come to know what you are, you’re probably not going to get a job putting nails in people and stuff.

Salvadore: That’s it, exactly. (Both laugh.) Exactly. And that’s what he says: They know not what they do. They don’t know their essential nature is free, and they don’t need to do this kind of thing, you know.

Rick: Yeah. And what you said just now actually has exciting implications for the world. I know you don’t like to speculate too much, but we live in a world with a lot of violence, a lot of problems, and so on, and I kind of feel like a spiritual renaissance will really be able to be the antidote to all this stuff.

Salvadore: Well, I don’t know what will happen or what will ever happen, but if everyone right now finished seeking and knew they lacked nothing, there would be no Dick Cheneys in this world, would there? Yeah, I always like to point him out. (Laughs.) He’s done a lot of bad things—not his fault either; there’s no doer—but it would be… If everyone knew they lacked nothing and they were complete and whole, there would be so much—or maybe no—greed and thirst for power and abuse in this world, would there? But I don’t speculate that that’s going to happen. I have no idea, you know.

Rick: Yeah, it’s hard to say…

Salvadore: They can only… we can only see for ourselves. We can only awaken for ourselves—not that there’s a doer, but it only happens to an individual. I can’t predict what’s going to happen to anyone else, you know.

Rick: Well, you know, a forest can only be green if each individual tree is green. You can’t have a green forest if all the trees are withered.

Salvadore: Absolutely.

Rick: And it does seem to be a proliferation of awakening and interest in awakening and so on among more and more individuals, so one can only hope for society.

Salvadore: I think you’re right. It does seem to be, and the internet’s been an amazing thing for that, because even when I started seeking, I didn’t really know much about the internet and there wasn’t much on it. I had to go to foreign countries to meet teachers, which I did because I was very dedicated. These days, it’s all over the internet, so that’s very good, I’d say.

Rick: Yeah.

Salvadore: That’s very good. And even though there’s probably a lot of not-so-great stuff, I think there’s also a lot of good stuff out there as well, you know.

Rick: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of funny cat videos, and then there’s Buddha at the Gas Pump. (Both laugh.)

Salvadore: Those funny cat videos are very positive, you know. They make people feel good, and that’s nice.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a great one of a cat riding around on a rowboat wearing a shark suit. It’s got millions of views. (Both laugh.)

Salvadore: That’s great.

A simple holiday exercise

Rick: All right, so we’ve covered quite a bit. I’m sure we can cover more. In your book, a lot of it is transcripts of sessions you’ve had with people where you put them through these little exercises, and you have them do what you call “holidays,” which is like just taking a break from the usual engagement in our activity and our perception, and looking within or just checking in to see if this or that…

Salvadore: No, I wouldn’t say it like that, but yes, having it. Yes, okay.

Rick: Yeah. So if people decide to call you up and do Skype sessions, you’ll do some of that kind of thing with them? (Salvadore nods.) Or is there anything you could do with the general audience that you would like to do here in the interview?

Salvadore: I could lead people through a very basic holiday. People can maybe have a basic recognition of something that’s here and now.

Rick: Yeah, why don’t you do that, keeping in mind that you’re speaking to ultimately thousands of people who are going to be watching this?

Salvadore: Okay, fine. I’ll try it.

So I would say, then, just be relaxed. There’s no meditation and stiffness. Keep your eyes open and just relax away. Just for a moment only, a few seconds, just relax the focus of attention so that attention is not focused on anything in particular, and that aware is just freely open. We’ll just do that for a moment, a few seconds.

What we see very quickly is maybe a thought comes in, and then attention goes to that thought. In that moment, the attention becomes exclusive to that thought. No problem; that’s a perfectly natural function of this form. We’re not demonizing it or trying to change it. We’re going to see something, maybe notice something a little different.

So once we’ve noticed that we’re attending to thoughts, as soon as we notice, once again, just relax the focus of attention and allow aware to be open here.

Then I would say, let’s start noticing a few simple things. We don’t have a lot of time, but we’ll notice a few little things here. What we notice, firstly, is what is aware. Aware. Can’t deny it, right? Simple, ordinary, everyday aware. Notice that.

Again, thoughts come in and we’ll attend to thoughts. No problem. When we notice it, we’re on holiday. Aware.

So then let’s notice a few more things here. When we’re not exclusively focused on one thing in particular, like thoughts, when we relax the focus of attention, we see everything is included here, isn’t it? Everything. All the objects in the room, my voice, the body, your body, your thoughts—they’re all included. Nothing is excluded. I think that’s probably pretty clear.

See, we’re coming to know some things. Where I work is, I start very simply like this. We come to know very simple things. Step by step, we come to know more things about our essential being, you see.

So for now, we notice a couple of things: when I relax the focus of attention, attention is not… aware is not exclusive. It includes everything here.

Let’s notice some more. This which is aware here is not a thing, is it? That’s why I don’t call it “awareness,” because it’s not an object. It’s simply aware. And as simply aware is not an object, aware is not bound to anything, is it? So then we could see that aware is free. We can use that word, right? Freely aware.

What’s more, we see that aware is here and now only. It’s not a time and it’s not a place, but here and now we can say aware is.

This which is aware, which includes everything which is here and now, always is the same now as it was five minutes ago if you had looked, isn’t it? It has not changed, and it’s the same as it will be in five minutes if you look again. Aware here, free, all-inclusive, now. And all of the objects here are changing. They’re all changing. But this aware is not changing, is it?

Let’s look into self for a moment. Because I say self, this ego-self thing is a story. It has to do with time, right? The story of Salvadore, where he came from, all his past experiences, the poor-me stories, the great-me stories, all of the things that happened in Salvadore’s past—so-called past—and Salvadore’s future aspirations and goals and future enlightenments and all these things.

The story of self—the self is a self, isn’t it? So have a holiday now. Look here and now. There’s only now, right? Look now. Where is the self? Must get real. Where is it? It isn’t. It’s a myth. Otherwise, you have to show me where the past is, and I don’t see any past. I don’t see any future. I see now.

That story of Sal, the whole past-me story and future-me story, is just a fantasy for adults. We play that story. Let’s just say, for a moment here and now, just for a moment, not forever, just to see something that’s a little more essential and a little more actual here and now: There is no self-story, is there?

I’m not sure how much further to go, Rick.

Rick: That’s good. That’s good. It gives people a taste. I just wondered…

Salvadore: This is the beginning, and this really leads to more clear recognition of what this is, you know.

Rick: Yeah. Usually, when you’re doing that with people, it’s a little bit more interactive and they’re kind of responding to your questions and stuff, but I just want to let you run through some of that, just to give people a taste.

Salvadore: Okay, thanks. I think that was a good idea.

Closing the conversation

Rick: Yeah. Okay, well, this has been a great conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Salvadore: Me too, Rick. Thank you so much. I’m really grateful that you invited me. Thank you.

Rick: Yeah. To make a few wrap-up points: I’ve been speaking with Salvadore Poe, and I will be creating a page on batgap.com for this interview, which will have some of his biographical information linked to his book, linked to his website—websites, isn’t it? Don’t you have a couple of them?

Salvadore: Well, I have a music website and then the Liberation Is Enquiry website.

Rick: And so that’s liberationis.com, is it?

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. I’ll be linking to that. But in case of viewers listening, it’s liberationis.com, which is also the name of his book.

Salvadore: If you go to salvadore-poe.com, then you’ll see the link to it. Both sites.

Rick: Nicely designed book, by the way. My wife does book-cover design and has in the past, and when she saw this one, she thought, “Wow, good book cover! For a change.”

Salvadore: My girlfriend came up with the egg concept when she did it.

Rick: It’s good.

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: Cosmic egg.

Salvadore: Yeah.

Rick: Because, for some reason, a lot of times spiritual people design really lousy book covers, but this is… (Laughs.)

Salvadore: I did, I did.

Rick: … This is a nice one. It’s like trying to discourage people from picking up the book.

So anyway, as I mentioned in the beginning, this is an ongoing series, which most of you listening or watching this know. There are hundreds of them now, so if you go to batgap.com, you’ll see them all archived under the Past Interviews menu.

There is also an audio podcast of this, and just about as many people listen to the audio as watch the video, so feel free to subscribe to that. There’s a link on the side.

If you just watch this on YouTube—some people don’t even bother to come to batgap.com—they just subscribe on YouTube to the channel and get notified by YouTube every time there is a new interview, so you can do that too.

But we’d like you to come to batgap because there’s a lot of interesting stuff. There’s even a ringtone for your phone and a screen saver and things like that.

There’s also the Donate button, which, as I mentioned in the beginning, is kind of essential for us to support this whole enterprise. It’s made totally available to everyone for free, but it relies upon voluntary donations for its continuance.

So again, thanks for listening or watching, and thanks to you, Sal. I’m really glad that your internet connection worked out and that we had a great conversation.

Salvadore: Yeah, we got lucky. It’s been a rough week with this internet, I tell you. I was concerned for a while.

Rick: Yeah. Well, your internet is better than Andrew Harvey’s was, and he’s over in Chicago. Yours is like twice as clear—ten times as clear—

Salvadore: [Unclear]

Rick: Or this other guy that I interviewed in North Carolina last week—Norio. He was having internet problems. But I’m encouraged about the podcast. For years I’ve been saying I don’t want to interview people in India because they won’t have a good internet connection, but you’ve inspired me to check it out.

Salvadore: Good, good. Good. I’m sure there are lots of great people to speak to here.

Rick: Yeah. All right, well, thank you, Sal, and thanks to those who’ve been listening and watching. We’ll see you next time.