Sandra Glickman Interview

Summary:

Background & Education:

• Lifelong spiritual seeker with a deep interest in human identity and transformation.
• Studied at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, focusing on experiential and interdisciplinary approaches.

Spiritual Journey:

• Devotee of Adi Da Samraj from 1986 to 1996.
• Later studied with Saniel Bonder, founder of Waking Down in Mutuality.
• Experienced a significant awakening in 1996, integrating divine and human aspects of self.

Professional Work:

• Senior Teacher in the Trillium community.
• Active in developing dharma, courses, and workshops.
• Practicing transpersonal psychotherapist since 1987.

Key Themes in the Interview:

• Witness Consciousness: Describes the shift into a state of awareness beyond ego.
• Paradox of Awakening: Emphasizes the coexistence of divine realization and human vulnerability.
• Transformation through Relationships: Personal growth and awakening often catalyzed by intimate and challenging relationships.
• Progressive Awakening: Awakening is not a one-time event but an ongoing unfolding.
• Living in the Present: Embracing the now and accepting mortality as part of spiritual maturity.

Personal Reflections:

• Discusses the complexity of spiritual communities and the need to discern authentic guidance.
• Shares insights on the anatomy of awakening, including subtle energetic and emotional shifts.

Full interview, edited for readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump, the weekly show in which we talk with people who have had or have undergone a spiritual awakening. I am always trying to come up with better terminology than that, but so far that is the best I have come up with. Maybe my guest this week, Sandra Glickman, will coin a better phrase for me. Sandra holds the distinction of being the first guest on this show to not have a TM background, Transcendental Meditation background, which is great, not that there is anything wrong with having a TM background, but it is hard to find anybody in Fairfield, Iowa who doesn’t have one, and yet who has had a spiritual awakening. So I was glad that Sandra agreed to come on the show. So maybe that gives us a good starting point actually. How did you end up in Fairfield?

Sandra: Okay, I was living in California, San Francisco Bay Area, and I was involved in a practice there with a group of people called “Waking Down in Mutuality,” and this group was invited to come to Fairfield and teach, do some introductory teaching and bringing our ideas about awakening to a group of people here.

Rick: You mean you were asked to have a representative come?

Sandra: Yes, yes. So I happened to be the representative, myself and another woman whom I teach with, and so we came here, we gave an introductory course, and we came back again, and people liked what we were doing, so we were invited back quite a few times, and over time I got acquainted with the town and the wonderful community of people here, very lively, very juicy, very ready to get involved in another angle on spiritual life. And during that time I met my partner, Don Schmidt, here who came to some of the classes, and over time we kind of decided that we’d like to spend more time together, and then we did some traveling together, and then finally we decided we’d like to try living together, and it felt really ready-made for me because I was really wanting to have this relationship with Don deepen and grow more full over time, and I was really tired of California, believe it or not. It was really saturated, I spent most of my life there, and I was drawn to the community here, so I had a ready-made teaching gig, and lots of friends already here, and a relationship, and I was ready to leave where I was.

Rick: Sounds like the right thing to do.

Sandra: It was a great thing to do, and I’ve been very, very happy here.

Rick: How long have you been here now?

Sandra: It’s been about five and a half years.

Rick: Okay.

Sandra: Yeah.

Rick: Do you like the winters?

Sandra: I don’t mind them. I don’t mind them.

Rick: I love them, actually. I like to get out and cross-country ski.

Sandra: Yeah. Well, one of the things is I’m not a native Californian. I grew up actually in Kansas, so coming back here, I kind of reconnected to my roots.

Rick: Yeah, pretty similar.

Sandra: Fairly similar, and I actually love the seasons, and I know that’s … So I don’t mind the winters.

Rick: Good.

Sandra: That’s good.

Rick: So you had a spiritual awakening. Were you on a kind of a path of a seeker for decades before that, or did it just strike you, hit you out of the blue one day when you were crossing the street, or what?

Sandra: No. I’ve been a lifelong seeker. I was thinking back over that period of my life. At age 20, I think I was just like an empty, hollow, boring, bored person, and I felt the kind of sting of existence. But by 30, I began to say, “Turn around in my life and begin to look for the light.” That was my first conception of what a spiritual awakening was.

Rick: Started reading books and whatnot.

Sandra: Yeah, I started reading books. I got interested in Edgar Cayce. When I learned that he was talking about reincarnation, I said, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this?” I knew it was so, and I was kind of ignited by that idea. And so I continued to read more along the lines of psychic material, and I began to investigate healing energies and subtle energies. I remember spending a lot of time trying to see auras. So my first idea of spiritual life was to get in touch with that which is not physical, but maybe connected with the physical.

Rick: Subtle physical.

Sandra: Subtle physical. And I did the Course in Miracles. I did many things, and I started investigating palmistry and phrenology and numerology and tarot. I was on a mission to see what all of these approaches could tell me about life and tell me about my own character and my own spiritual nature.

Rick: Did you pursue them simultaneously or sequentially?

Sandra: Simultaneously. I’ve always been one of these …

Rick: So you’re just checking everything out right, willy-nilly?

Sandra: Yes, yes, everything. Voracious appetite for everything unusual.

Rick: Were you doing some kind of actual practice, sitting and meditating or something, or were you just kind of reading things and thinking about things more?

Sandra: I was more reading and thinking and fishing around for everything. And at the same time, I was raising a family. I was married and raising a family. And so at a certain point, I went through a divorce, and then I decided I need a profession. And I kind of discovered that the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology was right in my own hometown. And when I visited there, I thought, “Wow, I can get a degree in everything I’m interested in,” because it was a very multidisciplinary school, and it was very experientially based. And we had studies in five different areas of human endeavor. And so that’s when I became more disciplined. I began meditating regularly and reading and studying and writing papers, and I was exposed to a lot of spiritual teachers on a regular basis.

Rick: They would come through and lecture there or something?

Sandra: Yeah, they were associated with the school. And so…

Rick: This is out in California?

Sandra: Yes, California in the Bay Area. And during that time, I had also been visiting a teacher in Oklahoma City that my sister introduced me to. He was a yogi, I guess you would say, because he would take us on these inner journeys � a whole group of people � on these guided inner journeys into the subtle realms, ascending realms of awareness and consciousness.

Rick: Was he American or Indian?

Sandra: Oh, he was American, but he was trained himself by Indian teachers. And he led us on the most fantastical experiences.

Rick: So you’d just be sitting in a room with him?

Sandra: Yes.

Rick: And he would somehow do something or other, and you would actually…

Sandra: Yeah, he would say, “Okay, I’m going. Follow me.” And it was like he had…

Rick: You were able to just follow.

Sandra: He had the power. He had that kind of city to pull people into his experience. And so we traveled with him in the inner worlds, and every time I would go there, he would say, “This is it. I’ve got it now.” And he would sketch out on a board all the inner worlds that he was working with, and first we see it, and then we feel it, and then we become it, and then we fill it in with our awareness, and then it’s ours. And then I’d come back next time and he’d say, “Well, there’s something beyond this.” And I kept expecting to find, “Where’s the endpoint? Where’s the foundation?”

Rick: Yeah, what are we looking for here?

Sandra: Right. And I realized, “This is going to go on forever.” And even though I had amazing and wonderful and beautiful experiences there, I kind of came to the realization that this is not where it’s at.

Rick: Right. And also you might have realized at that point that you only have these experiences when you’re in Oklahoma City, and that doesn’t cut it out in the Bay Area.

Sandra: Right! I was incrementally becoming more sensitive and more self-aware, but it’s true. It’s like it was kind of a group experience, and I also kind of had this intuition, “This isn’t my way. This isn’t innate to my nature.” So I continued. By then I was in the School of Transpersonal Psychology, and I was being exposed to many different disciplines that I was feeling more related and kind of more aligned with those disciplines. So I was getting my degree there, and I was going on to be a counselor in the clinic there, and working for my license, and I was very happy with that as a profession and as a way of expressing myself and learning. And then at the same time, I somehow became introduced to the spiritual adept Adi Da Samraj, and that was a really amazing opening, spending time in his tent while he talked with people and did satsang, and I would come away in great waves of bliss, being uplifted beyond myself. So it wasn’t hard to sign up to be a student there and to study on a very regular basis. And I started going up to Lake County where he had a sanctuary, and I spent a lot of time there with the group, practicing in that community. And these were comprehensive life practices, every day meditation, puja, chanting, study, diet practices.

Rick: That’s what you mean by comprehensive, that they were multifaceted and you did all these things every day?

Sandra: Yeah, we had prescriptions for how to lead our lives every moment of the day.

Rick: Sounds familiar.

Sandra: Yeah. This was my big guru learning phase, right? And also the study there was very rich because we studied the traditions, and I got a very solid foundation for what the spiritual path actually is and how one develops through the stages. And I had many, many awakenings. I don’t think there’s any one awakening. I had many awakenings in that community, awakenings in consciousness at many different stages, personal realizations of my own unity and light, and my own deeper intelligence at work.

Rick: When you had those awakenings, was it sort of an “I got it, I lost it” kind of thing, or was it more like a stage and then stabilize that and then a new stage and then stabilize that and so on?

Sandra: Well, I wouldn’t say it was either. It wasn’t that clearly incremental, you know, you achieve a stage and you stabilize, you achieve another stage and you stabilize. And I wouldn’t say that I lost it, something always remained and something kept being added and kept being fuller and fuller, and it built, you know, and my own confidence in the spiritual life built and changed. And I was in that community for ten years. And then …

Rick: Living in it or going and visiting?

Sandra: Well, I lived in two places. Like half the week I did my practice in the Bay Area and the other half …

Rick: So by this time you had graduated from the transpersonal thing? You had a degree and you were seeing clients?

Sandra: Yes, yes. And then I’d go up for four days on the weekend and live in the community and go to the sanctuary. And that’s an empowered place, you know? It was easy to have deep meditations and to have revelations. And Adi Da himself came many times to the sanctuary when I was there, so I had Darshan and I served a lot. I became a mad devotee. This was my mad devotee phase, running all over the sanctuary, throwing myself on the ground, you know, offering flowers and weeping and tearing your hair. It was wonderful, I loved it. It was just giving oneself over to the passion of the religious experience and the devotion to the great divine other. And then there came a time when things sort of leveled off and all of that wasn’t popping and happening, you know? I had taken on some responsibilities to lead groups in my local area and I was very convinced. I just felt like, “Well, things are leveling off. I don’t feel the growth that I have had. But this is my guru, I’m going to be here my whole life and that’s how it is.”

Rick: And you had children at this point?

Sandra: Yes, I did.

Rick: Did you take them with you up to the sanctuary when you went there?

Sandra: No.

Rick: Did they stay with your husband?

Sandra: Yeah, my ex-husband and the children. The children chose to live with him.

Rick: Oh, I see. Well, you were tearing your hair out and throwing yourself on the ground.

Sandra: I know, my children. That was quite a time period in my life, you know? That was a real wound. It was kind of hard for me to get over, but I honored their choice and I understood why they made it and I also had this other urge to become a professional and follow a spiritual path, so I saw them. Of course, we lived close to each other and I saw them a lot, but I didn’t have to keep a household for them.

Rick: I see. So it gave you the freedom to do that. Alright, so things were kind of leveling off. He was still your guru, but maybe the fireworks weren’t quite there as much as before, so take us from there.

Sandra: Right, right. Okay, so I felt content. I didn’t feel like I was seeking anything. But at this point I heard that one of his former students, Saniel Bonder, had left the communion and that after he left that he became awakened. And this news was like radical in the community because the way it was set up was that the guru was the enlightened, awakened, and powerful one and everyone else was told, “Go back to the drawing board. You’re half-baked. You’re not there.” And no one was really ever encouraged to go further in what they were actually opening up to.

Rick: Interesting.

Sandra: The whole thing was that you were to be a devotee and you were to submit to the belief that only a few in any lifetime awaken and that it was arduous and difficult and you were full of egotism if you thought you were getting anywhere.

Rick: Sounds very familiar. I’ve heard that in several different spiritual circles.

Sandra: I was told, my favorite profession, I’m a psychotherapist, I was told, “If you want to get anywhere, you should drop this. Psychology is a backwater, it’s a delusion, you’ll never make it if you’re a psychologist.” And you know what? I was too much in possession of my own self by then. I had grown, I had integrated a lot of my shadow material, I had understood my patterns and how I worked, I had had exposure to many different teachers by then, and I just intuitively knew that was not right. I was not going to be someone who stripped myself down to nothing and just submitted childlike to this guru, so I did not do that, I refused to do that.

Rick: When word came back that Saniel had left and gotten awakened, did many people in that community believe it or was he pretty much castigated as being some sort of off-the-program dude?

Sandra: Oh, he was scorned and castigated. But an interesting thing happened, you know, I kind of started thinking, “Well, you know …”

Rick: “Check it out!”

Sandra: Yeah! And incidentally, Saniel Bondar happened to have a business relationship with a man who was my partner at that time, and he was coming down to Palo Alto to study the flute, the wood flute.

Rick: Saniell?

Sandra: Yes. And he also would come down and he would have business meetings, lunch meetings with my partner. And so finally one day my partner came home and said, “Now, you have to come and meet Saniel Bondar because I don’t have enough sensitivity to know what he’s talking about and to be able to make any evaluation of it.” So I said, “Oh, okay, I’ll go.” Well when I arrived and had lunch with him and after just a few minutes’ conversation, it was totally obvious to me that this was a person who was awake.

Rick: How was it obvious to you?

Sandra: He felt no different from Adi Da in his conscious nature. He was full, he was in his being, he was bright, he was clear, he was kind and loving. And I recognized, I just recognized the same qualities that I had seen in my guru. And so I said, “Wow, this is really cool.” So Saniel had just written an important book that kind of documented his own journey.

Rick: I think I read that book years ago.

Sandra: Yeah, it was called what is the name of it White-Hot Yoga and the Heart?

Rick: Yeah, that’s the one I read.

Sandra: You read that?

Rick: Well I listened to it on tape actually. I think it exists on tape and my wife and I were driving down to New Mexico and I listened to it on the trip. It must have been that book because he kept saying “white hot” a lot. S Yes.

Rick: And my wife was like, “Give me a break. What is this white hot?”

Sandra: I know, that’s still a mysterious phrase. So Saniel, the next time he came down he delivered this book to our door and I started reading the book and I really recognized if this man is telling the truth about his own journey, he knows, he has been through the transformational journey. And the criticisms he was bringing to his life in the community with Adi Da rang true for me.

Rick: Criticisms he was bringing?

Sandra: Yeah, he was saying, because of the setup there that no one would be affirmed, that the guru held all the power, and it wasn’t just he was holding it, the devotees were giving it all to him. I knew people in that community. It was clear to me that they were awake, they were clear, they were there. And I had said to one of these persons in particular, “Why don’t you say something?” And she said, “Oh no, no, no, that’s not my role. That’s not who I am.” You know, it’s just like there was no invitation, there was no support for actually receiving yourself where you actually were, because it would be an affront to the guru. It was taboo. And I don’t know if it was actually taboo to him, although he kicked out Saniel Bondar.

Rick: Why? Was Saniel getting a little bit too independent?

Sandra: Well, Saniel was like…

Rick: Kind of self-fulfilled?

Sandra: Yeah, he was kind of like refusing to comply with every last request.

Rick: Yeah, it’s common. I mean this is a universal pattern actually. It happens in the two spiritual organizations that I’ve been familiar with. I’ve seen it over and over again. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s more like I think of an organization like that as being an incubator, and once the chick is kind of out of the shell, it’s not very helpful to stay in the incubator, either for that chick or for the other eggs in the incubator. So time to get out.

Sandra: I like that metaphor. I really like that metaphor. I discovered it myself. I discovered and I kind of had this inner play between myself and the guru that I kind of knew he was putting up the heat on everybody, and that was the confrontation that we needed. And I realized I had to break the taboo. Like part of coming into your own being was to break the taboo, was to break through and just say, “That’s it, I’ve had it, this is who I am, and I have to take responsibility for that and go on my own.”

Rick: Yeah, we can extend my little metaphor a little farther to say that if you break the shell from the outside, you might kill the chick, you know, you’re not helping it. The chick has to peck its own way out, and once it does that, then it has a certain authority, if you will, which it wouldn’t have had if you said, “Come on, I’m going to break the shell before I let you out of here, and it’s time for you to leave the incubator.”

Sandra: Right, totally. You’re not going to get ushered out in that way. There’s a little parallel with that in psychotherapy actually. It’s like the psychotherapist does not say, “Okay, you have to leave therapy.” I mean that is not empowering to the client.

Rick: It dawns on the client that it’s time to fly the coop.

Sandra: Yes, exactly. Well I sort of phrased it, I like this phrase, I decided that I wanted to be my own weak little light in my own world, rather than one of the millions of lights in the grand marquee of my guru. I just decided, whoever I am, however I am, I’d rather be me. I’d rather come into my own.

Rick: That’s great. And perhaps we’d be laboring the point to say it again, but it’s interesting to observe how it happened kind of naturally, you just grew into it. And that being the case, and I’ve seen it in many other cases, I don’t think people have to be overly worried about people that are in spiritual groups. I mean, there have been some really terrible ones, which can’t even be classified as spiritual groups, like Jonestown or something, but in relatively healthy ones, which have a fair degree of legitimacy, if not great legitimacy, people know what to do. And if they reach a point in their growth where leaving is appropriate, they’re going to leave. And maybe for a while they’ll build some negative story around it, “Oh, he said that,” or, “She said that,” or, “It’s not what I thought it was.” But that’s sometimes just an artifice to give them a little kick.

Sandra: Yeah, I think a person has to build a little negative story to empower themselves before they can get out.

Rick: And then usually you look back a couple of years later and you say, “You know, I appreciate it. The whole thing was great,” just like you were saying.

Sandra: Yeah.

Rick: “It was just what I needed at that time, it was a phase I went through, it was extremely helpful, and I’m so grateful, and now I’m doing this.”

Sandra: I actually decided that everyone actually needs to have a time when they can idealize and worship a great, powerful, other force. And I did not have that with my parents, I didn’t have that kind of security and adoration, but I needed it and I found it in this Guru, and it was glorious while I was there.

Rick: I think particularly when we’re younger we have a tendency to do that too. You’re idealistic and you think that somebody’s got the answers, and so maybe this guy’s got the answers, and then after a while, “No, not him. Well, this guy must have them. Somebody’s got to have them.”

Sandra: Well, I think you’re right also in that people have to grow, they have to get the foundation, they have to learn what it’s all about, like you have to read and study and practice, and you need a place to do that, and you really don’t know in the beginning. So I went through that, I really have no regrets at all. I gave a ton of money, a fortune. I have no regrets. I’m very happy about it, and I still deeply honor who Adi Da has been in my life. And he’s a magnificent teacher. He has written profoundly deep and beautiful books.

Rick: I’ve always heard that about him. I’ve never read any of them.

Sandra: And in the later years in his life, he became a creative photographer, artist.

Rick: Oh, right, yeah. I saw some of that. I glanced at some websites and saw some of that stuff.

Sandra: Yeah, stunning work, stunning work, really gorgeous work. And he also kind of initiated a unique kind of tantric embodied practice that was different from many of the practices I actually touched into, and I’ve come to deeply appreciate that in him.

Rick: Is that relevant to your story? Do you want to go into that, or is that just sort of tangential?

Sandra: Well, that does become relevant to my story, but I guess I want to tell you how I left that communion, because I met Saniel Bonder, I told you that. I recognized that he was a realizer, and I said to myself, he did not encourage me in any way. He was not into taking people away from the guru, but I began to pull him out and ask him more and more questions, and then I read his book, and then I said, “Well, this is a no-brainer. I can just drive an hour up to Marin County and sit with this man, rather than go through all the hoops that it takes to go to Fiji and have a retreat without a job.”

Rick: Oh, he was in Fiji by that time, I see.

Sandra: Yeah, and so this was like in October.

Rick: Of what year?

Sandra: Of ’95. So then I went up to Marin County and sat with Saniel, very personal, a very small room, face-to-face like we are right now, and talked personally about my experience and about where I was, and meditated with him and a small group of people. This was really the clincher. I walked away from that meeting, and I recognized that I had fallen into the witness consciousness, and it never…

Rick: You mean the very first one of those meetings you went to?

Sandra: Yes, with Saniel, because I’d been, I’d touched into the witness many times with Adi Ta, but I recognized it there again, and to my wondrous surprise, it never left me, never.

Rick: Describe it a bit, this witness consciousness.

Sandra: Okay. At first it seemed to emanate from my whole being, and it was “it,” “I.” I experienced myself as being uplifted, very clear, not different, but more attuned to everything around me, more in tune with everything around me, more aware, I guess you would say. My mind was more clear, and everything seemed bright, brighter than ever before.

Rick: Now the things you just described, the average listener would hear them as being characteristics of your individuality, “Everything is brighter,” that’s your perception. You felt uplifted, that’s an emotion. You felt, I don’t know, some of the other things you said, but those can all be sort of associated with just feeling great as an individual person, but I suspect that there’s something more to it than that, or not.

Sandra: Well, you know, the witness consciousness is a subtle form.

Rick: A form?

Sandra: It is a subtle form, the witness consciousness is a subtle form.

Rick: Meaning it has a sort of actual physical existence?

Sandra: Yeah, it has an energetic, subtle existence.

Rick: And does it have, as a form, all forms by definition have temporal and spatial boundaries, does it have those?

Sandra: Well, I, myself, seem to expand. I don’t know if it had a boundary, but I seem to be large and full and expanded, but this never left me, this quality never left me. And I also became capable of keener insight and discrimination. It was beyond anything, it was suddenly a big leap beyond anything I had known before. I had experienced it temporarily, but not like this, not like this in a continuous way, where there was something of a transformation.

Rick: Is this line of questioning, I have more of these, but is this helpful or does it interfere with your explaining what you’re trying to explain?

Sandra: Let’s see. No, it’s okay, but maybe I should tell you my …

Rick: Okay, say more and I’ll come back in a little bit later.

Sandra: Yeah, come back in, because the awakening that I have experienced and continually experience and teach may not be definable in the traditional sense. And the questions you were asking me come a little bit from the traditional side, you know, and so I want to tell you that first and then maybe I can get into these more discriminating points with you. So I started to tell you that Adi Da was a tantric, a tantric. He was not simply a jnani or a heart devotee, you know. He was a multidimensional person and he himself had experiences that were completely non-dual and he had experiences that were of a kind of union of himself and the goddess. He had the consciousness awareness, many samadhis of that, many … I don’t know.

Rick: Degrees?

Sandra: Well, I don’t know what you would say. He was awake in consciousness and that had no energetic component to it, you know. And he spent many years observing his own behavior, inner and outer, how it coordinated and what came up in his field and how the synchronicities occurred, you know. And in his final realization, he sat quietly in a temple in Los Angeles and realized that the feminine form of the goddess had become him, that he and she were dancing creation alive. And now this sounds maybe kind of far out and weird.

Rick: No, but it needs a little elaboration because feminine form of the goddess, tantric, you know, we’ve got to kind of unpack these phrases a little bit to know what we’re actually referring to.

Sandra: Okay, well …

Rick: But maybe that’s part of your story.

Sandra: That’s part of my story, but I don’t know if I can give it the kind of fine edge that you would like.

Rick: Well, I don’t know. I’m a bit too fussy, but …

Sandra: Okay, so by tantric we mean, you know, the ability or the, not ability, but the permission to use that which is usually forbidden in practices. You know, to use …

Rick: Sexuality.

Sandra: Sexuality, substances, just …

Rick: Any drugs.

Sandra: Any drugs, alcohol, wines, elixirs, and to be more in the flow of embodied life rather than in the disposition of restraint all the time or like quietly leaning into the background and simply observing and letting everything pass before you in a kind of traditional

Rick: Removed, sort of.

Sandra: A little removed or kind of quietly loving and pleasant and illumined, but not lusty in life, engaging in the flow of life. Okay, that’s what I mean by tantric.

Rick: Okay, now I don’t know if we want to get into this, but I got quite an earful from a fellow one time who had been with him for 17 years, and I don’t know if I want to get into all this stuff, but it sort of left an impression, you know, what I’m alluding to. And so I’ve always been … well, I’m totally enjoying your story and I honor your whole experience, but there’s a little skeptical voice in the back of my mind also and I’m trying to reconcile that. I mean in India, and I don’t know much about all this stuff actually, but in India there’s a tradition of tantrics and of Aghoris, I believe they call them, which are these guys who are completely, you know, don’t give a hoot about social conventions and do all kinds of crazy stuff. And they’re respected in that culture and considered to be enlightened, but just in a very non-conformist way. And like you say, they’re not trying to be all prissy and proper.

Sandra: Proper.

Rick: You know, they’re just wild and crazy guys. It doesn’t … I mean, it’s kind of more indigenous to that culture and can get a little dicey in this culture if we’re talking about married people and so on and so forth. So it’s kind of a big question mark, I don’t know what to make of it. But undoubtedly this guy was a powerful force, you know? I take that for granted considering the impact he had and the evolutionary influence he had on people like you and Saniel Bonder and so on. So there was obviously something really profound going on there. I don’t dispute that. I just have … I’m just not as knowledgeable as I perhaps could be about what you’re saying.

Sandra: Well, you know, I appreciate that you say that and that is a common attitude and feeling surrounding Adi Das’ work.

Rick: Yeah. I’m not condemning it, I’m just sort of a little dubious because it doesn’t fit into my kind of world view as I have been raised, so to speak. But there’s a lot of things that don’t fit in my world view, which I’m sure are completely legitimate, you know?

Sandra: Well, you know, what I know, what I’ve discovered is that everyone has a sort of bent of character and everyone has unique doorways into realization. And some people are more disposed toward coming into realization at the, you might say, at those levels of non-conformity, of engagement with matter, engagement with forbidden elements. Some people have more of a feeling for that, more of a resonance. And I had a resonance for that. I wasn’t with Adi Das, however, in his most experimental years. So I didn’t get abused or I didn’t get manipulated in ways that I’ve heard people did. And I’m fine with that. I feel like, well, I didn’t need that. I went there, I got what I needed, it awakened me, it enlivened me. I took away so many treasures. And I don’t even know how to say who this person is. I don’t even really want to say.

Rick: I’m sure he was a mystery in many ways.

Sandra: He was a mystery. He was a paradox. And you know what? We all are.

Rick: Yeah, that’s my favorite word. I should have a t-shirt made “paradox”!

Sandra: Right. So this leads into what I’ve learned is the nature of the realization I’ve come to, that the realization is non-dual, it’s embodied, and it is based in this paradox where there is consciousness, it infuses everything, it is not separate from everything, spirit and matter are one, and at the same time they’re separate. So that we as human beings have the capacity to experience both myself as separate from you, self and other, we are separate, but we also have the capacity to experience non-separateness. And so there are many times when that is happening at the same time. And so it’s hard to speak of this kind of realization, except to say that it partakes of paradox.

Rick: Oh, I think you’re speaking of it very clearly.

Sandra: Okay, good.

Rick: You’re doing a good job.

Sandra: Good. But see, it’s not exactly the traditional realization. It’s not the words of the tradition.

Rick: I think it may be though. Maybe it’s not the exact same words, but I think the concepts probably go back throughout the ages. I mean the whole Sanskrit thing about Brahman, as I understand it, Brahman is considered to subsume everything, it contains all paradoxes. It contains the absolute, it contains the relative, it just harmonizes. And if you read Indian literature, especially the ones where they tell these stories like the Ramayana or the various Puranas, so many wild and crazy things. And every single story has the effect of throwing you to this end of the spectrum, then to that end of the spectrum, then to this end of the spectrum, then to this end of the spectrum, like all this crazy stuff, and you end up with the overall impression that the great intelligence that essentially we all are, contains this entire play and all of its diversity and harmonizes it perfectly, all the paradoxes.

Sandra: Great, I like that. I’d like to have a few lifetimes to read those stories.

Rick: Yeah, I know. Get the cliff notes.

Sandra: I want to say one thing, now it may not mean anything, but Adi Da had this paradoxical realization and he could not find a reference to it in any literature. The particular kind of realization he had, now I’m just speaking for him so I don’t really give you too many details, but he reported that he was going crazy, so he read everything, he went through everything, and the one place where he found a reference to his own experience was in Ramana Maharshi’s writings, where Ramana Maharshi talked about the realization of the heart on the right.

Rick: On the right?

Sandra: On the right.

Rick: Interesting.

Sandra: That the heart is a sinoatrial node, and that the esoteric center of the self was in that anatomy of the sinoatrial node.

Rick: Sinoatrial means what exactly?

Sandra: Well, it’s the pacemaker of the heart. It’s on the right ventricle.

Rick: It’s just a part of the heart?

Sandra: It’s the right ventricle valve that opens and closes, and it mysteriously appears in the embryo at about three weeks, and it has no other tissues around it. It just suddenly, Creative Fiat, it’s there, and it starts beating.

Rick: Interesting. Then everything else kind of grows.

Sandra: Then everything else grows, and that regulates everything else. Well, Ramana Maharshi, this story, Saniel likes to tell this story, that he was sitting with a big crowd of people for weeks on end, and his pundits and people who were with him, they were getting exasperated with Ramana. They came to him and they said, “Look, you’re just sitting with these people, you’re not giving them any mantras, you’re not giving them any practices, what’s going on?” And he said, “Why should I give them anything? They have to fall into the heart.” And what he meant was that the center of the self was not the crown, it was not the crown, the Sahasrar that opens, that is yogically usually considered the point of the realization of the self. He said, “The crown has to open and the person experiences that, but after that they have to fall into the heart,” and he called it the Amrita Nadi, the heart that connected the crown and the Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the formless realization, but it was connected to the heart because the heart was the actual source of the intersection of consciousness and all form.

Rick: There is a beautiful verse in the Chandogya Upanishad about a person that dwells in the heart that is the size of a thumb or some such thing.

Sandra: That’s the passage.

Rick: Is it? Okay.

Sandra: That’s the one that Ramana grabbed out of the teachings.

Rick: There is a fellow here in town who could talk to you for hours and hours about this. I’ll have him on the show one time, named Rory Goff, and he has developed this whole elaborate cosmology of all this stuff in great detail. I don’t know what he is talking about but it sounds interesting.

Sandra: So Adi Da translated it, he said, “There is a flame that is extremely minute, smaller than the awn of the grain of rice,” and goes on. It’s the same one. But when Adi Da found this, he finally relaxed. He finally said, “Okay, there is a reason why I’m feeling this in my heart here.” So that is what Saniel Bonder brought forward too, is the realization of the heart, the heart on the right, the intersection of all matter and consciousness. So that is basically the realization that I fell into. In a certain kind of way, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the ascending or the refinement of consciousness per se. I didn’t spend years meditating and refining and having lots of samadhis and so forth. I had some, I had at different times, I had Nirvikalpa Samadhi even, but I did not spend time refining that pathway. Because it simply became irrelevant to me once I landed here in my heart, and everything revealed itself as my conscious nature. And I fell into a very deep rest from which all seeking fell away. My mind completely calmed and calmed down and opened up, and my awareness moved out, and many different qualities came to the forefront for me. And why would I want to spend time meditating? After that happened to me, I didn’t meditate for ten years. It felt like, why would I sit down and meditate? Nothing was ever different from having my eyes open.

Rick: About half the people that I’ve had on the show have said the same thing.

Sandra: Right, right.

Rick: All of them being people who have meditated for decades.

Sandra: Right, well I had my share of it. But you know, so in recent years since I moved here and I spend time with Don, I do enjoy meditating. I’ve gone back to meditating because it’s very relaxing and soothing to the body, and also because I deepen in my knowing, in my self-knowing, in my capacity to know what the world is about, what’s going on, and I enjoy it now.

Rick: Good. It’s like you’re going along saying all this stuff and it’s like you’re throwing flowers as you go, and I’m chasing along behind in my mind, sort of picking up all these flowers. Each represents questions that I want to ask you about the things that you’re saying. So going back on the path just a little bit and tying it all together, is this awakening that you’re now talking about, being centered in the heart, the same one you had when you first went up to Saniel’s place in Marin County?

Sandra: No.

Rick: No, so this is a subsequent development, a deepening or a maturation of the original witness consciousness?

Sandra: Yes, yes. It wasn’t a simple maturation either. I went through a lot of transformation at the level of my emotional nature.

Rick: Subsequent to the witness awakening, you can’t think.

Sandra: Yes, and I also went through a revelation of my ego structures that was quite excruciating.

Rick: Well that will keep us busy for the next half hour.

Sandra: Well in a way it’s really the ego that’s a very interesting structure.

Rick: Yeah, I mean what else are you going to talk about?

Sandra: Right.

Rick: All right, consciousness. What do you think about consciousness?

Sandra: Right, there’s nothing to say about it, is there?

Rick: Yeah. Well let’s hold that thought because I want to get into that. But I just wanted to wrap up a little bit about the witness thing and then let’s get into this. When you first described your witness consciousness awakening, you did describe it as though it were just a sort of a swelling or an expansion of individuality, at least that’s the way it sounded to me. You said it got larger, brighter, things like that, and if something is larger it still has dimensions. I mean, does it go as far as the wall, does it go as far as the next town, you know what I mean? So it’s still in the realm of space and time.

Sandra: I submit to you that witnessing does have that quality. The witness consciousness I already said is a form. I just submit to you that that’s true. And it also has formless qualities, which you’ve already said, it’s hard to speak of.

Rick: Yeah, true. To a certain extent we’re just defining our terms here, because people might think of witness consciousness in different ways.

Sandra: That’s true.

Rick: I just want to make sure I understand how you’re defining it.

Sandra: Well, I use witness consciousness because I don’t know what else to call it. I mean, it’s in the realm of consciousness and it was a giant leap in terms of my awareness and my capacities. It greatly enhanced my life. It moved me into a lot of spaces. I was able to observe things I had never observed before. I had a sense of knowing.

Rick: To my mind the word witness kind of implies that it’s uninvolved in a way, it’s like it’s a witness, it’s sort of observing without being so involved. So that’s why that adjective is used?

Sandra: Yes, it had that quality. It had that quality that I was vast and not touched, and just in a kind of blissful, silent enjoyment of everything.

Rick: And you probably noticed that even if you’re driving through rush hour traffic, it was just there, there’s the craziness of the traffic, but there’s this vast, silent, uninvolved quality.

Sandra: Yes. So that was that phase that lasted about four months, and it was quite wonderful, quite enjoyable. And then, I don’t know what you would say, being took me down to another place. It revealed something else about me that was much more startling, much more difficult to endure.

Rick: What was that?

Sandra: That was that I was in a study group with Saniel and some other people, and just in an instant like that, I embraced a friend of mine I had known for seven years or so, and I don’t know what happened to me, I suddenly fell madly in love with him. And all kinds of energy started pouring down my body, it was like an initiation process. And it was totally a shock to me.

Rick: Was he having the same experience?

Sandra: No, not exactly, no. But I had a chance to talk with him about it later. He was married, he had a kid, he had a job, he was not interested, but I had known him for seven or eight years, and we were close friends, we were colleagues actually. And so we talked about, “What is this phenomenon?” And it was good to have him to talk about, but there was nowhere to go with it. That’s what was so maddening.

Rick: Well do you think it was innately him, or was he a convenient sort of magnet for a transformation that you were on the brink of undergoing?

Sandra: Yes, yes.

Rick: And that, “Okay, this guy is here, it could have been the other guy, but he was here, so we can zingo.”

Sandra: That’s right, that’s right, that’s what it was. It was part of my transformation. But to him it wasn’t any big deal. He could hold it, he could be with it, he could talk about it, and it wasn’t a bother to him. To me it was a big bother, because it was revealing to me a deficit in my own character, in my own emotional life, early life, bonding life with my parents. And during the next six months I still was able to witness all of this, but my body and mind were going through tortures. It was awful. It was totally awful. And I had a chance to notice how innately crazy the ego is. I made up all kinds of stories, I justified my behavior, I attributed all kinds of evil to him, I had all kinds of schemes and manipulations go on in my mind, I felt totally victimized. I can’t tell you, I was crazy. I was fantasizing, I was out of my mind.

Rick: Was that movie with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas?

Sandra: No, something about body heat?

Rick: You know that one? You know that movie I’m talking about?

Sandra: Anyway, I know what movie you mean. Obsession or something.

Rick: Fatal Attraction.

Sandra: Fatal Attraction, that was it. It was like that. It was like this incredible workout. And furthermore …

Rick: Did you know anybody else in the Saniel group that was going through stuff like that, or was it just you?

Sandra: Well, other people went through other things, but here’s the tight squeeze for me. He was in the group, he didn’t want anyone to be apprised of this. He didn’t want me to tell Saniel. He was really into protecting his own life. He had it all together, it was all very neat, it was all going well, and he wasn’t into having anything exposed.

Rick: And there was nothing going on because he wanted his life to just be …

Sandra: Right, there was nothing going on except I was going through torture. And this went on for six months, and finally I just said, “Okay, this is it. This is my life. What can I do? I can’t get out of it. I don’t know how to get out of it. I can’t get on with it.” I was in a relationship, and part of the realization was that the relationship I was in actually hadn’t been working for a long time. So I did confront that, and I decided to get out of that relationship. I got my own place, I got established on my own, and I just said, “Okay, here I am. What can I do? This is it.” Well, about six months later, everything broke in a way I never would have expected. This man walked into our small group.

Rick: What man? The man that you were crazy about?

Sandra: The man that I was crazy about. And he came into Saniel’s group one day, quite unexpectedly, and he looked horrible, like he was deathly ill, and he announced that his wife, the night before, had left him, taken their child, was divorcing him and marrying her business partner. I was totally stunned, mainly because I thought I knew what it was all about. I thought I knew what the situation was. I thought I was just going to be suffering this particular life for a really long time. And I thought that his life was known, and suddenly, within the space of twelve hours or so, I didn’t really talk to him anymore, but I went home to my own home, and my whole mind collapsed. I don’t know if you can get the drift of it, everything just blew wide open. It’s like all the assumptions I had made about myself, about what life is, about what kind of life I was going to be having, everything crashed, crashed.

Rick: Well, you had kind of come to terms with the fact that nothing was ever going to happen with this guy, because he was pretty established in the life he was living, and yet you were in love with him. And then all of a sudden, the possibility of actually getting together with him dawned on the scene.

Sandra: Yes, and that dawned on the scene.

Rick: And then when it became possible, you went home and dropped the whole thing? Is that what you’re saying?

Sandra: Well, I went home and it’s like my jaw was dropped, I was gaping. I was like, I did entertain the idea, “Well, what if he would be available someday?”

Rick: Well, now it seemed like he was.

Sandra: Yeah, now it seemed like he might be. Well, that didn’t happen. We did finally get together for a while, a few months later, but in the meantime, the main thing was that it blew open my assumptions about everything.

Rick: Can you give us an example of how it blew open your assumptions? What were you assuming, and how did that get blown apart?

Sandra: Well, I was assuming, like a really big thing for my own ego was, “I never get what I want.”

Rick: So the destruction of that one was, “Hey, I could have what I want now.”

Sandra: Right, right. Or, “I’m just doomed to suffer, this is my life.” Emotional torture.

Rick: Were you conscious of these assumptions, or were they just kind of guiding you without

Sandra: I was somewhat conscious of them, yeah. And also, there’s like a way in which I had merged with him so much that I was completely shocked for him, because I knew all the value he had stacked into his life.

Rick: Right, you knew how traumatic it must be for him.

Sandra: Oh, I was so shocked for him. I was so astounded that his life, that he had carefully protected, could turn out like that. And it was like out of the blue. It was out of the blue for him. He was totally …

Rick: Floored.

Sandra: Yeah. So all that together rendered me sort of helplessly raw and open. And the next thing that arose, that I knew that arose out of me was a review of all my relationships that I’d ever had. My parents, my family, my friends, my sister, everyone I had ever known, every partnership I had ever had, my children, people I had taught with, people I knew at school, they all came before me. And I began to spontaneously sing a song of praise to each one out loud in my room, in the middle of my bed.

Rick: You made up little songs and sang them?

Sandra: Yes. Yes. And I internally, I bowed to them, I thanked them for everything they had been in my life. I saw that my life was completely perfect as it was.

Rick: Was this uncharacteristic for you to be doing something like this?

Sandra: Yes.

Rick: But it was just a spontaneous impulse to do it?

Sandra: Outpouring. Yes. Yes. And that went on for a couple of hours.

Rick: Amazing.

Sandra: And it was like, by then it was …

Rick: Totally, you actually made up songs just out of your … that no one had ever composed?

Sandra: Yeah. Well, I did.

Rick: You weren’t just putting some tune to a Beatles song or something?

Sandra: No, I also used a tune that I had learned when I was at graduate school. And I elaborated on it and I spoke to all these people and I thanked them and I blessed them and I remembered …

Rick: Cool. So it was like a little ceremony almost.

Sandra: It was a ceremony. It was like a puja. Yeah, it was. It was like a celebration for each one. And at the end of it …

Rick: It seems like it’s really symptomatic. I mean, it’s not like you were just indulging in a moody thing. It’s like symptomatic of a huge kind of resolution that was taking place deep within you and you were just kind of expressing it on the surface.

Sandra: It was. This is it. That’s a nice way … you have a good way of words.

Rick: Thanks.

Sandra: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. And at the end of that time, I finally laid down, really kind of like leveled, you know, and opened and spent. And then a most amazing thing happened. Like my crown chakra opened up and I felt this energy, very, very fine, which I kind of called it silver rain. It came pouring softly through my head and descended down my entire body.

Rick: Like tingles of bliss or something.

Sandra: Tingles of bliss.

Rick: Yeah.

Sandra: Very, very fine energy. And it soothed me and I fell asleep.

Rick: Wow, very nice.

Sandra: And that was … I thought that was the end of it. And I woke up a couple hours later, because it was almost morning, and I got up and I felt fine and I got ready to go to work. And I walked down the hallway and then suddenly I noticed, “Well, this is interesting. You know, it doesn’t seem like there are any walls here. It seems like I am in touch with the outside.” And that expansiveness went on, but it was very subtle. It wasn’t psychic. It was a very subtle awareness that expanded far, far out. And this was like on a Friday morning. And this went on over the weekend.

Rick: Good, so you didn’t have to go to work for the next two days.

Sandra: I know.

Rick: Good timing.

Sandra: This went on over the weekend and then I went and I had a meditation on Sunday with Saniel up in Marin County. And during that time, during the meditation, I had a confirmation of my awakening in yogic terms.

Rick: How so?

Sandra: Well, I was sitting there and my meditation was deepening and deepening and deepening, and all of a sudden I heard this very still voice inside of my heart. And it said, it was a traditional phrase from some traditional writings, “When the Goddess is well pleased with the meditation of the devotee, she opens as Vichara in his heart and expands as the rising sun.” And that was kind of enacted.

Rick: That phrase just came to you?

Sandra: Yes, it just came to me. It said itself right here.

Rick: You had heard it before.

Sandra: I had. And then it all completely opened up again, this great uprising of well-being and expansiveness. And I just said to myself, “Oh, I’ve awakened.”

Rick: Interesting.

Sandra: I knew it. I’ve awakened.

Rick: You’ve taught me something very interesting here about the distinction between the witness and what you subsequently have just described. You know, my neck is getting sore from turning sideways too much. I’ll have to think about that more, because that witness experience is something I’m very familiar with, but this stage that you’re describing now, I don’t think has really dawned for me yet. But it’s helping me, it’s clarifying my understanding to see that distinction.

Sandra: Okay, good. Now if you listened to the White-Hot Yoga of the Heart, you would have heard it before. And it’s the embodied witness. The witness becomes fully embodied and coincident with one’s experience in every moment.

Rick: Yeah. That part I can get.

Sandra: No, but in a very full way.

Rick: In a very full way, right. So what year was this?

Sandra: So this was ’96, that was my awakening, October 4th of ’96.

Rick: And so it was pretty much, like you just said it, October 4th, and so the 3rd and the 5th were very different days, and it was the 4th. And it was irrevocable, I mean, nothing has caused it, even when you’ve gotten the flu or something like that, it doesn’t have any …

Sandra: It never changes. I mean, this does not mean I don’t have an ego, this does not mean I don’t hit limitations, but you know, they more or less evaporate fairly quickly.

Rick: Yeah. It’s interesting because I’ve been listening to, there’s this website and podcast called The Urban Guru Café, and it’s all these people who are kind of associated with this guy in Australia named Sailor Bob Adamson, who was a disciple of Nisargadatta, who of course was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. And so they all talk in this sort of Advaita kind of way, but they all seem to be saying, you know, there is no person, there is no personal identity, the notion that there is is just some kind of illusion, and so on and so forth, and they go on and on with this point over and over again, and to me that kind of sounds like one side of the coin, and it doesn’t really do justice to this paradox concept in which I am and I’m not a person simultaneously and there is no conflict or contradiction between both of those things, which I think is what you would say.

Sandra: This is what I’m saying. The person that you thought you were is gone, and you still have ego structures because how could we be here, how could we function? How could we know that I am I over here and you are there? We couldn’t operate on the world of phenomena if we didn’t have an ego.

Rick: So the person you thought you were was gone, so what is left in the sense that what do you think you are now, if that is a weird way of putting it, but what do you take yourself to be? If you had to describe yourself in a couple of minutes, how would you go about it?

Sandra: I don’t know, that’s a good question, because more and more I come to this, I know I have this come to me all the time, that whatever you can say about this right now, in a little while you won’t be able to say that, and you won’t even be able to remember what you said.

Rick: If you went up to the average person and said, “Who are you? What are you?” They would say, “I am Joe Smith.” “Well, that’s your name, but what are you?” “Well, I am six foot tall and I weigh 170 pounds.” “No, that’s just you talking about your physical body. What are you?” “Well, I work at such and such a place, I like bowling and I like strawberry ice cream.” “No, those are just your preferences in terms of taste and activities, but what are you?” And you can go on and on like that and you’ll never pin them down. So if I were to try to do that to you, would it be equally frustrating?

Sandra: Well, I mean, it’s going through my head right now. Okay, I am a location of a collection of conditions through which consciousness operates in a particular way in this universe.

Rick: That’s great. Somebody should write that down, because you’re not going to remember it in five years.

Sandra: No, that’s right.

Rick: I am a location.

Sandra: of a particular set of conditions.

Rick: Of a particular set of conditions.

Sandra: That are more or less stable. They come and go.

Rick: They fluctuate.

Sandra: They fluctuate, but they kind of return to the same location. And these conditions are …

Rick: Through which consciousness expresses itself.

Sandra: Yes. Through which life expresses itself and lives as this location in this particular way.

Rick: Some people like to say we’re sense organs of the infinite.

Sandra: That’s nice.

Rick: Yeah.

Sandra: Yeah, that’s nice.

Rick: Well, that’s very interesting. But do you have a sense of I mean, that’s kind of what you just said, a sort of fancy phrase, but do you have a sense of being a person?

Sandra: Sure.

Rick: Yeah.

Sandra: Yeah, I have a sense of being a person.

Rick: Just as much as you did when you were 15 years old?

Sandra: No, not the same quite.

Rick: Some flavor of it still, or completely different?

Sandra: Well, there are some qualities that persist, yeah, for sure.

Rick: Well, for instance, when I was 15, I was really concerned, “Am I good looking? Am I cool? Do girls like me? How come I’m so scrawny and I’m not good at sports? And is my hair getting long enough?” And all these concerns about very isolated personal identity. And these days, it’s not only because I’m 60 and not 15, I think it’s because I’ve been doing this spiritual work, because a lot of people my age are getting facelifts and stuff like that, and they’re still very concerned about that stuff. But there’s just no awareness or concern for any of the minute personal considerations like that. They just never enter my mind. In fact, my wife has to practically dress me so I don’t come out looking like a hick every day. And yet, and this is the reason I started on this tangent, and yet there’s still very much a sense of personhood, sitting here on this couch talking to you. Sure, there’s the awareness and the witness and the silence and all that, but there’s a sense of somebody here.

Sandra: Yeah, of course, I do have that sense of somebody here. I feel that I’m quite morphed from what I was, although I still have a lot of the same qualities. And of course I have a person, and I have an ego, and I have sensibilities and sensitivities and preferences, but you know what? I experience a lack of concern about it most of the time. Not that I am uncaring for this, that I am.

Rick: Right, you take care of yourself.

Sandra: I take care of myself, I take care of my attitudes, I take care to be present and to listen to others and to be a responsible citizen as much as I can. I take care of where I’m involved and where I’m engaged, but I am not deeply concerned about it. For the most part, I am not deeply disturbed and neurotic like I was.

Rick: Would you say that – this is very helpful to me actually – would you say that the reason for that may be that your primary identity or identification is with something that is much larger than that, much larger than this personhood who needs to be sure to drive in the right-hand lane and eat the right foods and all that stuff? I mean, the whole waking down thing is about living enlightenment in an embodied sense, not being sort of an airy-fairy ethereal consciousness who has anorexia. But at the same time, in my experience anyway, there is a sense of, even though both things are going on at the same time, there is this paradox, there is a sense of primary identification. And primarily, I would say, I reside in that silence, and secondarily, not less significant but perhaps with a little bit less emphasis, there is the individual concerns and preferences and activities.

Sandra: Ah, how would I speak to that? Let’s see. I rarely ever think about it anymore. I am not sure that I would say that I am identified with something bigger. I am identified as what is, moment to moment.

Rick: And that contains everything.

Sandra: Yeah, it contains everything that comes within my field of awareness. I don’t know that I would say that I am primarily identified with consciousness, although that may be true. But I am just primarily identified with everything, with consciousness and form.

Rick: Yeah, it does seem a little inappropriate to split it up like that, having listened to what I just said. You know, it is too compartmentalized, the way I made it sound, and it really isn’t that compartmentalized.

Sandra: No, for me it is there. But any time I check, I can identify myself as consciousness, and I certainly am not the same solid character that I was. There is a sense that things flow through me and permeate and move, and they are nuanced layers upon layers, but it is not stacked and packed like it used to be.

Rick: You still have that sense that you did that morning when you woke up after going through that big catharsis, that it is as if the walls aren’t there and the spaciousness just extends without any obstructions?

Sandra: Not quite to the same degree.

Rick: More vivid when it first dawned.

Sandra: Oh yeah, it was more vivid in that time. But that returns every now and then, you know, in a very beautiful way. So now my awareness is sometimes expansive and sometimes narrow and sometimes in between. I would say more than anything, it is kind of in between. I think I am kind of an in-between character. Like I am not really extreme in any way. I am quite familiar with the gross and the subtle, and the conscious nature. I don’t think about it too much anymore, except when people ask me questions and I try to convey to them the idea of it.

Rick: When you are teaching and the waking down thing, you must be thinking about it then somewhat?

Sandra: You know, I don’t even think ahead. I do make a plan, like today I even made a little outline.

Rick: Which you haven’t even looked at?

Sandra: That’s true, I haven’t had to look at it. I make a little plan and then I wait and I see what people need. This is one of the delightful things about where I am now, is when there is an energy kind of needing and requesting something and it is put to me, there is something in me that opens up and kind of gives forth. It flows out of me. I don’t have to think about it.

Rick: You spontaneously know how to respond.

Sandra: Yes.

Rick: Maharshi actually used to use the analogy of the teacher being like a reservoir and it would naturally flow if somebody hooked a pipe up to it, and if nobody hooks up a pipe then it doesn’t flow, but whatever the capacity of the pipe they hook up, that’s how much it will flow.

Sandra: I totally can understand that, completely understand that.

Rick: Do you still have a sense of personal growth, like from year to year you feel like “I’m progressing, things are much more clear” or whatever than they were a year ago?

Sandra: Yeah, thank goodness.

Rick: Yeah, you’d get boring wouldn’t you?

Sandra: No, I do have a sense of personal growth. I have a sense of having desires to open up to something and know more about it and involve myself to the degree that I can get more of a handle on it. I guess that’s what has persisted from my early life. I’m an inveterate learner.

Rick: So you naturally are always curious, but without the sense of craving that characterizes most seekers.

Sandra: That’s right. I used to go in a bookstore and I just couldn’t stand it, you know? It’s like, “How can I get all this knowledge? Where do I begin?” For many years then I didn’t even go in a bookstore, and now I’m back to bookstores because I feel the questions of my students and I want to have something.

Rick: You want to be equipped to answer them.

Sandra: I want to be equipped to allow something to come forth.

Rick: Yeah, I mean I used to have this desperate sense of seeking and frustration and yearning and all this stuff ripping me apart. And now I’m probably, by all observances, I’m as ardent a seeker as I ever was in terms of being interested in this kind of stuff, talking about it all the time, listening to tapes and reading books and whatnot, but there’s no sense of need, there’s no sense of yearning or seeking. It’s like, I’m content and just keep putting icing on the cake.

Sandra: Right, yeah, I understand that. I’m never without several books I’m reading, and I enjoy learning, I enjoy opening up to new experiences, but like you, as with you, it’s not a deal-breaker, it doesn’t make a difference on whether or not I’m okay.

Rick: Yeah. If someone were to tell you, sorry to throw you a curveball, but if someone were to tell you with certainty and you knew they were telling the truth, “You’re going to die tomorrow,” how do you feel like you would react?

Sandra: Well, I think I would take it in stride. I think I would start contemplating what that would be like and what I needed to do before I died, and feel more deeply into how my life stacks up, and enjoy what I have learned and accomplished. I would want to have time to evaluate it. I would wish for that.

Rick: That’s a nice answer. I think it would be informative to many people to hear that answer, because I think many people perhaps not so much people who are really on a spiritual path but most people in the world would probably freak out pretty bad if they discovered they were going to die tomorrow. There would be a lot of fear, a lot of worry and remorse and what not.

Sandra: I don’t rule those things out that they might come to me, because not having had that experience, I don’t know.

Rick: It’s hard to say. It’s easy to say in the abstract what you’d do.

Sandra: I don’t know what would arise. I can imagine that I might have some fear and some grief about leaving so suddenly.

Rick: But you probably have a sense that essentially you wouldn’t die, that it would just be a new adventure.

Sandra: I think I have a sense of that, yeah. I’ve actually had, excuse me.

Rick: Do you need any water or anything?

Sandra: No, I think I’m fine. I have had experiences in my sleep where, especially in those days when I had this blooming forth of consciousness, where I would turn over and then I would feel myself lifting out of my body. And I said, “Oh, this is what it’s like to die.” I just had that recognition.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. So is there anything that we haven’t talked about, which when you get home you’re going to think, “Oh, we should have talked about that.” Is there anything you can think of that is either in your notes or that you generally like to talk about when you talk about this stuff that I haven’t touched upon or asked you about?

Sandra: You know, let me see. I’m going to look them over just because …

Rick: Sure, yeah.

Sandra: Well, I guess I want to say that I don’t feel like my realization, while it’s pretty summary …

Rick: Summary? S-U-M-M or …

Sandra: S-U-M-M-A-R-Y. It summarizes my life pretty nicely, my awareness. It’s comprehensive, I would say. I don’t expect it to be the last awakening I have. I do think that …

Rick: Oh, glad you brought that up.

Sandra: I think there will be other awakenings, and other intensities, and other openings. In other words, I don’t feel like this is a finished deal at all, not at all.

Rick: And probably your experience has borne that out so far, that there have been degrees and stages of further awakening.

Sandra: Yeah. And so, I think that’s important to say. This is a journey in which I think being wants to incorporate more and more and more and more and more and more of its own nature. Like I say, I’d like to have a lot of time to just open up to all these things. It seems so enticing.

Rick: I’m glad you’re saying that, because I can relate to that very much. And I’m a little puzzled by these guys that I sometimes listen to or read, who just say, “Either you’re awake or you’re not, and when you are, that’s it.” And they really put down the idea of progressive awakening, and stages, and so on and so forth. And I sort of feel when I listen to them, and there are plenty of authors and speakers and teachers who speak this way, I sort of feel like they’re in for some surprises, unless they really manage to keep a lid on it for a long time. Because just the experience that I’m more familiar with, among all the people I know, there continue to be awakenings. In fact, originally I was going to call this show “Awakenings,” but it’s too familiar a term, and somebody came up with “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” which I thought was more clever. But it’s kind of the nature of life to evolve and to grow, and it just seems kind of static. And also when you meet great sages and people like that, you think, “Well, sure, I’ve had an awakening maybe, but I don’t seem to quite have everything that person has, and maybe it’s the same essence we have, the same consciousness, it’s not like different consciousness there, but the degree to which it’s kind of appreciated subjectively by that person and radiated to others by that person seems to vastly exceed mine.” Can you relate to that way of looking at it?

Sandra: Oh yeah, I absolutely can relate to that. So combining my interest in psychology and a lot of studies I’ve done about personality types, I am thoroughly convinced that people have different expressions in their awakening. Some people are very structured personality-wise, and even I study this human design, which is a very detailed and concrete and very specific multi-level interpretation of your astrology. And it shows you very graphically how people have openings in certain areas of their being and not in other areas. So people are going to, like Adi Da once said this in one of his early books, “Go forth and realize according to your own nature.” And so everyone is going to realize in a little bit different way from everyone else. And some people will have the capacity to be very full in consciousness and knock you over with darshan, their radiance and their clarity. And other people will be very full in the loving heart and the beautiful watery flow of connection.

Rick: And some might have brilliant intellects.

Sandra: Yes, and none of this says that people are not awake. People are awake according to their own nature, and they’re not going to be awake according to so-and-so’s nature. And that is an important thing that I think has to be taken into consideration when we talk about awakenings. And if you have a non-dual awakening and your own body-mind is paradoxically wedded to your conscious nature, your own body-mind is not the same body-mind as someone else, but the awakening can be functioning in you in the same manner, but the quality and content of that awakening can vary from person to person. And that’s one of the things about waking down. We have really learned that to assist people into awakening is to invite them to be themselves without efforting, to let go of the disciplines, to relax into who you are, just who you are, and to speak from there, and to be seen from who you are. And what is non-essential to you will begin to purify out, and what is essentially unique about you will remain. And that cannot happen if you’re just cracking the disciplines. And so validating people’s uniqueness is what jump-starts them into their own awakening. Instead of trying to match them to the model you have that was handed down from this teacher to this teacher, to this teacher to this teacher, that model will not suit. It will not suit that many people. It suited the teacher who drafted it, and everybody has their own way of voicing, speaking, enacting, expressing their uniqueness, and it’s not separate from their own awakening once this paradoxical, embodied, non-dual awakening is recognized.

Rick: Very good.

Sandra: That’s my soapbox.

Rick: Yeah, now your teacher juices are really flowing now.

Sandra: But it’s very important.

Rick: Yeah, I agree. It’s a good point, and it’s unfortunately often not appreciated or not lived in some spiritual circles, where everyone seems to conform to a mould, and dress a certain way, and act a certain way, and speak a certain way, and use the same hand gestures, and you know.

Sandra: Well, all you can say is, I went through a period …

Rick: It’s a phase.

Sandra: It’s a phase. I was a devotee for ten years, and I did that. It’s a learning phase, and when people are ready, they’ll break out, like you said before.

Rick: If we use the term “awakening” or “awakenings” to refer to kind of the sequential, progressive shifts or stages or unfoldments, or whatever you want to call them, do you envision kind of an ultimate stage for which we might reserve the term “enlightenment,” in which such unfoldments cease, or do you feel like it’s a never-ending thing?

Sandra: Personally, I can’t imagine that these unfoldments will ever cease. That’s my answer. That’s my way of understanding the universe.

Rick: Yeah, so I suppose it’s conjectural, but that’s the way it feels to you.

Sandra: Yeah, and also I’ve been looking into Ken Wilber’s integral theory lately.

Rick: I was wondering a minute ago when you started talking about that discipline you studied, whether you were referring to Ken Wilber, but then you said astrology, so I guess it was …

Sandra: No, human design is another discipline.

Rick: It’s a different thing, yeah. I like Ken Wilber’s stuff.

Sandra: Ken Wilber, the way he describes a fully enlightened person, you know, it’s someone who’s awake in all quadrants, all lines, all levels.

Rick: You think there is such a thing, such a person?

Sandra: Well, he says it would be pretty impossible, and also I like what he says is that our understanding of spirituality is constantly evolving.

Rick: As a culture, as a society.

Sandra: As a society, as a line of development, the spirituality itself is evolving, so there will be new frontiers that we cannot even imagine now.

Rick: Andrew Cohen talks a lot like that too. And I mean, even the fact that we’re sitting here having this conversation is a reflection of what you just said, because the whole idea of spiritual awakenings in times past was considered, like you said earlier in the evening, so rare that there might only be a handful of such people on the planet at any given time. And as it is now, I mean, I’ve been doing this show since October and I have a different person on the couch every week, you know? And most of them, I think, have undergone very legitimate and abiding awakenings. So it’s some kind of epidemic going on for which we don’t really need a vaccine.

Sandra: Yeah, right, we don’t. No, I know, it’s either we live in extraordinary times or being has decided to change the plan, I don’t know.

Rick: Yeah, I kind of like to think that, you know, one way of looking at it is that people who aren’t aware that this phenomenon is taking place are wondering whether the world is about to end because problems seem to be getting more and more severe. Time Magazine just put out an issue called “The Decade from Hell” to refer to the last ten years and they itemized all the horrible things that had happened and so on and so forth. And a lot of people are getting very upset and discouraged and losing their houses and losing their money and everything else. But it seems like in a subtle way, subtle because it’s not so obvious that it’s going to make Time Magazine, there’s a corresponding upwelling of consciousness or awakening and so on, and it’s just kind of spreading and becoming more and more common and counterbalancing this yucky stuff that’s going on. And perhaps this yucky stuff that’s going on on a societal level is kind of similar to what you went through after your initial awakening when you had to purge all kinds of nonsense that had accumulated over the years. So maybe the world is purging right now because there’s such an upwelling of consciousness happening.

Sandra: Yeah, I don’t know, but it’s such a mystery. They talk about time speeding up, you know, it’s a great mystery. And I more and more just return to, nobody really knows what’s causing anything. And we all play at knowing because that’s what we’re here to do, but we really can’t put our finger on it and we don’t know where it’s going and we don’t know where it came from.

Rick: It’s fun to speculate.

Sandra: It’s fun to speculate.

Rick: But as long as you don’t say, “This is the way it is and this is what’s happening,” it’s fun to play with possibilities.

Sandra: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s our delight to do that.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s fun to be along for the ride at this point. I mean, it’s an interesting there’s some great quote about this but it’s a fascinating time to be alive, you know? And much better this than the Middle Ages perhaps, where you could get burned at the stake for having a conversation like this.

Sandra: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Rick: All right, well on that cheery note, maybe we should wrap it up.

Sandra: Oh, I’m grateful for our time.

Rick: Yeah, thanks Sandra, I really enjoyed this.

Sandra: Rick, you’re a great interviewer, thank you.

Rick: Oh, thank you. I’m sure you would be too, I’m sure you are. It’s just I had this idea to have a TV show, so here we are.

Sandra: Yeah, well I’m delighted to have been asked.

Rick: Yeah, we’ll do it again actually. I mean, next time you have a breakthrough, call me up, we’ll do another one. So thank you all for watching. This has been “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” and the implication of that title, by the way, meaning that what we were just talking about, that ordinary people are having spiritual awakenings and experiencing life from a perspective that was once considered to be the sole province of rare and sacred beings. Now it’s becoming fairly commonplace. This past week I created a blog, and the blog URL by the way is www.batgap.com, which is an acronym for “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” and that will also lead to an iTunes podcast thing, where you can download these interviews, definitely audio, maybe also video some people have expressed interest in that and watch them as podcasts, and by the time you actually see this show, that will all really be happening. Right now it’s probably months before this thing will actually be on the air. But in any case, at the end of the show, as always, there will be titles, and in the titles you will see a URL for the blog, for a chat group where people are talking about this stuff all day long, Buddha at the Gas Pump Yahoo group, and for the iTunes thing where you can get the podcast, and for an email address where you can contact me if you have questions for guests. And in the blog actually, many of my guests will be participating because their particular interview will be posted as a whatever you call them in blogs it will be there discreetly, and within each post of each guest’s interview, there will be a comment thing that you can get into and ask questions and get into discussions and so on. So if you go to www.batgap.com you’ll see that, and most of my guests I think will be perhaps willing to go in there and answer questions or discuss what they’ve been talking about on the show. So that was a long-winded way of concluding this. I’d like to again thank Sandra Glickman for coming in and being with us this time, and we’ll see you next week. Thank you.