Saniel Bonder and Linda Groves Bonder 2nd Interview Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guests again this week are, Saniel Bonder and Linda Groves Bonder. If you happen to be watching this interview without having seen the one I did previously, which was also with Saniel and Linda, you might want to watch that one first, because this one will sort of springboard off of that one. And if you don’t know where that interview is, just go to batgap.com and take a look at Saniel and Linda’s section on there, and you’ll see both of them, and you can start with number one. So, it’s been about less than a week since your interview was up on my site. There have been about 400 or so people who have listened to the audio, and maybe last time I checked, about 150 people have watched the video, which went up several days after the audio. And I must say, it stirred up a lot of discussion. There’s something in the Bible where Jesus says, “I’d rather you were hot or cold, just don’t be lukewarm or I’ll spit you out.” And I would say that that pretty much typifies the responses to this interview. Some were saying, “It’s the best interview you’ve done. I loved it. Totally great. Saniel was so articulate, and he expresses his story of awakening in such a clear and interesting way, and yada, yada. And Linda was all heart.” And then other people were saying things like, “That’s not even low on my list. That interview isn’t even on my list. I can totally not relate to them.”

Linda: That’s just life, right?

Rick: Yeah, right. Different strokes for different folks. And there was a lot of discussion. There were about 41 posts to the chat group on Backgap.com, and I got a lot of emails, and I didn’t even have a chance to read them all yet, much less put them all into a really coherent, organized, distilled form from which I could extract questions. But in reading a lot of them, I got the impression that one of the main points of contention, and people were kind of arguing back and forth on this, is the whole idea of the continuation of ego after enlightenment, or whether ego needs to be destroyed in order to awaken. And one guy quoted Eckhart Tolle, and some guy, and Mooji, and Adyashanti, and others as saying it does. He quoted Ramana Maharshi as saying, “If you seek the ego, you will find it does not exist. That is the way to destroy it. Liberation is the extinction of the ego, with form, without form, or both, with and without form.” And he went on to say, in the ancient Vedic tradition, there were great kings and people of worldly life who were acknowledged as highly enlightened, and so what’s the big deal about having to make a practice of waking down? It seems like it happens, and other people said this too, it seems like it happens naturally. Why do you have to do anything to have it happen? Aren’t you going to naturally sort of integrate into your body and into your worldly life after awakening? So, that’s enough of a mouthful to start you with. Why don’t you run with that, and we’ll take it from there.

Linda: Yee-haw!

Saniel: Good stuff. So, I’ll start in, and we’ll see where we go. Yeah, I’m glad people picked up on that. I’d say that’s one of the elements of the traditional notion of enlightenment, that we’re respectfully taking issue with, and there are a number of things you could say about it, in terms of the various things that people were pointing out there. If your own awakening process, if you feel impelled toward an extinction of ego, we’re definitely not the concept of enlightenment you should be pursuing. We’re on a different track, and we acknowledge that that more traditional, in many ways venerable, ancient track has its validity in its own world view. As we were talking about last time, we’re really proposing that a new world view appears to be opening up here. On one level, the teaching that I was most associated with in my years of seeking Adi Das, it’s kind of straddled the fence between the two approaches. There was an acknowledgment of the continuation of ego, at least in himself, while at the same time, more and more as he went on in years, he was talking about being an egoless personal presence. I’m not trying, we’re not trying to square our views up with and justify them to any other tradition, ancient or contemporary. We’re just working with what has actually taken place in our own lives, and what we see in the lives of others who find our work appealing, and who, as it turns out, are themselves motivated toward what winds up being a different world view, a different way of being present and participating in life. In that perspective, what we see again and again is a couple of things that you brought up, and I’m remembering from several there. One is that the ego, the sense of the personal “I” and the feeling of a fundamental identification with it, does not have to be extinguished for great realization to emerge. Is that therefore the same as the traditional realizations that require the ego to be extinguished? No, we always acknowledge this is different. We’re happy with that inclusion. We feel that this may be an approach that is actually going to make great realization available to more and more people, and as I said last week, from the perspective of the world view that opens up, we question the ultimate long-term evolutionary validity of the ancient concepts and where they sprang from. Another, and maybe more practical point, is that for those who are wondering why can’t integration just happen naturally, well, for some people maybe it can. Again, Linda and I are living this process and also serving it in others, in the trenches. We wind up doing a lot of triage, in effect, emotionally, psychologically, existentially, with people, especially in some cases, people who have gone through profound awakening and are finding the integration process on a spectrum of challenging ranging from a little to extreme. So, they need the help. In fact, we call the process “Wake Down, Shake Down.” That’s one of our friendly names for it. It’s not very technical, but right now we have a “Wake Down, Shake Down” navigation coaching process that we’re leading a number of people through, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, who have gone through things like that before.

Linda: Yeah, I was going to mention this intensive program that we do with individuals, specifically linking around what happens after realization, or what we call “second birth realization,” which is the realization of consciousness in form, in the body, every part of who you are. You don’t have to perfect any particular piece in order to live that non-dual marriage of consciousness and matter. I was working with a woman yesterday and she actually asked a beautiful question. She’s participating in one of our intensive programs around integrating these shadow pieces, “Wake Down, Shake Down” pieces after her awakening. She questioned, “What is the importance, do you feel, of the transmission, the ongoing transmission of the waking down and mutuality work for individuals who’ve had their realization?” I said, “Very important.” The reason I say that, is that that transmission of being is an activating force that enables individuals to integrate more quickly. Also, it’s not merely just about transmission, it’s about living a life in mutuality, living a life where you know you have your tribe in place, your support team. That could consist of a senior teacher, a teacher, a mentor, a therapist perhaps, definitely a peer group that you talk to, maybe do sittings with, do mutual gazing with each other. This is a very important aspect of this integration process after awakening.

Rick: I guess what rankles some people is if they have a strong sense of loyalty or adherence to the ancient tradition, if they feel like that’s really the template against which everything else should be judged, then they can’t help but have a problem with what you’re doing, because you are admittedly a maverick, and you feel that there’s new territory to be explored and you’re exploring it. You are certainly within your rights to feel that, and it’s not for me to say that you shouldn’t, certainly. But it’s just that that’s never going to sit well with people who just feel like the ancient tradition was perfect and can’t be improved upon.

Linda: Yeah, thank you.

Saniel: We agree.

Linda: Yeah, totally agree. Blessings on anybody’s journey. What really is, I feel, the most important thing for any individual to consider for themselves and to continue to do their investigations and their deep discrimination is what is singing true to my heart? What is my truth and how do I move in the world that really supports me in that spiritual seeking or in the living of a realization? That can be based on very ancient traditions. Many people are involved in many ancient traditions, and we honor that. We honor the foundation in which we’ve come in certain aspects of this work. We’re also, just us personally and the Waking Down to Mutuality work, we feel that we are doing a hybrid, kind of like a melding of East and West traditions. There are aspects of the work that are very traditional, and yet there are also aspects that are very new, very Westernized, bringing it into our culture now and being able to distinguish how you’re splitting off from spirit, if you feel that spirit is the more primary aspect of a realization, and how you may not be embodying pieces of your own realization. We talked a little bit about that last week with you. This place of the spirit-matter split, for us, spirit and matter are equally important and part of the whole equation.

Rick: Yeah, well since I’m going to be throwing some more skeptical responses at you, here’s another nice one, which is in line with what you were just saying. Some guy said, “I loved this interview.” Very well done, Saniel and Linda. “I felt particularly moved by the vulnerable wisdom that is such a rare thing among ‘awakened’ individuals. This was a much-needed antidote to the fixed, dualistic positions of the no-self realizers.”

Saniel: Yeah, right. So again, whoever wrote that, thank you very much, we appreciate it. To go back to what you were bringing up earlier and some people’s concerns about that, one of the points I make in the book “Healing the Spirit-Matter Split” is my interviewer was asking a somewhat similar question. How can you go against 5,000 years of tradition? And my point about it was, again, where I started off in my, as I told the story of my awakening process, was acknowledging that spirituality appears to be not only evolutionary but is itself evolving. And so, did you just lose our…

Rick: No, we’re okay. Keep going.

Saniel: So, to me, what we represent is another moment, potentially, of that evolution. Now, do we know what we’re doing has ultimate significance? Could it be somehow disproved someday? Who knows?

Rick: Yeah, someday you might even say, “Hey, I no longer have any sense of a personal self, it just finally went poof.” Are you open to that possibility?

Saniel: Well, I’m not only open to it, I actually espouse that. The evolutionary view or the developmental model that I have for the work assumes that people grow in the context of awakening. And what I see is that chronologically and as a person matures in their fuller expression, and particularly as you move toward later maturity and eldership in this life, and there’s more and more of a let go and a refinement, and very likely there will be less and less of the local personal self-moving into life. So, to me, that makes great sense. It is, however, a different picture of how the whole process can emerge. And the other point, though, that I want to make for people to consider along the lines of what Linda was saying, is that if you actually examine the history of how these traditions themselves emerged, and there’s a great book called “The Great Transformation, The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions” by Karen Armstrong. It’s such a profound book. She is herself a mystic practitioner and a great historian. And she goes into depth and detail about what happened in India with Buddhism and the Upanishadic sages, what happened in Israel with the great prophets, what happened in Greece, what happened in China. And time and again, what you see in these ancient venerable traditions is that when they emerged, somebody was a revolutionary in relation to what had come before. The Buddha, as an example, he was well known in his time for radically departing, diverging from the established Indian traditions of the day. So, without going into, “Well, are you saying you’re the Buddha?” Let’s not. What we are pointing out is that both acknowledged great religious figures and small secondary ones in their time, whatever, there has been an evolutionary progress through the ages. And the traditions, each of them, if you go into the details, people are innovating, people are taking new steps, people are daring to consider things differently, even while paying homage to what’s come before. So, one of the ways that I frame it is, our way of paying homage to those who’ve come before, I think I mentioned this last week, is a little bit more like the scientist who said, “If I’m seeing far, it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.” That’s how we feel. If we’re seeing far, we’re acknowledging where we’ve come from. They made us possible.

Rick: Do you want to add anything to that, Linda, or should I ask another question?

Linda: Yeah, just real quick. Those traditions, and every place in your life, adds to what makes us individually possible, the work possible. Everything that anyone ever experiences has led them to what they’re living in any given moment. So, it’s important to acknowledge not only the great traditions, but even your own particular religious belief systems prior to an awakening or an urge to seek. Like, for instance, last time I was talking about my Catholic background. I’m very grateful for my Catholic background. It helps me land more fully as me and discriminate what works for me now in this time and what doesn’t. I think that’s a really important thing for each body to acknowledge, is their entire history.

Rick: Yeah. Each morning when I sit down at my computer, I look at the latest NASA photo of the day. They put up a new one each day. Did I mention this last week?

Linda: That’s cool.

Rick: So, I start out looking at a picture of a galaxy, or maybe a cluster of galaxies or something, and I just kind of briefly contemplate how significant my personal dramas are, in the light of the vast expanse of time and space that we live in, actually, without being aware of it. And I can extend that not only from my personal dramas, but our whole drama as a planet, as civilizations and so on. Who knows what’s out there? Who knows how many forms of spirituality there may be, which if we were actually to take a look at, then we might consider vastly superior to our own, or whatever, or vastly different from our own, and yet significant in their own right. So, the way I see it, sure, there are some things which seem to be more effective than others, or more clear than others, or whatever, but people naturally gravitate toward whatever is appropriate for them, and whatever is going to be useful for them. And are they going to be doing that for all eternity? Probably not.

Saniel: That’s right.

Rick: But as you say, your Catholic background was appreciated, it was a stepping stone. If you had been a Hare Krishna or something, you could probably say the same thing.

Linda: Absolutely, yeah.

Rick: So to me it’s not ultimately significant whether a teacher is saying that your ego completely dissolves, or doesn’t, or something or other. If he’s wrong, if it does completely dissolve for real, complete, genuine enlightenment to be there, then that will happen when it happens, and maybe even to the guy who’s saying it doesn’t need to, including to his followers or whatever.

Saniel: Yeah, and I have to pipe up. A lot of the turmoil in spirituality, not only in our time but through the ages, has had to do with people proclaiming or being proclaimed to have had their ego completely dissolved or destroyed or extinguished, and then showing up in ways that made it very, very difficult for their followers and/or others to comprehend how that could be so. So, to me all of this is up for viable and creative and really helpful debate.

Rick: Which is actually a scientific approach, you know?

Saniel: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: It’s like nothing is static, everything is open to investigation, everything is to some extent a theory, and theories are never proven, they’re just sort of buttressed or dismantled according to new evidence.

Saniel: That’s right.

Linda: Right. One of the questions I love to ask my students sometimes in our work together is, can you just hold open the possibility of this or that, as a possible occurrence? Either in an awakening process or just in how you deal with your life situation and some of the shadow pieces or some of the difficulties of being in a relationship. Holding open just the possibility that there can be change or that there can be even more of a landing, or a realization in the context of even a broken zone. That’s one thing I’d like to ask the question back, holding open to these individuals, holding open the possibility that the ego actually can exist in the context of great realization. That the ego itself is realized, and so that brings in another whole piece of conversation, I think that many of us are living, and places for people to question that and to maybe just hold open that possibility.

Rick: I think part of the issue is semantic. It’s like we’re going to be banding about this ego, what do we really mean by it? One guy sent in a nice thing, he calls himself Snow Leopard on the chat. He said, “My particular definition of ego is simply a personal identification with the body-mind. That in and of itself is not a problem. The problem is that this ego can identify so totally with the body-mind, that it actually believes itself to be exclusively the body-mind, and that it’s running the show and in control. This is being egocentric.” Charlie Sheen comes to mind, he said. And thus, it becomes very attached to all of the body-mind’s paraphernalia, concepts and toys, and he goes on to elaborate. But it’s sort of like there’s a certain amount of salt you might want to put on your vegetables that makes them tasty, but beyond that, it ruins them.

Linda: Yeah, that’s great.

Saniel: A very good point, and I think we talked about that a little in the last conversation also, that we completely agree, egocentricity, self-absorption, and the phenomena of selfishness and incapacity to encounter and be with and honor others, that level of ego doesn’t survive very well in waking down in mutuality. We’re inviting people to take greater and greater responsibility and clearly transcend, go beyond that. But the point that Snow Leopard was making there about the simple fact of being able to say the word “I” in reference to the body-mind, and have a basic sense of ownership, stewardship, responsibility, a fundamental identification, does that need to be destroyed and all of the factors of mind that go along with it in order for realization to be well established? We’re suggesting, at least our version of realization, no, and we also cheerfully acknowledge that what we mean by that, therefore, is different from what many people mean more traditionally.

Rick: Yeah. I think you could probably take the most enlightened guy in the world, and if somebody came and said, “Hey, there’s a guy outside spray-painting your car,” he would get up and try to do something about it. There’s a sense of ownership, there’s a sense of “my car,” and there’s a sense of “I” to the extent that he knows who’s being addressed, and he responds accordingly. Now, of course, that’s just from my perspective of still having a sense of “I,” and I’m open to the possibility that a realization may occur where there’s just this sort of something that’s as spontaneous as the heart beating, that just sort of makes the body get up and go attend to the situation, but there’s no personal doership involved. It’s just like a complete sense of not being involved, and there’s just a sort of a knee-jerk response to every situation. I’ve actually had moments that were like that in my life, where you feel like you’re completely on automatic and things are just kind of happening without any sort of volition or intervention from anything that can be recognized as an individual, but it’s certainly not my all-time reality. If it becomes that, I’ll probably change the whole theme of these interviews.

Saniel: Yeah, you probably would.

Linda: That brings up a question for me, too, around that, and that is, if and when that happens for an individual, where does the deep, deep empathy, compassion, and feeling sense, and heart, and emotion go to all creatures? That’s one thing I question.

Rick: Yeah, Tim Freak has a nice phrase. You know who Tim Freak is? He’s a British fellow that I interviewed a while back; he’s written a bunch of books. But anyway, one of his pet phrases is, “Love is how oneness feels.”

Saniel: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. You mentioned back there a little bit Ramana Maharshi, and again, Ramana was extremely important to me, and is. And when I was a student of his work, I devoured everything I could find about him. I read all the books, and many of the magazines from the ashram that grew up around him. And there are several interesting pictures here about him. One was that he would never formally assume identification with the “I” of a separate self.

Rick: In himself, you mean?

Saniel: In himself.

Rick: Right.

Saniel: And that included, he would never openly acknowledge to someone, “I am your guru.” And there was this great story about this one big British guy, an ex-soldier, who tried to pin him down. Major Chadwick, he was called. And finally, he kept trying to get Ramana to say, “I am your guru.” And Ramana wouldn’t do it, and finally he drew himself up to full mountain presence and said to somebody else, “What, does he want an affidavit?” He still wouldn’t do it. At the same time, speaking of the love and the compassion, when he heard that a bird had hit the window and died outside the meditation hall, tears would stream down his cheeks. And he was the soul of loving compassion and loving kindness in his relations with people. But he would rigorously, rigorously insist that the local, personal ego sense, that whole structure and dynamic of mind, had dissolved. Another thing about him that’s not so well known in the kind of well-broadcast tradition, is that he could be pretty testy. He was well known among those who were there for getting quite angry in the kitchen, because he would help make the food. He was blessing it. And if somebody messed something up, he’d get fierce. So, again, it gives us room to contemplate, like you were saying, what do we mean, what are the different meanings we have in mind compared to one another, and what, which is what I’m pointing to here, what is the actual life of an individual who’s really living this out? I remember seeing a video of the Dalai Lama, who again is the soul of loving kindness and forgiveness and tolerance, and I so honor him. I so profoundly honor his holding of responsibility for an entire sacred culture, and what he’s had to do in his lifetime, and how impeccably he’s done it. And the story I’m referring to, to me, is part of that impeccability. It happened to be a video of him instructing some of his senior monks, and he was ferocious. He was intense. And that doesn’t come out in his public persona for very good reasons, I’m sure. But I’m just wanting to make room. We’re talking about ego right now. Another thing that’s very forbidden in much of spirituality today is anger. And anything like it. So, I happen to be mentioning these two characters who were capable of showing some.

Rick: Yeah, well I hung around Maharishi a lot, and he would go into white-hot rages, to use that term, on fairly frequent occasions. I’ve seen Amma do the same thing. So, I guess what we’re saying is, enlightened or not, people have normal human emotions, and anger is one of those. Now, if you could see them from the inside, perhaps you would find that, or if you could step into their shoes as they were yelling at the cook or something, you might find that there’s a quiet, silent witness that is not angry, and not even touched by that anger. It’s just the body is going through the motions of anger according to the appropriateness of the circumstances.

Saniel: Right.

Rick: Yeah. A couple more points about Ramana. He used to read the newspaper every day. He used to listen to the radio. He was very concerned about world affairs. He also had his devotional side, as did Nisargadatta. Nisargadatta used to engage in loud, boisterous bhajan singing after most of the people had left, with a smaller cluster of disciples who were into a more devotional perspective. I remember reading recently someone asking Ramana about, “Do all these gods exist, Shiva and all these different levels of creation?” I said, “They exist as much as we exist, and so they can be interacted with, and one can devote oneself, if one wishes, to something like that.” I’m going on a little long with this particular comeback, but I want to throw in one more thing, and that is that there’s a term in Sanskrit called “mithya,” M-I-T-H-Y-A, which means “dependent reality.” And the explanation of it, you probably are familiar with it, is that, let’s say, a pot is nothing but clay. And so ultimately, essentially, there is no pot, there’s just clay. But obviously there’s a pot, it can hold things. The clay has taken the shape of a pot. So, we can say perhaps that there is no creation, there is no ego, all this fuss about ego, ultimately those people are right. None of that ultimately, essentially, when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, exists, and yet it does, at the same time, in a sort of dependent reality kind of way. And just as a pot and clay as clay coexist very harmoniously, so does the vast diversity of creation and all the concepts and components, and whatnot that we care to discuss, exist with the fact that on some level, and a physicist could tell us this, it’s all just sort of pure unmanifest potentiality.

Saniel: Yeah, and in terms of living out our lives and in terms of what this really means for people, part of our witness and what we offer into the mix here is, we see a lot of people who kind of hole up in those concepts and aren’t actually noticing what’s underneath. They’re not noticing that they’re reactively way holing up on the spirit side of the spirit-matter split. And so, the need to affirm that none of this exists, it’s a little bit like that bit from Shakespeare, “He thinks the lady doth protest too much.” Why is it so important to have to affirm that? What about being here as a body-mind person is so difficult? We acknowledge a lot about it is difficult. We’re not proposing people should just be at ease, but we’re suggesting that there may be deeper investigations for people to make, and we spend most of our time working with and serving and being helped ourselves by people who are looking for a deeper integration, or what we see as one.

Rick: Go ahead, Linda.

Linda: Yeah, I just wanted to say there’s the mystery. It really is paradox, it’s mysterious. How can any one individual say, “This is absolutely how it is”? Mysterious.

Rick: Adyashanti was here this week, and he made a big point of that, just sort of getting down to the level of being comfortable and really not knowing anything with certainty, you know? And just enjoying living in the mystery and how actually that ends up paradoxically being a much more secure place to be than glomming on to some certainty in some particular concept or worldview. Why are fundamentalists of any stripe so fanatical about being against this perspective or this religion or this, that or the other thing? I always feel like it’s because there’s an insecurity and they’re defending their lack of genuine grounding in the stuff they talk about, whatever that may be. If they were really living it, they’d be comfortable with everything. It would just sort of flow through them.

Linda: Interesting point. Yeah, I love that point too, earlier, when you were talking about how, take anger for instance. One experiences, like Amma perhaps, experiencing the anger, allowing the body, mind to express that in relationship, and yet there is the place in her and others in our realization, where you are observing, you are not affected by the anger. That’s one of the ways we work with individuals, even in the second birth awakening, being able to be that, be the witness or be that conscious nature, but yet also fully allow your humanness to be present also, so you can have both. That’s what this non-dual conscious embodiment awakening is about for us, being able to notice, notice, notice, be that and that simultaneously.

Saniel: And also, and this is another detail I think in which our quality of the awakened life may differ from others, most people who I’m aware of, of the dozens and hundreds who’ve gone through this general kind of transition, most of them notice that the quality of a witness being a part somehow, really dissolves.

Rick: Yeah, the stage.

Saniel: It’s however the intrinsic freedom. When Linda and I go through stuff, it’s a paradox, we’re really just being it, and the being and knowing of that freedom is intrinsic, and so far, it doesn’t seem to be corruptible, and so, we’re surrendered into the living out of a life that has also got this white-hot conscious beingness to it that’s delicious and free, and we’re free to get upset when things upset us. We’ve certainly, we just had some interesting upsets this very week, not between us, but life delivers its stuff.

Rick: Stuff happens.

Linda: The thing about that too is that there is so much life and juice, even in the difficult encounter, even more so now for me than ever before. I don’t know if I would want to live a life that’s just complacent and flat. I love the ups and downs of being human, but being divinely human, and being very realized in the midst of those ups and downs, that’s what gets you through the day, and that’s what opens your heart up to gleaning what others are going through as well. We talk so much about mutuality in our work, and how others, you can feel what they’re going through. You can actually help them process it and go through it more readily if you’re actually allowing yourself to fully go there yourself, and then you play, you dance with each other. It’s so juicy.

Rick: Yeah, I haven’t gone to a lot of Advaita meetings or talks or anything like that, but one critique I have heard from some people is that there does seem to be a syndrome among some people at least, where there’s a sort of a flatness or an emotionlessness or a sort of a disinterestedness, a kind of a dulling down of the vibrancy of the personality that perhaps is the outcome of, as we were saying a little bit earlier, a sort of a little bit of a fundamentalist adherence to concepts rather than an actual full living of what those concepts point to. And in my experience, the people that I’ve run into in life that I would consider the “most enlightened” have had very vibrant personalities and have had a kind of a natural innocence and enthusiasm for all kinds of things. And also, well, taking Amma for an example, just charming and fascinating personalities, interesting to watch her. And there’s this sort of flexibility or malleability. You can watch her giving darshan and watching the hundreds of people come up, and one moment she’ll be crying, and the next moment she’ll be angry at her swami or something, or the next moment she’ll be laughing her head off. And just sort of like clouds going across the sun on a windy day, just no rigidity. I tend to be a little bit long-winded today, but let me just throw in one analogy that is sort of used in the Indian tradition, which is that if you make a mark on a stone, it’s hard to make the mark, and it stays there a long time. If you make it on sand, let’s say, it’s easier to make, and it doesn’t stay there as long. If you make it in water, it’s a lot easier to make, or perhaps even air, very easy to make, and it just disappears the moment you make it. So, I’d say the more … you can see what this analogy is pointing at, the more established in pure awareness or whatever we are, genuinely, the more … it’s not that we don’t experience things deeply and richly, it’s easier to make a deep mark in sand than it is in stone, but also, they don’t etch permanent grooves in our nervous system, as we are able to sort of move right on to the next thing.

Saniel: Yeah, it’s actually a beautiful analogy, it’s a very beautiful analogy.

Rick: Alright, so any lingering thoughts about what we’ve discussed before I shift gears a little bit?

Saniel: Well, there was something that came to mind a minute ago, but it wasn’t etched very deeply.

Rick: Okay, if it comes to that …

Saniel: This is, I think, very relevant, because I think talking about ego or no ego in the abstract can give the impression that our work is one in which we are basically just indulging people in being who they’ve already been all their lives, and giving them the impression there is some kind of awakening that goes with that. There is in fact a profound process, and this is part of what I am grateful to have inherited from both Ramana Maharshi and Adi Da, and then further innovated and clarified and come up with new forms for. It’s a very profound process of the direct investigation and exploration of the transcendent nature of being that is required in this quality of realization. Now, some of the Waking Down teachers might require it more than others, and ours is a democracy. We’re not in control of it. So, I’m not going to vouch for every single awakening that’s happened and say, “Yep, it has to have been this way.” But for Linda and me, certainly, and many others, and the general agreement is in the work, that people have to do the waking aspect of this. It’s not just about being down here, being your ego, and being really mutual, loving one another and communicating straight. There has to be this access to the great transcendent ground of being. And the reason this came up as you were speaking, Rick, is because we’ve noticed in many cases that people, when they are cultivating that awareness, pretty spontaneously, not by trying to be without affect, or cool, or flat, or emotionless, quite spontaneously, in a natural way, for a period of time, while they’re intensifying that identification with the ground, the rest of life goes pale. It goes flat. It goes stale. They find nothing compelling for them. One of the first people I worked with, who is a very, in her expression, now as a teacher for many years herself, Rini Hansen is her name. She’s very warm, and engaging, and loving. But there was a period of time when everything just went dry, while she was deepening in this, and becoming enriched in that identification with the infinite ground. So, what we see is that that kind of quality has its place. But for some people, they may need to hang out there for a very long time. And we’re not making that wrong. But it does produce different qualities among groups who might be doing that.

Rick: True. And I suspect that some people hang out there longer than they might really benefit from doing. Who’s to say what an individual’s path is supposed to be? But sometimes it almost seems, to put it bluntly, like they got stuck there. And that it wouldn’t hurt for them to shake loose from that. Who was it? Jim Carrey, I think, said at one point. No, it wasn’t Jim Carrey. It was this great comedian named Stephen Wright. He said he broke up with his girlfriend because he wasn’t really into meditation, and she really wasn’t into being alive.

Saniel: Well, there you go. It kind of says it, doesn’t it?

Linda: Before we shift gears, there’s one thing I want to address, which you brought in a little earlier in this whole conversation. And that was part of the question from someone about how, it’s kind of like, “Aren’t we all just one anyway?” “Why do we have to do anything in order to realize ourselves?” And fundamentally, I guess, in the great scheme of creation, true, yes, we all are one, we’re all interconnected, but individuals are driven to seek to fill something that they have not realized yet. And so, as long as that drive in any individual is there to realize, to know, to be more grounded, to be more of an authentic, integral human being showing up in the world, then that drive has to be fulfilled by ways of being practices or disciplines or ways to fill those voids in any one person. So, each person, again, needs to find their own unique way what that is. For some, there are very graceful moments that you don’t have to do anything in order to have these graceful states come in, but for many, that’s not the case.

Rick: Yeah, Maharishi used to refer to the very purpose of creation as the expansion of happiness. He said that was sort of the ultimate driving force, which brought about manifestation of the universe in the first place, and that we were all deeply motivated by that drive, evolutionary impulse, or whatever you want to call it, so that it wasn’t advisable to deny that or try to thwart it in the name of having arrived.

Linda: Right, right.

Rick: So some person said, “What is white-hot yoga? I like simple, as a state of full awareness should be. Mutual white-hot waking down sounds pretty complicated to me.” And I’m sure that what you’re referring to is neither white nor hot, it’s just a metaphor that you’re trying to use to describe something. So, what actually are you referring to there?

Saniel: Yeah, actually we’ve had some great discussions about this in our work, including among the more advanced or senior teachers. And there is, that’s right, white-hot is in this case metaphorical, although corresponds to some of the ways that this quality of further intensification, of the unity of spirit and matter, the unity of consciousness and phenomena. One of the teachers, Ted Strauss, who you’ve interviewed, his best phrase for it is a little more practically descriptive. There’s a sense of an absolute fusion that takes place, that becomes the baseline, the given of life.

Rick: Fusion between?

Saniel: Between consciousness and phenomena, between matter and spirit. In other words, there can be a unity while there is still some sense of, how to put this exactly, well the better way to say it is that the awareness, the subjective awareness of the union can go through an intensification. And one of the ways that I’ve tried to make a picture of it, is we’re getting into the land where poetry is pretty much, at least as useful, maybe better, than trying to be technical and descriptive. But it’s as if in the great awakening, that we call the second birth, this fundamental unity of spirit and matter, it really is just a beginning. We could shift gears and picture it more as, say, the wedding ceremony of what appear to be opposite or different kinds of beings. And that white-hot quality or that sense of absolute fusion then would be what could arise in the consummation of the marriage. There’s a greater intensification. There’s a lot we could say about it. It’s something that I inherited through my time with Adi Da.

Rick: Did he use that phrase?

Saniel: He didn’t use the phrase exactly in that way. He had different language, and for all I know, he was referring to something completely different. But it’s the best analogy I find from the sources that I’m aware of. The point here is that, to come back to the original question, I know generally we want simplicity. Many of us do. But evolution is increasing complexity also. And many of these traditions have found it very necessary to go into a lot of complex consideration and practice in order to bring forth a fundamental simplicity. We feel like we’re living a fundamental simplicity, very profoundly so. Again, some people just prefer much simpler language. I have often tried to write things more simply as well. Fair enough. There’s a good call for that.

Rick: Yeah, it seems like it’s one of those paradoxical things where complexity and simplicity sort of rise together and counterbalance one another. I mean, look at the sophistication and complexity of our human nervous systems. If not for that, we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation, or even able to have these realizations. It takes a very complex, sophisticated instrument to even deal with this stuff or experience this stuff. A snail can’t do it. So anyway, in summation, when you say, “white hot,” you’re talking about sort of the ultimate fundamental fusion between matter and spirit, to put it in a phrase.

Saniel: Yes, or a subjective sensing of intuition, realization of that ultimate fusion. It doesn’t mean that then there’s no further growth and change in the individual who’s living that. In fact, on the contrary, it tends to stimulate or accelerate even more your passage through changes.

Rick: Sure. Did you want to add, Linda?

Linda: Well, I can tell a quick story, actually, that might help an individual understand an experience of a white-hot moment for me. This was many years ago. We were visiting Ken Wilber in Boulder. We went up on the mountain and there was this beautiful vista that overlooked the mountains and the town below. Saniel and Ken had been sitting on a rock for a while talking and I decided to walk over to this precipice. I’m just looking out at the mountains and looking at the valley and the clouds and the sky. In a moment, that fusion was so powerful for me, that it felt as if I could literally just take a step off of the edge of the mountain and I would just still be there, immersed, as every part of everything that I was perceiving.

Rick: Like Carlos Castaneda.

Linda: What’s that?

Rick: Like Carlos Castaneda ended one of his books that way, stepping off a precipice. He had to wait until the next book to find out what was going to happen to him.

Linda: Right! So here I am, I’m like maybe a foot away from the edge and all of a sudden, Ken and Saniel look over at me and Samuel says, “Um, honey, you’re a little too close to the edge.” And it kind of brought me back. It wasn’t like I went away, but I did in that moment, kind of lost track of time even. I felt so immersed and so submerged as everything, that I felt huge. And I also felt small, you know? It was just that connectedness. So that was an experience. Many people talk about these kinds of experiences of this white-hot fusion of connectedness, of no space-time. This happens for me on planes a lot. I like to sit by them.

Rick: Oh, me too. I love planes. For that reason, among others. It’s interesting, it just occurred to me, but my first experience that is reminiscent of what you just described, was when I was a kid and I had a high fever, which I was literally hot because I had this high fever. And I sat there in bed having this experience of simultaneous hugeness and tininess, infinite lightness and infinite heaviness. And the two of them were just sort of there together at the same time. And I just sat there for the longest time, just sort of amazed by that experience. I don’t know, but what you said just reminded me of that.

Linda: Yeah, thank you.

Saniel: Thank you. Let me add a little bit of traditional language here. The advent of this white-hot quality, the way it comes on in a person is typically pretty spontaneous. We haven’t figured out a way to kind of guarantee it can get duplicated for everyone. But it may be, it may come about in something like a Nirvikalpa Samadhi state, a radical dissolution of everything, the whole persona, the sense of me, self, world, form, color, object, subject. Or it may come about in a passage where that quality is the essence of it, but there is still perception and cognition taking place to some degree. And so that’s the heart of what Linda was describing. And similarly in my process and so forth, when this kind of quality emerged. And it was different for me from this second birth awakening. And interestingly for me, because I knew that Adi Da pointed to something like this, as a next stage beyond the basic quality of awakening that we call conscious embodiment, second birth. I knew it was necessary to regain that because I had had that experience one time in Darshan with him. My eyes were wide open, but there was just this white-hot, this flash of intensification. In fact, it took me years to even remember that it had happened. I had to awaken first so that I could actually hold the recollection of what had taken place. And then it became necessary to duplicate that autonomously in my own work, and that is part of my story.

Rick: Let’s talk about levels for a minute. One of the criticisms I hear sometimes, and have heard for years about waking down, and perhaps other things as well, not just waking down, is that it’s lowering the bar. People say, and there’s all these characters around saying, “Oh, I’ve had my awakening.” And people say, “Well, yeah, what kind of awakening? You’re kind of just cheapening the idea of awakening. It’s really something much more profound than you must have had.”

Saniel: Because you’re such a piece of crap.

Rick: Yeah, you seem like such an ordinary…

Saniel: You’re so obviously still a flawed mortal with all your stuff hanging out. How can you possibly be awake?

Rick: Well, also, I could sort of buy into that idea as long as we acknowledge that there are perhaps many stages of awakening, and to not use the term in too static or final a sense, like “I have awakened and that is it.” Stages not only in terms of refinement and development and integration and all that stuff on the relative personality level, but also, perhaps stages on the absolute level, in terms of, you know, I think one can have an awakening to what one feels is sort of the ultimate ground of being, and then discover later on that it wasn’t so ultimate after all, that there’s a sort of a deeper settling into something much more fundamental. What do you say to that?

Saniel: We agree. And basically, when we have people saying, “Well, I’m awake now and it’s over and all is done,” we say, “Well, we need to have a discussion because that’s not how we view it.” That sounds to us like, in this context, the stink of enlightenment.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Saniel: It’s simply a transition. In fact, we like to say, “Second birth, it’s a big deal. It is a non-dual conscious embodiment, fully activated, that’s what it is, and it’s just a birth. Congratulations, now you’ve got to get a life.” And we go through many other changes, as you were pointing out, Rick, not only in terms of the refinement of character and presence and participation of the relative expression of our existence, but also, deepening’s in that intuition of the great mystery of existence itself. So, the white heat is one such potential further development, and our sense is that there are many, many other developments possible, and we’re happily going through them, or, well, mostly happily. We’re going through the transitions, and we don’t find this to be static at all.

Rick: I understand that you have some sort of questionnaire or test, or some kind of examination that you put people through when they say they’ve awakened, to sort of verify that it’s genuine. Is that so, and what is that about?

Linda: I wouldn’t exactly call it a questionnaire, it’s not as static as that, or organized. There are three individuals who are senior teachers in Waking Down that are certified, if you will, to do this interview process. It’s called the second birth interview, and that is myself, Sondra Glickman, and Van Gwen. What we do is, when someone feels like they’ve gone through a major transition, the awakening itself, and they’re really feeling like they need some guidance or clarification as to where they are in this particular shift, that has been lived consistently and stably for four to six weeks, we won’t do an interview process prior to that. Someone needs to really kind of steepen it a little bit so that they can actually find their own articulation. We sit them down or we do phone conversations, and there is a number of questions that we ask them, but it’s actually structured very organically according to the individual. There are very specific questions we need to ask within the context of the interview or the conversation, but it’s not, okay, first yes, this, and then this, and this, and this.

Rick: Can you give me an example of what those questions are?

Linda: Absolutely. First off, I let people know that the way that I like to do the process of the interview, is I ask them what happened. I open it up with them telling me their story, what the experience was. Maybe tracking back to prior to the experience, did they have a witness awakening prior to what we call second birth? That’s a transition also. How did it show up bodily? What’s their understanding of consciousness? What is their understanding of the core wound? How are they living that? How are they living the paradox of existence? How are they actually being that? There are a number of different things that we ask along the way.

Rick: Could you please quickly define witness awakening versus second birth awakening, and then after that I’ll ask you to talk a little bit more about core wound.

Linda: Oh, sure. Well, in our work we like to talk about embodied feeling witness, and not everyone has this particular opening, but most do, where they have an awakening of feeling and sensing and knowing consciousness, sometimes oscillating in and out of form, but sometimes they actually feel a presence, or the intuition of consciousness, maybe behind or above. They sense that the witness quality comes and goes, and yet not permanently gone, so hence it’s a stable stage of witnessing. Something like an observer behind, that’s how it was for me, feeling it back here over my left shoulder. I lived that for nine months, very consistently, and I knew it wasn’t complete. This place of what I was feeling and sensing, a more landing in what Saniel coined the second birth realization. We like to say embodied feeling because it’s not merely just outside of oneself, although there’s a sense of it being that. It also is very in the feeling sense of matter. This is a very embodied process, so people can actually feel the sense of the witness quality of consciousness. Do you want to add anything to that?

Saniel: Well, I guess the main thing I would say about it is that it is accessing that witnessing, observing, noticing, registering ground awareness that is fundamentally impersonal, it’s continuous, it’s always doing its thing. The kind of criticism that people might make from a more traditional perspective, is one that we acknowledge is accurate, and however we take issue with the whole foundation of that perspective. So, one of the classic points would be, well, if it’s not continuously, permanently stabilized as this realization of witnessing, that’s not it. That’s a good example of how you guys “lower the bar”.

Rick: Like if you don’t have it during sleep, for instance.

Saniel: Yeah, or if you, when you’re going through your daily life, you may have had it for a little while, pretty strongly, and then something comes up and suddenly you’re tumbled into some of your stuff, broken zone, whatever you want to call it, and for a period of time, witnessing consciousness is nowhere to be found. Well, from the very beginning of my work, I began to say to people, based on what had happened with me, people would come and say, “Oh gosh, I lost the witness.” And I would say, “Hey, I sympathize, I realize that’s not what you would have preferred to have happen, but from this evolutionary perspective of integration, you actually need, apparently, to lose the witness.” We’ve even got a, Linda and I have an online course called “Get Fierce, Cultivating Consciousness and Discriminative Intelligence”, and one of the seven sessions is called “Losing the Witness”, because it’s actually from our, admittedly from the traditional orientation, rather twisted perspective, but from our perspective, it’s very straight. It’s how the total being winds up getting integrated.

Rick: I think even traditionally that’s legitimate. I think, from what I understand of tradition, it’s understood that it comes and goes, and sort of gets more and more stable in the process, until eventually…

Saniel: Yeah, but in many traditions, though, or the way people are interpreting it, which might not be what the tradition itself says, but many people are under the impression, “I’ve got to get into the witness so that it’s stable all the time.” And our orientation is, and therefore, when they’re in their stuff, they’re feeling, “Oh God, this is further proof that I’m not yet mature in the practice. I need to learn how to dissociate from my stuff.” And that contributes to the whole dismissal of your story and everything else, and all the ways in which you’re supposed to stay unidentified with the local personal self. So, our…

Rick: It’s a misunderstanding of what actually gets disidentified. It’s not that some individual component steps apart from the rest of the individuality and sits there and watches. It’s that the universal component is, by its nature, kind of on its own level, and the ocean is still the ocean, and there’s waves on the surface of it.

Saniel: And so then, to complete then, what happens in the second birth process is that the fundamental sense of a witnessing or observing, registering quality of consciousness, awareness, being, and a sense of some kind of still veil of separation, something not being complete, that veil dissolves. There is a sense of a much more obvious unity. Now, one of the things we discovered going through this, just quickly, is that some people have a clear instant of that transition. I did, Linda did, many others do. Quite a number of other people do what we call “oozing”, where it takes a while for them to figure out, “Wow, I’m established in that simultaneously being the ocean and the wave.” It’s obvious, that feeling knowing of being.

Rick: But I can’t tell you when it happened.

Saniel: But I can’t tell you when it happened.

Rick: Right. There are two ways to get wet while taking a walk. One is you get caught in a sudden downpour and you know exactly when it happened. Another is you’re walking in a heavy mist, like in the UK, and after a while you realize you’re drenched, but you just don’t know when it happened.

Saniel: I like that. That’s a beautiful image. We’ll use that. Thank you.

Rick: Okay, good. It’s all yours.

Linda: Another way to speak about the transition to second birth is, back in the day, early in my process, I would hear Saniel, in his own unique way, and another couple who had their awakening with Saniel’s help, and then they branched off and started doing their own teaching, sittings every Friday night. I would go and sit with them, as well as sit with Saniel. I would hear him talk about how consciousness recognizes itself to be consciousness, recognizes itself to be you, and on and on. I’m going, “Huh?” I’m sitting there scratching my head. I couldn’t put mind or logic around it, which is what I tried to do early on, which is make it all linear and logical. It’s not. It’s very mysterious. Until you have that experience or realization of that occurrence, that complete fusion, again, of consciousness seeing itself, being itself, being you simultaneously, then it’s not quite complete. That’s how it was for me, anyway. In my second birth awakening, that’s what happened in a split second. It was so quick. In a meditation, it literally knocked me backwards, the intensity of that coming together, that recognition, that realization, recognizing me, it, as all, not separate any longer, not a missing piece.

Rick: Cool. Okay, so how about core wound?

Linda: You want to start on core wound?

Saniel: Yeah, this is, it’s actually good in the context of discussing the confirmation of the second birth and so forth. Maybe before I go into core wound, let me briefly go back to that, the fact that we had these interviews or conversations with people. Fundamentally, we respect everybody’s right to take their stand however they’re moved to in their lives. We don’t require people to have a conversation that confirms, someone else is confirming their own intrinsic nature.

Rick: Right.

Saniel: But there are a couple of good reasons in our process why that’s helpful for people, and can be extremely important. One is that this is, as we’ve said, I think, last week, this is not only a self-realization, this is a self plus other field realization. And the honoring and acknowledging that matter and the world and others and objects, have their own intrinsic importance in reality, makes it such that we see that there is great, often great help in knowing and clarifying what has taken place, and being able to confidently live from that perspective, to have someone who you regard as a trusted representative and holder of that knowledge, if you will, be able upon serious in-depth conversation, these conversations typically take at least an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes I’ve heard Linda say, I’m not clear, call me back in a month or six weeks, let’s try again. We don’t take it lightly. But what happens then is that the experience of someone coming from the world, the material world, another saying to you, “yes, it does, it’s real obvious to me, you’ve tapped into this, this is what you’re established in”. That is very empowering for people. It helps them deal with, and this gets to the second point, the changes that one undergoes after such realization in this process can be extremely challenging. I liken it to learning how to scuba dive in a beautiful, serene, clear water lagoon, the bottom is 15 to 30 feet below the surface, you can see everything clearly, it’s calm. So that’s the quality of learning how to go deep, if we could say the water represents your stuff, that’s what it’s like previous to this realization. After realization, the buffers are stripped away, there’s so much less capacity to be able to do some of the practices, for instance, that you used to be able to do to distance yourself from experiencing things, or work on it or be friendly to it but not really affect it. And people can feel going through that exposure, which is a much more profound, again, to us, bio-spiritually natural integration of the total structure and dynamics of the psyche. As people are going through that, it can be very disorienting. They can come away from it feeling, “Did I ever realize anything at all? What the hell is going on here?” And we often, in our Wakedown/Shakedown coaching, which really is coaching them into a deeper divine incarnation, divinely human incarnation, we often wind-up helping people reframe what they’re going through. And when they’ve had this confirmation of their second birth, that can be very important for them, in terms of, “Hey, this has been confirmed. Okay, I’m kind of losing it here, but let me keep on maturing and going through this.” And gradually they learn how to be with that stuff without it having the meaning that they’ve lost the intrinsic realization. They discover, among other things, that they were confusing some of the qualities that they like in the body-mind, with the essence of realization itself.

Rick: Apropos of our earlier discussion about tradition and all, it’s certainly very traditional for a teacher or guru, to give a final stamp of approval to a student’s enlightenment and to dispel doubts that might be still muddying the waters.

Linda: Exactly.

Rick: Both on the verge of enlightenment, I think, and also perhaps even after the shift, because there can be a lot of stuff, as you say, that needs to be cleared up and it’s not always easy to go it alone.

Linda: Right, and the doubt mind can, especially for most, can slip in there, but if you’re really living the awakened condition, you see the doubt mind for what it is, and it can’t fundamentally take away that realization. So, again, with the interview process, it really helps individuals integrate much more quickly some of these places of recognition, and, “Oh yeah, that’s doubt mind and here’s my consciousness, even in the midst of that, cannot be thwarted, cannot go away. I am stably established as that.”

Rick: That’s a good point. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Saniel: One of the things I started saying to people early, because, again, I had a good deal of immersion in the Advaita tradition, both before and then during my years with Adi Da, I studied a lot of it from time to time. And in that tradition, I remember reading stories about Ramana and so forth, and say, “Well, doubt is the last thing to go before realization.” And what we discovered in this process is that really, for many people, not everybody, but for many people, the deeper doubt only gets released afterward by a sequence of recognitions in which it dawns on you that, for instance, when a quality of serene, bright, calm radiance disappears, that doesn’t mean that you’ve lost your fundamental realization of unconditioned being. It means that those qualities in the body-mind that you prefer, what’s not to prefer, aren’t sustainable in the flux. So, you get surrendered that much more to allowing the flux to be what it is, while still, as Linda was saying, being that much more confident. And this then goes to the question about the core wound. What we mean by the core wound is the subjective registration or the subjective juncture of knowing that you are both infinite being and finite being. And in all the details. So that’s why it’s good to have brought up these discussions of broken zones and the stuff, the doubts you can tumble into. Because the core wound as a realization, it’s not that its qualities, the pain, the distress of existence, the sting of being alive, it’s not that that disappears, it’s that you become conscious, you’re no longer motivated to try to escape a fundamental, essential, existential distress, that paradoxically is realized to be completely simultaneous, indistinguishable from fundamental wellness, deep joy, serene peace. There’s a kind of a tension, a war in the heart of the being that just is released. And part of the release is allowing existence to have both of these qualities. So just to come back to that for a second, because Linda mentioned that in the context of the second birth interview. If someone comes to us and says, “I have this expanded non-dual realization beyond the witness, I’m just being everything and I’m also here and so forth.” But it’s not really clear to the interviewer that they’re able to own this, there’s a kind of humility I guess you could say, in acceptance of the core wound. And so, we look for people to be able to acknowledge that both/ and, and not merely be affirming a great realization that to us feels like it’s riding above that deeper existential quality.

Linda: Yeah, that’s good. And the core wound sometimes can get confused with core issues, two very different things. Core issues, obviously issues of life, broken zones, things that happen, particular occurrences. The core wound is existential to your existence, it’s primal. It’s just this place where you feel and intuit that both/and and you have to live that from that place.

Rick: Now wounds eventually heal and maybe you’re left with a scar, but what you’re saying is that there’s always going to be this both/and, where you’re kind of cosmic and individual at the same time.

Saniel: Yeah.

Rick: So is wound really the best term to use, because it implies that there’s something really wrong with that that ought to be tended to and cured or healed.

Linda: Yeah, we’ve had that.

Saniel: We’ve had this discussion many times over the years for that very reason.

Linda: I just wanted to say the core wound gets transformed and transmuted into the conscious wound.

Rick: So, the wound is still a wound.

Linda: Yes, there, but it’s conscious. In second birth, you are aware of it, you are being that and yet you are not, you’re not controlled by it.

Rick: Right.

Linda: You’re not swallowed up in it, you don’t lose yourself because you are conscious of it.

Saniel: Yeah, I like to say that the unconscious core wound transmutes into the conscious core wound.

Linda: Yes.

Saniel: And that is the deeper implication of this simultaneous full divinity and reality of both spirit and matter, both the eternal and the temporal, etc. So, it’s part of that deeper acceptance of the totality of being alive.

Rick: I’m trying to think of examples of people who might have actually healed the wound and become so cosmic in their individuality that there was no dichotomy anymore, but I can’t think of any. Nisargadatta and Ramana both died of cancer and I’m sure that was no picnic. I guess as long as we’re breathing, there’s going to be some faint … The Sanskrit for this is “leisha vidya” which means “faint remains of ignorance” and it was my understanding that as long as you’re alive, that’s got to be there, otherwise, you’re not going to be able to function as a human being.

Saniel: Well, again, to me those pictures of the ultimate liberation are themselves worthy of question.

Rick: Yeah.

Saniel: Maybe so. I know Ramana used to talk about “parabdha karma”, vestige of karma, after realizations. People would say, “Why are you still even alive now that you’re free?” And he says, “Well, the body-mind is just winding down like a clock.” Parabdha karma. But our orientation is one that kind of has this exciting potential to it that also, it’s not like it came out of the blue. If you read Aurobindo and the Mother, they’re also talking along these lines. It’s like, “Hey, maybe there’s something about matter that actually makes this the place of potentially the most transformative work.” And so, to us, this is not dumbed-down dharma.

Rick: Right.

Saniel: Or what was that? The lowering the bar. Or if you want to say lowering, we’re questioning whether lowering means making less. Maybe it’s a deepening of our total nature that’s going on.

Rick: Good. Well, I wanted to save a little bit of time… You were talking about starting a university, and you mentioned last week a certain stage and implying there might be other stages. It’s a big deal to start a university, at least an accredited one. So, is that what you’re talking about? Are you just calling it a university and it’s going to be on a smaller scale? And what is its function and what stages were you referring to?

Saniel: I’m not sure what the reference to stages was, so we might have to get back into that.

Rick: Okay.

Saniel: Yeah. Who knows? By the way, one of the great inquiry questions, speaking of history. So, who knows what’s going to come of this intent? But we feel very strongly that we have something useful to contribute, that there are aspects of what we’re contributing that we don’t see already happening and available elsewhere, and ways in which we bring them forward that are unique, and that are already of great use to quite a number of individuals, and we’d like to make it more widely available, not only for people in our own time, but also for people in time to come. So, our orientation of that kind, and Linda will talk about the heart of that, which is, well, I’ll let you use your language, but it’s a very deeply felt intent to serve and give and make available something that many people find extremely special. We get letters and emails and messages from people all the time who can’t express strongly enough their gratitude. One of our friends, one of the teachers in Waking Down, expressed that he called up my father once last summer to thank him for having been my father. And apparently his expression of thanks was so profound that it really blew my dad’s mind. And it wasn’t like I set him up to go do that. So, we’re getting in the self plus other field of humanity that there’s something here that’s worth clarifying further, making available in a number of forms. I think what you may be referring to as stages is in terms of different focuses of the work itself, which we’re looking to have show up in several different schools in this university. And even though right now, and maybe for the rest of our lives, it’s going to be the little red schoolhouse version of the university, we’re looking to lay the foundations for something that can go on and on. And while we’re alive, to turn that over to people who are able to carry it forward in alignment with, a high integrity alignment with a lot of the details of what really matters to Linda and me. And yet to continue to evolve and innovate and be very creatively present and expressive in their own times and places. And the motto we have for this that speaks to both of our hearts is awakening and empowering leaders for the third millennium. And we really hope it will go on and on and on, that it could last hundreds and hundreds of years. It may sound like a wildly grandiose scheme, given that we’re this little tiny seedling at the moment. We’re picturing a great oak, but that’s what we feel called to do. We feel the work requires that. And a question that might come up just to mention as briefly as well, is what Waking Down in Mutuality already is. And our answer to that is yes and no. In certain ways it is, but we had to let Waking Down in Mutuality be so democratically structured, which it is now. We don’t run any of its organizations, we’re not on its boards of directors, whatever. People are free to, much freer in that context, to take the teachings and go with the parts of them that they want to. And we always want that to be there. But we also want to establish something that takes some of the things that mean a great deal to us, including our other teachings, we have a teaching on relationship and a teaching on life purpose or destiny, that are in some ways distinct from the Waking Down teachings. So that’s the purpose of the university and remains to be seen how much we can do with it in this lifetime, but that’s our ambition and our goal for the rest of our careers, really.

Linda: Yeah, another piece, real quick, is that it will enable individuals to maybe find their own voice and articulation of the work that we do, and maybe some pieces of Waking Down as well, where they’re not going through the other structures. When Saniel said we had to give over the work, it was “had”, because that was our heart’s impulse and drive in our being to give the work to the teachers to create this democratic structure, which is now in full gear with our teachers association and the Waking Down and Mutuality organization that is run by other senior teachers and teachers. It’s brilliant and they’re doing a fabulous job. The university that we’ll be pursuing, and again, seedling form right now, is to empower people who have a need to take a very unique teaching of Saniel and mine and say, “I really want to share this.” So, we’ve formed affiliate programs that we’re still in the midst of structuring more efficiently, for individuals to be able to teach without having to go through other forms of being a teacher of Waking Down. So, that’s a piece of it.

Rick: Great. Well, I just noticed that when I put up your video and everything on my site last week, I didn’t remember to link to your sites. So, I’ll have you email me. You should look over the little bio that I put on the site and see if you like that, and send me any changes you’d like me to make. But also, please do send me any links to other sites and a little explanation of what each site is So, a person can read that before bothering to click on it. That way, people will be able to get in touch with you and get into whatever aspect of what you do appeals to them.

Linda: Yeah, that’s great. People can dip their toes in very gradually and very tenderly, and they can dive right in and do the big splash.

Rick: Actually, I was listening to an interview with you a little while ago with some – I forget the guy’s name. Was it Terry Patton or one of those people?

Saniel: Yeah, it might have been Terry.

Rick: You actually made this little offer at the end where you said that if people want to call in and have a brief chat with you for 15 minutes or something, you’re open to that.

Linda: Absolutely.

Rick: So, if people want to do that, how would they get in touch with you?

Saniel: What they should do is email us at info@saniel.com. Info@saniellandlinda.com. Let us know that you’d like to have a chat with us, and we’ll do our best to set something up as soon as we can. We’ve got a lot going on, so it could take a little while to be able to have the conversation.

Linda: One of our heart’s desires, though, is to grow the work, reach more people, reach more, what I like to say, hungry, hurting hearts in the world who are feeling like maybe some of the great traditions that they’ve been involved in aren’t working for them anymore, and they’re exploring. Or, even people who are just feeling like they’re needing something more in their live

Saniel: to be more grounded, more authentic, and integral. We’re so passionate about reaching as many people as we can, because our world, I’m going to joke up about this, our world needs it. Everybody who feels that hurting drive or that impulse to be here and to serve others in their own unique way, bravo and blessings. This is where our heart goes every day, gets me out of bed every morning. That’s how it is.

Rick: That or the cat, right?

Saniel: That’s how it is for both of us, really. I want to add a little bit more. If people would like to have a conversation with us, we also suggest, go to our more introductory site that is heartgazing.com. There’s a free four-session course, about half-hour audio of each of us talking, just four sessions, called Transmission of the Heart. You can plug in with us that way. Of course, there are videos of us gazing with people. We talk about gazing and how that works in that course, the very first session. There are gazing videos of us now up on YouTube. There’s quite a lot of material on YouTube. Well, there is a good amount, let’s put it that way. We welcome people to do that as also part of, if they want to talk with us, it would be good to get more of a sense of what we’re offering. Although, I have to say, if people have listened to this several hours of your conversation with us, we also welcome you to go ahead and contact us directly. This is quite an initiation and introduction.

Rick: paid your dues if you’ve listened to these.

Saniel: It must be interesting, or at least curious.

Rick: Well, I want to wrap up by harking back to what we were talking about in the very beginning, which is that, in light of what Linda was just saying about how the world needs this and so on, we’re all doing what we can, as the Beatles sang. And if somebody doesn’t like your particular emphasis on the ego or whatever, then fine, they don’t have to do this, they can do something else. But I would just suggest that we all, as Rodney King said, all learn to get along and appreciate all the contributions people are making, even if it doesn’t resonate with one person, then fine, something else will resonate with him. And certainly, I know many people who are good friends of mine, for whom your thing very much does resonate, and they seem none the worse for having gotten involved in it. In fact, they seem to have benefited very profoundly and are really wonderful people to be around. So, I think we should just all cut ourselves some slack and not get too rigid about philosophical distinctions, about things we may not actually have even experienced yet ourselves, debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Instead, let’s just appreciate all the wonderful expressions of spiritual development that are available in the world today, and never consider our own one to be the best in the world. Maybe it’s the best for us at this time, but it’s not necessarily for everyone.

Linda: That’s exactly right. Thank you.

Saniel: Very well said.

Linda: Well put.

Saniel: And, in that sense then, the rubber meeting the road of how do we live, how much angel radiance can we bring into life, if you want to use that kind of language, rather than debating it endlessly, merely. How much of, in our language, a human sun, S-U-N, can you become? How much can you love and benefit others, and be a benign and fundamentally helping presence in this world? So, we both love to say, and Linda, I think, said it earlier, wherever you go, speaking to each person listening and viewing this discussion, blessings on your journey, wherever it leads you. Even if we disagree with some details of how your process, your philosophy, your practice is unfolding, or we don’t hold it the same way, ours the same as you do, we’re so grateful that you’re here doing your work, doing your piece. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if millions and billions of people were having this kind of conversation, rather than some of the other ones that are going on in their unfortunate ways?

Rick: The world would be a paradise, I think.

Saniel: It would be a much, much more benign and serene place.

Linda: Indeed. Yeah.

Rick: Great. Well, that’s probably a good point to conclude on.

Linda: Well, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your time. This has been, last week and this week, it’s just been such a blessing for us. We’ve really enjoyed being with you. You’re a superb interviewer and conversationalist. We’ve really enjoyed this very much.

Saniel: Thank you, Linda. I want to also say, and I completely second what Linda said to you, Rick, one of the things that I noticed that really touched my heart is that you work very hard to bring your listeners into the conversation.

Linda: Yeah.

Saniel: And that’s very moving, and that is in itself very empowering, and acknowledging of everybody’s authentic, intrinsic meaning and reason for being here, and having something to contribute. So, I really, really appreciate that.

Rick: Well, thank you for the compliments. I too have really enjoyed talking to you guys, which is why I set up a second one. It’s really, really been good. If I could, I’d make this a call-in show and let people all participate, although that can get a little chaotic.

Linda: That’d be cool, though.

Saniel: Yeah, I might be able to do that, technically, at some point. But for the time being, it’s not, and yet there are ways people can still participate after the fact. If you go to batgap.com, you’ll see this interview and all the interviews I’ve done. With each one, there’s a place where you can click on the comments link, and it leads you into an area where people are having discussions about that particular interview, although of course they also veer off on various other topics as they go along. So, there’s that opportunity. There’s also a Yahoo chat group that you can find a link to on batgap.com where some discussions take place. And, you can listen to this as a podcast if you don’t like to sit in front of your computer for hours on end watching things. You can do it while you’re driving. I have a friend who’s a neurologist who listens to this during his commute every day, back and forth to work. So, all that’s there. There’s also a place to sign up for emails, if you’d like to receive an email about once a week when each new interview goes up. You’ll see that on the site. And there’s also a donate button. If you would like to make donations, just today I ran out and spent $100 on a little hard drive that I need for shuttling files around and stuff. So, there are expenses like that, and if people are enjoying the interview and feel inclined to donate, just click that button. I keep the finances of this whole project separate from personal finances, and only use any donations that come in to further enhance this project. So, thanks again, Saniel and Linda, and thank you to everyone who has been watching or listening. And we will see you next week.

Saniel: Thank you. Thanks so much, Rick.

Rick: Thank you.

Linda: Thank you.