Saniel Bonder & Linda Groves Bonder Part 1
Summary:
- Background: Saniel is the author of Healing the Spirit Matter Split and founder of the Waking Down in Mutuality work. Linda is a senior teacher in the same work and a professional singer and songwriter.
- Spiritual Journeys: Both Saniel and Linda recount their spiritual journeys, including Saniel’s experiences with various spiritual teachers and his eventual awakening.
- Teachings: They discuss their current teachings, focusing on the integration of awakened consciousness and mutual evolutionary exploration.
- Personal Insights: The interview includes personal anecdotes and insights into their spiritual practices and philosophies.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guests this week are Saniel Bonder and Linda Groves Bonder. I’ll introduce them briefly by reading short paragraphs from their website. And then in the course of the interview, you’ll get to know them a lot better. Saniel is the author of Healing the Spirit Matter Split and the founder of the Waking Down in Mutuality work. He has been a pioneer in the widespread embodiment and mutual evolutionary exploration of awakened consciousness for over a decade. Probably more than over a decade now since this was written. Linda Groves Bonder is Saniel’s full-time partner in the White-Hot Yoga of the Heart transmission and teachings, transmission and teachings. And a founding and senior teacher of the Waking Down in Mutuality work. Linda is also a professional singer and songwriter. So, thank you very much for joining me in this. As people who listen to the show probably know, I’ve interviewed, I think, about seven people who are waking down in mutuality teachers. The Gilberts, the Boggs, Ted Strauss and Hillary Davis, and Sandra Glickman. So, and I’ve really enjoyed all those interviews, and I’m sure I and the listeners are going to enjoy this one very much.
Saniel: Our pleasure.
Rick: Yeah.
Linda: Yeah, thank you for having us on this.
Rick: You’re welcome. So, what I’d like to do in the course of this interview is, have you both sort of recount your own spiritual journeys, in as much detail as you feel is significant. And then we’ll kind of lead up to what you’re teaching now, and what you would really like to convey to people about your work and what you teach, and how they can participate in it, and so on. So, let’s do that, and who would like to go first?
Saniel: Well, since we’ve got a little time to play with here, I’ll ask you a question back.
Rick: Sure.
Saniel: If Linda goes first, you get an immediate take on what the work is. And if I go first, then we go back into some more ancient history a bit. [LAUGH]
Rick: Yeah.
Saniel: What would you prefer? What do you think this would be?
Rick: Well, I don’t really care, but why don’t you go first? Because then when you’ll be talking about the work, and then she’ll talk about it, and somehow, it’ll probably all work out best that way. And of course, as you’re telling your story, Linda can interject any time she wants, and I’ll probably interject with some questions.
Linda: Yeah, that’s good.
Saniel: Okay, well, great. Yeah, happy to do so. I think the place to start for me is, I never was consciously spiritual as a child, or in my teenage years. Though when I had my bar mitzvah, I was raised Jewish. When I had my bar mitzvah, afterward, everybody else was dancing and partying at the reception, and I was out on the front lawn crying. My father holding me, and we assumed it was because of all the stress. A lot had gone on that time in my life. But years later, after going through the shift or awakening that led to my work, it dawned on me that really, I had been looking for that bar mitzvah to be, at the soul level, a real connection with the divine. And when that didn’t happen, there was a deep disappointment that I couldn’t really know at the time.
Rick: So you wouldn’t have been able to articulate that to your father at the time, but looking back, you figured out that’s what it was.
Saniel: Yeah, and I wasn’t able to articulate it even until I was in my 40s, I’d awakened, and I was able to make sense of my whole existence better. And really, my spiritual quest began when I was 19, going into 20. I was a student at Harvard in the late 60s. Went there from a small little, tiny town- actually much smaller than Fairfield- in Tennessee, where I went to a prep school, and suddenly I’m in this giant maelstrom of Cambridge and Boston and SDS and counterculture, etc., etc., etc. And it was a pretty shocking transition in many ways. And I became active as one of the student protesters and so forth. But I remember that was my first year. My second year, when I came back, I already was not able to do that anymore. The major reason was that this insight had awakened, that I hadn’t read any books, nobody told me about it. Just came to me very naturally, a recognition that it was as if everybody was on the inside of a cage of mirrors, and we were only able to occasionally make contact, actually see another person. And everybody seemed to me to be so self-absorbed, whether it was a student activist like myself, university administrators, police, all the people on all the sides of all the issues. It was such a sobering recognition that I knew I had to find some way to break out of that cage, and the only way I could imagine would be through finding divine grace of some kind, God’s help, whatever you want to call it. I don’t even remember if I exactly prayed per se, because I didn’t have a direct knowing that there was a Divine. But there was this feeling of, “I sure hope you exist, because I need some serious help here.”
Rick: And somehow that feeling just welled up spontaneously and naturally.
Saniel: It just came up. I don’t know when exactly it crystallized, but I know by the time I got back to school for my sophomore year, I was out of… I was no longer capable of getting into protests and trying to make things change. And the feeling that I had, was that if I didn’t negotiate this transition in myself, anything I would be doing would be, in effect, cosmetic.
Rick: That’s interesting. Yeah, a lot of young people, of course, have that sort of restlessness and realization that something’s wrong, but most of them, I don’t think, give it a subjective slant the way you did. They think mainly in terms of changing the system or changing the outer circumstances.
Saniel: Right, and that insight, “Everybody’s living in a cage of mirrors here,” pretty much wiped me off the map of fixing the outside and feeling that’s the problem. Not that there weren’t problems. I never really have ceased to have a kind of activist orientation to social change and all the rest of it, environment, you name it. But that became the guiding impulse. And so, then I went through a period of being exposed to the beat poets and I remember the electric Kool-Aid acid test was a major book for me. And I remember reading it and feeling at the end of it, “Oh, wow, all the good stuff has already happened. I’m too late.” And a particularly important influence for me at that time was Martin Buber.
Rick: Did you take some drugs also? Reading Ken Kesey, did you…
Saniel: Oh, I definitely took some drugs. Had my share of, marijuana and various psychedelics and so forth. But Buber’s teaching was very interesting. It really locked me into the importance of I-thou or relationship to the other. And after a while, however, and this is on into sometime in my sophomore year there, after a while, it became apparent to me that that wasn’t going to be enough. I needed direct access to something more complete, full, infinite. I don’t remember exactly how I languaged it to myself, but people have been saying to me, “You should really check out the Eastern Wisdom. It’s, a big part of what’s happening.” And I remember saying, probably later, but not now. Well, at that point, it became important to turn to the East. Actually, it was in the summer of my sophomore year, I’d done a Colorado Outward Bound course, and when I came down from the mountains in Colorado, that was when I felt, “Okay, time to plug in.” And this was in Boulder. It was a mecca of counterculture and spirituality. Ram Dass was coming through frequently and so on.
Rick: Still kind of is.
Saniel: Yes, still kind of is.
Rick: What were you majoring in, by the way?
Saniel: What’s that?
Rick: What were you majoring in at Harvard?
Saniel: I was majoring in … They had a combination of what they called social relations. It was sociology, psychology, and anthropology sort of mushed up together. It didn’t last much longer, but that’s what my degree was in.
Rick: Okay, back to Boulder.
Saniel: So back to Boulder, and this is still after my sophomore year of college. I read the book, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” over about three days, staying at a friend’s house who was out of town. Immediately after I read the book, I was lying there and I was about to go to sleep, and I had the thought, “I wonder if yoga is going to be part of my path,” because it was such a … as it was for many people, and I notice you’ve got the book actually on your bookshelf right behind you. For so many of us, at least in our generation, it was what opened the door to, “There is a whole other world here,” along with things like acid and mescaline and so on. But it really showed that there is a tremendous history and tradition for all this. And so that was my question, “Is yoga going to be part of my path?” And then I heard this oscillating sound and listened to it, just came out of nowhere, and suddenly shot up. There was a sense internally of like being on a rocket going up of energy, and there was a bursting through into some other kind of environment, like a dream space or a vision, and then bursting beyond that. And the next thing that I knew was I was coming back down into the body as a kind of a flash of light. And my immediate thought was, “Okay, I guess yoga is going to be part of my path.”
Rick: There’s your answer!
Saniel: That’s the answer!
Linda: Let’s do that again, right?
Saniel: That was very much the feeling of, “How do I get back to that?” And fairly quickly I realized, reading Yogananda’s literature, “Okay, this must have been a spontaneous what he called nirvikalpa samadhi, a formless ecstasy of union with the divine, whatever.” I didn’t know that it was God, but I knew that it was utterly beyond description and blissful. And I really wanted back, as Linda was just saying. And so that was what set me on the path. And I figured my feeling, though, however, was very much along the lines of what Yogananda was talking about. If you get really good at this, you can have full access to that state anytime, and you can always be really in touch with it, grounded in it. So that became my quest. And to kind of scoot through things, I don’t want to go into endless detail, but I went to India. I was studying with an Indian yogi who at the time was fairly well known in America, and was in India a radical activist. I wanted something that had social activism associated with it. And the time I spent in India proved not to be the path that I had started on, which was a kundalini yoga path. Eventually I began to feel, “At the rate I’m going, I’m never going to get my kundalini above my navel again.” And having had that blowout, I knew what it could be like.
Rick: Was that Yogi Bhajan that you were studying?
Saniel: No, it was the yogi who started Anandamarga. I don’t know if you…
Rick: Oh, right, I’ve heard of that, sure.
Saniel: So, and there was a lot of adventure that…this is not the time to try to go into all the detail. But the main next transition was I began to feel the kundalini process was not going to…I needed something that would be more direct. It seemed to me that if the self was myself, I should be able to have access to it much more readily, even if I needed to mature in it. And gradually I found my way to Ramana Maharshi’s teachings. And I remember just picking up his little pamphlet, “Who Am I?” with a picture of him as a 17-year-old or 20-year-old awakened kid, and just those coal black eyes burning from the photograph. And I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to find out what this guy is about.” And shortly, I think later that day or the very next day, I found a book of his teachings, the collected teachings, tried the meditation of self-enquiry. And I know a lot of your viewers and listeners are familiar with that tradition. And also, particularly his thing about the right side of the heart, which didn’t make any sense to me because I always ended the impression that the heart is over here on the left side of the chest. I didn’t know that anatomically the heart actually straddles the center. But I tried the meditation, and during that meditation there was what felt like an infinitesimal white-hot fire or light in the core of my heart, just leaped forward and up. And there was a sense of bliss that came through from that. And the feeling there never really went away. And of course, then I felt, “Okay, I must be close to enlightenment.” So, I was really doing a lot of meditating and self-enquiry for a couple of years. That then led me to recognize that I needed a living guru, but it had to be someone who had realized the heart. And in 1973, I found the teachings of then known as Baba Fridja, and eventually Da Fridja and Adi Da. And that was his main statement from the opening of his first book, “I Am That Heart.” And so, here’s an American just a half a generation older than me, just starting his teaching work. I felt indescribably blessed and in fairly short order came out to California from New Orleans where I’d been teaching, school teaching, and became a member of Adi Da’s community. And to make a great big, long story extremely short, there were further openings, various other spiritual awakenings that took place, many of them very powerful. And a lot of work with my human self, and he had a very different orientation to where the spiritual process is leading and going and so on. We may get into that or not. But after 19 years or so, it became evident to me that I was no longer really fitting there and much more sobering than that, he had lost faith that I was among those who might likely awaken in this lifetime on his path. And I began to individuate in such a way that I felt like I had lost my moorings of really the earliest training in my life from my parents and my mentors at the school I went to, the high school, which is pretty much basic human stuff, personal integrity, honor. I felt I had so over devoted, so tried to surrender everything that I had lost my anchor in simple things like honesty, trying to do the right thing for the guru all the time and so forth. And I’m not saying everybody there was living that way, but I sure was. And so, there were some arguments that I wound up having with my teacher at a certain point there and to make the long story very short, at a certain point, I just realized I can’t stay. I would rather have my own integrity as a man than stay plugged into this field of grace, even though I felt he truly was the great divine incarnation of the age. I wrote his biography.
Rick: Do you still feel that, that he was?
Saniel: No. I feel he was a very, very great and paradoxical and challenging realizer in the sense that his work is an important gift to humanity. I’m very clear on that. And once I left, I haven’t really told that story. I’ll try to tell it quickly too. Once I left, as it turns out, my awakening process kicked into very high gear within a few short months. I had gone through what felt to me like the great incarnating of that awakened condition that I’d been seeking all those years.
Rick: I’ve seen that quite a bit here in Fairfield among people who were hook, line and sinker in the TM movement for decades. And then they kind of distance themselves and perhaps reevaluate all their assumptions and kind of start trying out some different things, and very often they quickly come into an awakening. And I don’t know which is the cart and which is the horse, whether it’s because they’ve left, they’ve awakened, or because they’re about to awaken that the chick is pecking out of its shell and ready to leave the incubator, and so they feel the inclination to leave, and maybe it’s both/and.
Saniel: I think it’s both/and. I think it’s a developmental readiness, and certainly it was that way for me. And so, looking back, he’s a pretty complex figure, but from my point of view, he and others and the whole history of tradition are now making possible what we call a democratization of these awakened conditions, and it’s happening in a variety of ways. A show like yours, Buddha at the Gas Pump, even if they didn’t have the internet, but even if they had something like it, that wasn’t happening in the old world. There were only a few in any generation who would break through.
Rick: Yeah, and they could only walk so many miles in a lifetime.
Saniel: That’s right.
Rick: Before we leave the topic of Adi Da, when I was interviewing Sandra, quite a few, maybe a year ago, she referred to him as a great tantric, and I didn’t want to say anything at the time because it just felt rude or something, and I don’t want to be rude now, but I was just curious.
Saniel: Go ahead.
Rick: Okay. I once had a conversation with a fellow whom I’m sure you know, who was with him for 17 years, and who left because Adi Da was sleeping with the guy’s wife, to put it euphemistically, and apparently that was not uncommon. And he kind of ticked off a laundry list of things that Adi Da was into that would be considered by most people pretty hedonistic or immoral. And in my way of understanding, that does not necessarily mean he wasn’t awakened, but the thought crossed my mind that perhaps that paradox was instrumental in your emphasis on and enthusiasm for a balanced development in which not only the inner awakening is clear, but the whole relative structure of the personality is developed and is in accordance with decency and moral principles and compassion and kindness, and all those sorts of things. You think I’m barking up the right tree with that observation?
Saniel: That’s pretty much how I feel and how we feel. My looking back on my guru’s life and work, it’s bittersweet. A lot of people were damaged by that “crazy wisdom.” And of course, he isn’t the only one who presumed that imperial divine right of the guru to interact with people in all kinds of challenging ways, with the intent of challenging and overturning the ego, breaking through the boxes of people’s conditioning. But my sense is that there was an enormous amount of collateral human damage in those approaches and that characters like Adi Da, Chögyam Trungpa, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Osho, they made something possible. They were like crazy flamethrowers, or the guys who crossed over the Rockies before the Conestoga wagons. They opened something up for us and we were in their debt. But on the other hand, they didn’t provide models for creating society together or for even being a sane and whole human being related to others. Part of our perception is, how many people can be a king or a queen in their own world of subjects? It doesn’t work. So, if we’re relating to one another as equals, whether the other person is as “realized” as you are or not, then some of these laws of human decency and other ways of interacting with one another come into play that much more. And at a deeper level, as you were implying, Rick, really there’s a question of what does realization itself amount to and what other kinds of growth do we need in order to be whole and sane and capable of the most optimal ways of interacting?
Rick: Yeah, Ken Wilber’s lines of development idea comes to mind, where a person could be quite far advanced along a certain line, maybe the self-realization line, but really deficient in some other lines. And there may be a tendency both for that person and for that person’s followers to rationalize those deficiencies as some sort of cosmic play or something. And maybe they are, and the old paradox thing, probably they are, but at the same time it’s equally valid to view them as areas that this person would have been better off looking at and working on and resolving.
Saniel: Yes.
Linda: Absolutely, I was going to say exactly that, Rick. I was going to bring in the levels and lines aspect, which you just did so beautifully. Obviously, it feels to me that in these cases there may have been some of the weaknesses and difficulties in their own personal development, but they couldn’t go there, perhaps.
Rick: Yeah, especially once they’ve become famous to a certain degree, and it’s really hard to say, “Wait a minute, I screwed up, let’s kind of re-examine everything here and I’m going to change my ways.” You get really invested in your status and in the adulation that your followers throw at you, and it might be a little hard to back out of that.
Saniel: Yeah, I would say actually that there’s an even stronger kind of governor for those kinds of characters. They had to be extremely willing to risk everything to achieve their own realization. If you look at particularly those more outstanding characters who were mavericks, who took huge risks and set things up in new ways, that force of how they did it became the only way they could trust living. And so, it just kept right on going.
Rick: Interesting, yeah.
Saniel: And they weren’t really in a position to know that there were other choices they could make after a certain point.
Rick: Yeah, so they sort of had a “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead” way of living.
Saniel: Something like that. Having written Adi Da’s biography in 1989-90, I knew his life story pretty much inside and out, at least up to that point. And he was in some ways, from this perspective, there’s a kind of tragic heroism there. And I have enormous appreciation. My work would not have been possible without him, without Ramana, without these other influences, without Martin Buber, who balanced out the “Don’t overrule the other. Don’t be so self-radiant that you can’t actually encounter the other and let the other be really other. Don’t let your self-realization include the whole world such that everybody else is just almost a figment of your imagination.”
Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I’ve seen that happen actually, where a so-called enlightened person, who probably really is enlightened, dismisses the world as an illusion so easily or so readily that he feels justified in treating people like pawns, you know? Just toying with people’s lives in ways which are just really not, from an ordinary perspective, not appropriate or not kind.
Saniel: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Interesting.
Saniel: So, to finish it up, shortly after I left, this awakening process just jumped into high gear. I really was primed by everything that had happened. The elements of that process, speaking of the tantric aspect, one side of it, yes, was suddenly there was much more capacity to complete the investigation of consciousness directly, which I just thrilled to do because I’d been working with that since the early ’70s, from my exposure to Ramana Maharshi. The other side that was extremely important, that I didn’t figure out actually until after I’d awakened, was that the Shakti, the goddess, came into my life and grabbed hold of me. It was as if, and you’ve got to speak in code here, it wasn’t like I was walking down the street holding hands, but it wasn’t like there was nothing happening either. And I later had just the very strong feeling that the great feminine principal person presence wants to participate. We can give her, if we can project a want and need onto her, which admittedly, language is failing here, but she wants the uniqueness of each and every one realized. And this, we talk about in our work, mutuality, this democratization, this flowering of many, many people, which, we have language coming from the traditions, like Jesus, you will all be sons and daughters of God and do greater things than I. So, there’s been an expectation, it’s wired into us, that many will flower. And the era of the singular great heroes and heroines is, I think, rapidly coming to an end. And then the unsaid awakening took place, which was just a few months after I left Adi Da’s work, and the transmission aspect kicked into gear, which I understood very well from having been around him, and also the other great yogis and sages who I had encountered, including Ramana Maharshi, Neem Karoli Baba, there were a number of them.
Rick: You met him too?
Saniel: Yes. And, I understood clearly, okay, the transmission process is activated. And my feeling was, if I could awaken after having, in Da’s language, risked hellish karmas for lifetimes to, for some reason, go out and be an ego again, if I could awaken under that kind of challenge to my whole being, my soul, anybody with a strong desire ought to be able to. And let’s Johnny Appleseed this thing. Let’s get as many people awake as we can get and really shift the landscape,
Rick: really investigate what is baby and what’s bathwater in terms of these traditions, in terms of these assumptions, even the assumption of what enlightenment is, or what wholeness is, what sanity is, frankly.
Rick: Let’s dwell for a moment.
Saniel: Let’s question everything.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s dwell for a moment on your actual awakening, because you kind of glossed over that a little bit. So, you left Adi Da, and you said within a few months you awakened. What actually did you experience or undergo in those few months?
Saniel: Well, first off, there was a clear question in my mind. When I left, I knew I had to regain my own integrity as a human being, and I wasn’t sure I would ever even get tapped back into a sense of spirit moving in my life. I didn’t know. So, I was willing to risk everything for something very, very basic that then I never sacrificed again. But I also found a friend, a mentor, who was doing a kind of shamanic journey work that I began doing, and it included use of substances, psychoactive medicine.
Rick: Like ayahuasca or something like that?
Saniel: Basically, it was ecstasy and psilocybin, and then ayahuasca and psilocybin, the feminine and masculine principles, both. And I did that for a while, but it really, the awakening took place so quickly that I never felt that the medicines themselves were the main causes, if you want to call it that. It felt like they were secondary aids to a process. There were only a couple of journeys before my awakening took place.
Rick: Did it take place in the midst of one of those sessions of taking that stuff, or later on?
Saniel: Actually, yeah, it didn’t. In fact, it took place more, for a couple of years afterward, I assumed that it had taken place during lovemaking with a woman who was my first intimate partner after leaving his work, and my wife had left me shortly before I left Adi Da’s work. So, I didn’t have a relationship until this new relationship started. And it was very clear to me that there was this interaction going on with, again, the great feminine, the goddess, that was central to the whole awakening process. But the work in consciousness matured very rapidly. I had this shamanic mentor who said the right things that I needed to hear at some specific moments, and there was just a deep relaxing into being myself as a human, as a person, as an ego, and at the same time, tapping into this current and presence of the greater conscious nature that, in effect, was pressing forward. It was realizing me, not so much me somehow getting out back to it, but there was this incarnation going on. I remember when the quality of the witness consciousness really opened up. Simultaneously, it was like it dropped into me, and also, I dropped into being a person here, more fully at the same time. And it was very obvious that there was this kind of “kathunk” landing going on.
Rick: Was that “kathunk” such an obvious moment that you could have marked it on a calendar? There was a certain day?
Saniel: Yeah, October 14, 1992. I got up at 7.30 or so in the morning, in my car as I’m driving, listening to a Native American flute tape, and asked my inquiry question that I had come up with on my own during my Adi Dai years, when you weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. You weren’t supposed to come up with your own practices, but it had arisen in me.
Rick: That’s the second person I’ve interviewed who had his awakening while driving. Could you almost say that, that being, or whatever you want to call it, awoke to itself through the instrumentality of Samuel, and that the sort of coming back into your integrity as Samuel was kind of hand-in-hand with that awakening? In other words, Saniel had to be integrated and kind of a whole person in order to be a fit reflector or instrument for that being to awaken to itself. Would that be a correct way of putting it, maybe?
Saniel: I wouldn’t use the language of vehicle or reflector. There’s a singularity that emerges, and we use the language of a divinely human person. And the infinite and the finite get fused, and both the local persona, which in some ways is the prowl of the boat of the total being, you could say, both the local persona and that more infinite ground or totality or environment just become unified in a fundamentally peaceful way. The sense of a distinction between the two dissipates. And actually, over a couple of years after that, I realized, wow, it’s so completely dissipated that I’m not really realistically referring to a consciousness as if it was a something else than totality.
Rick: Right. Good. That’s clear.
Linda: And there was a further deepening for you in the landing at the restaurant. Can you speak about that?
Saniel: Well, yeah. I’m sorry. I’m really skipping around here.
Rick: It’s okay. But luckily, you make time for us. Of course, Linda’s got a whole other story.
Rick: Yeah, we’re going to get into that.
Saniel: What happened was I knew that my awakening process was strongly activated, especially from that day, mid-October of the year 1992. And as it happened, I’d been on my way down to visit down in Ojai the man who was my mentor at that time, who is still a teacher, a guy named Brooks Barton, and a very fine person. And I’m very grateful to him for his help. And at the time, he said to me, “Yeah, it looks like your awakening is really kicking in a gear.” There was a beautiful thing he said, by the way, that I want to share with you and everybody who might listen and watch in the future. I said to him, I said, “You know, I don’t get it. I left the guru in disgrace. I’m like the last candidate for awakening from the world that I came from. And yet it’s obvious this is going on.” I said, “What gives?” And he made a great statement I’ve quoted ever since. He says, “Well, spirituality is not just evolutionary. It is itself evolving.” And so, the criteria for qualified candidates for great awakening, even the criteria are shifting. The game is, the rules are different. Everything is up in the air now. That was very helpful.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. Who is to say that the criteria that were adhered to in the group that you were in had any sort of absolute validity anyway, in any age? There’s always something to be said for a certain independence of thinking and freedom from slavishness to dogma. There’s a time for obedience and there’s a time for just sort of breaking out and reevaluating everything.
Saniel: That’s right. And you’re quite correct. Really, if you look at the history of spirituality with anything like a close eye, you’re going to notice that there is the both/and that you were just describing. There always have been characters whose awakenings have come in that kind of way. But then what occurred was after several months, mid-October to early December of 1992, and I began this new relationship, which was obviously to me, my partner was infused with goddess energy and she was completely beside herself, not knowing what was going on. But I had been around a lot of this kind of thing, so I had a strong sense of what was happening. And then a couple of days later, or maybe the second day that we had come into it, I was sitting in a restaurant one morning and just looked out the window and suddenly there was a very simple recognition. It wasn’t a big Kundalini moment. It was completely unnoticeable to anyone around me. It was like, “Oh!” and the obviousness was that there was no difference between the inner “consciousness” and the total field of being and consciousness. And the word that came to mind immediately was “seamless.”
Rick: And by “total field of being” you would also mean, like the entire environment that you perceive, the restaurant out the window and everything?
Saniel: The trees, the restaurant, the other people. There was a sudden release into unity. And I often quoted after that, one of Adi Da’s comments about that kind of transition. He said, “You would think that you’re expanding from a point to infinity.” But he said, “It’s more like a balloon being popped and the pressurized air inside being equalized with all space.” There’s a sudden equalization, which is actually what the word “samadhi” means. It’s equalization of pressures. So, I knew intuitively that that was the shift that I had been longing for my whole time of seeking. And shortly after that, this transmission factor came into play and I began feeling, “Well, I want company. So, let’s figure out how to get as many people up and running with this as possible in their own way.” There were all kinds of little insights there, like Ramana Maharishi’s inquiry “Who am I?” did not work for me. Adi Da’s inquiry “Avoiding Relationship” did not work for me. I had an inquiry that was a little longer, a little more wordy, which is kind of not unusual for me, a little wordy. What is it that is conscious of everything arising? No matter what the body and mind are going through, what is the conscious principle here? And so, my takeaway from that is, “Oh, everybody’s got to find an inquiry that works for them.” In many cases, they have to create it themselves on the spot based on what, if they’re going to use a verbal question to help attune themselves, which not everybody does, but those who do, you want one that attunes you most naturally and most directly, rather than assuming that the one that worked for your guru is really empowered by his realization, therefore it’s going to work for you. So, there’s, multiple insights of that kind over the years that have contributed to what’s made it possible for, among other things, you to talk to seven of awakened in the same way. They wouldn’t use the same language, and if we go nitpicking, which is not a bad thing to do sometimes, what factors are present, what factors aren’t. People are in different states and qualities of it. But fundamentally, there’s hundreds of people now who, among other things, aren’t exploitable by a quest that they can’t fulfill unless they do what someone else tells them to do anymore.
Rick: Right. Good. Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like a good place to, like, we’ve taken your story up to this point, now maybe we should hear Linda’s, and then we’ll kind of come back in and discuss a bunch of things with both of you.
Saniel: Sounds great.
Linda: Thank you, that was wonderful.
Saniel: Oh good, thank you. I felt like I was all over the place. It was good.
Rick: There are a lot of things I would like to have probed into there, but we’ll get to them. We’ll talk to Linda.
Linda: Yeah, it’s hard to actually fit a lifetime of being here on the planet in this precious body-mind, to consolidate it, but I’ll do my best and have some brief conversation here. I was raised in Indiana, a little town called Muncie, Indiana, and I had five brothers and sisters. My mother was a very devout Catholic. My father more of an agnostic, but was supportive of my mother wanting to raise us as Catholics, and so, I was raised as a Catholic at a very young age, up and down the age exactly, but between seven and nine probably, I found myself going to church and listening to the priest, and one particular day – it was a beautiful sunny day – I’m sitting on the kneeler, with my back to the priest, and I’m so bored and I’m thinking, “I just want to be out playing,” and I was listening to him saying that, if you’re a good person – I’m very much paraphrasing – you will go to heaven, if you sin, if you are bad, then you will be thrust to hell, and yet God is an all-benevolent, all-loving God. And I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, “Well, how could he be so benevolent if he’s throwing his creation into hell, forever?” So that, I think, actually was the beginning of my questioning, and I was a very shy, very introverted young girl. So, for me to even have that question sit in me, I didn’t know where to take it, because I was afraid to go to the nuns. I went to a parochial school. My mom – I asked my mom, and my mom says, “Go ask your teachers. Ask Sister So-and-so; she’ll help you.” So, I did. I mustered up the courage, and she says, “Well, dear, God works in mysterious ways.” It was a non-answer, really, and a little bit more, and she says, “If you want more of an answer, go to the priest.” And I couldn’t do that because that was just way too scary. So, at that young age I started questioning the Catholic faith, and yet I was very much still going to church every Sunday with my mom at that age. And then my mom, as I got a little bit older, my mom had said to me, as I was asking questions, she says, “When you’re old enough to make your own choice about where you want to go in your religious beliefs or in your way of moving in the world,” – she didn’t quite put it like that – but she says, “When you’re old enough to make your choice, I will support you if you don’t want to go to Mass anymore.” And so around, I’d say around 14 or so, 14, 15, I said to her, “This does not work for me. I am not feeling it. I’m not in it like you are.” And she said, “Okay, well, just take it slowly and see where you want to go.” So eventually I pretty much stopped going to Mass altogether. And at 18, I graduated high school, went into college, put myself through school in Muncie, went to Ball State University, and I was an art major with the emphasis on teaching, and a music and theater minor. So, it was all creative arts, and that’s how I lived my spirituality at the time, as I look back on it. I really enjoyed creating form, creating artistic things in my major. I had a double major. It was actually a triple major. The teaching was art teaching. I could teach any level. And then I also majored in ceramics and photography. So that was added on. And then I had a minor in music and theater. So just loved being on stage. I did a lot of productions in college. I was in a band in my hometown where we went around all over Indiana and Ohio and other places, performing.
Rick: Singing and guitar?
Linda: I didn’t play guitar, I was a singer. And I had the backup band, so I was the lead singer, and that was just so much fun for me.
Rick: I used to play drums in a band.
Linda: Oh, you did?
Rick: Yeah, it was great fun. I’ll send you a photo.
Linda: Yeah, that would be great, I’d love it. Yeah, so that was one of the ways that I found a place where I felt like I really fit. Because growing up, as I had mentioned, I was so shy that I had to really push myself to break out of that shyness. So, I would, in junior high school and high school, I would just push myself to audition for things, audition for cheerleader, and audition for the plays. And I got the lead in my senior play, Bye Bye Birdie, and I was so thrilled that I got the lead, even though I was scared to do that big of a role, but it was really, really fun. And I wasn’t actually attending Mass or anything at that time, because Mom had given me, God bless her, she had said, “Follow your heart,” and so I did. And through college, I think I was so preoccupied with my schooling, and working, and performing in my band, and having a full schedule, because I had to bring money in in order to get myself through school. So, spirituality, that wasn’t really a direction I had in my early 20s, or let’s see, I graduated as I was 22, or 21. So, when I graduated, I felt the need and the urge to move to California. And I picked up my stuff and moved in with my sister and her daughter, and that was, I think, the beginning of a real deep place where I started searching, because we would stay up for hours on end, my sister and I, in the middle of the night, taping our conversations, just about the world. Who are we? What are we doing here? And we’d listen back to the tapes, and it was pretty fascinating. I don’t know what ever happened to those cassettes. I would really love to have them, but they kind of disappeared through all the moves. But that’s where I started exploring, and in my exploration from there through the years, it was really more of a, I would say, a New Age, kind of positive thinking, kind of path that I went on and dabbled in many other things. As I got older, that was kind of falling away a little bit, and I was feeling like there was still something more. I still practiced some of the practices of writing my affirmations on cards and that sort of thing, but it just didn’t seem like it was serving me that much. So that took me into a place where I was dabbling with all kinds of different things. I read Deepak Chopra, and I sat with a man who had more of a kundalini process, and when I addressed him, when I went to him, he asked me what I was looking for, and I said, “Well, I’m really basically looking for a deeper meditation, where I can just go deeper so that I can feel myself more. So that’s what I’m really looking for.” And he said, “Oh, I can help you with that.” So, we worked a little bit with that, and then I left that. I was very eclectic in my seeking.
Saniel: Just to interrupt you for a second, there was a… One of the things that some of us used to tease Linda about is that she was one of the few people we knew who actually really did get all that good affirmation thing working. She had a power walk, “I’m getting better and better every day and every way.” And it actually happened for her, and she then matured into where she then went.
Rick: You used to put little Post-its on your mirror in your refrigerator?
Linda: They were all over my house. I would draw pictures of things that I’m trying to attain, like a better job or I needed a better car, so I drew a picture of a car and I looked at that every day and I affirmed. And this was mostly after I had left my first marriage. I divorced my husband, and I went out on my own. I had never lived alone, ever. And I just focused and intended to find a place of my own without having to have a roommate, and financially I was barely scraping by. And it was just like the universe provided. I found this amazing place where it was my own, on a little piece of water, a channel that went into the bay, San Francisco Bay, and close to where I lived was this little island, and I used to walk around the island, and I’d do my power walks. And my mantra was, “With every day and every way, I am getting better and better!”
Rick: My grandmother told me that when I was about ten years old. I used to go to bed thinking that at night. It didn’t work for me though.
Linda: And I got teased to no end from some of the people, but as Saniel said, it actually kind of worked in some ways for me because I did feel like I was growing. And this was before I met Saniel. I was still kind of dabbling here and there, and I would do my power walks several times around this little island, and then I would go up into the center of the island, where it’s a hill and it’s beautiful trees and bushes and very rustic with lots of rocks and things, and I would sit on the ground and I’d meditate. And I had some phenomenal experiences on that little island with creatures and with nature, and the feeling sense of that oneness, that connectedness. One time I was sitting and meditating, and I just looked up. It was a beautiful sunny day and I just felt like the trees were coming down and embracing me – all the branches. And then a moment later, I noticed to the right, a little moth comes flying over, and then another little moth, two little moths. And they just flew right in front of me for a few seconds, these little moths, this close, and I’m like, “Hello!” I just knew that I had just somehow connected with them. That’s been a huge piece of my process ever since I was little, is my connectedness to creatures and my connectedness to plant life and the earth. No wonder I was a ceramics major. When I was little, I would sit out in the yard for hours in the mud, and I’d bring in these big things of water, so I’d create these big mud maces, and little people, and I made these little villages out of mud. That was just something that my heart just kept pushing me to do, and still today. Not that I build maces in the mud, but I am very, very much adoring my plants. I adore our cats, I adore the horses that are on the property where we’re renting a house. It’s just that creatures really speak to my heart, so I’ve always seen that as part of my spiritual process and how I show up in the world.
Rick: Beautiful. My wife is like that too; she just totally loves animals. She worked at the local animal shelter for eight years, and if there’s anything on television that suggests any sort of pain being inflicted on animals, she just can’t watch it. She’s got to turn the channel.
Linda: That’s exactly it. The instant I know that’s it, I’m going, “Okay, stop it, turn it off.” How funny.
Rick: In fact, when we first got together, I had her watch “Little Big Man,” and there were all these scenes. But there was one point where the cavalry was coming in and shooting all the Indians’ horses, and she completely freaked out, “They’re shooting the horses!” Basically, I had to turn the movie off or fast-forward it or something.
Linda: Yeah, I totally can relate to that. A sister in the heart in that way, huh? That’s beautiful. So, I’m living alone, I’m still doing my practices, my affirmations, and I started dating an old friend that I had known for many years. We ran into each other at a party and just, “Oh, very interesting. Let’s explore a little bit.” And a couple of months into our relationship – no, only about a month into our relationship, a housemate of his told us about this amazing man who’s doing sittings in Greenbrae in his apartment every Sunday, and we really should go and sit with this man. And at the time, I was considering, around that time, to start working perhaps with another teacher, which I hadn’t sat with yet, but I was very curious. And so, I thought, “Okay, I want to go check this guy out.” And it was Saniel Bonder. And I had connected with Saniel through a magazine called Common Ground – that was a very common magazine in the Bay Area, Marin County. And he had an article in this magazine one time – this was before I heard about it from this other woman. I look at his picture, and I’m reading his blurb here, but I’m looking at his picture and I’m going, “This man looks so kind, and his eyes just drew me in.” And so, I filed it away – Saniel Bonder. And then so when this woman said, “Saniel Bonder,” I went, “Oh, that’s the guy I saw on Common Ground.” So, my boyfriend and I went. And that was October, mid-October of ’94. It was two years after Saniel had started teaching, about a year and a half, two years. So, I was totally intrigued. A lot of what Saniel was talking about, since we come from very different backgrounds, kind of went over my head. But what I felt as I sat in the room was this amazing presence, an authenticity and realness about Saniel that was very intriguing. And then he would talk about this teaching around the core wound of existence, and how individuals feel like there’s something more, they’re intuiting that there’s something more, and yet they don’t know what that is. And so, it’s so constantly driving them to seek, and I’m going, “That’s me!” And I felt it here, in my diaphragm, in my solar plexus. There was always an emptiness, no matter what I did. I did several different things, gleaned a lot of knowledge and a lot of support from all these different things that I involved myself in. And I was the kind of person that didn’t want to stick around too long if it wasn’t feeding that place here. So, I’d glean what I needed and then I’d move on. I did a channeled teaching, RAMPHA, School of Enlightenment, up in Washington for a while. My sister was very involved in that organization and learned some amazing things, and yet it still wasn’t the thing that I needed. And this coincided with my early work with Saniel. I wanted to complete that. I wanted to discriminate and see what else was there for me, and if I felt like I needed to move on, then I would move on. And so, I did a six-day retreat with my sister up there in Washington and realized afterwards – good work in some ways, very hyper-masculine in other ways, and I’m done. I completed this, I feel very finished, and now I can really fully focus on my work with Saniel, and that’s what happened. So over time, as I continued to sit with Saniel, my boyfriend and I went every Sunday. I started asking questions privately to Saniel because I was really shy in the group. It was hard for me to speak up. I was very quiet, but listened, listened, listened. And noticed that even though I wasn’t understanding some of the Dharmic terms that he was talking about, I felt a presence that was actually getting ignited in my body, in my own being. And it wasn’t like Saniel was doing something to me; it was really more of me, I believe, gleaning off of his transmission. His transmission was nurturing me to find my own ground and my own strength in my being, and that served me very well. Kept going back. My boyfriend and I broke up after three months, but a very friendly breakup. He continued to come to the sittings also and really learned a lot from Saniel. And then eventually, over time, Saniel and I became interested in each other, and that was really exciting. Because initially I wasn’t attracted to Saniel as a partne
Rick: I was attracted to him definitely as my teacher. And so, it’s a little tricky situation, a teacher coming on to a student, which he never did. He was so integral and so gentle, and once we started expressing our interest in each other, he said, “You are really going to have to make the move because I want to respect the rhythm of your process and who we are exploring together, so I will not come forward – you know who I am – I will not come forward until you feel it’s absolutely necessary for you.” And I so appreciated that. So, we took it very slow, and the initiation happened, the full initiation, and we’ve been together ever since. So that’s been sixteen years. We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary in December, so it’s about sixteen years. And he just so opened me up into my own process. Over time I was just feeling more of an enlivenment. I had a witness awakening, what Saniel called back in the day, and still does in Waking Down to Mutuality, the embodied feeling witness. I had that awakening, lived that for nine months very consistently, and then I had a deepening of the awakening, which is what in our work we call the second birth, which is a further embodiment of that non-separation, further engagement of being simultaneously consciousness but in form, in matter, in the body, full. Every single part of who you are is that consciousness, marriage together. So, I experienced that in August of ’96. You had something you wanted to say?
Saniel: Well, just to go back a little bit to the, when we recognized that there was the possibility of becoming intimate with each other, as Linda was saying, to me particularly, as you had indicated, Rick, given what I had observed with people over many years, I knew it was extremely important for me to be in really the passive mode, so that if our relationship didn’t work out, we would as best as possible be able to protect, if our intimate relationship didn’t work out, we would as best as possible be able to protect or sustain the spiritual connection.
Rick: Right, you didn’t want your personal relationship to damage or jeopardize or sabotage your spiritual path.
Saniel: Right, and to create those complications of the teacher in effect seducing the student and all that. And I have to say, Linda was so clear and in the best sense self-possessed, so strong in knowing who she was, that we were able to go through that and various other adventures. It wasn’t like it was just simple and easy, but the relationship always had this depth and also simplicity to it, a compatibility that has continued more and more delightfully to this day. So, I just wanted to acknowledge that.
Rick: Okay, so Linda, do you feel like that’s pretty, is that your story or should we stop at that point with your story, or is there more that you’d like to unfold before we get into the whole mutual discussion thing?
Linda: Well, I won’t go into the details of the actual awakening itself, but that for me was a moment in time, I remember it very clearly. It was in the afternoon of August 26, ’96 and it was very clear that that was the land ending. There was a teaching always talking about consciousness recognizing itself to be consciousness as you, as form, as … and early on I go, “What? What are they talking about?” I was a very logical, linear kind of thinker, so things needed to make sense to me, and that never made sense. I couldn’t put a finger on it until I actually realized it in that realization, because as I was living the witness quality, my feeling sense of the witness was always hovering here behind my left shoulder.
Rick: That’s interesting, I’ve heard others say that. In fact, there’s this book, I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, called “Collision with the Infinite” by Suzanne Siegel, and she had had a spiritual background and all, but had sort of drifted away from it and was living in Paris and pregnant and just coming back from a swimming lesson, and she was getting on a bus one day and all of a sudden, boom! There was this awakening, and she totally lost all sense of a personal self at that point, yet it felt like there was some kind of observer over her left shoulder. In her case, she didn’t know what was going on, it freaked her out and she spent ten years in terror before she came to terms with it and realized it had been a spiritual awakening. I don’t want to diverge into that story, but the over-the-left-shoulder thing, it’s not the first time I’ve heard that.
Linda: Yes, yes. Sometimes people will call it more of a background realization, and I knew that it wasn’t complete until that sitting where this sense, and even though logically I knew consciousness was everywhere, and you can’t really locate consciousness, but in that sitting what had happened was that feeling sense came like that, and literally knocked me backwards.
Rick: Were you sitting with Saniel at that point?
Linda: Yes, yes. Both awakenings happened in a meditation with Saniel and others in the room.
Rick: I see.
Linda: Yeah, so that’s what happened, and I knew that that was second birth. I knew that was the piece that I was missing, so it was very powerful. And I loved the teaching that Saniel always had in his sittings. He’d say, “I’m looking for company. I’m looking for people who find it just a natural desire and need in their being to show up.” And it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be a teacher of this particular work, just showing up in their own creative arts, in their own teachings, however your being moves you in the world, him looking for people to realize and to bring their gifts. But that was another thing that I just went, “Yes, yes, yes!” And back in the day I never thought I’d be a teacher of this work because I felt a little too shy, but after my second birth, two months later, or about six weeks later actually, I said to Saniel, “I feel like the mother’s milk is backing up in me,” because he didn’t talk about that. And I’d say, “I have to give somehow. I want to start doing sittings.” So, I did. I did my weekly sittings.
Rick: That’s great.
Linda: That’s pretty much it.
Saniel: P.S. the shyness disappeared the instant after the awakening.
Rick: Right.
Saniel: Because she really, literally up to that point, Linda would hardly ever speak like in the sittings. And on my side, I’m sitting there and while people were meditating, I often had my eyes open and so I noticed, I could tell from the expression on her face and just the feeling around her that something was going on. So, after the meditation ended that day, I said, “What’s happening?” And then she proceeded to explain it to us, and her language was extremely salty and vivid. We were all like, “Okay, here she is.”
Linda: It’s like, who just walked into Linda?
Rick: Interesting.
Saniel: And another thing that I want to add also is, that was a very ecstatic meditation for you. The very next morning, Linda had in her meditation, and the awakening was obviously established, but there was this visionary process that opened up where one after another, the faces of humanity came forward and into her and she felt everyone suffering so profoundly. She was literally wailing.
Rick: Wow.
Saniel: Maybe like you never had before.
Linda: Never, ever had I felt that. And it started slowly, visions of all cultures, all ages of faces coming at me and then it sped up and it dropped me into the pain of the world. It just took me right there and I couldn’t stop sobbing. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I was held.
Saniel: That’s continued to be a very primary factor and attribute of Linda’s, not only your realization, but also, your transmission and your service to others. She just, well, it’s not that uncommon as you were describing, Rick, in terms of your wife. What’s your wife’s name?
Rick: Irene.
Saniel: Irene. But in Linda, this is a particularly pronounced attribute, and she really has to work with it. Like Irene, there’s only so much footage of tsunamis that we can expose her to and then she says, “You’ve got to change the channel, I’m saturated, I’m broken open.”
Rick: Interesting. I remember like decades ago I asked my TM teacher some question about the pain of the world or something and she said, “Be an ocean.” And if you think about that metaphor, if you just have a glass of water and you try dissolving some mud in it, it gets muddy pretty fast, but if you have an ocean, you can throw bucket loads of mud in and it tends to dissolve. So, it’s kind of like when you achieved oceanhood, you were able to start processing all this pain of the world, and perhaps on some esoteric level you’re actually helping to heal it and resolve it. It’s not just some visual hallucination you’re having, it’s more like an actual, subtle, washing machine effect that you’re having.
Linda: Thank you, that’s beautifully put. I really feel that. I do feel that that is just part of my being and how I have to show up in the work that I do in the world. Quan Yin, by the way, is one of my deities, she’s my girl.
Rick: She’s sort of the Chinese image of Mother Divine?
Linda: Yeah, the Goddess of Compassion, and I’ve always been a very empathetic person, even as a child. In high school I was known as the “Dear Abby” of my high school. Everybody knew they could come to me and just dump anything, and I would hold the confidence very sacred and I always did that. And I would just be there with them and listen deeply, so that’s just been part of my character I think, even growing up.
Rick: I’ve often heard that it’s said that yogis in the Himalayas and so on, who aren’t even doing anything much externally, are actually kind of helping to hold the world together by virtue of their presence. And Ammaji, the Hugging Saint, I’ve heard her say that … someone asked her something about what happens when you go to bed at night or when you’re in your quiet time, which she has very little of, and she said, “All my devotees’ prayers and all the pain of the world just sort of comes to me and I heal it.” So, it’s like she never stops.
Saniel: Yeah, and that’s … different adepts are arranged differently in relation to these kinds of phenomena.
Rick: Different roles to play.
Saniel: Right, but it really is a 24/7 event. And there’s a process between us, where we fairly early worked out, when we do sittings with people, at the beginning we gaze with one another, which is, as you know, one of our processes we teach and use as a transmission technique, so to speak. And then at the end we do that again, and if Linda’s wound up taking on a lot, oftentimes in sittings she’ll say to people, “If I start crying when I’m looking at you, don’t take it personally.” It may or may not be associated with particular emotions, but it’s just part of what’s happening. But at the end we’ll gaze with one another, and somehow mysteriously she downloads to me any kind of excess. And my nature is such that there’s an easier incineration or dissipation release. It feels like I’m more fiery, she’s more watery, you could say.
Rick: But it’s interesting that you’re able to do that process. I think most people have a kind of a shell that prevents them from being open to all this. And obviously in your awakening you lost your shell, but obviously shells serve a dual purpose. They keep what’s supposed to be in and what’s supposed to be out, out. But if you’re both in and out, if you’ve achieved a larger status, then maybe the shell is superfluous.
Saniel: Well, it’s more like having to learn how to manage the … I love the way you just put that. There are still pieces that have to stay in and other pieces that have to stay out, and so, there’s something happening multidimensionally here, and you have to learn how to navigate or manage. And everybody finds out they’ve got a different calling, different capabilities. And that’s part of the beauty of communities of individuals coming into this, each with their own unique persona and so forth. One of the great things, by the way, about Fairfield, where you’re living, Rick, as you indicated, other than Ted and Hillary who are at a distance, the other waking down and mutuality teachers you talk to are right there in Fairfield. So, people in Fairfield get to see a whole bunch of different personalities manifesting this according to their own temperament and constitution.
Rick: And there are a lot of other awakened people in Fairfield who aren’t into waking down but doing their own thing. It’s just kind of a happening place. Incidentally, I’m really enjoying this conversation, and if we get to a point where we feel like, “Boy, there’s so much more we could talk about, but we’ve been going on for so long,” let’s make it a two-part, if you have the time. So, let’s not rush and we’ll just kind of keep doing stuff, and if we feel like, “All right, this is enough,” we could do a second part, maybe next week or sometime, or whatever works for you.
Saniel: That would be wonderful. Thank you so much.
Rick: Yeah. So, I have some questions here that I told somebody I was going to be interviewing you guys, and I have some questions that somebody sent in, and perhaps I could read them and that would kind of springboard us into more of a discussion about waking down itself and the whole process of what it entails and what it can do for people and all. So here we go. The first question was, “Can some people wake up into their conditioning? In other words, can the neurosis, or in some cases psychosis, still be running the show after the wake-up, and if so, wouldn’t it be difficult, if not impossible, to go back and attempt to alter the persona following the wake-up?”
Saniel: Oh, great question. Really great question. To me, I think that’s what does happen. You wake up, or in our language, you wake down as you are. In my first book, “The White Hot Yoga of the Heart,” I’ve got an essay, if I can remember the title, “Take a mugshot of the body-mind exactly as it is. That’s who’s going to awaken, warts and all.” Now there is, what we’re discovering is that this, in some ways, maybe that’s been happening all through history anyway, but the old schools typically required a lot of purificatory preparation of the human character before people would even be considered candidates for ultimate awakening and the challenges that it would bring forth.
Rick: Yeah, some of the old schoolteachers went so far as to say, “You better clean that stuff up before you awaken, otherwise you’ll be stuck with it.” Patanjali’s whole path of Ashtanga Yoga, that you’re supposed to move all these things along simultaneously so you don’t get lopsided.
Saniel: Right, and go through sequentially from taking responsibility for the gross body-mind and then the energetic system and the various levels of mind and so forth. And you’d have to achieve mastery before you’d get initiated into the next stages. And what we see happening in our time appears to be some kind of a new format emerging, a new model of how maturity is reached, or the greatest possible wholeness and self-mastery even, where these great awakenings do appear to be taking place and stabilizing in people who haven’t fulfilled the ancient or medieval criteria for what your character is supposed to be like, what qualities of competence and proficiency you have in various preliminary yogas and so forth. Characters are waking up who are much, we could say, more raw rather than cooked. And then what we’re seeing is the post-awakening process is when we get to grow into our full humanness. Now, there’s a caveat here. Linda and I talk about this on the DVDs that I think you have a copy of, “Awakened Radiant.” Some people are just plain old way too compromised, at least with respect to our process, which is very powerful. It’s an enormous energetic that tends to get activated in people. It makes for changes. And if a person is significantly beyond neurotic and into psychotic, this is going to be bad news.
Rick: Yeah.
Saniel: Not only at the level of they might get that much more crazy inflated, that’s possible, but also, as you were suggesting, it becomes difficult to impossible for them to find the will and the wherewithal to do the work to achieve a fundamental healing or wholeness that produces an integrated ego, an integrated adult ego that’s capable of enduring the paradoxes and the challenges of the awakened life.
Rick: And can they even achieve the awakened life? Maybe they’re so damaged, so screwed up, to use that terminology, that it’s just not going to be very possible for them to awaken in that condition, and maybe some other maturation and healing and stuff has to take place before it’s even feasible or realistic to expect.
Saniel: One or the other of those two, if they do awaken, that’s not necessarily a good thing for them. In other words, they can have an expanded consciousness, but that tends to produce even crazier crazy people, to be blunt about it.
Rick: Now, on the flips … I’m sorry, go ahead.
Linda: We have had that in our work, actually, where individuals have been psychologically and emotionally a bit compromised, levels of minds again. Their development is very weak, perhaps, in those areas, and yet, their being opens up to the realization of consciousness. But as Saniel was pointing out, it can really create a lot of distress and turmoil, even in the awakened condition, because in this work, it’s not just about the absolute transcendence of matter and form and life. It is thrusting you down in it even more fully. You’re way more aware, you’re way more sensitive, you’re way more conscious in the midst of this awakening.
Rick: Yeah. In the TM world, there’s this sort of understanding that you don’t really awaken or get enlightened as the term they might use, or “cosmic consciousness” is another term that’s used, until a fairly high degree of perfection has been achieved in terms of purity of the nervous system, and it’s assumed that that purity of physiological functioning is going to correlate with highly advanced degrees of emotional development and psychological health and so on. And I haven’t necessarily seen that pan out in practice. It also has, I think, in some cases been a stumbling block for people because they feel like, “Well, I feel so imperfect that this just isn’t going to happen for me in this lifetime. I’ve been doing this for 30, 40 years and it seems like I’ve still got a long way to go, so I might as well give up on the hope of awakening.” So, it’s like you can look at it both ways.
Saniel: Yeah.
Linda: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Saniel: Thank you. And I’ll tell you, my feeling all along has been, “Well, I clearly wasn’t some kind of perfected being when I awakened, and let’s try something else.” Because that factor you just pointed to, of the, “Oh well, I’m not good enough,” “I’m deficient, I’m defective, I don’t seem to be able to do it,” that’s been so much of the history of spirituality. So, our work is a kind of experimental gamble that says, again, going back to that original language, “Let’s get as many people cooking with this as possible, find ways to keep helping one another to grow and to refine the human character.” And I really feel that a new…I think in time, over generations, centuries, I have a very strong suspicion that the old view of spirituality is going to be supplanted by a different kind of human wholeness, in which the kind of awakening we’re talking about, this fundamental fusion of spirit and matter, this unification, and the further growth a la the integral orientation of structural growth or growth along various different lines of development, will be something that we go through after that basic awakening, and we’ll wind up seeing qualities, something like traditional capabilities and sensitivities that we’ve seen in traditional yogis and saints and sages and so forth, will be attained by people or grown into, is a better word, in the post-awakening sequences, where they’re no longer looking for the fundamental unification. That’s a given. But the body-mind continues to evolve and mature and refine. So, it’s really a different developmental model, actually.
Rick: Well, considering the acceleration that seems to be taking place in the world, we may not be talking about centuries. One thought that just occurred to me as you were saying that is that maybe the case is that a couple thousand years ago, when we had the Buddha and these great sages of antiquity, the sort of membrane that had to be pierced to awaken was so thick that you pretty much had to be a perfected being in order to have the oomph to pierce through it, to break through into enlightenment. And these days it’s been pierced so many times by so many people and the whole pace of world consciousness is accelerating so quickly that the bar for entry has been lowered to a great extent and with a much lesser degree of perfection or personal development, one can break through into that conscious awakening. Do you think there’s something to that?
Saniel: I do. Do you want to respond or shall I? I do, and at the same time I also feel that the whole worldview underneath what enlightenment means, what spirituality is about, is itself evolving. And a simple, as essentially as I can state it, to me what has appeared to be the case is that in human prehistory we were simply embedded. Most humans were embedded in nature, in our tribal clan identity. And there were a few heroic characters who would break through, and they would be the great leaders, the great kings, the great sages, whatever. And at some point in the conventional view of history, not trying to take into account legends of Atlantis and all that, but the history that we can trace archaeologically, somewhere between 10 and 5,000 years ago, we in effect went through a transition from being so embedded in material nature. You could say it was a hyper feminine quality of consciousness that had almost no distinct differentiated self-awareness. And what occurred was that around the globe, in many different cultures, suddenly humanity began moving toward agriculture and then city states, toward literacy, and toward more and more people beginning to have a differentiated self-awareness, although it’s been a long, slow process over centuries and millennia. But what that produced, in my view, was a kind of, the force of the differentiation became a dissociation, a cut off. And in the classic East, that took the form of, okay, what’s going on here? This is a snake pit of karma, of endless craving and desire and grasping and, lifetime after lifetime, let me out of here. Classic Eastern orientation is escape into ultimate transcendence. And there have been great arguments, what is the great, the true liberation? That’s a big deal for the classic, traditional Eastern practitioner. In the classic West, as it evolved, especially a bit later, I mean, there was the Greeks and Romans, but then at a later point, starting, in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and so on, the disposition was more that of the differentiated and dissociated mind. And so, the mind is able to look at material nature and you have people like Sir Francis Bacon saying, we must torture her secrets out of nature, put her to the rack. You literally have that kind of language. And it’s expressive of, again, I use that term hypermasculine because it’s so isolated into itself that it’s dissociated, it’s not just differentiated. So, to me, what I see apparently taking place in our time is the beginning of a really epical shift, another great evolutionary sequence that, yeah, there’s tremendous acceleration of change going on, but my hunch is that to work out all the kinks of this, particularly with the world as wild as it is these days, it’s more likely to be generations and centuries than weeks and months and a few years.
Rick: I wouldn’t say a few, but if you think how much the world has changed in the last hundred years though, airplanes, computers, the atomic bomb, all the things that have happened in our lifetimes even, it’s pretty radical change and everyone seems to say that the pace of it keeps accelerating.
Saniel: And I agree with that, and at the same time, what it takes for something beyond a few people on the leading edge, even if that’s hundreds of thousands or multiple millions, what it takes for humanity to outgrow its deep-rooted fundamentalisms and so forth …
Rick: Yeah, there’s a lot to clean up.
Saniel: There’s a lot, but I do completely acknowledge it. It feels like the whole thing is not only evolving, it’s accelerating.
Rick: Yeah. Do you want to add to that, Linda, before I go on to the next question?
Linda: No, I think that was pretty complete. Thank you.
Rick: Okay, good. So, this next question, this person asked, she said, “Embodiment, as I see it, and as Adyashanti speaks of it, is coming back into the body after having been to the mountaintop, but this time with the ego dissolved and only wanting to serve the world, not our own self-interest.” And perhaps I could add to this question this whole notion of dissolving the ego, which seems to be really big in many spiritual circles these days, that you’re really not a person, there’s no one home, you don’t need to do spiritual practices because that implies that there’s someone to do them, you should just give up the search, yada, yada, yada. So, what do you say to all that?
Linda: Yes, through the ages there’s been this consideration, not even reaching the goal at the mountaintop and then coming back down to the body. Some traditions you don’t even come back down to the body, as you were just speaking, this place of, “This is all illusion anyway.” In our process, we’ve actually had some people say, “First you wake up, then you wake down,” but that’s not really how it happens. For some who enter into the waking-down-mutuality work, they may have had, prior to even encountering us, a very transcendental kind of realization, and they’re feeling and intuiting that there’s more to their realization, and so they’re intrigued by the embodiment aspect of this work. But in second birth, quite often, it is the simultaneity of consciousness and matter realizing itself non-separate, non-dua
Linda: you’re there. So, it’s not that you have to have the consciousness piece prior to the embodied piece; they coincide in second birth awakening, quite often. And as far as perfecting the ego or living a life of serving others and not being concerned about self …
Rick: Or even having an ego. Do you guys feel like you have egos? There are so many people I talk to who say, “There’s no one home,” “Life without a center.”
Saniel: Guilty as charged! (Laughter)
Rick: And you know …
Linda: Yeah, I adore my ego, because as Saniel has pointed out for years, you can’t get out of the bed in the morning and fix yourself a cup of tea or comb your hair without an ego, right? Now, however, you don’t want the ego to run rampant in its place of control and dissociating from individuals, right? You don’t want it to be solely about oneself; you don’t want to be narcissistic in the ego. But there is the balance; there is the realization and the conscious aspect of who you are that embraces that place of ego. And then you can actually move from more of a whole being – when we say “whole being,” we really mean it. It’s every part of who you are, even the ego, and seeing and also getting reflected to the times when the ego gets a little bit out of whack. You’re going to have people coming to you and going, “You know, that’s a little too strong right there.” You’re constantly adjusting; you’re constantly learning and evolving, even after second birth. Some people look at the awakening itself and say, “Well, that’s the goa
Linda: that’s where I want to go.” But, as Saniel says, it’s second birth; you’ve got to get a life afterwards, and you have to continue to grow, evolve, and serve others, and serve yourself too. It’s not merely just serving others from a selfless, altruistic place. You have to take care of self in order to take care of others. So that’s kind of how we feel it; we live it. And again, if you’re imbalanced, if you’re really doing your work in mutuality, you’re going to have trusted friends and others, and teachers and mentors, saying, reflecting to you, “There, right there. That’s a piece where you can look at and adjust.”
Saniel: Yeah. There’s a lot more to say about this.
Rick: Well, I was just going to say, there are a lot of people that I’ve interviewed and have yet to interview who fall into this so-called “neo-advaita basket.” Just yesterday I received an email from somebody saying, “Hey, what’s with all this neo-advaita bashing that you do?” And I wouldn’t think of myself as bashing, but I often bring up the topic because it perplexes me. And I actually don’t know quite how to interview these people because there’s so much of an emphasis on their not being a person. It’s not that you get out of bed in the morning and brush your hair and fix your teeth, it’s that hair is brushed, teeth is fixed, but there’s no one doing it. And there’s such a strong emphasis on that. And I’m not one to dispute people’s experience, maybe that’s the way they experience the world, I can’t say they don’t. But I wonder, am I missing something? Because that’s not how I experience the world. I experience the impersonal, silent, nothing-is-happening quality, but also, I feel like I’m driving down the road at 70 miles an hour and have the distinct feeling that there’s nobody driving the car, and yet there is somebody driving the car, so passengers can relax. So, to me it’s both. But these people who emphasize so heavily on their not being a person, and then extrapolate from that, that you should give up the search or you shouldn’t do practices because practices imply that there’s a practicer, and you’re only reinforcing a sense of individuation. I haven’t fully grokked that whole perspective.
Saniel: Yeah, well thank you, that’s why I say I feel like this is an enormous consideration. And it’s right at the center of the spiritual debate for however long we’re going to be going through it. And we were in some ways being playful a minute ago, guilty as charged. People could read that very wrongly. To me, that kind of language, that whole perspective, is a kind of fetishism for a certain quality that is possible in awakening processes. Classically in Indian Advaita language, people would say things like, “I’ve realized the Self, now I’m free to die.” Because among other things, the world doesn’t matter. It’s all an illusion anyway. One of my all-time favorite great Advaita lionesses was a woman named Brahmagnyama who lived in the mid-20th century. And she was so radical, she wouldn’t even take disciples. She said, “You know, you don’t exist. Nothing exists.” If you’re going to get me to open my mouth on this stuff, trust me, nothing exists. Realize that, leave me alone. And so, there is an authentic possibility that many people are having more or less profound realizations of, where the immersion in that impersonal expanse of existence is so profound that in Sanskrit, one of the terms is the antahkarana, the local psychic ego structure. For all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist. And the person goes around without such a thing, which for some people, it can be very pleasurable and harmonious and full of flow. There’s no doer, another way of languaging it. For other people, the shock of that, and I’ve met people, in fact, in Fairfield. I’ve met people for whom, when that realization awakened, they were not ready for it, and it took them years. Kind of like the Suzanne Siegel story you mentioned.
Rick: Yeah.
Saniel: And so, what is emerging now, and I really want to credit Ken Wilber’s work, the whole integral orientation, the combining not only of psychology, but of developmental understanding of all the different aspects of a human character. And our work, Genpo Roshi, whatever his current troubles and issues are, Big Mind is a huge innovation made by a credentialed Zen master who is a lineage steward. And I know he’s stepped aside for the time being, and blessings, he’s a friend of ours. We love Genpo.
Rick: I interviewed him a few months ago and really enjoyed it. And we were supposed to do another one the next week or something, and then the whole thing broke. And so, I emailed him, I said, “Whenever you feel ready, we’ll be there.”
Saniel: And so, the point is, and I remember Genpo and us talking with one another at a meeting at an integral conference, and he said, “My traditional guru, Roshi, my Zen master, couldn’t have gone where I’m going.” And we were saying, same with my teacher, that something new is emerging here that among other things doesn’t require that radical obliteration of the sense of a local self in order for realization to be authentic. And furthermore, politely but firmly argues, maybe that’s not really the ultimate state. Maybe that is a stage along the way that actually human realizers need to outgrow. And that, by the way, was one of Adi Das’ contributions, a very vigorous argument toward a greater integration. Now his way of living it was, as I said earlier, not a model. But something else is emerging now that I feel what you’re giving voice to is the more likely future of human beings than that, the sense of an egoless flow state. And I also want to add, again, for every person who gets to be living that stably and can happily say, “Yep, no problem,” the I that was here is gone. And I’m certain of it. There are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, who can’t get there. And as you mentioned earlier, start to despair and lose hope and figure, “I can’t do it in this lifetime, I’m too much of an ego.” So, we’ve got a big debate getting underway here.
Rick: Yeah. Incidentally, I know a couple of people, one of whom I’ve interviewed already, Scott Killeby, and another whom I’m going to interview, Jeff Foster, who did just as you said, they kind of went through that stage of there being no person and so on, and heavy emphasis on that, and the world is an illusion. And then have kind of grown out of that and are now talking in a more holistic way. Like Jeff tells this story about taking a walk with his mother, and his mother points out, “Oh, look at that beautiful tree,” and he goes into this whole heavy rap with her about how there is no tree and there is no person and all, and now he kind of kicks himself when he thinks about that.
Saniel: I’m sorry, go ahead.
Rick: No, go ahead, that’s basically the point.
Saniel: Thank you. One of the very interesting moments, we met one of the current Advaita teachers quite some years ago, about a decade ago. And obviously, dharmically, we’re on slightly different wavelengths, and we could agree that we have some disagreements and made a nice connection. And then a few weeks or months later, I forget when exactly, we just got a one-line email from him, a number of Advaita teachers had gathered at some hot springs and had a retreat together. These are all people who had been taught by Papaji, who was a disciple of Ramana. And he wrote and he said, ” I just want to let you know that we all agreed that something like what you call waking down into life is really where the process seems to be taking us.”
Rick: Oh, cool.
Saniel: And, how they each speak with respect to the ego, the woman was quoting Adi Ashanti, there are different emphases. But there’s a lot of ferment around this big issue. And it’s really important, because if people can be empowered to awaken without feeling like they’ve got to continue to go to war on their ego and everything associated with it, all their weirdo desires, all their emotional reactivity, all of the quirky animal stuff that supposedly they’re supposed to be beyond, if that war comes to an end, what we discover is suddenly people have got a lot more free energy and attention to awaken.
Rick: Cool. Well, I won’t feel so guilty about harping on it as often as I do. It does seem important to me, and it’s a little bit perplexing to me, because I sort of feel like, well, maybe they’ve got something that I don’t understand, but it’s reassuring to have this conversation with you, because I feel intuitively that it’s only half the picture. And search is both a candy mint and a breath mint, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Saniel: I should probably send you a copy, and I think we will, Rick, as a gift to you, I’ll send you a copy of my first book, The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart.
Rick: Actually I read it years ago. You can send me a copy anyway. I listened to it on an audio tape one time when we were driving down to New Mexico years ago.
Saniel: That’s a different book.
Rick: Oh, okay, sorry. This was like ten years ago I listened to it.
Saniel: That was probably Waking Down. There was a lot of White Hot in it, I remember that. Well, yeah, and that’s true of Waking Down, but The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart is a bit more colorful, we could say, and I was also really in my Young Turk days, and I felt very much alone, and I was kind of going to war with this whole perspective. I have some sterner comparisons to make about what that, apparently liberated, but from this more embodied perspective, it’s an encapsulated and isolated state of consciousness that seems to be, it calls itself non-dual. And in some ways, there’s a legitimate perspective from which it may be the height of a kind of very subtle but completely impenetrable dualism. Like the guy saying, the tree doesn’t exist. So again, there’s a lot more to this discussion, and I’m glad we can get into it.
Rick: Yeah, no, please do. I’ll read it. And if you have it in audio version, send that because I have more time to listen to things than I have to read them.
Saniel: Unfortunately, that one’s too big.
Rick: Okay, I’ll read it. So, I feel like, well I have one more question here, maybe we could end with this question, and then as I suggested, maybe we could have a follow-up, because I feel like we could continue this conversation, but it’s been almost two hours and that’s probably enough for anybody to listen to, even in segments. So let me give you one more question and then we’ll take a break and we’ll come back for part two. And so, this is the question that this woman asked me to ask you, “Why does it have to be taught when it seems to be a completely natural evolution of a self-realized soul?” And I think she’s referring to the sort of, if you’re self-realized, why do you have to do anything else to actualize or wake down or become a more holistic human being when it’s just going to happen anyway naturally? I think that’s the question.
Linda: Well, for some it is very graceful, and it can happen naturally if they’re doing their work in the ways that they need to do their work, but for most, individuals really do need to be guided and have suggestions given to them in order to make the choices, to make what I like to call “skillful, willful choices,” conscious choices. And so, the guidance goes right back also to mutuality, where you can do a level of work on your own and you can also have the feeling sense of, “Well, we’re all one, aren’t we anyway?” And this is true; we are interconnected, but that’s not individual’s truth until you actually embody it and realize it, you see. So, it can be a concept and you can live from that place of going, “Well, yeah, I’m just connected with everyone and I don’t need anything else.” That may work for some, but others very much need the support and the suggestions and the guidance and in this work, very much the transmission of waking down and mutuality. All religions, paths, spiritual processes have a specific kind of transmission. They’re all transmitting. This work has a very specific kind of transmission of awakened being force where the teachers and the mentors are entrusted to help individuals template off of that transmission of being. That’s a very activating force and it really enables one to hear the suggestions and feel their internal impulses more readily. It activates that self-questioning, that guidance in oneself, the transmission. So, these are all just bullet point things that I’d like to respond to that.
Rick: Do you feel that it’s possible that a person could awaken genuinely and yet through some sort of negligence or inattention or disinterest or whatever, get stuck at a certain point and sort of miss out on more glorious possibilities? That they should take a more proactive role even after awakening to unfold everything that could potentially be unfolded?
Linda: Absolutely.
Saniel: Right. To us it’s about the awakening and empowerment of not only a new consciousness, but also, a new kind of human character. A new kind of character, a different way for humans to be in the world that goes beyond being on one side or the other of what we call the spirit matter split. And that leading then to the development of a new culture. And part of our urgency in this argument, if you want to call it that, goes to in response to this lady’s question, well yeah, if you don’t feel the need for help or for further work, blessings on your journey. But we’re looking to find people who recognize that it’s not enough to come into this kind of sublime state and sort of hope others may someday as well, that we’ve got work to do on this planet. And there’s a kind of narcissism in that sort of flow consciousness, which again, like your friends who were talking about, I lectured my mother, there’s no such thing as a tree there. Well, when you embody more, like Linda, , the day after her awakening, and you land here on this planet more fully, to us there’s a lot of work to be done. And it’s going to take not only people who’ve come into an awakened state of consciousness, but also, people who have refined all kinds of skills. And not only, by the way, relatively spiritual skills, but business skills, political skills, leadership skills in all kinds of fields. Because as long as we’re not doing that, we are letting people who are profoundly undeveloped in these ways, really control massive amounts of human society in ways that are very unconscious, driven by, as we saw in the last financial collapse, massive cultural mistakes, such as institutionalized greed.
Rick: Yeah, if you watch that documentary Inside Job, the guys that were primarily behind that whole thing, are running around spending thousands of dollars every night on cocaine and prostitutes, and those are the people that were running our economy.
Saniel: So, so from our perspective, we’re actually in this next phase of our work, we’re founding what we’re going to call Human Sun University. And its focus is to awaken and empower leaders for the third millennium. And to contribute, yeah, the awakening thing, the way we look at it, it’s kind of stage one. It’s very important, but Linda quoting again, it’s just a birth. It’s literally just the beginning of a new life. And we want to help people develop a perspective where they not only want to bring forward their gifts, but they feel, and I appreciate this is more and more an integral in other groups as well, more and more of an obligation. Fnd out what you’re here to do that works for you, that makes your soul sing, and do it, because the world needs you to come forward.
Rick: Great. That’s a good stopping point. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to listen to this myself and write down any questions that I think of while I listen to it. I’m going to get it up on the web as quickly as possible and I invite anybody who watches or listens to it to email me, rick@batgap.com, or post messages on batgap.com, which you’ll also see a place to do, any questions you may have for Saniel and Linda. And we will do a follow-up, hopefully the next interview in the series, and if all goes smoothly and quickly, technologically speaking, we’ll have some window of time for you to post questions and I can ask those, and in that follow-up, we’ll talk more about the things Saniel just alluded to, this university, and you mentioned a stage one, so we’ll hear about whatever other stages there may be, and that’s what we’ll do. This has been fun, thank you very much. Those who have been listening or watching in whatever way you have found this can come to www.batgap.com, that’s an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, that’s B-A-T-G-A-P, and there you will find all the interviews that have been done so far. You can subscribe to an email newsletter there and you won’t be bombarded with emails, you’ll just get about one a week whenever a new interview comes up, notifying you of it. There’s also sort of discussion groups that happen there if you want to participate in those. You’ll also see links to a podcast, I have one guy, I’ve mentioned this a couple of times, and he listens to these while riding horses in northern Arizona, mending fences.
Saniel: Wow, talking about Buddha at the Gas Pump, right!
Rick: So if you’re the podcast kind of person, you can subscribe to the podcast. Personally, I can’t sit in my computer chair any longer than I do, and I listen to a lot of stuff on my iPod. So, thank you very much for listening or watching, thank you Saniel and Linda, and we will see you next week.