Sarah Taylor Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how childhood trauma, anxiety, and nervous-system patterns can obscure an early sense of spacious awareness. It also examines meditation, creativity, Buddhist practice, and healing beyond limiting identities and diagnoses.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can meditation help heal the effects of trauma and chronic anxiety?
• Can creativity, music, or acting open a person to spiritual awareness?
• How can someone move beyond a mental-health diagnosis that does not fit their experience?
• What can cause a childhood experience of unity or spacious awareness to fade?
• How can spiritual practice support recovery from depression and emotional suffering?

Key takeaways

• Trauma can keep the nervous system locked in a high-alert state.
• Emotional abuse can affect the body and brain much like physical trauma.
• The nervous system and brain can heal and develop new patterns.
• Meditation can calm the nervous system and support emotional healing.
• Creative expression can provide a doorway into presence and connection.
• Spiritual awakening does not automatically resolve unresolved trauma.
• A diagnosis should not become a person’s entire identity.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews or conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This program and all the time we put into it are made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to support it in any amount, please click on the PayPal button on every page of the site. There’s also a Donate page with other alternatives if you don’t like dealing with PayPal.

My guest today is Sarah Taylor, and I met Sarah at the Science of Non-Duality Conference last October. We hit it off and had some fun together. I think that, at that point, Sarah wasn’t feeling like she was quite ready to do an interview, but now she is, and so here we go.

Sarah: Yeah, I was like, “I don’t know, Rick, not yet.” We’d check in through email, and I’d say, “I don’t know. I’ll let you know.”

Rick: That’s always a good sign. We’re much more inclined to interview people who have that attitude than people who are champing at the bit.

I met Sarah because she and I are both friends with Susanna Marie, who recommended her and who has been sort of a mentor for her.

Sarah: She’s wonderful.

Rick: Yeah. So, a little bit about Sarah. I’m just going to read the first part of a bio and let her fill in the rest. Sarah is an actor, a writer, and a stand-up comedian. Can you be funny sitting down, or do you have to be standing up?

Sarah: Never. I always have to be standing up, Rick. It just doesn’t work if you’re sitting down.

Rick: So you’re not going to be funny in this interview, then?

Sarah: Not at all. It’s going to be a very serious, humorless interview.

Rick: So she’s those things, and she’s also a spiritual and creative mentor living in Los Angeles. As a child, creativity and spirituality were in the forefront of her life. The lived experience of unity faded as trauma and stress from a troubled home edged out this awareness. But as Sarah began to discover singing and acting, she was hooked on the transcendence they evoked. Creativity became her church.

Actually, I wrote down another little thing. Sarah’s working on a book, and I’ve read a few rough drafts of some chapters. It’s going to be a very good book because she’s a good writer, and she’s been living a fascinating life.

But here’s something maybe we can start with, and feel free to just elaborate and fill in and take us off on tangents. At age four or five, on the playground at school, you would stand on the wood chips amongst the swing sets and slides and, with eyes open, gaze at the space in front of you until you were the space: vast, tranquil nothingness and everythingness. It was all around you, and you were it—home. I replaced “I” with “you” just to read that. But anyway, is that a good starting place?

Sarah: Yeah, sure. I think the funny thing about this is that—and maybe this is the way it is for a lot of people who come to spirituality later on and then go, “Oh, I remember this feeling. I felt it as a child.” I think we all are connected like that when we’re young, so I don’t think it’s just that special people have it.

But yeah, as soon as I started meditating and having deep experiences later on, on the spiritual path, I was like, “Oh, that’s what I was doing.” It actually was a specific meditation in the Dzogchen tradition called Awareness of Awareness, which I guess Padmasambhava, an eighth-century Buddhist meditation master, taught. I was just gazing downwards and resting in awareness, but holding inside and outside at the same time.

And yeah, it was an escape. When I was a child, I’d also lie on my bunk bed, the bottom bunk, and look up at a wood knot just above me. I’d focus on that until I was taken into a transcendent place. So I must have been six or seven or eight.

It started out—I think it was my lived experience. I remember looking around at my family and going, “Huh, wow, everybody’s just really running around. This is what people do. Okay, all right, okay.” It was kind of being a witness to it in a way. And then it became sort of an escape, I think. Around seven or eight, those experiences—I can’t really remember them—there was a kind of shutting down that happened.

Rick: Yeah, our friend Susanna said a similar thing, that she felt it slipping away. It was like she was trying to hold on to it: “Oh, I don’t want to lose this.” But then life just kept intensifying, and it kind of slipped away.

Sarah: I think for me it was more like the survival mechanism, the fight-or-flight mechanism, with how highly strung my nervous system was becoming.

Rick: Yeah.

Sarah: I had a troubled home. Nobody has a perfect upbringing, but it was a bit troubled. When the nervous system is really keyed up, that edges out so much.

Rick: Yeah, that’s why so many meditation practices are designed to get the nervous system unkeyed, because a more settled mind and nervous system are more conducive to clarity and transcendence.

Sarah: Totally. For anybody who suffered trauma and says, “Well, I’m not good at meditation,” or “I want the spiritual path, I want to wake up, I want to—whatever—but I don’t want to meditate,” I’m usually like, “Try it, because it’s so soothing and calming, and it rewires your nervous system.” You know this.

Meditation is so soothing and calming, and it rewires your nervous system.

Rick: Oh yeah. I suppose it’s not too much of a stretch for people to hear “meditation” and “nervous system” in the same sentence, because everything we experience has a physiological basis, or a neurophysiological basis. If it’s a significant experience or a significant shift in awareness, there should be a significant shift in the physiology.

Sarah: Mm-hmm, there sure is. I found just on my path that trauma, even after very significant realizations, keeps bumping the nervous system offline.

Rick: They’ve done studies on meditation where they’ll expose long-term meditators to a very stressful experience, like a loud, sudden, unexpected sound. The nervous system will react, but there’s a much quicker recovery time from those things; it gets back to stasis much sooner.

Sarah: Well, yeah, there’s something about the nervous system’s set point. Apparently, the nervous system doesn’t like to go way up and way down. So, if you’re very young when you’re developing as a human being and you’re learning that you need to be on high alert, your set point will be higher. The nervous system goes, “Okay, I don’t want to go up and down like this, so let’s just stay right here and keep it high.”

Rick: Interesting.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m no trauma expert, but I’ve learned some things.

Rick: I think that’s true. That’s part of the deal with PTSD. There’s so much excitation, agitation, or trauma that the nervous system gets habituated to functioning that way—the fight-or-flight response, which is supposed to be a momentary thing that’s important in a saber-toothed tiger incident. But if it happens often enough, it becomes the norm.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: But the bright side of this discussion is that no matter how much of that has been piled on through stressful incidents, it can all be unwound and deconditioned, and we can get back to a very beautiful style of physiological functioning. That, too, has research on it. They’re doing research on PTSD sufferers and so on.

Sarah: The nervous system can heal, the body can heal, the mind heals, the brain heals, new neural pathways develop, and awakening helps that.

Rick: Yeah.

Sarah: I didn’t get into this thinking, “I want to wake up.” I just wanted to sleep better at night. I had anxiety; I was a very anxious person, and I had stage fright. Yet I loved performing, so it was this push-pull of, “Well, I love doing this, but I kind of throw up before I do it. Gee, is that normal?”

So, yeah, I was just like, “Oh, I guess I’ll learn meditation,” and then I got way more than I bargained for.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. Well, we’re jumping ahead a little bit. I don’t want to have you talk about anything you don’t want to talk about, so you can give a very short answer if you wish. But for the sake of those—and there are probably many—who also went through traumatic childhoods, is there anything you can say to make your experience a little more specific or concrete, so that people can relate and say, “Wow, if she went through that, then maybe there’s hope for me?”

Sarah: Yeah. I think with any type of trauma, you feel like your boundaries are being crossed. There was a lot of that, and just feeling like there’s a threat to the organism, like there’s some sort of threat. Even psychological and emotional abuse can be just as devastating as physical abuse.

I found that sometimes people who weren’t physically abused say, “What? Everything’s fine. I don’t know why I’m so anxious. I don’t know why I have so many problems. I don’t know why I…” But emotional abuse can feel like physical abuse. Emotional abuse and sexual abuse are crossings of boundaries. It’s actually something you can point to and go, “Whoa, this happened,” even though people block it out as a survival mechanism.

So, whether the trauma was emotional or physical, apparently the nervous system and the brain respond similarly. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Peter Levine’s work. He’s got a great book, Waking the Tiger, that I highly recommend for people to read if they’ve had any kind of trauma in their background.

He says things like a surgery when you’re four years old, or three, or before the age of seven or something, can be extremely traumatic, which I had. I had a list of things that were wonderful in my childhood, but everybody did their best. So there’s no blame or anything, but it is what it is.

Falling off your bike and not being able to discharge that energy—Peter Levine talks about this in a much more eloquent way—but even just falling off your bike when you’re six and trying to ride a bike, and it’s a hard fall, and let’s say a parent is saying, “Get back up on the bike,” and you don’t have a chance to discharge the energy and to cry and to go, “That was scary,” and to shake a little bit, then it stuffs down; it gets stuffed down. So our nervous systems are filled with stuffed-down stuff.

Rick: I’ll bet that circumcision creates a lot of stuffed-down stuff for little infants that don’t know what the heck is going on. All of a sudden, they must carry all kinds of sexual issues.

Sarah: Maybe. Yeah, I wonder if there’s some research done on that.

Rick: In a couple of weeks, I’m going to interview a guy who wrote a book called Soul’s Gift and another one called Soul’s Plan. Basically, he seems to be saying that even if we’re abused—there may be exceptions to this, and I’ve only read a little bit of his book so far—even if we’re abused, it’s like we actually made a plan for that to happen as we came into this life. It may have been done in collaboration with our abuser.

The abuser might have said, “You know, I really don’t want to do this. I love you. I can’t possibly treat you that way,” and we might say, “But I want you to, because I need to have that experience in order to undergo such-and-such a growth.” Do you think that there’s any validity to that way of thinking?

Sarah: I do, yeah. I’m grateful for my life, and we’re all one organism, we’re all one thing, so we’re all in cooperation. Even somebody like Donald Trump—he’s playing a role. I can just imagine him before having to land in a body: he’s like, “What? You want me to do what?” But yeah, everybody’s kind of playing a role so that humanity can evolve in some way, and that involves the individual evolving, the individual consciousness.

Rick: Yeah, all the world’s a stage, and each man in his time plays many parts, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Rick: We have our exits and our entrances.

Sarah: That’s right. Shakespeare.

Rick: Yeah.

Creativity as a doorway to transcendence

Sarah: So, all the stuff that I was doing—kind of going into a meditative, absorbed state when I was very young—was actually probably really helpful for my nervous system. Then I kind of forgot about it and tried to fit in and everything, and then I discovered singing when I was about 14. That was when the transcendence started returning.

Rick: Oh, really? So that wasn’t a long hiatus, if you went from nine to fourteen. That’s pretty good.

Sarah: Yeah, or it was probably about maybe six or seven—six—and then, yeah, I thought, “Oh, wow.” So, this singing thing, this creative thing that I do, whether it’s writing or acting out little characters for my family, or acting out scenes with my dolls in my room when I was little, I guess I was feeling it then, too.

There was a stillness and a spaciousness and an interconnectedness and a peace that would descend, so that kind of hooked me. It was very pronounced when I was 14 and when I began singing. Music really can do that to all of us, but I got hooked on it. I was like, “Oh, well, I’ve got to keep doing this.” Then I discovered acting, and so it was all—performing gave me that doorway into presence and peace and interconnectedness.

Rick: Yeah, but you did go through quite a period, it seems, of being kind of dependent upon antidepressants, and you were drinking, and all kinds of stuff happened. So, let’s touch on that a little bit without belaboring it too much.

Sarah: Yeah. When I found performing, it was a really exhilarating time, but again, I misunderstood it and was like, “Oh, great, I’ve got to keep doing this thing so I can feel that way.” I went to a college for the arts. I went to American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and then went to California Institute of the Arts, and I got a degree in acting, which makes you lots of money.

But I had developed this identity of Sarah the actor, Sarah the performer, because that was the only time I really felt connected to everything, alive—you get it. So, what happened upon graduation—every college graduate goes through a tough time. I was no different. But graduating from an art school, looking back now, that identity was starting to be seen through, and it wasn’t fitting.

I was trying to do the Hollywood thing, getting an agent and going on auditions, and I was like, “Wow, why doesn’t this feel the way it did when I was acting and performing, and why does this feel different?” Well, because now you’re supposed to go make a living at it. But there was also something about knowing what I am beyond that, which I think was starting to dawn.

Kundalini Awakening and Deep Depression

I went to massage school so that I could learn a trade and support myself. It was in massage school where I feel like I had the beginnings of a Kundalini awakening, because energy started moving through me a lot. You know how Kundalini works. It’s—you get very energized, and the stuff was coming to light, and I fell into a really deep depression. I fell into a very, very deep depression, and depression was not something new to me. I would fall into these bouts of depression.

When I was 15, I tried to kill myself. I took a bottle of sleeping pills, and I lay on the bed, and I did what I always did when I was a child, which was rest my attention on my breath. It took me into a very still, quiet place, and I had a vision of me acting on stage. Something in me said, “Get off the bed. Don’t die. Go do this. Go do this thing.”

Rick: So, you got up and went and vomited or something?

Sarah: Yeah, I went into the living room where my parents were, and I said, “I have good news and bad news.” I was like, “The bad news is I just swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills, but the good news is I’m going to be an actress.” So, they were like, “What? What are you talking about?”

It was from that day that I had a sort of purpose. So, out of that darkness came this vision, and I was like, “That’s what I’m going to do. That’s what I’m going to be.” So, here I am, just graduated from this art school, and I’m in another depression, but yet I didn’t feel identified with Sarah, the actress. So, I felt aimless, and I didn’t know what to do, because acting and performing had been my thing, my doorway into the divine.

Rick: It’s interesting that the stirring up of Kundalini would coincide with depression. Usually people experience—well, it can coincide with all kinds of things, I suppose, but most often it seems like it stirs up some bliss or some—

Sarah: Oh, yeah, it sure did for a while. Then Kundalini visited me again in 2011, and that was a ride.

Rick: We’ll get to that.

Sarah: Yeah, lots of bliss and lots of energy and feeling great, and then it starts kicking up all the sediment in the system.

Rick: Yeah.

Sarah: So, it starts kicking up all the sediment in the system, and I fell into a depression. I went to one of those low-cost clinics because I didn’t have any insurance, and they listened to me say, “I’m depressed.” The guy wrote down “She’s depressed” on the little piece of paper—whatever he was coming up with for my diagnosis—and then I said, “Oh, by the way, bipolar illness runs in my family.” He went, “Oh,” and just crossed it off and said, “Bipolar II.”

Rick: Oh, brother.

Sarah: He handed it to me and said, “You need to be on this medication,” and I was very happy to have a new identity.

Rick: Bipolar lady.

Sarah: That’s right. So, from actor lady to, “Oh, that’s what it is, that’s what it is.” And we know that trauma can masquerade as a lot of different physical illnesses.

Rick: You thought you were going to be like Jonathan Winters, I guess.

Sarah: I don’t know, or Patty Duke. No, who knows? But now there are a lot of great examples of people with bipolar doing wonderful things. It turned out to be a misdiagnosis. That wasn’t really what was happening. So, I was put on—

Rick: Which tells you something right there. How many millions of kids are there in this country who are on various medications because of some snap judgment by some—yeah.

Sarah: I just took that diagnosis to another psychiatrist and said, “So, I’m bipolar II.” I was such a good little actress: “I’ll play that role. Please give me an identity. I need one.”

The medication numbed me. I’m not anti-medication. I think it’s helpful for people if it can get them over a hump or if they’re destabilized without it. But I was on it for about 10 years.

Rick: What kind of medication was it?

Sarah: There was a mood stabilizer, and there were always two different antidepressants that the psychiatrist was trying out.

Rick: I remember one time when I was a teenager, when I was taking drugs, trying a tranquilizer just for kicks. I thought, “God, this is horrible. It’s so numbing,” to use your word, “just so flat, so blah. How can anybody stand to live like this?”

Sarah: Yeah, and I felt tranquilized. I found out that one of the initial medications they gave me—I looked it up online later—and it said that’s what it does: it tranquilizes you. So, it was just like, “Here, kid, go sleep for a while.” And that’s not what we need. I mean, we have a long way to go with understanding mood disorders and mental illness, but not everybody needs to be on medication.

Rick: So, what got you out of that phase?

Sarah: I’m so grateful for the internet because I just started doing research and going on message boards and stuff. Facebook wasn’t invented yet. I was just going, “Wow, this doesn’t feel like me.” All these people were having horrible side effects from medication and playing around with their medication to try to get the right cocktail.

I was definitely searching for something, for sure, and I eventually came to the conclusion that I didn’t think I needed to be on it anymore. Of course, being the good little people pleaser that I am, I went to my psychiatrist, whom I met with every month, and said, “I think—can we start lowering the dosage? Lowering the dosage?” And he was like, “Yeah.”

Eventually it was like, “I think I want to go off it. Like, ooh, what’s going to happen?” He just looked at me and said, “I think that’s a great idea.” He agreed. He said, “I think you’re going to be okay.” But he did ask me, “So, what are you going to do to support yourself instead of the medication?”

I said, “Well, I think I’m going to take a meditation class.” So, that’s how it began. I guess that was in 2005, when I got off the medication. And you have to detox that stuff out of your system. It’s so—ugh.

Right around that same time, I was feeling this urge to write and perform what it was that I was writing. I was taking some classes about performing what you write, kind of solo-show-type stuff. Then I took a meditation class from my friend Angela, who taught me a meditation with chakras and stuff.

Then I got into some therapy—finally. Yay, finally getting into therapy, because I was always seeing a psychiatrist rather than actually talking to somebody about what was going on. So, I got into therapy, and I went to my first Buddhist talk.

I was like, “Oh, this is cool.” Funny, it was right around the same time that I started doing stand-up. Something in me said, “You’ve got to go do stand-up.” I did think it was odd. I think you and I were talking about it before we started recording, that I’ve never been a big fan of stand-up comedy. You’d never find me in the comedy clubs, sitting there with a drink in hand, watching a comic.

I was like, “Stand-up comedy?” But something in me was pushing me to get on stage and do it. So, I began meditating and doing stand-up comedy at the same time.

Rick: Nice. Okay, well, I’m not going to ask much of a question here. I want you to just keep going. Oh, I did want to mention, though, that for those who are watching the live broadcast, if you feel like submitting a question, go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com, and you’ll see a form at the bottom through which you can submit a question.

Sarah: Cool.

Rick: All right, so, you went to your first Buddhist meeting.

Sarah: Yeah, and I was like, “Well, this is cool. That Buddha dude had some cool things to say.” I remember I went with a couple of friends who were like, “I don’t know what they’re talking about.” I was like, “Oh, it kind of makes sense to me. I don’t know.”

When I would read Buddhist teachings or hear a talk on it, there was a resonance, for sure, and it felt very familiar to me. So, I began having deep experiences, I think, right away.

Rick: Such as?

Sarah: Well, I went to a meditation retreat, my first meditation retreat. My therapist would lead these little Buddhist retreats up at a Zen center, which was very helpful. I didn’t know what I was doing because I was just sitting there in the meditation zendo, kind of like, “Do I focus on my chakras? What do I do? Why am I here?” I don’t know why I signed up for a nine-day meditation retreat right off, like, “Let’s do this.”

I became one-pointed and concentrated, and sort of a joy welled up in my chest. This was the first retreat that I was on, and I remember being outside with the trees all around me. I just took a breath in and focused on my heart, and there was this bursting open. I heard inside, “Welcome home.”

Welcome home.

So, I’ve had lots of little intuitive pointers along the way, little voices inside, which somebody could probably diagnose as something, but you and I know better. But yeah, it was a very deep kind of homecoming to go into meditation. That doesn’t mean that I stayed in these absorbed states for hours and hours or days at a time. I’d get bumped off of it because the nervous system was so jacked up and the mind was busy, but I became hooked. I became really, really hooked on meditation, and I began to meditate for hours and hours and hours a day.

I went on about three meditation retreats a year for a while. I found that I was able to go into what’s called the jhanas. I don’t know a ton about Buddhism. I know that, through the whole time that I was on the Buddhist path and doing the practices, I’d start to read something about Buddhism or try to intellectually understand something, and I’d be like, “Ugh, I’m just going to meditate.” I wanted the direct experience. I didn’t want to get bogged down.

Yeah, that was really—I mean, I’m glad it was some sort of intelligence telling me, “Ugh, she’s got enough stuff in her mind. No, don’t fill it with other stuff.” So, I began going into the jhanas, which are these eight absorbed states. There’s a very blissful state. There’s a quantum state. There’s a state in which you’re connected with everything. There’s the state of no thing, and then there’s the eighth jhana, which is called neither perception nor non-perception.

Rick: And you weren’t trying to go into specific jhanas? You were just spontaneously slipping into one or another?

Sarah: Well, my teacher was talking about the jhanas and teaching them, and he did a great job with it because I just latched on.

Rick: When he would talk about one, you would find yourself being able to experience it?

Sarah: Yes, yes. I started coming to him saying, “Hey, I was experiencing this, sort of like falling into a white snowbank and being enveloped in all white. Everything is spacious, and it goes on forever.” He’d say, “Oh, well, that sounds like the fourth jhana,” which the Buddha described as being wrapped in a white blanket from head to foot or something like that. So, I would have these experiences, and I was hooked on that.

Rick: So that kind of stirred up the Kundalini again, as I understand it?

Sarah: That took a while. That was 2011, so I was meditating probably from about 2006 to 2011.

Rick: About five years.

Sarah: Yeah. I’d had a glimpse into the nothingness of the small self a few years prior to that, which actually—you might enjoy hearing about this, because we were talking about comedy before. I was in L.A. traffic, and it was like a glimpse, a foretaste, of seeing that who I had taken myself to be was really just a series of roles. It’s like we’re putting on costumes and then taking them off, putting on costumes and taking them off. It’s fluid, it’s not fixed, it’s not stable, it’s not permanent.

I fell into the witness state, I guess, as you TMers would call it—deep, deep emptiness and witnessing everything. I was just sort of this bag of emptiness, going around doing comedy shows in L.A., and it built my confidence at the time. I hadn’t really had a profound shift yet, but it built my confidence in emptiness and in presence and in being nobody.

I remember sitting in the back of the Comedy Store. I had a bunch of shows that week, at the Hollywood Improv and this other comedy club and the Comedy Store. I’m sitting in the back and I’m just this bag of emptiness, and I hear the host say, “Ladies and gentlemen, Sarah Taylor.” Somehow, I was thinking to myself, “What’s going to happen? I’m just this bag of emptiness.”

I get on stage and I grab the mic, and jokes start coming out, material starts coming out, engagement with the audience comes out, spontaneity. So, I had already had a sort of emptying out that occurred. I guess that was about 2009.

Then the Kundalini mayhem ensued in 2011, which happened as a result of an awakening, of a real seeing that I’m made up, that the small me is made up. It was a seeing of myself. It was actually visual for me, and I just watched myself go down a drain. I felt this pop of relief and expanse, and I kept banging the floor, going, “I’m free! I’m free!” It was like fireworks—a fireworks-type of shaking and crying and laughing.

The next day or two later, as I was sitting in meditation, the Kundalini erupted.

Rick: And what was that like? How did it erupt?

Sarah: It was like a fire hose.

Rick: Shooting up your spine?

Sarah: Yeah, totally. Luckily, I had just had that shift in seeing, and I think I was…

Rick: It probably wouldn’t have erupted if you hadn’t had it.

Sarah: Yeah, right, although you never know. You hear some crazy stories. I have some students and people who work with me who’ve had big Kundalini openings, but they have no context for it.

Kundalini Energy and the Release of Dark Thoughts

But yes, it was like a fire hose just going off from bottom to top. I thankfully knew enough to lie back on the bed and just let it move through me for about 20 minutes. Every dark thought I’d ever thought, every self-harming thought, every “I’m worthless, it’s awful, life sucks, I’m a piece of shit”—can we swear?

Rick: Yeah, sure. Shit.

Sarah: I just lay back on the bed, and it all was just coming out, I guess, coming through. Then, the next day, there was a download through the top of my head.

Rick: Let’s talk about the previous point first, and then we’ll get into the download. I think it illustrates a principle which probably most people listening to this are familiar with, but it’s worth mentioning. The body is like a container or an instrument through which anything is lived, but if there’s a profound spiritual awakening, then, as we were talking about earlier, there has to be a correlation between that and the physiology.

If the physiology is full of crud, and a profound spiritual awakening is happening or has happened, then that crud no longer belongs in that nervous system, because that nervous system isn’t going to be able to support that kind of experience if it’s full of crud. So, the crud has to go, and there it goes, as you experienced.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. All those energetic knots loosening. And that wasn’t the end of it. As many of your listeners and viewers know, awakening just opens up the door and then the little demons come flying out, and people are like, “What happened? Why is this happening?”

It was many years of stuff rising to the surface. It was at that time that I went to my teacher and said, “Hey, you know, I’m just wanting to talk about the abuse and the trauma that I’ve experienced.” I remember him saying, “Why? You’ve just had this profound realization.” He didn’t really get it at first, but who knows why. I sort of floundered for a few years because there was so much dark material coming forward, and so I got into therapy.

Rick: So, as that dark material was coming forward, did the witness state, or whatever you want to call it, abide or persist and thereby give you the sort of stability to handle all that was coming?

Sarah: Not always. It was really back and forth. It was the “I got it, I lost it, I got it, I lost it, I got it, I lost it” thing.

Rick: Which also is indicative of a culturing of the nervous system, because the nervous system can’t just go from A to Z and snap on and sustain it. It has to sort of—and it tends to purify in waves. So, there’s a wave of purification and then integration of that, and then a wave of purification, and that cycle can repeat for a long time.

Sarah: And it repeats. People always say, “I just went through this. Why am I back here again?” But it’s a spiral. You just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper, and the sediment keeps coming up. Every time there’s an opening, there’s a greater capacity, and then more of the crap can come through.

Rick: Yeah. Sometimes I like to think of these openings, or consciousness, if you will, as a solvent. The way, let’s say, water can be a solvent—you can dissolve things in it. If you just have a cup, then you don’t have very much water, so you can’t dissolve very much. But as the capacity of the water increases, more and more can be dissolved. If it becomes oceanic, you can throw in dump trucks full of mud or something, and they’re just going to get dissolved because there’s enough capacity.

Sarah: Yeah, something like that. I kept saying, “When’s it all going to be dissolved?” It was a very tough time. There was a lot of that. 2011, 2012, and 2013—those were really, really, really hard years. My poor now-husband.

There was chaos all around me. Things were falling apart, toxic relationships were dissolving. I was doubting what I wanted to do. There have been a lot of stops and starts on my path. The doer—I couldn’t summon getting back on stage and doing the grind of a stand-up comic. It just wasn’t coming.

So, I stopped performing for about three years, maybe four years. I didn’t—I had an agent, so I did this NBC show that was like a web series, and I did some other stuff. I remember thinking, “Oh, do I want to do this? What am I doing?” Everything seemed meaningless.

That whole stage was about having seen that the small self is more or less made up, that it’s transparent, that it’s not necessarily real in a fixed sense, and so is everything else. So, it was a real chaotic time. It was a divine mess, as I like to call it.

The Kundalini was doing its thing. The body would shake and move from the Kundalini, and I would get sick a lot. The reactive patterns would recruit the Kundalini energy, and then I’d be in an inflamed state. I was doubting what I was doing. I didn’t know where I was headed. Everything was changing around me, so it was very chaotic.

But also, after that Kundalini awakening, about a day later, there was some sort of download through the top of my head.

Rick: Oh, yeah, you were going to talk about that.

Sarah: Yeah. We now know that it’s maybe universal Shakti, so perhaps that was personal Shakti that had become awakened. There was a download of a very, very big energy that started moving through me.

In the midst of all this chaos, I started doing energy-healing work on people, which, thankfully, people were helped and aided by it, even though I was still kind of stabilizing.

Rick: Perhaps it helped you to stabilize or integrate, to do that work.

Sarah: I think it did, because I felt like, “Well, I have to do something with this. I want to be of service. This energy that comes through wants to become—it wants to help, it wants to do something.”

Rick: Yeah, and when I became a meditation teacher, Maharishi said, “Well, teaching is one of the best things you can do for your own evolution and for your own integration.” Once you step into that role, a lot more energy or wisdom or whatever will come through you.

Sarah: So, that’s interesting.

Rick: The more you give away, the more you get, sort of thing.

Sarah: Yeah, because I didn’t even think about it like, “Oh, it’s such a cliché. People get into spirituality and then start teaching.” I didn’t even know that was a cliché. I was just like, “Oh gosh, I want to share this.” I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, why don’t other creatives know about this?”

So I began back in 2008 or 2009. This was before the Kundalini mayhem; we’ll get back to that. I had a class called Comedy Karma for comics, where we would sit around and meditate, then work on comedy material and share it with each other. I was teaching meditation to the comics here in L.A. and did that for a while.

Then it just sort of became me teaching meditation at companies. A lot of the teaching I was doing ten years ago, or eight years ago, or whatever, was more like, “Oh, meditation is really going to help you with anxiety. It’s going to help decrease your stress.” Of course, through the years, how I teach and how I work with people has changed.

But yeah, I think the teaching was very, very beneficial and helped move me along. It always felt like, “Oh, well, this is something.” It just felt very natural. So, Kundalini Mayhem.

Rick: Yeah. Good name for a rock band, maybe.

Sarah: I know, we just thought of it. Let’s do it. Can you play the guitar?

Rick: No, I’m a drummer.

Sarah: Oh, you’re a drummer, that’s right. Oh, cool. Well, I kind of badly play the guitar and the ukulele—not well, but just enough to sort of sing loud enough that it covers it up.

Rick: I don’t know if the ukulele belongs in a band called Kundalini Mayhem.

Sarah: You never know.

Rick: Sounds more like heavy metal to me.

Sarah: Ukuleles rock out. Non-duality, Rick. It all belongs. Okay. But yeah, the Kundalini was going crazy, and the Shakti or whatever was just pouring through me. I think we were talking this past week about how, right around this time, I went into Kinko’s FedEx and all the copiers stopped working.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Sarah: The guy was like, “I don’t know. This has never happened. There’s like eight copiers.” I was like, “Hold on a second.” I’d been learning about grounding my energy and dumping excess energy. I was learning all this personal energy stuff to help me.

Rick: Just to interject, I was on a long meditation course. I’ve done a lot of long meditation courses, sometimes six months at a time, where you’re doing all this long stuff, and weird things would happen. It was very common for watches to stop working and all, but also for glasses to explode—water glasses and glass doors to explode.

I would walk into a room and the typewriter would break, but then I was also good at fixing things. It’s weird when this stuff happens.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s super weird. There’s a laundry list—I won’t bore your listeners with it—of just crazy things that happened during this time, where people finally started turning to me and going, “Is that your energy? Stop it!” And I was like, “It’s not my energy. It’s everybody’s energy.”

But yeah, just crazy, crazy stuff was happening. There was a lot of chaos, but eventually things started settling. Good therapy for anybody who’s had any background of trauma and is in an awakening, or wants awakening, is to do as much healing work as you can.

Having a trusted relationship with a qualified therapist—shout-out to Dr. Beth Leedham in Encino; she was incredible—I saw her from around 2012 to—I don’t know. That was incredibly helpful. Doing energy-healing work, not just on others but going and getting energy-healing work done on me, was also helpful.

It was a real time of healing: getting massages, being in the body, doing yoga. So, anybody going through something like that, it’s so important to stay connected to the body and to develop good relationships with people if you’ve been through trauma.

Rick: Sometimes good old physical exercise can be very helpful, like some kind of sport, jogging, swimming, or whatever appeals to you.

Sarah: I like to run. And you do pickleball, right?

Rick: I do a lot of it. Yeah, look it up, people. It’s kind of like tennis. It’s tennis for old people.

Sarah: It’s tennis for old people. I saw a video or something that you sent me. It looked insane. It was just so—

Rick: Oh yeah, I mean, the champions are young, but you can get good at it. Well, let’s not get off on pickleball.

Sarah: Okay, all right. We’ll have a whole other Batgap interview about pickleball.

Rick: Yeah, so anyway, the Kundalini started to simmer down.

Sarah: The Kundalini started to simmer down. During this time, psychic stuff opened up as well.

Rick: Let’s talk about that. That’ll be interesting. Put your turban on and tell us about it.

Sarah: So let me tell you: Madam Sarah, fortune teller. Yeah, I did a bit of that. I actually started doing psychic readings. I was really looking for what—why am I here, and how do I give back?

Rick: Yeah, what am I supposed to do with all this stuff?

Sarah: What does this all mean? I know that’s the common thing that people get into: “What do I do with it? What do I do with it?” First and foremost, it’s for us, to help us navigate our way, because there’s more to be done.

Rick: So, what were some specific psychic experiences you had, just out of curiosity? Not that we want to dwell on that too much, but anyway.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, I found out that I’m a medium, or that I have mediumship abilities. But I think this is very, very common. Maybe it’s not common—I shouldn’t say that, because not everybody will experience this. It doesn’t mean something’s not happening on your path. Your listeners know that by now.

But yeah, just being able to know what was going on with somebody, being able to see energy and to see where there might be blocks, and then correlate that to the chakras. I could sit with somebody, and the blocks would kind of dissolve, or the energy would get discharged and reorganize in the system.

Knowing things about people, having visions, having dreams—and for a while I did mediumship. If people were coming to me for energy-healing work and their dead uncle wanted to talk, then I was like, “All right, let’s do this.” But in time I stopped making that part of what I do.

Rick: Is that what you meant when you mentioned siddhis in your bio?

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. Well, I haven’t walked through a wall yet.

Rick: Can you levitate?

Sarah: Not yet, but I’m working on it, because that’ll be useful.

Rick: You could become a magician.

Sarah: Right, or just L.A. traffic. Screw this, I’m just going to levitate to Santa Monica today. But yeah, more like psychic stuff. I thought, “Okay, I guess I’m a psychic.” Somebody hooked me up with a reality show that was going to do something on me being this psychic who was traveling the world, and then I was like, “Okay, that feels really wrong.” So, it was a very tumultuous time.

Rick: But around 2014 or so, I found Adyashanti’s book because I was lost. I was a little lost. Apparently, I didn’t know how to Google non-duality or what happens post-awakening, but I just knew that something—a significant shift—had occurred. But I was lost. I was pretty lost.

Which is an interesting point, because here you were having experiences that would make many spiritual aspirants envious, if envy were cool to have if you’re a spiritual aspirant. And yet you were lost. What that highlights is the value of knowledge. Experience alone is only one leg, and you can’t walk on one leg. You need the leg of knowledge as well.

Sarah: Yeah, I just wasn’t finding anything that said, “Hey, if you’ve had a significant opening or awakening, then,” like we were talking about, “the sediment is going to rise to the surface. Things are going to be in motion for a while.” There’s all that stillness, right? But then there’s all that motion of the chaos, at least on my path.

Then I found Adyashanti’s book, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment. I think you know the guy.

Rick: I think I have it on the shelf right behind me. And yeah, I know the guy. We’ve eaten spaghetti before together.

Yeah, and so I was like, “Oh!” Even just reading the first few pages, I sank into a deep, luminous peace, and everything sort of settled down. I feel like sometimes just being seen and acknowledged is enough to kind of cool all that energy that’s in the system: “I see you. Relax. This is natural. This is par for the course. Nothing’s wrong. It’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be like this forever.”

Sarah: Yeah, and so I was like, “Oh!” Even just reading the first few pages, I sank into a deep, luminous peace, and everything sort of settled down. I feel like sometimes just being seen and acknowledged is enough to kind of cool all that energy that’s in the system: “I see you. Relax. This is natural. This is par for the course. Nothing’s wrong. It’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be like this forever.”

That book really, really, really helped me. Then things started stabilizing and integrating more after 2014, I think. Thank God.

Rick: Yeah, there could be more, but it sounds like you’ve passed some significant milestones and you may be on cruise control now, you know?

From witnessing to unity

Sarah: I then had an awakening far beyond the awakenings that I’d had before.

Rick: Let’s talk about that in one second. As a setup for that, I just want to ask you about the previous awakening. The previous awakening had a strong witnessing quality to it. You kind of saw through the nature of the personal self, and you weren’t really making decisions. Everything was kind of on autopilot, I guess, and you probably felt like you weren’t the actor or the doer or anything. Somehow, action was just being done spontaneously, automatically, by who knows what, right?

Sarah: Yeah, and there was a lot of muscling too.

Rick: A lot of what?

Sarah: There was a lot of muscling too, because then a doer would try to summon a doer.

Rick: Try to use your authority.

Sarah: Oh yeah, sure.

Rick: Did you go through a seesaw phase where there was kind of a—you talked about, “I got it, I lost it”—but was that characterized by a sense of alternating surrender and control? On the one hand, you felt like the divine was really orchestrating things and you didn’t want to get in the way. But on the other hand, that could lead to passivity, and there needed to be some initiative. Was there a working out of a balance between those two different tendencies?

Sarah: Yeah, it was a confusing time because I felt very passive. I didn’t feel like doing much, and with the nature of the things that I do, just being an actor and a comedian, there’s a lot of efforting.

Rick: Yeah, you’ve got to do something.

Sarah: Everybody’s under the impression that we need to be doing. We’ve got to do the grind, we’ve got to muscle it, we’ve got to get out there and hustle. There was no hustle. The only thing I felt called to—the only doing that really felt continual—was the teaching and the energy-healing work.

But with the acting and the performing, something in me would start to rise up and go, “Wait a minute,” and grab ahold of it and go, “But I’m supposed to be doing this with my life.” Then there’d be a muscling and a contracting and a kind of pushing. So, there was this feeling of pushing, and then, “Oh, all right.”

Rick: When you tried to push, did you get some blowback from nature, if you want to call it that? Did you get resistance?

Sarah: Yeah, I think I got into car accidents and had illnesses that would just lay me up for a while, so it was definitely getting the message.

Rick: It reminds me of Adya’s story where he was into this competitive bicycle racing thing, and then he’d have some profound awakening and then he’d try to get back into competitive bicycle racing, and next thing you know, he’d be flat on his back for six months.

Sarah: That’s right. I would have to say…

Rick: Got other plans for you, kid.

Sarah: Yeah, I got other plans for you, Mr. That’s kind of like what it was. I’d get back on the horse and I’d start muscling the whole “I’m an actor” thing or “I’m doing stand-up,” and then it would all collapse. And I would be forced sometimes just to be flat on my back, and just—there’s nothing I can do. I guess I have to really let that go.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve gone through a lot of that myself, and even recently some guy got in touch with me and he said, “I had this awakening and I don’t feel like doing anything, and there’s no impetus to action. How are you supposed to act when there’s no sense of an actor?”

So there’s this kind of gear shift thing that happens between a sense of individual self being in control and this—well, there’s a Vedic phrase for it. They say, “Brahman is the charioteer,” so you have to let go of the reins so Brahman can take them up.

Sarah: Yeah, and that letting go has to happen. Some non-duality heads might be like, “Well, who’s letting go? There’s nobody there.” Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, but yeah, and I think that contributes to a lot of the “I got it, I lost it” phase, which—rule of thumb—is surrender to what is. Whatever is happening belongs. Whatever is happening is needed, so we polish that facet of the diamond, you know?

Rick: When you’re going through the “I got it, I lost it” phase, did you have days where, during the “I lost it” aspect, you felt like, “I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight so I can just be oblivious because I can’t stand this gripped feeling of being lost again?”

Sarah: Yeah, and then I’d have super-weird dreams where some yogi is stroking my third eye the entire night, and I’m witnessing the dream.

Rick: I had the same thing, yeah. I don’t want to say “me too” many times, but I had the very same thing—this, on the forehead like that—and then woke up in this profound state of, “Wow, what was that?”

Sarah: Wow, very cool. Yeah, these little gifts that we get. It was a dream a few years after the Kundalini awakening, and I just was lying back in this yogi’s lap. I’m still trying to figure out who that was. He was wearing an orange robe and a turban, and I was the witness watching him as he just stroked my third eye. Then he looked up at me and just nodded to the “me” watching, and then went back to stroking the third eye. It was an eight-hour-long dream or something.

That was around the time that the psychic stuff was opening up and all that kind of opening, like a bigger seeing—not just seeing things about myself, but seeing things about others and about life.

Rick: That’s neat. I also had a thing one time where some being of some sort worked me over, had me lie on my stomach, holding on to some handles, and then worked my spine up and down with some kind of implement, some kind of spear or something like that.

Sarah: Spiritual chiropractic.

Rick: It was the biggest and most intense experience I ever had in my life.

Sarah: Wow.

Rick: But anyway, I feel like I’m talking about myself too much.

Sarah: But hold on a second. How did you feel afterwards? Like, what?

Rick: Utterly released. It was as if I had been gripped by steel bands for all eternity, and suddenly those bands had been broken. I just felt this awesome sense of freedom and bliss and relief and gratitude. I kind of walked around with my jaw hanging open for a few days, just adjusting to this new condition.

Sarah: Yeah, what the body had been holding on to. Our bodies hold on to so much, and he was working your spine too, which is…

Rick: Yeah, it was like I was ushered into this room, told to lie down on my stomach, hold on to these handles, and something—somebody with a spear or a trident or something—came and started stabbing up and down my spine with this thing. It was like a hold-on-for-dear-life experience, and it was excruciating but wonderful at the same time.

Then when I came out of it, my body was drenched in sweat, and I was sort of lying in bed like this and just felt this huge relief. God.

Sarah: What a chiropractic adjustment. Well, network chiropractic—if anybody out there is interested in looking into it—I think it’s called Network Spinal Analysis now. It’s really great for clearing the nervous system through the spine of a lot of crap.

Rick: That’s where the deepest stresses lie, I believe.

Sarah: Yeah, totally.

Rick: And there’s a whole Vedic understanding of it in terms of the subtle physiology and Sushumna and Kundalini and all that stuff, and the nadis and all that business.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: All right, so you were beginning to… I asked you the question about the witnessing phase and about the juggling act between individual control and sort of divine control, if we want to call it that, but then you alluded to a more profound awakening, and I think you said—

Sarah: It was in 2016, which is why, when you and I met in 2017, I was like, “Let me settle a little bit before I go there.” And then I just woke up one day last spring after having another dream in which—I’ll go into that later—but where I was like, “Okay, I’m ready, I’ll tell Rick.” But, oh, those dreams.

But yeah, in 2016, I decided to go on another Buddhist meditation retreat. I sort of turned away from Buddhism. I was angry at Buddhism during that time. I was like, “Why didn’t you guys tell me about this, about all the chaos? I want to just go back to the way things were.” Well, not really.

Rick: Does Buddhism have the tools to deal with all that? Somehow I have not had a Buddhist path, but somehow I just get the sense that they don’t really know how to deal with Kundalini and psychic abilities. Or maybe they do and I just don’t know enough about it.

Sarah: Maybe they do and we don’t know enough about it, but I couldn’t find anything about the energetic awakenings. The most I would get is sort of like, “Just don’t pay any attention to it. Don’t worry about it,” and that’s very helpful advice—to not fixate on it, don’t attach to it, don’t make it a new identity.

Rick: But you can’t just brush it off. Sometimes stuff has to be dealt with.

Sarah: Yeah, and my teacher was helpful with that, but I needed some other type of guidance. During that time, I got really into just managing my personal energy. When you’ve been blown open so much, there is also a personal energy that we need to tend to—grounding myself, visualizations of being rooted to the earth, dumping energy, taking a big breath in and dumping excess energy, just this kind of managing.

I kind of figured it out on my own. I pieced stuff together, but yeah, so finally I was ready to go back to a Buddhist meditation retreat. This one was eight days and up at Mount Madonna Zen Center, and it was the seventh day, I guess, right toward the end, because I like to wait until the very last minute. I’m always running late.

I was doing this open-eye meditation, holding the space of the mind. This is another Padmasambhava meditation, just resting in the space of the mind, watching whatever arises, eyes open. And I was bugged by the perceiver, by the witness. I was like, there was a knowing that I am this awareness, and it’s in me, you could say, if it had a location, and all around me is awareness, but there’s this perceiver, there’s this witness that’s in the way.

Rick: And the witness was not awareness? The witness was something other than awareness, maybe a vantage point of some localized nature?

The Perceiver as Awareness and God

It was a vantage point, but something shifted in that I saw Padmasambhava’s face, and I heard, “The perceiver is not a problem.” In that moment, everything went and dissolved, and I realized that the perceiver is the same as God, as awareness, as this-ness.

Sarah: It was a vantage point, but something shifted in that I saw Padmasambhava’s face, and I heard, “The perceiver is not a problem.” In that moment, everything went and dissolved, and I realized that the perceiver is the same as God, as awareness, as this-ness.

I’m sitting in the meditation zendo with a bunch of other quiet meditators, and I start laughing hysterically. As soon as I left, I just wrote in my journal, “I am that, I am that.” I’d never heard that phrase, “I am that,” and I get emotional thinking about it. Yeah, I just laughed and laughed and laughed, and I could not stop laughing. It was hilarious and relieving. It was like the biggest cosmic joke ever, and—

Rick: You should try it in your next stand-up routine.

Sarah: Well, we’ll see. I’m trying to bring in a little more philosophical stuff now that I’m getting back to it.

Rick: Jim Carrey would like to talk to you.

Sarah: Well, I’d like to talk to him.

Rick: He’s really into this kind of stuff these days.

Sarah: Yeah, he is.

Rick: Russell Brand.

Sarah: Yeah, maybe we’ll cross paths. But yeah, the whole day was just spent kind of laughing hysterically and just in wonder that I am that. Everything about me has always been that and always will be. It all comes out of the same thing, the same source.

I woke up the next day at this meditation retreat, and I was like, “Well, boy, I got a lot out of this meditation retreat. Am I going to skip some of these meditations we’re doing in the zendo?” And I just stared at the trees. I was in such joy.

Then, at the last meditation of the day, I said, “Okay, I’m going to go sit and do this meditation.” It was a Dzogchen meditation where, with your eyes open, you just hold everything inside, everything outside. Everything is inside; everything is outside. So you really hold that dualistic perspective, and then you toggle back and forth, back and forth, faster and faster, until it all ideally dissolves.

That’s what happened. All of a sudden, inside and outside dissolved. And again, like in 2011, I saw what I had always taken myself to be, and I saw her go down a drain, and I was sucked into a void for a while. I don’t know how long. When I was spit out of that void, I looked around and saw that I was the cushion and the Buddha statue and the floor and the window, and that I was everything and everything was me.

I am that. Everything about me has always been that and always will be.

Rick: So the difference, then, would be that the 2011 one was a witnessing shift and the 2016 one was a unity shift. Is that fair to say?

Sarah: Yeah. It was a shift into unity.

Rick: Yeah. And that was about two years ago?

Sarah: A little over two years ago, and time and space collapsed, and the Sarah that I was really felt like she died. And yeah.

Rick: So what about this thing Padmasambhava said, “The perceiver is not a problem”? Is there still a perceiver?

Sarah: No. Actually, I left that out. In the 2016 shift into unity, right before the inside-outside dissolved, I saw his face and I heard him say, “There is no perceiver.” And again, that pointer just went—that made everything dissolve.

Rick: So how does perception happen?

Sarah: Well, I don’t know. There is a perceiver and yet there isn’t. That was the thing that night, as I was walking along, which I wrote about later in my journal: Wow, there is no body and there is a body. There’s no perception and yet there is perception.

My teacher said, “Oh, well, that’s non-duality.” So, of course, that has deepened over the past two years. But yeah, all of it is being held at the same time. The experience is that there’s no perceiver, that there’s no one holding or owning perception.

Rick: Yeah, so to say that there’s no perceiver, no body, and no perception would be only half the story, because it’s true that there isn’t, but it’s also true that there is.

Sarah: Right, yeah, and I think that’s where a lot of non-duality heads get caught up. They’re in a high level of duality. They’re stuck in the transcendent, or they’ve seen that form isn’t all there is. So now they’re like, “Well, nothingness is all there is, emptiness is all there is, man.” It’s like, “Wait a minute, what non-duality?”

Rick: Yeah, both and.

Sarah: Both, and, yeah. And what has been happening has been a shift into—I can only describe it as a totality. It’s been persistent and abiding, what I am, this pure consciousness, awareness has persisted. But unity, maybe a year ago, started shifting into something else, something that’s still in the works, I guess, something that’s beyond unity. One of the ways I describe it is like a totality. David Buckland and I had a good…

Rick: I was just going to ask you about David Buckland, whether you’d ever spoken with him.

Sarah: Yeah, I did end up emailing him.

Rick: He has a very TMS orientation, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but he has this mapped out pretty clearly, and I always try to read his blog posts. I’ll probably be interviewing him again pretty soon. But, okay, let me ask you a question. So, just as we covered that perceiver and no perceiver were a body/nobody, both are true in the context of a larger totality, would it also be true to say that there is no sense of a personal self and yet there is, and paradoxically somehow or other both of those can be held in the larger totality?

Sarah: Yeah. Susanna Marie and Adyashanti gave a great interview with you, I think in the fall of—was it?

Rick: Yeah, I think so.

Sarah: About the falling away of the self.

Rick: Right.

Sarah: That is what happens beyond unity. I think Susanna Marie actually just had an interview with Renata McNay on living beyond unity, and she and I’ve been having a lot of conversations about it. So, that’ll be an interesting interview. But yeah, I think Adyashanti calls it the falling away of the self. TMers might call it Brahman consciousness, and I think it plays hide-and-seek a little bit until it falls away. But it’s not like, “Oh, there’s no body here, there’s nobody here.” The experience is that there is nobody here.

Rick: And?

Sarah: And yet I am here. There’s a body and a mind, and there’s Sarah-ness that arises. Sarah-ness arises out of nothing and then goes back into nothing, just like Rick-ness arises out of absolute nothingness and goes back into this spacious potentiality. And so, yeah.

Rick: If you were to summarize your experience in three phrases, would these three phrases be apt: “I’m everywhere, I’m nowhere, and I’m right here”?

Sarah: Yeah, that would be part of how I’d describe it, probably. Yeah.

Rick: Okay, yeah, and I feel it that way myself, but I never quite felt resolved or settled with that conversation with Susanna and Adya, because, knowing them both quite well—for instance, that weekend Adya was just getting over a terrible flu. In fact, we had to postpone the interview because he was telling us before the interview how he was sick as a dog. He got out of bed and basically collapsed to the floor, and Mukti had to help him back into bed. That wasn’t happening to the tree outside the window; it was happening to this Adya guy. There was a sense of, “My God, I’m really sick. There is some kind of me here that is feeling this.” Even though presumably a deeper, perhaps even more predominant reality was that there is no sickness and there is no me or anything else, part of the package of the total experience was a severe flu that somebody was suffering through somehow.

Sarah: I think this is where words really fail. There’s not a lot written about Brahman consciousness, and there’s not a lot written about experiencing no self. Bernadette Roberts wrote that great book about it. Of course, it’s her own experience with it, so she covers that terrain quite well. I think Adyashanti maybe has—hats off to her—she’s informed the work that he’s doing now with talking about it and stuff, and Susanna Marie, too. But nobody’s denying that there isn’t a body.

Rick: Or that there is a body.

Sarah: Or that there is a body.

Rick: You did a double negative there.

Sarah: I did. I ain’t gonna tell you. There is a body. The experience, I think, when people talk about this state of consciousness—which isn’t really a state; again, words really fail—is about the experience of it from this vessel, this instrument.

This instrument is experiencing Sarah-ness right now, and then it dissolves. This instrument is experiencing hot tea or the flu, but there’s no separation. It’s like the veil of—because even unity is a very, very, very subtle, “There’s someone there.” There is the perceived sense of someone who is one with this computer right here, one with you. So, there are two that are one. We’re united; we’re unified.

So, when that falls away, it’s—I know Maharishi sent me that interesting thing. He’s like, “Well, it’s a deeper state of unity,” which—it’s a flow. So, I’m sure when Adya was collapsing on the floor with his flu, it’s a flow with all of it. He is the flu, and he is the body collapsing on the floor, and he is the nothingness, and it’s all happening at once.

Rick: Sure, but the experience was being had there in that instrument. I wasn’t aware that Adya was sick, so I was off somewhere else doing something else, and so my instrument was not having the experience that his instrument was having. And so there’s some kind of—the concept of lesha avidya may fit in here, which is used in Vedanta and means faint remains of ignorance. Ultimately, it’s just all totality and there’s no individuality, but that can’t be. Go ahead.

Sarah: Ignorance creates bodies, and that’s why we’re here and that’s why we’re in them. I don’t know about any of that. I don’t think anybody can answer whether that’s true or not, but I think what Adya and Susanna Marie—and what I’m starting to talk about, too—is really about your lived experience. And yes, experiences fade and they’re not permanent, but it works.

I can’t—someday I’ll find words for it, but it doesn’t feel like it’s stabilized in me yet. So, let’s talk two years from now or something. Susanna Marie, you and Susanna Marie can probably have a far more colorful conversation about it than you and I could right now.

Rick: Maybe we’ll do a threesome sometime, or foursome.

Sarah: That’d be great, but it’s all included. Nothing is left out. And I think Adya has said it in some talk he gave: “It’s eternity looking out through these eyes.” So that is no self, that is Brahman consciousness, and we’ve all glimpsed it. Everybody has, whether it stabilizes or becomes a lived experience, that’s another thing. But it’s eternity looking out through eternity’s eyes, so it’s not just Rick, it’s not just Sarah, and it goes beyond even, like, “Oh, well, it’s eternity and Rick.” Something falls away where it’s just this.

So, it’s sort of like if the realization in 2016 was, “I am that” or “I am this,” now it feels like something is developing that’s just this.

It’s eternity looking out through these eyes.

Rick: Without the “I am” part.

Sarah: Yeah, which—you go to see a comedy show and I’ll be just being a goofball, but that belongs, too. It’s all just this. It’s all just happening. It’s all just happening. When people talk about this stuff, somebody can hear it and get intellectual about it, and the mind or the ego can get engaged and go, “Yeah, but…” I mean, there’s no arguing with it, right? It’s just—this is the experience, and this is what people have reported experiencing.

Rick: Yeah, well, I’m certainly willing to admit that my experience has got a long way to go, and that I’m doing my best, based upon what I have experienced and what I have understood, to understand this and to talk with you about it. But when I hear somebody like you say, “Well, I’m still a work in progress and there’s still development taking place…”

Sarah: We’re human beings.

Rick: Yeah, so what is it that’s developing? The instrument, right? But the instrument is not just a flesh-and-blood thing; it also has subtle components, and there’s some kind of subtle thing which evolves even if the physical instrument dies. And you say Padmasambhava came to you, and people talk about Ramana coming to them, or our various other sort of ascended masters, and so on and so forth. So what is it that persists even when those human beings die and now they appear to be functioning on some subtler plane?

Sarah: As far as that goes, I just feel like somebody drops the body, their body dissolves—individuated consciousness.

Rick: The gross body dissolves.

Sarah: Yeah, the gross body dissolves, but individuated consciousness gets absorbed back into the great consciousness, and their essence from when they were here is also still floating in the ethers. Maybe it’s floating in the ethers for—I mean, this is my take on it—perhaps it’s floating in the ethers for a second, but to us on this gross plane it’s a lifetime or it’s several lifetimes that Ramana can—the essence of Ramana can come to someone, or Padmasambhava, or…

Rick: Could be, and we’re getting a little philosophical here and speculative, but it’s interesting to touch upon. I interviewed a guy a few weeks ago named William Meader, who has a background in the Theosophical Society, and he said in their understanding, once you reach the sort of pinnacle of human evolution, as far as one can go in a human body, then you shift to the next phase, where you become a beginner again relative to what is now attainable from there. And that also jibes with the Vedic tradition’s understanding of 16 kallahs, or levels of evolution, with four through eight being the human. The highest human that ever walked the Earth would have been an eight, or somewhere in there, but after that there are eight more. So, I don’t know.

Sarah: Sure, I can see that. Well, we’re all just starting; we’re all just beginning. No matter where we’re at, with everything that’s happened, I feel like, “Oh, now I’m really beginning my life.” Like a bit of a late bloomer. Hollywood doesn’t like old broads, but that’s changing.

Rick: Yeah, Meryl Streep is doing okay.

Sarah: I think she’s doing okay, but then again, she was Meryl Streep when she was…

Rick: In her 20s, right.

Sarah: Meryl Streep when she was—yeah, but there was no Meryl there. But I feel like I’m starting. I’m just now beginning. I was just telling my husband the other day, “Wow, I feel like I’m just now starting my life and just now starting to scratch the surface of what I can create as a comedian, as a performer, as a writer.” And so I feel like I’m starting over again. I see all these young comics who are just starting out, and I feel like, “Hey, I’m one of you.” And they kind of look at me; they’re like, “You’re a little older than me.” But yeah, so.

Rick: What throws people is that they just heard you talk all about how there’s only this and there’s no kind of person anymore, and then you launch into, “Well, I’m getting going as a comic, and I’m doing this and I’m doing that.” So, the language itself…

Sarah: Language can’t support this. It’s all of it. Everything belongs; everything is included. Now I feel like something is operating through me, and so that is an operation. But even a year ago I was still wondering, “Oh, what am I doing? I’m doing all the spiritual work with people, but yet there are all these creative impulses. On my business card, what am I, relatively speaking? What am I on the relative level?” How do you move forward? But life sort of takes care of it.

Rick: It does, and we have different roles to play, different dharmas.

Sarah: Yeah, so there’s something moving me, and I have to say that I feel—I was surprised about it—that I still keep coming back to standing on a stage with a microphone, talking to people. I think I was under some impression, especially after the 2011 awakening, when everything fell away and I didn’t have any motivation to get on stage, that, “Oh, this is so not spiritual. It’s all meaningless, man.”

There’s that side of the coin: It all doesn’t matter, and there’s this whole other dimension that we truly are, so all of this doesn’t matter—all that shit. Which, if that’s where we’re at, that’s where we’re at. We kind of have to be there and polish that facet of the diamond for a little while until we move on to another one.

But yeah, it has been surprising over the years that I keep coming back to performing, because I think part of my conditioning was, “Oh, that’s selfish. That’s for people who want attention. That’s for…” Who knows? All sorts of conditioning gets kicked out of the system.

But then here we are. This past week I performed at a gay bar, a comedy club, and an alternative church, so I’m still doing this. Something is motivating me.

✨ Awakening and the evolution of society

Rick: Sure. If the kind of experience that has dawned in you can be thought of as the direction in which human evolution is heading, then if we could imagine a world in which a large percentage, or even a majority, of people had undergone such a development, we’re still going to need airline pilots and doctors and politicians and athletes and performers. People will be doing many of the same things that we do now.

Sarah: That’s right.

Rick: There may be certain things that will become obsolete and totally inappropriate. Just as blacksmiths aren’t very common anymore, nonetheless, you can imagine that, just as when you had your awakening, the physiology sort of began purifying itself, you can imagine a society of awakened people in which all the various professions get purified by those people.

You can imagine a politics, for instance, that’s not full of all the crap that it now is, and medicine that’s based upon a much more enlightened consciousness, and so many different things.

Sarah: Yeah, I do feel that entertainment and media are undergoing something right now, for sure. Just with the Me Too movement recently, there’s been an expunging in Hollywood, and even in the comedy scene. The comedy scene is much more friendly toward female comedians now. It feels like there’s more—something has shifted.

So yes, I think that’s well put. We need Wall Street brokers who are awake. We need pediatricians who are awake. That’s how humanity as a whole evolves.

I feel like we’re in a new age in which people who would discover these aspects of reality, or the nature of reality and the nature of self—or beyond self—would then sit in a cave or sit on a pedestal and teach, and that’s all they do. That was entirely appropriate, and it’s still appropriate if that’s what somebody is doing now.

But I’m noticing that more and more people—I have people coming to me who work in all areas of life and who have had awakening experiences, profound ones, through a near-death experience, an ayahuasca journey, childbirth, or something else. They’re a producer in Hollywood, an actress. There’s a stand-up comedian who had an experience happen to her recently but had no context for it. I’m trying to explain it to her, and she’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know.”

But something—something’s happening here.

Rick: That’s Buffalo Springfield. There’s also, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” That was Dylan.

A lot of times people feel like, “Okay, well, we have to change the system. Politics is a mess, and we need to elect different people. Medicine is a mess, and we need to change those systems,” and various other things we could talk about.

But really, we need to change—I’m crudely putting it—we need to change the people who comprise these systems. Once they change, the horse will be before the cart, and the cart will naturally get pulled in the right direction.

Sarah: Yeah, consciousness needs to change.

Rick: Yeah.

Sarah: All this other stuff is like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe what’s happening!” Consciousness is changing in individuals, in different arms of the one thing. All consciousness is changing, and that will…

It’s just not happening fast enough. We want change now, but with these shifts, now I’m like, “Oh, okay, so this is something that’s evolving over the next 100 or 200 years. Who knows what humanity is going to look like?”

But we live these 80-year, 90-year lifespans, and we’re like, “It’s not happening fast enough! Oh my God, what’s going to happen?” Who knows if things are going to clean up in the next 20 years? But in the next 100 years, it’s going to be different.

Rick: Well, nature has its own timetable, and I’m sure it’ll happen in something faster than geologic time. It’s not like the shifting of continents, and it seems to be accelerating.

Sarah: It does seem to be accelerating. When people look at politics and everything that’s happening, they’re like, “Oh my God, it’s a sign that the world is falling apart.” I actually look at it from the healing perspective. No, this is what happens when there’s enough light: The dark comes to the surface.

Rick: There’s a kind of a healing crisis.

Sarah: We’re in a healing crisis. That’s what’s happening. Everybody’s clutching their pearls and freaking out, but this is what happens with deep healing. Whenever we go through healing as an individual, dark matter comes to the surface.

What has been unseen, what has been in the shadow, comes forward into the light, and we experience it again. We feel it again. It tortures us again until it’s sort of run its course and dissolves. That’s the healing process.

Humanity is going through a healing process. More light, more awareness, is being shown on that which has been in the shadow. So suddenly people are like, “What? Racism still exists?” “What? Misogyny? I thought those women were fine.” It’s all coming to the surface. It’s a healing crisis.

Rick: So we’ve gone off on some philosophical and societal considerations, and in our remaining time I wanted to bring it back to you a little bit.

Sarah: But there’s nobody here, Rick.

Rick: Well, let’s bring it back to nobody. He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land.

Sarah: Hi, Irene. I’m like, “Is she doing a yoga pose?”

Rick: She’s ducking under to open the dog door. This is all sort of juggling dog situations during these interviews.

Sarah: Well, I love it because…

Rick: No one can see her, but Sarah can see you.

Sarah: Oh, I can see you. Guys, Irene is doing some yoga. She’s contorting, going through the door.

Rick: I’m going to cut that part out. We can continue, but let me ask the question I just asked again. We’ve gone off on some philosophical considerations, which are necessarily somewhat speculative, and some societal considerations about what the impact of this sort of thing might be on society.

I think that’s very important, actually. If you are a harbinger—and you and the kinds of people I interview are harbingers—of what is to become a larger societal trend, with more and more people having these sorts of awakenings, which is what I believe is happening, then I think that has extremely exciting implications for our world and for how we might end up much better off than many of us fear.

We can even talk about that. You can respond to it if you want, but then I want to bring it back to a little bit more about you.

Sarah: Yeah, well, it’s interesting when you say that. Everybody’s expecting some sort of miracle. We need a miracle, but that is the miracle. It’s just not arriving in a flash; it’s arriving over time.

People who weren’t sitting in caves meditating in the Himalayas are waking up. It’s just happening now.

Rick: Yeah, that might have been happening a thousand years ago, too. Kabir was a weaver, and that was his profession. Nisargadatta sold cigarettes.

We mainly hear about people who left an historical record of their teachings, but there could have been many people who didn’t leave teachings because they weren’t teachers. They were just cobblers or something, and yet they had a profound awakening.

Sarah: Yeah, I meet people who are like, “Oh, you know, that’s kind of how I see things,” but they don’t call it that. Harri Alto—what the heck? He just sort of came out of the womb like that or something.

Rick: He’s been like this all his life.

Sarah: It abided, and he had that one moment where he felt the ego and the separation closing in, and he was like, “Whoa, how do you guys live like this?” I’m paraphrasing him. Maybe he didn’t say it like that.

Rick: It was kind of like that. He was saying, “Yeah, I can’t live like this. How do people do it?” Then, after about 15 minutes, it melted away again, and he was back to his usual state of bliss.

Sarah: Yeah. You know what I do think is important to stress, too, is that since the awakening into unity, rainbows have been shooting out of my butt, and I’m like, “Everything’s great.” Excuse me. I’m swearing again. Ah, shucks.

Rick: That would be great on stage, but anyway, go ahead.

Sarah: But there has been more clearing. Just eight months ago, seven months ago—what is this, September of 2018 right now?—a big chunk of something cleared from my system, but it felt like more of a gut release, a body release.

Oh, that was the dream that we were talking about—dreams. Early at the beginning of this year, I had this primal fear dream. I’d never had a dream like that before. There’s always a narrative in the dream, and often I’m aware I’m dreaming. Sometimes I just say, “Just knock me out,” but there was no awareness in this dream. There was just total awareness of this primal fear.

It was completely terrifying, and I woke up and something had fallen away, something that the body had been holding. So I think the body continues to release long after, and stuff arises because we’re in a body, the neural pathways are still rewiring, and everything’s still stabilizing and integrating.

I was nervous for the interview. I felt the nerves in the body, which dissipated. I still feel a little nervous as I’m about to get on stage, but it’s all everything. There’s no problem. It’s not a problem.

So there was this big gut release seven or eight months ago, and that’s when I woke up and said, “Something feels completely different.” I felt like, “Oh, I think I’m going to email Rick and tell him that I want to do the interview.” Not because it was, “Oh, I’m finished. I’ve completed my clearing out and I’m ready,” but it was just, “Oh, let’s see what Rick is doing,” and being moved by something.

So at every step on the path of awakening, there is clearing. It just gets subtler and subtler and subtler, and especially if somebody has had trauma, the body—even just the cells and the tissues—is holding it.

I think that consciousness, before waking up, identifies with the psychological self, with the me, to know that it exists. But the body identifies with suffering and pleasure to know that it exists. So if you’ve had a certain type of life or certain experiences in your life, your body may identify with being contracted or traumatized. There are subtle clearings all along.

There is no problem. It’s not a problem.

Rick: And who knows how many more there may be.

Sarah: Who knows how many more.

Rick: You could be going through them 20 years from now or whatever.

Sarah: Who knows?

Rick: Yeah. I know that in the Vedic tradition, it’s thought that the refinement is never-ending, and that if one were to live long enough, one could actually refine the physical body to become a celestial body. There are records of people having done that, supposedly. I think in the Buddhist tradition there are records of people having done that as well.

Sarah: Yeah, the rainbow body.

Rick: Yeah, and that kind of stuff might be just mythological, fanciful stuff. I don’t know, but from everyone I speak to—and I’ve spoken to hundreds—the vast majority do feel that there is going to continue, and is continuing to be, refinement. In many respects, not just the body, but the senses, the intellect, the heart, all the various faculties that make us up. There’s no end to it.

Sarah: So just because I might be awake, or whatever, and look at my husband and not feel like there’s any separation between us, but then also be really annoyed that he’s doing something, and then not have the facility or the communication skills yet, let’s say—all of this is hypothetical; we have a perfect relationship—but not have the communication skills, let’s say, to say, “Oh, you know what? That feels weird right now. Hold on a second.”

We’re always developing. We’re developing our communication skills. We’re developing our mental and intellectual understanding of how the physical world works and how relationships work. So it’s never-ending if you’re in a body. We are works in progress.

Remember Peace Pilgrim? Did you ever read Peace Pilgrim?

Sarah: Uh-uh.

Rick: She was this marvelous woman. Look up Peace Pilgrim. You’ll find it. There’s this little book that you can read, and she basically spent decades and decades wandering around the United States with nothing but the shirt on her back and a pair of pants, as well as sneakers, completely at the mercy of whatever happened.

People would pick her up, people would feed her, people would give her a place to stay, or sometimes they wouldn’t. But she would just keep walking around the world. She had a shirt on that said “Peace Pilgrim.”

She was just this cosmic person, a very beautiful soul. She has a very beautiful face. But anyway, she had this little chart in her book about the pace of evolution, and she said that for a long time it just kind of goes like this: just a wavy line that doesn’t go up, or maybe it’s going up gradually, but it’s wavy.

Surrendering Control to Nature’s Intelligence

Then she said that once you undergo a certain shift of the kind I think you’ve been describing in this interview, evolution really begins to accelerate, because it’s sort of like you’re not in control of it anymore. You’re not the one who’s pulling the strings. You’ve surrendered to a much wiser and more powerful level of nature’s intelligence, and that can work out your destiny, or your evolution, much more effectively than any sort of individual effort can.

Anyway, that’s a recommendation for everybody listening: get ahold of Peace Pilgrim’s little book. It’s probably free online or something at this point, and just read it, because she’s a very inspiring figure.

Sarah: Is she still alive?

Rick: No, she died a number of years ago. She was doing this back in the ’60s, I think. Wonderful person. That little bit about evolution always continuing, but accelerating once the individual gets out of the way, reminded me—doesn’t Ken Wilber say something about, “We wake up, clean up, wake up, show up, clean up, and grow up”? All that stuff.

He talks a lot about the fact that those can be rather out of correlation, or out of sync, and they need to also be brought in line for a full awakening to really be.

Yeah, and also with creativity, with people who—because I just work with a lot of creative people—it’s how you get out of the way and let that happen. When somebody has had a profound awakening, they have some facility with getting out of the way, but that’s really what’s happening. We get out of the way and life can move through us, or the symphony can move through us, or the play, or the words for something that we want to have.

Sarah: Yeah, and also with creativity, with people who—because I just work with a lot of creative people—it’s how you get out of the way and let that happen. When somebody has had a profound awakening, they have some facility with getting out of the way, but that’s really what’s happening. We get out of the way and life can move through us, or the symphony can move through us, or the play, or the words for something that we want to have.

And you’re familiar with Aurobindo, right?

Rick: Sure, yeah. I would love to study him more. I hope to do that at some point. Maybe I’ll find an Aurobindo expert that I can interview.

Sarah: Yeah, well, there’s a good book called Adventures in Consciousness. Oh, I wish I could give a shout-out to the author. I think he passed away. But Adventures in Consciousness is what it’s called, and it’s a pretty good summation of Aurobindo’s work.

I don’t claim to have studied him very much, but that’s basically what he’s saying: evolution is happening. This is the evolution of humanity. Consciousness is now leading things, whereas the body was evolving—the body has been evolving—so now consciousness is evolving.

Our bodies are pretty good machines. We still have wisdom teeth and appendixes, and who knows what they’re for, but now it’s consciousness’s turn to evolve and to evolve humanity. I agree with that. I think that’s what’s happening.

Rick: Yeah, I would say it always has been. Throughout the 13.7-billion-year history of the universe—and this universe is probably only one of many—that’s always been the game.

But I think, at least on this planet, we’ve reached a stage of biological evolution with nervous systems. We’re not dinosaurs, we’re not troglodytes, and we have a level of complexity and brains large enough to really become vehicles for some very interesting developments to take place, and for a very interesting society to arise from those developments.

Sarah: Yeah, definitely. I agree.

Closing thoughts

Rick: Well, Sarah Taylor.

Sarah: Well, Rick Archer, what do you think? I think we’re winding down. Let’s not exhaust people who are philosophizing.

Rick: P. T. Barnum said, “Always leave them wanting more.” He also said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Sarah: He did say that.

Rick: Yeah, but he was from Bridgeport, Connecticut, right next to where I grew up.

Sarah: Oh, you’re a Connecticut guy. Yeah, I was from Fairfield, Connecticut, and Westport.

Rick: In any case, Sarah, you’re a good friend. We haven’t spent a lot of time together, but I just feel a kind of camaraderie with you, and I’ve enjoyed having this conversation with you.

Sarah: Me too.

Rick: I would certainly want you to have the last say if there’s anything else you feel has been left out. But I think we’ll probably end up doing another one in a few years. We can sort of have a chapter thing with Suzanne, Marie, maybe Adya, or whoever wants to be part of it—David Buckland. It would be fun.

A few years ago, I did this thing at Sophia University with 14 or 15 people.

Sarah: I remember that, yeah.

Rick: I didn’t quite feel moved to do that again this year, although I could.

Sarah: Well, there were so many people on that panel.

Rick: It was interesting. It was this all-day thing, and I kind of think maybe I’ll do another one of those one of these days, and you could be part of it.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rick: It took a lot of finagling to pull that one off, as well as a lot of technical work and post-production editing.

Sarah: And we had technical issues earlier this week. We weren’t sure this was going to happen.

Rick: I know, your computer kept freezing up and all. But in any case, this went well, I think, and I think people will enjoy it. We didn’t get any questions during it, but that doesn’t matter. You and I filled the time.

I appreciate your time, and hopefully we’ll see you out at SAND in a month or so. Are you going to make it?

Sarah: I think so. I think I’m going to be there. That’s about a month from now.

Rick: Yeah, late October.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rick: We’ll take it from there. I’ll just make a few wrap-up points. I’ll create a page on your website, on my website, about you, with links to your website and all that stuff.

I would recommend, if you haven’t already done so, creating something on your website where people can be notified when your book is released, because I think it’s going to be a really interesting book. They may not want to be on your regular mailing list, but they might want to just be notified when your book is finished, whenever that’s going to be.

So, people listening to this, go visit her website, sarahtaylor.com, right?

Sarah: No, sarahtaylor.org. Sarahtaylor.com is a real estate agent in Florida who fields my emails. She is so kind. Shout-out to Sarah Taylor in Florida. But it’s sarahtaylor.org.

Rick: Whitehouse.com used to be a porn site, and people would go there all the time. It’s whitehouse.gov that you want to go to.

Sarah: Well, it’s good to know that.

Rick: These days, it sort of is a porn site, even if you go to whitehouse.gov. But in any case, with apologies to the conservatives who listen to this.

Next week is an old friend of mine named Steve Briggs, who had all kinds of interesting adventures in India for years, lived and hiked in the Himalayas, and claims to have met Babaji up there.

Sarah: Oh, yeah, I have his book. I read part of it.

Rick: Oh, cool.

Sarah: Nice, yeah, I’m in the middle of it.

Rick: Yeah, I see him every week when I go to play pickleball. He’s up there teaching tennis. He’s going to be one of these people who make Fairfield, Iowa, an interesting place to live.

And then the following week is this fellow I mentioned earlier who’s written the book about the decisions we make before we come into this life.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Rick: Yeah, so stay tuned, everybody. If you want to be notified when these interviews are released, subscribe on YouTube. And there’s some kind of extra subscription thing you can do, I’ve been told, that helps make sure you get notified.

Also, subscribe to our little email list if you want to. It’s on batgap.com. You can also subscribe to the audio podcast if you like to listen while you’re commuting and stuff.

So, thanks, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you.

Rick: Take care.

Sarah: Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thanks for watching live.