Scott Hiegel Transcript

Scott Hiegel Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done nearly 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them all organized in a number of different ways. And there’s also a menu called content search, which is a new one, which has, I’ll just explain this briefly, has two different ways of interacting with the content. One is that you can search for any word or phrase, and it’ll instantly show you a list of any interviews in which that word or phrase was mentioned. And you can click on that listing and you’ll be taken right to that spot in video where it was mentioned. And the other is the BatGap bot, which is an AI chat bot through which you can interact with all of the content of all the interviews, plus much, much more, which you’ll see if you click on the link there, you’ll see what’s going on. And a lot of that has been made possible by the support of volunteers. So there’s a number of ways in which you can volunteer, and if you’d like to do that, get in touch. All of this is also made possible through the financial support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page describing alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Scott Hiegel. Scott lives in La Quinta, California and runs a business consulting and investment banking business called SoulQuest. He has a BBA from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA from UCLA. He’s been a former CPA, CFA, he likes acronyms, Vice President of Corporate Finance and Entrepreneur. He enjoys writing and talking about his experiences with Kundalini, which is why I’m talking to him today, and his lifelong rollercoaster and at times perilous search for inner peace, the divine, love, and higher consciousness. Through speaking, outreach, film, poetry, and other creative expression, his goal is to entertain and inform people about the gifts and profound importance of Gopi Krishna’s work, which we’ll be talking about, Kundalini, higher states of consciousness, and love. Scott has written two books, “Reaching Heaven on Earth, A Soul’s Journey Home”, in which he shares his personal story and mystical poetry, and “Love’s Design”, which I have here. Where is it? Is it showing? Yes, it’s showing. “Love’s Design: Reaching Heaven on Earth”, which he co-authored with Christopher Wrigley. In this book, they share their unique expressions of love, hope, and knowledge through an exchange of 12 poetic verses. Scott’s interests, besides Kundalini, include visiting museums and historical sites, traveling, listening to holiday music and oldies, and watching movies. He enjoys sports, hiking, and attending 12-step meetings. He loves reading books about spirituality and the inspirational people who have helped make the world a better place. So I think that last paragraph is significant in that he’s a normal guy who likes doing normal stuff. But he has had a profound spiritual awakening, and it’s really put him through the wringer, as we’ll describe in this interview. And another point I want to make by way of introduction is that I really resonate with Scott’s perspective. You may have heard me say before that a lot of times I feel that people dumb down awakening or enlightenment and Scott holds it to a very high standard and through his own experience and through his study of Gopi Krishna, he has high expectations for what a human being is capable of achieving spiritually and what the society at large is capable of achieving if enough individuals undergo the kind of development that we’re going to be discussing today. So, welcome Scott.

Scott: Thank you, Rick. It’s good to be here. Thank you for that introduction.

Rick: Sure. Let’s follow the pattern of your – I mean, we can do two things. We can kind of start with your chronological biography a little bit and some of the, you know, developmental stages of your life growing up in Madison, Wisconsin and so on. Or we could plunge right into the spiritual stuff and then backtrack to that. How would you like to do it?

Scott: Well, why don’t we start a little bit with the, you know, the history of myself and my background. Yeah, but I did want to say one thing in that introduction. Actually, a couple things came up. Can I do that?

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Scott: Okay, so the whole idea is I am a regular person and I never thought this would be the life that I would be thrown into, but it’s still like I still live a regular life and I have the “Reaching Heaven on Earth” in both of my books and their titles and because I have ended up in a place that I never dreamed was possible and it’s somewhat hard for me to talk about and even sharing my experiences related to this, But I do think it’s extremely important, and I think Gopi’s Krishna theory is extremely important for humanity, and the whole concept of kundalini and reaching a different state of consciousness. But I’m very grateful to be here too, Rick. I’ve listened to a lot of your podcasts, and they’re tremendous.

Rick: Well, thanks. And I’ve got news for you. Everybody’s a regular person. All these enlightened people that we read about, and if you were married to one of them, or got to know them really well, Hung out with them personally, you’d find a lot of regularity about them. And I think either their followers or even in some cases these people themselves try to portray an aura of specialness and otherworldliness or extraordinariness and so on, which is justified to some extent, but not to the exclusion of the rest of us who are also capable of extraordinary levels of development, and extraordinary just means they’re not common, but they’re natural and everyone is capable of them.

Scott: I couldn’t agree more. I always say to friends like I’m sure Buddha and Christ and Saint Francis and all the other really well-known mystics and saints that they were regular people who went through really hard things too. Their history is sanitized to make them look like gods, but then we don’t realize that. But but they’re really coming to communicate to us as we all have this, at least as what I believe, this potential within ourselves to approach where they were at someday.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, Adi Shankara, you know, who wrote the great commentaries on some of the Upanishads and the Gita, he suffered from an anal fistula, which they had no medical treatment for in those days, and, you know, it caused him a great deal of pain and suffering. Sorry, Shankara fans, but that’s the fact, at least historically speaking. So you know, we all perform the same bodily functions and so on. So I have a friend who wrote a book called, I think this was Craig Holliday, who’s a good friend, he wrote a book called “Fully Human, Fully Divine”. And you know, I think most people are confined to their humanness, which is a good thing, I mean, not the confinement, but the humanness. But there’s a whole other dimension, a vast spectrum of possibility that most people haven’t realized, even though they potentially could realize it. And there’s no reason why any of them couldn’t.

Scott: Yeah, and I was gonna say too, I remember reading a book back in the ’90s, I think it was called “Spirituality Then Perfection.” And I remember one of the last names was Kurtz, but that really struck a chord with me. really been a theme of my life, imperfection, and working through my imperfections has led me to a better place and not to hide them.

Rick: Yeah, now on this note, what do you think about this? Some people say, “Well, yeah, you can be an enlightened guy or girl and yet be abusive behaviorally or an alcoholic or a sex addict or a drug addict, you know, well, that’s alcoholism, all these human foibles, and personally, maybe I’m naive and idealistic, but I take exception to that. I have a feeling like if a person has really achieved what enlightenment is supposed to be, they wouldn’t be inclined to do these things. They wouldn’t have cravings for them anymore because their inner fulfillment would be such that such things would be distasteful. And also, a great deal of inner purification and refinement would have taken place, which would just disincline them to behave egregiously like that.

Scott: I agree a hundred percent with that. I mean, one of the things Gopi Krishna talked about was that, you know, the rising of Kundalini. First of all, he said it was a biological process and that really interested me because I was somebody like, okay, prove it to me. And a lot of people have different experiences, but he tied it to a biology and the evolution of the brain. And he said that, you know, at the early stage, you can have, you know, become more talented or you can get some new gifts and be more creative. He said, but going beyond that, you can have psychic paranormal experiences. And then going beyond that, you can become a genius. But if you want to reach the highest levels, which he called cosmic consciousness, which is same as enlightenment or same as Samadhi, somewhat, I mean, it’s all to me the same experience. Different religion, you know, had different names for it, but those people were pretty darn pure. In other words, I think we are evolving into some semblance of what we call God. We’re very, very far away from it, but we have to develop the virtues of what we call God to get to the highest levels. That’s my understanding of it and belief.

Rick: Yeah, mine too. I hope we’ll spend more time on this today, talking about this point. And one quick thing here, be careful not to knock your table ’cause it makes your camera jiggle.

Scott: Okay.

Rick: Okay. Good, so let’s scoot back a bit then. You grew up in Madison, Wisconsin in a large Catholic family and take it from there.

Scott: Yeah, actually it was a village in Madison, Wisconsin, called Maple Bluff, 1500 people and Oscar Meyer grew up there and so did Chris Farley, the comedian who ended up having trouble with alcoholism. It was a very idyllic place to grow up. I kind of looked at it like, for me it was like out of Mayberry from the Annie Griffith Show. And we lived on a lake and there were eight kids in our family, six sisters and then a brother, one brother that’s older. And so in the summers we would swim and boat and then we’d go up to the country club. And my dad was somebody who kind of the story of his life is he started in the mailroom at Oscar Mayer and worked his way up to CEO. And he was a kind of a, in some ways, a very scary person. He had this commanding presence. He could be moody and critical, but he was also very honest and generous and trustworthy. And he was the patriarch, he was God the Father, the ruler in our family. And he got the Tocqueville Charity Awards and the Catholic Charity Awards. So I’m saying he was like almost like a God, but he had a lot of flaws too. My mom was almost the opposite. She was to me was very kind, very loving, very understated. And my dad would always say she cooked meals for 30 years, not disparaging in that saying, “Wow, you know what, she did the basic work.” And she always played home sweet home on the piano. And I just, she loved children. And so yeah, we grew up with a big 10 of us. It was a lot of craziness, a lot of dysfunction, and a lot of really great times. I, you know, I kind of have both memories. And just about me really quickly, I was very shy, and I would say a very nice person. I was kind of a people pleaser, and I loved to play in my imagination. I dreamed of one day of being a professional athlete either in golf or basketball and I wanted to be either or a sports radio announcer and didn’t really like school but liked it for the social part of it and also the sports and rarely raised my hand in class because I was afraid of being called on and then I would blank out so I was very very shy. And I’ll just, a little bit more, in ninth grade was my first date and actually my friend asked the girl out for me and then he went with us on the date and waited outside and I don’t know what the girl thought of that, but I loved to play basketball and golf and when I practiced those sports, they were early form of meditation for me and basketball was a place where I could really create. And then I’ll just say one other thing, but I had anxiety from an early age and And it really informed a lot of my life because when I was like seven or eight I would go to bed at night afraid I would stop breathing. Sometimes I would jump in bed with my brother because I was very scared. I thought I had a disease oftentimes and then about when I was in high school my mind started whirling out of control. So eventually I looked up the word anxiety in the dictionary, I went and saw a psychologist finally at age 22 and he tried to give me Valium and I took maybe one or two and then it was like, “No, I have to do this without drugs.” And I just feel like I’m on a path of spiritual development and the ability to love. For whatever reason, I even thought that at age 22 and that was going to be a long journey, there were going to be no quick fixes. And so that’s what really started me on a path, almost like this simultaneous path. I had this perfectionism where I wanted to really achieve, but on the other hand, I had a really strong spiritual thirst and I also wanted to get rid of the anxiety. So on this parallel path, I was trying to climb up the ladder at the top, do more than my dad. And on the other side, on the spiritual side, I wanted to just keep growing and growing and growing. So I did these two things simultaneously.

Rick: Yeah, and I read your whole book and you worked really hard and, you know, got higher degrees and got into the financial world where people work really hard and you’re trying to do all kinds of big business deals and nature had other plans for you.

Scott: Well, it worked for a while. It worked to about age 34. And as you said, I think there was 12 initials behind my name. And if you put in the VP to a corporate finance, I got up to 14. And I did count those things, they meant a lot to me. I also joked about how I would count, you know, like the higher you got up in a floor in a building, that meant you were more successful. So I had gone from like floor 12 to 44. And then I actually worked for two weeks at the one summer. And then it was the 27th, 36th, ended up at the 43rd floor, 101 California Street in the heart of the financial district, working with a man named Howard Leach. And he was actually chairman of the board of the University of California Regents at that time, later the ambassador to France, and he wanted to buy companies, so we worked with him. But my story was, those things, you know, like I was doing what I thought was the perfect life and I would be happy, but I wasn’t happy. I never could understand why, and I finally went and saw a psychologist and they said, “Well, you don’t have to do what you don’t like, and you don’t have to public speak.” And it’s almost a joke to me, but it’s like, I always thought you had to, you know, I always thought I had to be this certain kind of person and I didn’t really know who I was. And so I’ll just end with I’m very grateful for what I did. I learned a lot. I worked with some really smart, good people, but I’m also glad that I got stopped on that path, you know, at age 34 and I could go into what happened then.

Rick: Yeah, we’ll do that. I was often reminded as I was reading your book of that John Lennon line that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. So you had all these grand plans, you know, but you kept getting smacked down.

Scott: Yeah. And the reason was because, honestly, I just felt like unless I accomplished a lot, I wasn’t good enough, you know, that sort of thing. Kind of a tenuous foundation to build your life on. And I know when I had to be the vice president of corporate finance, my parents came out and they were so proud and happy. There’s a little blurb in the San Francisco Chronicle with my picture and they were all happy and I was thinking to myself as we went out to dinner, it doesn’t mean a thing to me but now I’m okay. I’ve made it there. Now I can really do what I want to do.

Rick: Yeah, I live in a town where thousands of people meditate and have been doing so for decades and there’s so much in the mentality here, and I’ve definitely been prone to it myself, of just wanting to somehow get the financial things sorted out so we can do what we want to do, which is spiritual stuff. And, you know, I mean, I went through years like as a computer consultant crawling around under people’s desks, you know, messing around with wires and doing stuff like that. And I eventually adjusted to it and realized that every moment is life and you don’t, you know, have to lament the present and, you know, in hopes of some glorious future, you know, things will continue to unfold in due course, and they did. But I think a lot, you know, and I remember Thoreau said, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” So, I think a lot of people are just sort of frustrated with the mundane circumstances they find themselves in, but you can be in heaven while working as a janitor if you learn how to unfold that inner potential.

Scott: Well it’s funny because I always saw everything through the lens, even when I was doing the financial work that it was also preparing me for something else. So when I worked with this Howard Leach who was a very good man and there were five of us on the 44th, 43rd floor, and we were right right next to First Boston Investment Bank. And I used to watch all the senators come in and the CEOs, and I saw, wow, this is real power and how it works. So I felt like I was getting an education on kind of how power works. And I kind of looked, and I learned not to judge anything. It’s kind of everything happens for a reason, but could I quickly just say how I went, my dark night of the soul, would that be?

Rick: Yeah, please. You don’t need to ask permission. You just launch into whatever you want to say.

Scott: Okay, well, I don’t want to. So it was when about age 40, 1996 through 1998 time period. And it’s like when everything just went to hell and I felt like I descended into hell. Or I felt, I would always say I was exiled to the desert. And as I said before, at that time, and this was in my own mind, let me emphasize, I thought I had climbed the ladder of achievement. And, you know, I had all those credentials you were talking about. And I climbed all those floors, but the joke was, okay, once I was on the 43rd floor, then the next stop was the 13th. And then I was quickly, I was in the elevator going quickly to the bottom and I knew it and I couldn’t stop it. Years earlier, I had read a book by, what was his name? John Sanford. It was called “The Christ Within” or something like that. And he talked about crucifixion. And five years earlier, I thought, I got a feeling that’s what I’m gonna go through. I’m kind of dreading this, But I kind of knew this was happening. And so I was going to the basement quickly. And what I always say is, is, and I,

Rick: And by going to the basement, you mean like business deals were falling through, your marriage was on the rocks,

Scott: Yeah, like everything was going to hell.

Rick: All kinds of stuff like that.

Scott: I was going down from the high floors quickly. I went to actually to the 13th floor and I thought, well, that may not be a good sign. Only in retrospect.

Rick: Oh, you mean literally, you got put on the thirteenth floor.

Scott: These are all literally, I was starting to, ’cause I always like, if you’re at the 45th floor, you’re doing even more than somebody else. I didn’t really completely think like that, but, but I was, like I said, I was going to the elevator into the basement very quickly in the life I had known and expected to live was just crumbling. And so despite all these credentials and accomplishments, there was nothing I could do. There was like this downward rushing force of the tsunami. And one of the things I wrote at that time is, you know, the higher your eyes, not that I rose that high. It’s for me, it was high, but, um, the faster you fall when you’re going in the right direction or not doing what you’re meant to do. So it wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was meant to do, so it’s not like I could have. And I also think that’s what happens to countries. If you look at every civilization in the past, everyone has always fallen because they never make the jump to the next thing that they’re supposed to do. So in other words, I got blocked, you know, from what I was doing and it was devastating because, again, what I accomplished was who I was. So if I’m not accomplishing these things, you know, kind of like who am I, you know, and but the benefit of that was it really took me deep inwardly. It made me surrender to what I call God, which I call the intelligence behind the universe, and it diminished my ego. And but I went through like the end in like two years, the ending of my marriage, and I had to sell my house and move into an apartment. I had three investments that we had put together and had all these investors, very high-name people and also friends and family friends. And I had to keep calling them, telling them it’s all going to heck, you know. And literally, we lost almost all our money. I had invested a lot of money and I had a falling out with my partner. He had some problems and I got shingles and it was just like everything. So it was like like a dying star burning out and collapsing under my own weight. And, you know, again, who was I if I wasn’t doing these things? But the funny thing, Rick, was deep down inside, I knew this wasn’t a bad thing. I would joke with my inner voice, and I’d say, Jesus, this is hell on Earth. And the inner voice would say back, no, no, no, you don’t know, but you’re being sent to heaven. This is the beginning. So that was kind of a joke that I didn’t find funny from my inner voice. But in a way I kind of knew it was true. Like I was being taken off this path and I was being put on what I call an inner path. And you know, and what I wrote in the back of that book, “Love’s Design, Reaching Heaven on Earth”, which I did with, you know, Christopher, who this disabled young man who’s never been able to really speak, and he’s almost blind, and he just has this unbelievable mind and has these cosmic conscious type experiences. But I said that really the treasure is inside of us. There’s all these gifts. And so in a way I knew that, I knew the divinity was within, the glory and the splendor was inside of me. And instead of climbing up the ladder one step at a time, I was kind of like climbing into in my interior one step down at a time. And I knew eventually it would lead to, you know, a better place, but it wasn’t what I say is I wasn’t chasing the four Ps, the property, prestige, um, possessions and power. But now I was going within to really find out who I am. And I just kind of knew that. And I knew that eventually it would lead to more healing and expansive life, but I had a lot of doubts all along the way.

Rick: Would you say that it’s necessary for someone’s relative life to fall apart in the process of undergoing a spiritual metamorphosis? Or do you think that for some people, given their particular makeup, they could actually continue to flourish financially and in their relationships and everything else while still going under profound spiritual transformation. But just in your case, it was necessary for everything to sort of fall apart.

Scott: I’ve thought of that question a lot, and it’s a really great question. In my case, it had to fall apart. But what I also realized is I had to surrender to the deepest part of surrender. Like I had to almost give up everything. And that’s very scary. If you say that to anybody, what do you know? I don’t want to give up what I have. I’d like, I got wealth, I got this or that. It was just the journey that I was put on, but I just knew, you know, like I was being stripped of everything and it didn’t make me say, and what I think eventually is people are going to be born into higher consciousness, but I think right now for, you know, and, and working with really talented people, both on the spiritual side and on the financial business side, you know, like I work with Mike Murphy who started Esalen. I don’t know if you know Esalen.

Rick: Oh yeah, of course. I even tried to interview Mike Murphy years ago and he said, “Oh, I’m busy writing a book, I’m getting too old,” and blah blah blah.

Scott: I almost got him into this golf company we were trying to do, but what a, I call him a leprechaun, what a beautiful man. But still, and he wrote a book called “Future of the Body”, but I don’t know how to say this, but it’s almost like you have to even give up any prestige, and at least that’s how I view it. Okay, now it doesn’t mean somebody else has to, I guess, in the end, because I would never say what anybody else, but for me to get to the deepest part of this inner guidance, I had to let go of everything and trust the unknown. I literally did that for 25 years and it was very scary.

Rick: I’m trying to think of exceptions. I can think of some very successful people whom I consider very spiritual. Maybe the consideration is that if you’re attached to something, then you might need to give it up and you might involuntarily be forced to give it up if there’s this force of evolution governing your life. But if you’re not attached to it, if it’s not an issue for you, maybe you could sort of continue with it while you still make spiritual progress. You know, when Jesus said the thing about it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he said that just after interacting with some wealthy people who asked, you know, “What can we do?” You know, “Can we?” And he said, “Give up everything and follow me.” And they said, “Uh, sorry, can’t do that.” And he walked away. That’s when he said that thing about the camel. So, you know, and maybe he was just testing them, you know, maybe if they said, “All right, we’ll do that.” He would have said, “All right, obviously you’re not attached, so you can keep your rich stuff and you’ll use it to help people and I’ll be your teacher.”

Scott: Well, if you look at Buddha, and if you look at Saint Francis, and even Christ, none of them had anything, you know, they really didn’t. And well, I would know that Buddha, I know he was head of kingdom at first, and then he, you know, kind of got brought to nothing. So did St. Francis, the way Gopi Krishna talked about it was, he said, you know, in this continuum, you can be a genius, and you can have a very deep spirituality. And I’m not saying he was saying this, but I kind of got the sense that the highest, on the highest rung, it was like you were meant to to give kind of guidance to the race and with what you’re, you know, so like, you know, what Christ gave to the race and what Buddha was the highest teaching is to how to get closer to God. But I look at it more how to evolve to a higher level of consciousness so we can get higher to God. So he was kind of, Gopi Krishnan went through a hell on earth for 12 years. So I don’t know that, you know, like in other words, I’m saying, I wanna say the people that gave the highest guidance got brought to absolutely nothing, but is that required? Maybe not. And like, I think eventually people will just be born, so maybe it is true what you’re saying. You know?

Rick: Yeah. I mean, there’s the story of King Janaka in the Vedic tradition who, you know, was a great king. He was supposed to be totally enlightened and he’s depicted as like sitting with a beautiful woman massaging one of his feet and his other foot in a pot of fire, you know, meaning he had equanimity amidst pleasure and pain. He was just sitting there cool as a cucumber. So and, you know, I mean, I don’t know whether this is just, you know, mythological or not, but there are stories of enlightened civilizations where there was, you know, nobody was like, we didn’t have the wealth disparity we have today, where, you know, some tiny fraction of people can, you know, possess more wealth than the rest of the population combined, but everyone was comfortable and their needs met. It wasn’t a society of ascetics, in other words. You could live a rich life materially and yet at the same time spiritually.

Scott: Yeah, I know it’s been my journey because I laughed because every time I started, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to get some money now,” and it just vanished then. So it was always kind of hard, but I didn’t also look like I’ve got to be ascetic or this or that. I really believed in this idea that if I thought something was coming and I was disappointed, meant something better was coming. But I didn’t know what that better would mean. At first, of course, it was like, “God, if I get a little money, I don’t have to worry as much on this path.” But then when I didn’t get that, I can just jump ahead a little bit. One financial deal I got done in 2011, I needed money desperately. It was due a six-figure fee, and I didn’t get paid. I won’t go into why. And it was like, “Holy Christ.” Well then, 10 years later, I made a fee that was six times that. So it was like, and during that, those next 10 years that I didn’t have as much money, I even surrendered more deeply and worked spiritually harder. I found when I had a little cushion, I didn’t work as hard spiritually. And literally, like I said, I worked really hard financially. Even when I was in my 20s and 30s, I worked spiritually. So when I was flying on a plane to a business meeting, I’d be reading, you know, Freud or Jung or the Christian mystics. And so I always did that. But when I got on this path of just almost like complete spiritually working hard on myself, it was a full-time job. And so when I didn’t have the money, I had to learn I can’t do this. I might have to surrender more deeply to the intelligence within, as I call it. And I would work even harder on the spiritual side. So what that meant for me, I did spiritual direction counseling for five years. I did, I’ve done purify and get better connected to source. And I did find over time I got better connected to source, but in the end, and I’m getting ahead of myself probably again, but it was like from 1998, that’s when I made it in 1998, I made a commitment. I said, no matter what happens, I’m gonna just go inside and listen to my inner voice and wherever that takes me in my daily life And also in my work path i’m going to work hard I’m going to actually serve, i’m going to give, and i’m going to love, and i’m going to trust god to give me back What I need to live and the joke was I always and I said it in my book is like The first thing I really wanted back at that time was money But of course I didn’t get that I said God was a very uh hard task master but it just kept forcing me to go deeper and work harder and harder and then But ultimately in 2020, I got a deal done that I made more money in that deal than I had the previous 25 years. So in 1998, my inner voice had said, “If you trust me and let go completely, in the end, you will live an amazing inner life, but also your outer life will eventually blossom.” And I always had this joke to myself, “Well, it’s been 22 years and nothing.” And it is now because I would say now I’m, you know, not only got it, you know, doing some financial stuff now that’s helping me earn some money, but I would never dreamed I would write two books. Are you going to be kidding me? Never, never. I would have told you that. And not only that about spirituality. And so, and then actually, you know, speaking at conferences, even doing a pod, this is actually only my second podcast. I’m going to do more of them. But so anyway, I got led, but I’m now more outer. I even, I’ll say one other thing, I even planned my daughter’s post-wedding luncheon and I did it with my brother and that might have been my most great achievement because I had no idea what I was doing. Like I said, my brother helped me a lot, but so anyways, it’s like, yeah, I can trust what this inner voice told me and it always has come true. So…

Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting topic in itself because, I mean, some people, you know, their inner voice tells them to go shoot up a school or something. And so, the whole notion of inner voice can be a little bit suspect. But there is also such a thing, I firmly believe and experience myself as an intuition that has our best interests and everyone’s best interests in mind, and that often contradicts what we think we want, and then it turns out that we end up with something better, and we’re grateful for not having gotten the other thing in the first place.

Scott: Well, I know one of the things Gopi Krishna talked in relation to Kundalini, he said, that’s generating a, it happened to me, just like all of a sudden this more powerful energy was flowing in my body. And one of the things I learned right away was, you know, he talked about that it feeds a center in the brain and you can develop new talents, you can develop, you know, again, all these other, you know, maybe psychic paranormal gifts, maybe genius, all these things, but he also warned, very, he said, “But if you’re not living right, and let’s say there’s defects in your physical body or in your physical organs or your lifestyle isn’t conducive, you know, that energy can act in an unpleasant way and can lead to mental illness, even, you know, psychosis and so that, and he talked about, you know, people like Hitler and other, and maybe Genghis Khan, that they were geniuses, but in the end they always end up dying. So in other words, he said it was more like, so like your inner voice, and oftentimes what happens to like, you know, the mystics as they realize this whole thing about be careful when you’re listening to your inner voice, because it could be something, you know, not healthy either, and especially as they got older, they even got said, because their body couldn’t, as you get older, it couldn’t maintain the purity of the energy that it needed to do to give it the gracious gifts. So it could, you know, but they were already so pure that they wouldn’t do anything like bad. But so I always checked everything my inner voice, you know, and I know if I heard something, well inner voice this or that, you know, I’d be a little bit suspect. But that’s why I work to me to always purify myself to see if I could hear that inner voice more clearly. And I was talking to my brother the other day and we were talking about how in my extended family I was telling him that, you know, I have one cousin who was a polymath genius. Now he’s having, I think, some trouble mentally. I had another cousin that turned out to have schizophrenia. We had drug addicts, we had alcoholics, but we also had CEOs and really talented, and so there was a whole spectrum. And Gopi Krishna would say it’s just because the purity of the body in some people, and not that one was better than the other, might not have been able to maintain that gracious flow of energy. So, I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.

Rick: No, it makes a lot of sense, and I think we should talk about it more. So, we might want to define what purity is, but I don’t think you’re using the word, or Gopi Krishna used the word in necessarily a moralistic sense, but the body is the temple of the soul, as Jesus put it, and it’s for any experience. I mean, eating a sandwich, or watching a movie, or going, having a dream while you’re sleeping, or anything, the neurophysiology is involved. And we all know that if you ingest something that alters the functioning of the neurophysiology, like a six-pack or something like that, you better not drive. Your perception is going to be altered and your faculties are going to be diminished. And so, by the same token, enlightenment, let’s just use the word without fussing over the definition too much, but higher states of consciousness are, if they are radically different from ordinary waking state of consciousness, which they are described to be by everyone, would necessitate a radically different style of physical functioning of the neurophysiology. And there has been some research along these lines. I mean, they’ve found that people who’ve been meditating for decades have much thicker prefrontal cortex and there’s different brainwave signatures than in control groups and so on. So, insofar as there could be, I’m sure there are subtle mechanics to the neurophysiology of enlightenment that our modern instruments can’t yet measure. But there are certain things they can measure and it’s been seen that functioning changes quite profoundly.

Scott: It’s like the neuroplasticity work of Richard Davidson in Wisconsin.

Rick: Yeah.

Scott: Through meditation you can actually change your brain circuitry and develop more compassion and those sorts of things. Should I just give a quick, you know, kind of a summary of what Gopi Krishna put forward?

Rick: Yeah, please.

Scott: Because I think it’s a little bit different than, it may not be, but you know, he said first of all that human evolution is planned and that the brain is still in a state of organic…

Rick: Planned by whom?

Scott: What’s that?

Rick: Who planned it?

Scott: By a higher intelligence.

Rick: Okay, you got God or whatever.

Scott: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Scott: That the human brain is still in a process of organic evolution, and that we’re predetermined to evolve to a more expanded and profound state of consciousness, or a higher consciousness, and he called the zenith of that the cosmic conscious mind. And there was a book written by, I know you know this, Dr. Richard Maurice Buck in 1901 called Cosmic Consciousness, a study in the human, something like study of the human mind. And so his whole thing is that if, in this state of mind, if you reach higher consciousness, he says, you know, you lose your, you know, let me just, I’m going to read some of this. It can result in expanded awareness and magnificent state of being, grace with new talents, greater creativity and perception of truth, inspiration, intuition, psychic gifts. I know I’ve said this before, but you lose your fear of death, certainty of their internal life becomes, you have greater longevity, greater health, all those things. So there’s like the treasures are enormous, but like we said, it’s very rare now and it can go askew. And so this whole thing is, but what he said is there is a law of evolution, okay? That we’re predetermined to go to this state of mind. And it’s also a biological law. So when he lived, this is why I liked him so much, I felt he was so humble. And he said, “I don’t want a following of people.” Because normally what happens if somebody says really new things, they get a following of like a Christ or a Buddha and a religion forms around them. He said, “I just wanna put this idea out to science that the brain’s in an organic state of evolution. And there’s actually spiritual or mental loss too that we have to conform with. So in other words, you were saying, so I think where it’s gonna lead, eventually is the injunctions that you learn in spirituality, religion, yoga, et cetera, to kind of try to live, have virtues of like honesty and compassion and mercy. And yet you also have concentration practices like meditation and that sort of thing. You have devotional practices that those are all meant to what I call, there’s like almost a mental purification going on, if you follow me. And so like, if you don’t do that, then there’s actually toxins or poisons that can develop in the brain from not following the right spiritual. You know, it’s like if we’re living opposite of that, so you can not only like physically have toxins, but you can mentally. And he said, the biggest thing is this law of evolution. And what he would say to us today is, And he wrote about this and so did Walter Russell. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that name, Rick, but people in the audience may have. But they talked about how, you know, long time ago, maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago, they were saying that we’re heading in a bad direction because we’re off the path of healthy evolution. You know, we’ve become too materialistic, not ethical enough, that sort of thing. And so that there’s gonna be some bad things that are developing. And I mean, there are some scary things happening in the world, but also some really good things. So you know, I was so intrigued by him because of the biology. And he said, I think that this, if you run experiments on the brain, you could prove there is a biological, this process of Kundalini rising is a biological process. The problem is it’s driven by an intelligence that they can’t measure yet, or it’s more subtle or, you know, and I know in my own life, and this is why I believe it so deeply, people that I liked the fact that it was biology and let’s put it out to science, but in the end ultimately I think we have to prove it to each one of ourselves in the laboratory of our own experiences of whether we can reach a more higher state of consciousness or just be a more decent person. Like it’s all up to individually, an instrument can’t tell you that or you have to go within yourself and do that. So that’s why some of the scientists are now doing meditation and trying to prove these changes to themselves, but he said, but separate from that, the organic process of this evolution going on, he thought could be proven by science. And I was just getting to, so my symptoms that I went through and my, what I call, and maybe I’ll go into that really briefly, but so amidst that dark night of the soul, I was meditating one day and praying and all of a sudden I felt this, kind of this popping and crackling at the base of my spine and it was like it sounded like Rice Krispies when you put milk on a crackle crackle crackle and I and then all of a sudden I was like what is this am I really hearing this, and the next thing that happened is I heard this snap in this floor, I don’t know if it’s an energy because I don’t think it’s a material energy, I think it’s an intelligent energy, but it’s a subtle intelligent energy that went firing up my spine, into my head, lights were going off in my head. Simultaneously, I felt this from my reproductive area, this suction-like effect. And it was sucking something up from my reproductive area into my brain. It was a separate thing than the energy and the light. And it was so powerful, for a while, I would sit there and I’d stick my tongue between my teeth because I was afraid the suction, I was was going to swallow my tongue. So I felt like this milk-like substance going through my body, the energy was burning me and this milk-like substance was cooling me down, okay? And that’s what happened to me and what I say is I became a live wire. It’s like I went from I never felt an energy to 50,000 watts, you know, and it was like completely new to me. For whatever reason it didn’t really scare me. After it happened, though, I have to tell you that I was almost felt like I had been burned up from the inside and I was tired a lot. I couldn’t meditate anymore because it would burn me and I couldn’t concentrate as well. This went on for some period of time after that, but I also had, and here’s what I wanted to say, I had these biological symptoms going on. So my metabolism speeded up, my process of elimination and digestion and respiration were all working at this feverish pitch. So something was going on in my body. It was like I said, it was like a chemical laboratory working at a feverish pitch. And so that process has never stopped. That force has never stopped in my body. And as you know, reading my book, I went into right at, so that was a biology that I’ve watched all these years. And one of the things that’s really important to say, and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing this right, and I don’t know if you know what this, of this thing, but it’s called urdhvareta, the reversal of the reproductive system. Okay.

Rick: I don’t know, I can’t improve upon the pronunciation, but I know what you’re talking about.

Scott: Okay.

Rick: It’s often associated with celibacy, urdhvareta or something. Yeah, well what And it’s that the energy is always flowing upwards.

Scott: Yeah, well it was like there was an energy but also this going, flowing up from this urdhvareta, what Gopi Krishna talked about, he said it becomes an evolutionary energy. So instead of, the reason why at certain times in your lives, and I think even like Buddha and the monks when they went in the monastery and said, you know, celibacy was important, Like in this process, some of that, you know, where the strongest energy that you have inside of you is probably concentrated in the reproductive area. Well, some of that gets sent up to the brain as a more gross rather than a subtle energy, a more gross energy, and it works like as a coolant on the brain because you have this other energy burning you up. I absolutely experienced that for 20 years, you know. So it was two, the energy and this thing, and that’s where I thought, “God, it’s so obvious,” you know. And if I did things wrong sexually at a certain time and frittered away the energy, it was almost like my brain would burn up. So it wasn’t like I was sitting there trying to figure this out. It was just like learning to survive. So I know to most people, maybe hearing this, they’re going to go, “Wow, this sounds really strange or whatever.” And I agree, but I just felt like this, I think maybe the biology in this whole process. So in the end, what I concluded, I don’t know if I had, I think I had it in my book, but I said, there’s a regular organic process that’s gone on in my body since 1997. And I think even before that I was having little awakenings, but I couldn’t feel it. But 1997 was when I, you know, that energy shot up and then I started having psychic paranormal experiences. And so, but that’s gone on in a regular process biologically, okay, like the energy never stopped flowing. I felt like it was a purifying energy, like it was speeding up everything for me to purify myself. And I also purified myself by working feverishly spiritual practices. So that kind of drove me to do that. But yet also it was a, so a regular physiological, but when I look to it, all my, let’s say mental experiences, I could go back to the early 1990s and there were like four or five things that happened to me. One is, all of a sudden, Gandhi and truth and humility, character development was just so important. I don’t know why, but I had also when my grandmother–

Rick: Did you say Gandhi? You’re reading about Gandhi?

Scott: Gandhi, yeah. Like, in other words, it was more than just, I wanna be a good person. It was like, there was something inside of me, like that’s how I, Gandhi, that’s how I read about him all the time. It was 1992.

Rick: Oh, let me interject a really quick story about Gandhi that I just heard last week. I love this. So a mother came to Gandhi and she said, “Gandhiji, my young son respects you so much and he eats so much sugar. Would you please tell him to stop eating sugar?” And Gandhi said, “Bring him back in two weeks.” So two weeks later, she brought her son back and Gandhi said to the boy, “Stop eating sugar.” And the mother said, “Why didn’t you say that two weeks ago?” And he said, “Because two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.”

Scott: (laughing) No, I get that. (laughing)

Rick: Love it. So anyway, continue. I just had to get that in there.

Scott: Well, the funny thing was, so here’s 1992, and I’m working at 101 California Street, 43rd floor, you know, and I’m having these experience. One was Gandhi, but another was, you know, I had this experience of this bright light, you know, and it was like, ooh, I don’t know whatever this is, but this isn’t a normal bright light. It was up in the clouds and it was like, and so then all of a sudden nature itself had these radiant colors, much more different than I’d ever known. I also had, that’s when I started communicating with this inner voice, and that’s also when I started writing these poetic verses.

Rick: You mean with the radiant colors, you would just look out the window or something and you’d see all these beautiful colors?

Scott: I would look up at the clouds and there was this, you know how sometimes it’s like you see a radiant sky maybe, there’s this light or something, but it was ten times that or a hundred times that. It was like whatever this light is, it’s something different. And then I felt this enormous peace inside of me and presence. And then I was starting to think in a different way intellectually because I was thinking differently, politically, business. And so something was going on with that. But that’s when I wrote my first verse. Okay, so I wrote 48. When I was in college, I had to do something in poetry. I couldn’t write one lick of poetry and got like just terrible. And I would just all of a sudden I heard this voice and I was writing, the first one occurred in 1991. I was on a 747 plane flying from Washington DC to San Francisco. I was in the top bubble of 747. I heard this voice, write down what’s coming through you. I said, okay, well, it was weird to me. And I did, and then that was my first voice or verse, and I was writing how terrified I was and how much fear I was in. And then, you know, in 2009, I’m talking about a higher state of consciousness. Over 18 years, I wrote 48 verses and you can see the change from fear to this amazing state of consciousness. Okay, so what I was saying, what I was going to was, so I had those experiences in early Then I started, they got revved up a little bit, I haven’t explained them yet, but I started having psychic and paranormal experiences. And they were different, they were even more powerful than these experiences. And then starting in 2000…

Rick: Will you tell us what some of those are as you go along?

Scott: Yeah, I will. So almost right after that Kundalini awakening happened, which is at the end of 1996, early So the first thing that would happen is I’d have a dream and then whatever I dreamt would happen in the outside world. And if that had happened once or twice or three times, I probably would have said, you know, and again, I looked at things very critically. It’s like it kept happening, and I had one dream, even I wrote down in my journal, you know, I’m going to be in a certain place and the dream is about being in a certain place at a certain time with certain people. And then a month later, that’s where I was. And at that time, I had no idea I was going to do this. I had dreams. Oftentimes, I knew something was going to happen, it would happen. Then I started having out of body experiences where all of a sudden my awareness, I mean to some people this will sound weird, others not, but it was like somehow separated from my body and I would look down at my legs and I was like, I know that’s part of me but I don’t feel like it. And I one time looked at my friend and I said, “Now I better not tell him because he seems like he’s right in the middle of my awareness right now,” which was funny to me. And then, you know, one time I was on a very small board of directors with Ram Dass, you know Ram Dass, right?

Rick: Oh sure, yeah.

Scott: Yeah, and he, that’s when he, you know, it was on, it was people that had strokes and a certain lady that was doing counseling related to that, but he was talking and I started seeing apparition, like a Casper the Ghost, not an aura, but just the spirit go out of him and then I would see that. So those were just changes. And again, I didn’t, I’d say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” but it was like, “Okay, but stay grounded.” Then they went into, I had a lot of spiritual happenings where I was hiking in Maui and all of a sudden I saw Mother Mary’s face on the cliff, feel this whole cliff, and I looked at it like, I don’t think it’s Mother Mary or anything like that, but what symbolically does it mean to me that I’m seeing that? It feels like it’s projected out from my insides and she means to me the the beginning of the divine or the birth of the divine or the merciful or, you know, pure. And it was more like, okay, maybe that’s what you have to develop. That’s how I looked at things. Jesus was in a flame, he jumped into my heart. And then the third one I would say is after Mother Teresa died, which was in 1996, I think. Anyways, I was walking in Muir Woods, California, which is just north of San Francisco, this grove of redwoods. I was walking through there and she had just died and all of a sudden like a picture of her was just graven, this graven picture was just inside of me. And I heard this voice, she said, “I worked on helping save people. We need to change our human institutions and systems to help more people.” So in other words, she was saying, we gotta change our system. So I took all of this again with a grain of salt and then the final, I’ll just mention two other ones. Another one was like, it was like, sometimes it was like I would be back almost, back in the past, you know, I know that’s gonna sound weird, but sometimes I was seeing into the future. So an example of seeing, well, one of the things I, so in other words, it was like the past, present, and the future all coagulated into one. And one time I saw this picture of the moon, I can see it right now as I’m talking to you, and I was just above it. And it was like, how could that be? You know, it’s not, and again, I know a lot of people, it’s gonna sound weird or funny, but it was like, no, it was like seeing the moon. And I see it now still, just like I see Mother Teresa graven image inside of me. And all it meant to me was, you know, in the next state of consciousness, time and space disappear. So I was getting little indications of, in a sense, space had disappeared or distance, ’cause how could I see that? Now, somebody would say, “Oh, you’re just seeing, you saw a picture.” But it wasn’t that, it was more than that because then when the movie in 2019, Apollo 11 came out and there was a picture in that, I go, “Oh my God, that’s exactly what I saw and am seeing.” And the other one was I was at a volleyball game in Richmond, Virginia and I took a break, I walked to the James River. Suddenly it felt like I was back in Civil War time after Richmond was destroyed. And I was walking to the James River and I could just feel the sorrow and the anguish of the people. And I heard this voice, “We have a, obviously we have a civil war going on between the South and the North.” And so there’s a split in the United States and then the voice said, “And now we have a split today in the human psyche between the right and the left”, if you follow me, Rick. So it’s kind of like, and we’re losing the fact that we’re supposed to move eventually to a non-dual mind, but in a way we’re going the opposite right now. And so those are just interesting things, okay? So I didn’t get carried away by them or anything. I was like, interesting, all it’s saying to me, they seem to be guiding me. I don’t take them that seriously. Other than they’re pointing to me, there’s something beyond time and space I’m realizing. So it’s almost like the way this higher consciousness brings in this change in consciousness very gradually, it gives you hints. And if you didn’t come in gradually, you know, you’d probably freak out. So it started with the 1990 experiences early, then it went to these psychic and paranormal experiences, and then maybe we’ll get into it later on, but what I would call more like, more like what are called cosmic conscious experiences, ’cause they were much deeper and more profound than the psychic and paranormal experiences. And what that led me to conclude is there’s a regular change in one’s consciousness and the intelligent brings it in slowly, and eventually it leads to this maybe state that with Christ or Buddha we’re in, sort of thing.

Rick: Yeah, no, that’s all very interesting. I have a few thoughts on all…

Scott: Rick, am I going too far off the…

Rick: No, this is great. And I have a few thoughts on it all, and maybe you’ll have some thoughts on those thoughts. But one thing is, sometimes in spiritual circles these days, people devalue various experiences. And in a sense, they’re right, because people can get carried away with it. And you know, I’ve been on, you know, spiritual retreats where it’s like this one-upmanship game happens where, you know, people are getting up on the mic to see who can report the most flashy experience, you know? And it becomes an ego trip. On the other hand, inevitably, on the spiritual path, you’re going to have experiences of the kinds you’ve described and other kinds, and I think that’s perfectly normal. Now, some people might say, “Well, Ramana said that any experience which comes and goes is not the reality because the reality doesn’t come and go.” You know, there’s that verse in the Gita, “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.” But, nonetheless, you’re going to have experiences and we don’t just dismiss everything in life as worthless and unreal just because it comes and goes. I mean, you know, we look forward to having good dinner or whatever like that, or being with our friend, and you know, friends are going to die eventually. Does that mean we don’t appreciate being with our friend? So, experiences come and go. And as we unfold all the, and another point is, and I’m just giving an interpretation to everything you said, maybe a little bit of an elaboration, spiritual development does by definition mean the unfoldment of latent faculties. It’s not just about self-realization. There are all sorts of relative faculties that we possess that are locked up or suppressed by our lack of development. and as our development proceeds, those faculties are going to unfold and might take us by surprise sometimes. And also, I mean, if you think of the full range of creation as being like an ocean, ordinarily our perception is limited to the waves on the surface. There’s a whole lot to the ocean that we don’t perceive. But as your awareness expands, you begin to incorporate within your perceptual ability, subtler realms, astral, celestial, and so on, and you may perceive things there that the ordinary person doesn’t perceive. Celestial beings, you know, like you mentioned, the clouds look so beautiful. Well, sometimes people describe being in states of higher consciousness, God consciousness, where it’s as though you’re wearing golden glasses and everything just looks incredibly beautiful, even ordinary mundane circumstances. So and I think it’s important that we don’t obsess about all this stuff or cling to it or you know, strive for it. But it’ll just happen as a matter of course. And on the point of striving, I just want to, I’ll ask you a question and bounce it back to you. When you first had this Kundalini awakening, you weren’t, were you doing like a lot of intense spiritual practice. You certainly weren’t trying to make this particular experience happen. I think it quite took you by surprise and you tried to figure out later on what it meant by reading Gopi Krishnan and all. But what were you doing leading up to that that perhaps precipitated it?

Scott: Yeah, a lot of good things you said. But well, first answer, the latest thing you said is I had been working on myself feverishly from age 22 up to 40 was when this happened to me. And probably the least things I did was meditation, but I did meditate and, but I was doing all kinds of different practices, you know, counseling, you know, and they kind of got deeper and deeper. So starting out with a lot of reading and a lot of them self-help work, self-help books, you know, things like John Bradshaw had workshops, and then it went into eventually into spiritual direction counseling I did at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, and then eventually the 12 steps. So I was doing a lot of these things, and I would say, first of all, I wanna go back a little bit and say, I didn’t like sharing about the experiences I was having, these other worldly experiences, because you know what? The people that I hung around with, I felt like it was distancing, ’cause they didn’t have the experience and they might even think you’re a little bit strange. And you know what? I can understand that, it’s totally legitimate. And so if anything, I understated things and kind of put myself down and don’t talk about them. Okay, when I got into the 12 steps, it’s interesting ’cause a lot of times you’re talking about your frailties and everybody shares what they’re having trouble with. Boy, did I get connected to people when I talked on that level. So it was kind of strange. Like on one level, that’s when I felt really connected to people on this other level, ’cause I couldn’t find many people like me that were undergoing the experiences.

Rick: Did you have a problem with alcohol or did you just get into 12-step as a spiritual practice?

Scott: No, I actually as a spiritual, that’s why it was very strange. I actually wasn’t, I didn’t get into AA, it was Al-Anon, okay, which is a program for people that are affected by alcohol. So oftentimes the person who–

Rick: Like children of alcoholics or something like that?

Scott: Yeah, yeah. – Yeah. And I was working all kinds of program. One day that guy said, “Let’s go to this thing.” I didn’t even know what we were going to. And it was in Mill Valley, California, and there were about 80 people there. And I walked into the meeting with him. I was completely blown away. I was like, “This is home.” I mean, I just feel like they’re sharing so honestly. They’re so kind, they’re so loving, they’re so real. And I thought, “Wow.” And then over the years, what I found as I was in it, and again, I worked it like to the bone. I would do five to seven meetings a week, and I worked the steps because I also knew I had this other thing going on and it was also helping with that. So I just kept working that harder and harder and harder. But after I had those psychic and paranormal experiences, I didn’t even know it was a Kundalini awakening, okay? I didn’t find that out till three years later. And so that was on Christmas Eve. And I wanted to say one other thing I was trying to think. So oftentimes, like when I was seeing Jesus or Mother Mary, I looked at it like my consciousness was just had this higher energy and what I believe spiritually, it just was kind of putting that energy in so that I was seeing that vision. Where I eventually went to was like, I didn’t see those anymore, but just, and if we talk about it, have time to talk about, I’ll get into what I call cosmic conscious experiences where there wasn’t any, you know, forms like that, but it was just this radiant, beautiful, harmonious world that I landed into. So, in other words, I saw those as almost, you know, seeing things like Christ and Mary was an intermediate step.

Rick: Right. Well, you can talk about the cosmic consciousness thing right now if you want to.

Scott: Okay, let me just say one other thing first. Gopi Krishna, it was Christmas Eve in 1999, and I was at my mother-in-law’s house, and we were We were going to have a dinner that night. And even though I was divorced, I remained very good friends with my ex-wife. So we were in Delray Beach, Florida. They said, “You have some time, and you can go do whatever you want to do.” So I went to a bookstore, I went to Borders Bookstore. It was in Boynton Beach, and I walked in, and this happened to be for years. It was like, “Okay, go over to that section and get that book.” I mean, I literally read hundreds of books. One after, I would be led, probably you can relate to this, one book after the other. And I pulled it out, it was “Living with Kundalini, the Autobiography of Gopi Krishna.” And I was like, “Gopi Krishna?” You know, I wasn’t somebody Eastern, like I said, I didn’t do a lot of meditation, I did some, but I also think ’cause I was always concentrating too, like through my work, that that’s another way that you advance the brain. So anyways, it was “Living with Kundalini, Autobiography of Gopi Krishna.” So Kundalini, that’s a weird sounding name, I don’t really relate, and Gopi Krishna, I don’t really relate. But I read it and I was like, oh my God, this man, first of all, he’s Indian and I completely understood almost every sentence and the whole thing was 380 pages. It was published by Shambhala. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. But he explained everything that happened to me. You know, the biology I was going through, the things I was seeing, at times I felt like I had depression, a little bit of anxiety. It was never extreme, but also a little bit of paranoia. So he said that same energy is responsible for all those things. If it’s a little impure, then you might, instead of having this gracious flow of beauty and harmony, it might be a little bit distorted. But he talked about psychic and paranormal experience, and then he talked about cosmic consciousness. And he went through his whole life, and he said things like, like weird things, like I thought if I ever said this to certain people, but like, you know, just when I see Christmas lights at that time or any lights I was like, it was like seeing heaven. They were so deep and rich. And then my whole, how I saw things, it was like my mind was seeing things on a wider canvas. So it’s almost like I felt like I was at a height. You know, let’s say you’re at a height, big height overlooking the ocean and you know, you just see forever, right? That’s kind of how I was seeing. And so I was living in DC at the time and I would drive around on the Capitol Beltway and I’d have to stay so far back of cars because I just was seeing so, you know, that I couldn’t and then people would get mad at me. But it was like, so all these little things that he talked about, it was like everything he talked about in there I got. And then I love the stuff on cosmic consciousness. It just hit me deeply, like the state of mind he was in and permanently in. But then what really intrigued me too was like the last 18 pages of the book, he said, why this is important for humanity because humanity right now, and he wrote this back in the late 70s, I think, or maybe even late 60s, but it’s just as true today. He said that we’re evolving to another, and let me get into this just a little bit, a new faculty of the mind. Okay, so he’s saying, you know, if you believe in evolution, maybe we came from primates, primates, I mean, and they operate on instinct like most animals, you know, some animals have a little, but they don’t really have much choice or just acting automatically. And then maybe 20,000 years ago, roughly, I mean this may don’t hold me down, but the human intellect started to develop, okay, and it became more fully formed 10,000 years ago. And at that time was the first time where we actually had some choice in things. We could kind of create the world we wanted to by the way we thought and acted and lived, okay. So what did we create? We create the the world it is the way today, right, with mathematics and art and literature and language and all these things with this faculty of the mind. What he was saying is now we’re developing a faculty of the mind beyond that, and it’s called illumination. And it’s happening through the biological process of Kundalini, and it’s preordained. And so when he talked about it in these 18 pages, he said, “Humanity doesn’t understand where we’re being led.” Like a lot of people think, well, they’ve had a Kundalini energy and they’ve had these experiences, but I think he’s the first one that said it’s the evolutionary energy in humankind. And essentially he said, there’s a divine destination. Don’t use the word divine if that turns people off, but there’s this incredible new destination that’s preordained and he identified the mechanism. So like behind this evolution, and that’s something Buck in 1901 in his groundbreaking book didn’t have. So to me, Gopi was advancing that and he said, “If you’re evolving to a new state of mind, then you have to realize that the way you’re living may have to change too. And if you don’t realize that soon enough,” so he said things like, “You can build space rockets and you can do all these things, but if you relegate mind,” and when he meant mind, he didn’t just mean an intellectual mind, you know, he meant more broadly this whole inner mind. If you relegate that to a secondary position, then you’re working against evolution. And so it can not only lead to individual, you know, distortion like depression and those kind of things. So look at all the mental illness that’s going on in people today by the way we’re living our life. But it’s a collective sense too. So the whole thing, race is not evolving correctly. And if that happens, the brain starts to degenerate and you start tumbling down the thing. And I think that’s what’s happening today and like all these different, whether it’s climate change or overpopulation or all the other things that are going on right now in the world, there’s a common cause. It’s distorted evolution. And in a way, the way the politicians are trying to, they’re screaming at each other, you know, the right thinks they’re right or the left thinks they’re right, but in a way, they’re both wrong. And I don’t mean it that way, but it’s kind of like there’s something deeper going on in and the way you’re treating each other is a symptom of what’s wrong. Like in other words, you no longer can listen to somebody and say they have a different opinion. And so anyway, so that’s why, so the last 18 pages of this book really resonated to me. And he said, “Well, you know, so this needs to run experiments on the brain.” And he said, “I think it’ll be proven.” And, you know, our friend Duncan Carroll is trying to get a film done, as you know, it’s called “Super Meditate Me.” He’s just a great guy. It’s taken him longer than he thought, But as you know, on the spiritual path, everything takes, I always say, three times longer. But it’s about people that are having ordinary awakenings and like your show, and he wants to bring it through film to more people. And I think if this gets out in film, this idea, a lot of people will step forward and say, “Oh, that’s what that experience means.” Or even more rarely, “That biology that’s going on in my body, like this urdhvareta, the reversal that I, you know, as crazy as that sound, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people that step forward and talk about these things. So that’s kind of been my mission, it’s maybe, you know, but you can’t think in the normal way even as a scientist, you know, you have to think in a whole different way. You can’t think that the answer is in the normal brain material, and so it’s more challenging. Anyway, so.

Rick: Oh, that’s all good stuff. You’ve used the word predetermined a number of times, and I interpret that to mean that Gopi Krishna just had an understanding of how evolution works, individual and collective, and you know, and had the insight that large numbers of people were going to be undergoing the kind of processes he had undergone, and that that will necessarily cause a huge shift in society. And I think he was right about that. I think that there is some kind of enlightenment epidemic or whatever, some mass shift in consciousness, taking place, and I think that it will necessitate a, like you had that vision of Mother Teresa, I think it will necessitate a radical restructuring of all the institutions that govern us, business and technologies and economics and politics and all these different things. They’re just structured from, for the most part, from an ignorant state of consciousness. And they wouldn’t be appropriate or functional if a more enlightened state of consciousness were to prevail in the world. And I think there’s something inexorable about the upsurge in consciousness that’s occurring in the world. In other words, it’s a subtle force, but a powerful force that can’t really be stopped and that the more we can conform to its frequency individually, the smoother things will be for us. And the more we don’t do that or can’t do that, like you were saying, if that energy is rising and yet you’re doing things which pollute your system, you could get into trouble. And I think we may get into great trouble as a society for the same reason. Everything we’re saying about the individual could also be said about society.

Scott: Right.

Rick: So I interviewed a guy about a month ago who feels that we’re headed for a rather catastrophic societal collapse, and he analyzed it system by system and described how each system is pretty much untenable or will become non-functional. It is at the point of collapse practically already. And I don’t know, and all the spiritual traditions actually, not only spiritual but sort of ancient traditions prophesise something like this, that a time would come when, you know, a great sort of material intelligence would have predominated in the world and reached the end of its viability and that that would end up collapsing and giving way to something much better, but only after great turmoil. So, what do you think about all that?

Scott: Yeah, no, I agree with almost everything, with everything you said. Again, Gopi Krishna saw into the future and he said that he saw nuclear war happening. And he also saw that there’d be a war on one side would be China and Russia, and on the other side would be the United States and the Western countries. If we continue, it was never like, he called it, I think, a prognostication as if we continue to act like we are, not like this is gonna happen. He was too humble.

Rick: Like if we don’t clean up our act in other words.

Scott: Yeah, this is where we’re headed toward. So, and then also someday Walter Russell had, again, he’s another Titan like Gopi Krishna, ’cause to me, he had this science on a physical basis where he was putting the creator back into creation and he’s describing this higher state of consciousness. Okay, so Gopi, yes, his revelation was, he said, this is a revelation. He says, “Why I was given it to me,” he basically said, “I failed my college exam. “I grew up in India, in the backwaters. “We didn’t have running electricity or running water. “And how can I be given this thing?” But he said, “From watching my process, “I’ve come to the conclusion that my revelation is, “is the brain,” and again, don’t take it from me, but prove it, “is that the brain’s in a state of evolution “and we are moving toward this state of consciousness.” And so I just wanted to read you a couple of quotes I have and then, because they kind of speak to this. So again, he said, “Humans are biologically wired “for an enlightened or cosmic conscious mind.” It doesn’t mean we’re all gonna get there. You know, it’s like, it’s still, one of the things that happened to me is into this seeing this new, whatever, awareness, this new state of consciousness, is I just completely, I was terrified of dying before, completely not afraid. And know that, yes, my body will die, but that’s not who I am. Now, I know those words are parroted a lot, but it’s like, you just, I absolutely see, I’m a drop of this radiant consciousness, as you said, it’s a drop in this ocean, okay? But, and I didn’t finish my thought, but we’re gonna go back to the intellect that we created this, the world that we have today. It’s like one drop from this ocean created that world. I would say a bucket from the illuminated mind is gonna create the new world. Gopi Krishna wrote with, and maybe I’ll read that at the end, what he said as he sees the new world, but he said that’s out of an ocean. So we’re just so at the beginning of everything. It’s like, but one of the quotes he had is he said, “The real aim of yoga and religion, spirituality, is to open the door to the unused potential of the human brain.” I mean, how often is it thought of that way? And he said, “Physical science deals with the body. the new science, he called it a kingly science, will deal with the mind and soul. And that’s the new science that I think this, I’m throwing this name out there again that Walter Russell has come up with. And then he said, “Religion, spiritual yoga experience, and the disciplines advocated for it signify the operation of a budding faculty in the human brain over and above the intellect designed by nature to Extend this experiential area of human perception to include what is beyond our knowledge at present, the province of the mind and soul. Then you have one other one here, “Humankind is still evolving ” on its way towards an unthought of superior brain to explore the still mysterious world of thought.” So one of the things I said, Rick, was like when I began to understand that this consciousness is different than a regular intellectual mind. It’s hard to explain that to somebody because you hear intellect and you hear ego and you hear mind and what is consciousness? Maybe I’ll give examples later on, but I kind of saw the difference and I thought, well, let me just read something, if I may, something that will…”

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Scott: Okay, if I can find it here, which is one of… As I get older, I can’t memorize these things as well as I used to.

Rick: Well, while you’re looking for that. I’ll just say something and you keep looking.

Scott: I did.

Rick: Did you find it? Okay, good. Go for it.

Scott: Okay. I said this is how I describe this change in my own consciousness, poetically. And I actually have a list. I don’t know if we’re going to have time today, but where I, there’s like six individual experiences that I had that were much deeper than psychic and paranormal experiences. And then I say those eventually are coalescing together in a more permanent mind of this higher awareness. Like, it’s not just one experience, but in a very diluted fashion I’m having some of those. And maybe if we have time I’ll get to that. But this is what I wrote.

Rick: Not diluted you said, not deluded.

Scott: No, no, no, diluted. Like in other words.

Rick: Right, like, yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: Like homeopathic.

Scott: Like what they saw with a hundred times what I see. But it’s still the thing I’m seeing, you know, and maybe I’ll go after, I’ll read this and you can say what you’re going to say, but I wrote, “In summary, I believe that with our arrival at the next destination, our evolutionary life, our view of creation will be flipped on its head. The material universe will lose its size and substance and our mind and being will become a titanic giant, a monarch, a king and queen, an eternal drop of glory in this infinite ocean of consciousness. We will no longer see ourselves as an inconsequential grain of sand in an unfathomably large material universe, but we will see the truth that we are a blazing eternal ray of a living, loving, conscious sun which shines forever.” And here’s the ending to it. “So my story, which began as a young child, so excited about the future and the possibilities it offered, yet also filled with some anxiety and fear”, which I talked about in the beginning when I was younger, I had all this anxiety and fear, “now finds me arriving in a new world of light and delight with the glee and wonder of a small child, knowing a new treasure hunt has begun, one that goes on forever, as I am now exploring the mystery behind the mystery of the universe consciousness.” And what I mean by that is, so it shifted where I began to see the material world more as like an image on this deep ocean of consciousness. And I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but that’s a change that’s gone, undergone in my mind very gradually. And what I’ve always been right in my poetic verses that is we’re on a path of evolution just way beyond what we’re even thinking the next step is that we evolve to higher and higher and more grandeur and grandeur levels of beauty and that goes on forever, that we never die. And that’s the one realization you have as you begin to get into this new mind. At least that’s one reason. I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s what I have. I have no doubt in my mind that that’s kind of where I’m going with this in my life. So there’s something I was going to say, but it just fell out of my mind. But it’s just that goes on forever. But oh, I know what it was. Oftentimes people will say, “Well, what’s the first cause of the universe? How did this universe come into existence, right? There had to be somebody that did it or some law, but okay, if it were laws or just a material thing, how did that get going? So people ask that a lot. So for me, now the way I see it is it’s just, it’s really the mind, there’s a big bang in the brain and the mind, then you begin to see how, you know, a picture of the world comes, okay? So it’s different than the big bang theory, the physical big bang theory. And what I was saying is now you’re exploring a whole different first cause, like where did this consciousness come from? Do you know what I’m saying? I don’t know if this is clear or if I’m getting too out there, but I think to myself, well, ultimately it’s gonna lead to how did this new consciousness, where did that come from? And the only way I can say it, you were saying before that there’s a surface consciousness, which is how I, well, I’m gonna back up. When I created the business SoulQuest in 1998, I had a quest for souls. So if I was calling on a business guy and I was doing business consulting, I said it’s a quest for solution. But what I really knew it meant was a quest for SOL, which is the divine within, that became, my goal was to find my soul, S-O-U-L, and that became my sole purpose in life, okay?

Rick: S-O-L-E.

Scott: S-O-L-E. So I would always draw the circle with these concentric circles, and on the outside, there’d be like a blue, that was like the surface consciousness you were talking about, okay? You know, but we don’t see deeper. In the concentric circles, that’s there’s deep, and I say this in some of my verses, but there’s deeper and more than, there’s just probably a million levels of creation before we even get to God. But at the center was the white light, which was the intelligence behind the universe. So basically I was saying, again, that if we understand what the material world is now, and I’ll just say, you know, They estimate there’s two trillion galaxies and 200 billion stars in each galaxy. One scientist said there’s 100 times the number of stars in the universe and there are grains of sand in all the desert and all the beaches in the world. And also that the universe is some people estimate it to be 156 billion light years wide. So if you get it, you know, and the nearest star is 4.3 light years away, that’s Alpha Centauri and it would have taken the Apollo 11 spacecraft which went to the moon 43,000 years to go to that, that’s 4 light years, think of 156 billion. The point I’m making is we’ve come to understand we’re absolutely nothing in the universe, a speck, nothing. Okay, the next state of consciousness you begin to see it melts away and it’s like actually the universe is coming from you, okay? And so, but then that consciousness now is just really a thimble full of probably us being able to understand what the ocean is, and I probably just confused people with that, but hopefully that made some sense. Like in other words, consciousness itself is so deep, and we’re going to just be going on exploring this forever and ever sort of thing.

Rick: Yeah, well, good stuff. I’ll make a few comments. Firstly, my screen, my desktop pictures on my computer are NASA photos. I have like maybe a thousand of them and they rotate all the time. And now with the Webb telescope, I’ve got some of those in the mix. And it just reminds me of the kind of things you were just saying about the size of the universe. I think it’s nice to keep that in perspective. As far as where the universe came from, we can think of it historically and also at the moment. I mean, historically, maybe 13.7 billion years ago, there was a Big Bang and things have evolved since then, but at this very moment, the universe is coming into existence from, well, from its foundation, which is consciousness. And that kind of perspective is the opposite of what materialist science says, which is that consciousness somehow is created by the brain and, you know, didn’t even exist until there were brains that could create it. So, that’s upside down. And to take it a step further, what Vedanta would say is, number one, it’s all consciousness appearing as matter, and secondly, there isn’t any matter because it’s just consciousness. And, you know, the sense that things are material and solid and all that is just like the sense that a rope looks like a snake, but it’s really just a rope and there never was any snake, to use the Vedanta analogy. And quantum physics is somewhat in line with this. Now, I’ve read an article just the other day that said that they’re really having to admit that when you get right down to it, there are no particles. I mean, there is no physicality to the universe. So, anyway, all those different points. But what you said, like the universe shrinking or something, it’s not that the universe shrinks, it’s that we realize how vast we are by comparison with anything that can be measured in space and time.

Scott: Yeah, what I was seeing, Rick, was at a material level, like when I’m a normal human being and I realize how little nothing I am, right?

Rick: Yeah, just a little…

Scott: Copernicus and Galileo, we thought we were at the sun revolving around the earth and we were the center of the universe, okay? Now we’re like, once we understand we’re nothing, I’m saying. But that’s kind of, not depressing, but it’s humbling, let’s say. I’m just saying, this is where I said, like I see the physical universe now and it aligns with quantum physics and also Walter Russell thought that I see it more as an image, okay? I started to see that, I was going, “This is nuts!” It sounds nuts, but it’s not like things are changing, it just more becomes soft and it’s an image.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a faint remains. Yeah, there’s a term in Vedanta, “lesha vidya,” means “faint remains of ignorance,” and the perception is that, and the analogy is that, let’s say you have a ball of butter in your hands and you throw it off, there’s still a greasy surface on your palm from the butter. So, like that, there’s always going to be some perception of the world, otherwise we couldn’t live, we couldn’t function, but it will become more and more sort of diaphanous, more and more, you know, just a sheen on the vast ocean of consciousness.

Scott: Exactly how I see and quantum physics says there’s not a world until you view it. Okay, so in other words, it’s not like we live in a world, you know. It’s just projected out from our brains and so that and Walter Russell’s science about how there there… It’s not it’s a motion mind and total universe. He said and so it’s consisted of compressed light waves, he said, so there’s no materiality, it’s just made to look like it’s material. Even classical physics would say if you took a carbon atom, most of its mass would be in the nucleus, okay, but that would be like a grain of salt in a sports team.

Rick: In the superdome or something, yeah.

Scott: Yeah, so in a physical physics science, like it’s already almost nothing, you know, but but he went and said, “It’s really compressed light waves.” But yeah, I also said, to me, like one of my poetry thing, I wrote that, “This world’s a transport system to the next world of consciousness.” But it’s real when you’re in it. And if you’re not seeing this, it sounds like if somebody isn’t experiencing it, it’s a little arrogant to say, “Well, there’s maya and this isn’t real.” No, it’s real. You’re existing in it, but then…

Rick: Yeah, the idea of Maya is basically that things, it’s not that things don’t exist at all, it’s that they don’t exist in the way they appear to.

Scott: Yeah, I, well thank you, did you see Oppenheimer, the movie?

Rick: Yeah, I’m waiting for that to come out on Prime or something.

Scott: You haven’t seen it? Not yet, nope. I haven’t seen Barbie either, we’re going to watch Barbie tonight, but we won’t be able to do Barbenheimer.

Scott: But there was one, can I say one thing about that movie without ruining it?

Rick: Sure.

Scott: You know where when the atomic bomb goes off.

Rick: He quotes the Gita.

Scott: Yeah, he goes, “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” Okay. Well, you know what happens in this next state of consciousness, that world does disappear so you are shattering, so there can be a good definition to it.

Rick: Yeah, interesting.

Scott: And one of the things I’ve said is, it’s like, you know, they start out by showing the mushroom cloud and this bright light, right? Well, somebody has a kind of leaning awakening, what do they see? A bright light. You know, it’s almost like I’m saying, this next state of consciousness is the antidote to the nuclear bomb. Like it’s more powerful, but it’s so subtle and we’re so far away from it still. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.

Rick: It makes total sense. I like that a lot. And let me just rephrase it, which is, I kind of was saying this, trying to say this earlier, You know, we’re looking for solutions, right? And maybe this political system, maybe this economic tweak, you know, maybe this technological discovery, we’re trying to solve our problems with all these things, and we’ll continue to do those things. They need to be done on their own level, but all those are just really on the surface of life. And the more fundamentally we can work, the more power there is, which is why an atomic bomb is so powerful because, you know, it’s not on the molecular like a TNT bomb, it’s on the atomic, which is more fundamental than the molecular, therefore more powerful. But what’s more fundamental than that? Consciousness, you know, that’s more fundamental than the atomic. And if we can utilize, if we can harness that technology, then all these more manifest levels can realign themselves. It’s, what is that verse? It’s a verse from the Gita which says, “For many branched and endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one pointed.” And I think of that like a bicycle wheel where, you know, with the hub and then all the spokes, all the surface technologies that we try to meddle with are like out on the ends of the spokes. They can’t really be so holistic and so fundamental as to transform everything in a uniform way. But consciousness is the hub, and if we can alter something there, we have the leverage to bring about vast changes. And that’s what’s happening in the world, and that’s why these changes are afoot.

Scott: I couldn’t agree more, and you know, back to Oppenheimer, one of the things they said, well then they wanted to build a hydrogen bomb which would be more powerful than the atom bomb, and he was against that and he was saying, and there was a whole tribe of scientists that said, you know, we don’t have the, let’s say, the consciousness development or the ethics, we’re putting too much power in our hands. Okay, now he said that in the 40s and I look at it, we’ve gone almost further away in some respects, like we’re we’ve made it more at risk and one of my early, I call I call it, not revelating, but one of the insights that came to me, and it’s along the lines of what you’re saying, was the idea is you have to change, like we’re operating still by an old paradigm of materiality and even Michael Bradford wrote a book called “Consciousness, the New Paradigm.” It’s just, you ought to have him on sometime. It’s just, yeah.

Rick: Remind me later, send me an email.

Scott: Him and a Walter Russell person, I will tell you about these two people. But yeah, he wrote “Consciousness, the New Paradigm.” Now I lost my train of thought where I was going with it. Oh, so I looked at it, like he said, the old model, he called it dead on arrival, that we used to, you know, with Newton, it was a deterministic and it was objective and an absolute universe. And then he showed how, you know, between theory of relativity and quantum physics, that’s no longer true. So in other words, but yet we’re still operating like the material world’s the real thing. One of the early things that I got kind of intuitively was you have to change the paradigm of what we’re living by. People have to realize there’s a different paradigm. The different paradigm will be we’re evolving, the brain’s evolving, which Gopi has maybe, the biological basis that scientists can prove. So it isn’t just like you’re given an idea, but can they prove it? And that will bring more belief. So he has that we’re biologically evolving to this new state of consciousness and that that should be the new, consciousness should be the new paradigm. And I always said, then if you change the paradigms, the systems that are underlying those systems will automatically change. You know what I’m saying? Like out of a theory of materialism, you have hierarchical systems, right? And one of the things I said is we need stories. That’s actually what I’m trying to do with my story. It’s like we need thousands and millions of stories that are trying to convey, you need a new story, not the old Horatio Alger, which is a beautiful one. You know, you work your way to the top, you work hard. That’s still very valid within one, but we need a new story that people, you know, ’cause story’s how people connect to thoughts. You know what I’m saying? So you need a new story that aligns with the new paradigm and that’s what’s gonna change the system. So all this unrest in our kids and terrorism to me is there’s something people know is really deeply wrong with what’s going on. And there’s wrongs on all sides, you know what I’m saying? It’s not just that, and I think that’s what the kids are, they don’t know that, and so what they’re doing, a lot of people act out in violent ways, and Gandhi told us, you know, violence is the eternal law, or nonviolence is the eternal law, and violence is the law of expediency.

Rick: Yeah, and you know, the reason your paradigm shifted is that your experience shifted. It’s not just because you read a bunch of books, because your consciousness shifted and then your thinking or way of understanding fell into line. And that’s the way paradigms shift, if you read Thomas Kuhn. They shift because new evidence contradicts the established view and eventually that new evidence or those anomalies get strong enough that the established view can’t stand anymore. It has to topple and give way to a new way of understanding which correlates with the new evidence, the new experience. And so, you know, it’s not just a matter of adopting a new philosophy or everybody reading Gopi Krishna books or anything else. It’s a matter of people’s consciousness actually being transformed and then when that happens, all the other systems will fall into place. All our understandings, all our technologies, all our political systems, our economic systems. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t vote or that we shouldn’t try to change those systems, or we shouldn’t keep working on new technologies, but if we just do that stuff without changing consciousness, it’ll always be the cart before the horse.

Scott: I would always say to friends, like when Einstein comes up with his theory of relativity, well somebody can try to prove the math out at the intellectual level. With this thing, you have to prove it, you know, through experiences. And the reason why, you know, except for, Gopi said, you know, the idea of the evolution of the brain, that that might be able to be proven scientifically, that there’s this biological process going on. That would be one pillar that would help with. But also if you put out a movie that, and I guess, you know, somewhat, that’s what Duncan’s trying to do, but where people are having these different experiences and say, here’s what it means. And then all of a sudden you show that, you know, Frank Capra, you know who he is?

Rick: Oh yeah, It’s a Wonderful Life. And Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and all those great movies.

Scott: He was so, I think far, I don’t know if you’ve ever read his autobiography.

Rick: No, I haven’t.

Scott: Just astounding, so brilliant, he’s funny and humble. But he said that, you know, he said basically with film, he could do what religion couldn’t do ’cause he could bring his ideas to millions and millions of people.

Rick: Oh yeah. Well, this is one of my favorite little ideas, which is that people like Steven Spielberg George Lucas and all that have had a huge impact on the culture by introducing ideas like The Force, you know, in this very entertaining way. And it’s almost like they didn’t do it, they were used as a means for it to be done. In other words, that understanding had to infuse into the culture and so it’s like the higher intelligence that orchestrates everything said, “Okay, looks like this Spielberg guy would be a good one to make a movie. Let’s have him do it, or Lucas here.”

Scott: No, totally. You know, it’s like you had prophets that came at a certain time. It’s like the collective consciousness of the race knows when somebody to do something, it’s not just spiritually. It’s funny because I actually read a lot about both those two, because, and I thought, “These guys have had Kundalini experiences,” like, you know, Spielberg of the light, and seeing the light and I thought, “How can I get to them? I wish they could do a documentary or, you know, Lucas is doing documentaries or could do, you know, anyways.”

Rick: Yeah, well, you know, it doesn’t always have to be that explicit. I mean, stories can be a great way of teaching deep philosophical principles without sort of being pedantic about it, without being so explicit. And that’s why you have these great things like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and all these great, you know, other stories in other cultures. Anyway, I want to make sure we have enough time to, we have maybe 15-20 minutes left, so are there some points we haven’t gotten to that you wanted to make sure we got to before we run out of time? Otherwise we’ll just keep rapping here.

Scott: Yeah, but I may agree with I want to make one on that story, you know. That’s why you just share a story, you know, and not like you were saying a direct point, like, you know, maybe you do a documentary on something, but I mean, the movie should be just about you’re illustrating what this person went through and people can pick up from it. You’re not trying to get them to believe something. And I think that’s a little bit of what you’re saying. I’m in agreement with that.

Scott: Yeah, there’s so many great spiritual books like the Chronicles of Narnia, or even the Lord of the Rings, and all these different things that convey profound teachings that disseminate into collective consciousness. And, you know, a documentary, if it’s a good one, could do the same thing, but chances…it’s up against a greater challenge. It could be kind of boring by comparison.

Scott: That’s my least favorite. It was always a movie. It’d be like A Beautiful Mind 2, instead of ending up with schizophrenia, like, you know, John Nash did in that movie, that somebody can end up in constant consciousness. But but you don’t have to say that, you just demonstrate it. Or it could be like, I don’t know if you saw the movie “Contact.”

Rick: Oh, Jodie Foster?

Scott: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, that was great.

Scott: You could show that, you know, you could show this idea in a “Contact 2” or Frank Capra’s movie “Lost Horizon.” Have you ever seen that?

Rick: I saw that.

Scott: That’s really about Shangri-La, but it would be like, you know, something like “Found Horizon” or you could demonstrate something like that. Anyway.

Rick: Well, we’ve had that to a great extent. I mean, look at the Star Wars movie with Yoda, you know, performing siddhis and doing all this cool stuff and levitating the Luke Skywalker ship out of the swamp and that kind of thing.

Scott: I agree. I agree. Well, let’s see, what else? I mean, I don’t know.

Rick: That was inspired a lot by, by what’s his name? You know, follow Your bliss, that guy, you know, I’m talking about. I can’t remember the name.

Scott: My mind has gotten so excited by this conversation that I can actually talk about all these things with somebody. I normally can’t.

Rick: Yeah, it’s great fun. You should start an interview show. You could do it every week with somebody.

Scott: Yeah, I always thought Larry was doing a great job.

Rick: We started late. I’m sorry, so go ahead.

Scott: Oh, I was just gonna say, I don’t know if this is overdoing it. I was gonna share some of my experiences that were–

Rick: Yeah, let’s do that.

Scott: Is it, you don’t think it’s too much now?

Rick: No, people love to hear that stuff.

Scott: Okay, so, you know, the first thing I wrote was, as the year progressed, I said, my, you know, Kundalini energy continued to flow very strongly, and I worked feverishly on personal and spiritual development, and I started having deeper experiences than what I call psychic and paranormal experiences, the eight that I told before, earlier in the show. And then I backed up, and I said, I went back to 1992 when I was 14, And so this is one that was way back when, but I was going on a cruise with my family and we were in New York City and we were going out into the Caribbean the night before we were staying in a hotel and my dad was checking us in and I was standing there and all of a sudden every person that walked by, I was like totally felt love with them. And then as they passed, it was like, I was so sad ’cause I could never see them again. And it was so like, that was my first time of almost like, love is, you know, we’re all connected in love, okay? And it was like Thomas Burton had a Louisville experience that was somewhat like that. You know, 1997 is when I had all the psychic paranormal start experience started happening. So in 2000, 2002, I was driving down Third Street in San Rafael. I stopped at a stoplight and I looked out the window and I looked up and all of a sudden out of nowhere, it was like this bright light and these just fountain expanding waves of light and just joy, just joy. I kept seeing those things. And then pretty soon what happened is I could feel it. It was like it was in my interior now. And I still have it today. It’s like I have this fountain of joy inside of me that just bubbles up. I can be going through hell on earth and I can always go into that place. So I said that, so the first experience was love. This was one more of ecstasy that always stays with me. One of the things where Gopi Krishna talked about, he said, “The closer you move to the core of creation, the greater the joy becomes. And I’m just tasting a little bit of that.

Rick: Contact with Brahman is infinite joy. That’s a line from the Gita.

Scott: Okay, yeah. And then another experience I had with 2004 is walking out of the National Gallery of Art going down the steps and all of a sudden, I was like just merged with everyone and there was no differentiation between any of us And we were all in this titanic presence that was alive. And that only had that one time. And the only thing I can liken to is eventually it led to having a deeper connection to my inner voice, which I call this intelligent presence, but that was way beyond it. So that was, so now we went from love, ecstasy, and a oneness. Okay, there was a oneness in that experience. Okay, and then the next one was I was 2014. I was in Tyson’s Corner standing at the Metro station. at night time, it’s right outside Washington DC, Tyson’s Corner. Anyways, I looked up at the sky and there was this shimmering, sparkling, bubbling, airiness, like just otherworldly radiance. And what came to mind immediately is this is life without material alloy, like it is consciousness, okay? And it lasted for pretty much a long time after that and there’s some, so I called that life without materiality, as consciousness. So now you have, you know, all is one, consciousness, ecstasy and love. And then two other experiences. I was driving through the vast open spaces of New Mexico and it often happened, these things happen often when I was driving for a long time because I was concentrating so much I would look at the distant sky and all of a sudden there was this just titanic joy and light and love and it kept expanding and it was just titanic. And I thought about it afterwards and Gopi Krishna talked about these things. It was like saying like, I just realized my consciousness is like that of a firefly, as little as flicking in and off compared to the radiant sun. Somehow it was like, it gives me a measurement of what consciousness is more than what my normal consciousness is. Now, to some people that’s not gonna make any sense, But all I remember thinking at that time, if any more of that consciousness came into my body, it would be like a bug hitting a mosquito zapper, where it just zaps you, or like a thread that’s burned up. And I just was like, there’s no way I could handle the immensity of that. I’m just in my normal, I’m seeing this, and then this new consciousness, I’m seeing a little more, whatever this is, is just so beyond. And then –

Rick: Yeah, I was with a teacher one time and he was talking about cosmic consciousness and he said that until at least cosmic consciousness has been gained, the question of God consciousness is just, it’s not possible. He said, “God couldn’t even telephone from a distance. You’d be crushed.”

Scott: Then that’s what, I don’t know how to say this, but that’s what I got a sense of. You know, like the difference, and I don’t know how, you know, it’s so hard to put into words, but I was talking with my brother and I was saying, “God, when I was little, I used to have this dream of like the world sitting on top of my head and it was crushing me.” And then he said something like he had a dream like that too, but that was the feeling, I got that, that, it’s like consciousness that came in all in one would just crush me, you know, and that kind of, you know.

Scott: Well, this kind of brings us back to something we were talking about in the beginning about purity and strength and so on. It’s sort of like one’s priority should be not, you know, give me the consciousness, but you know, allow me to purify and strengthen to the point where I can be a fit receptacle or a fit reflector for it. If it’s, you know, if it’s consciousness first, without the capability to handle it, you will regret it.

Scott: Yeah, and that’s why I said I was given drips of it in stronger doses starting in 1992 than the psychic paranormal, now these, you know. So yeah, it was like gradually. And one thing I knew, Rick, was always, don’t get carried away. I used to go to my, with my daughter, we’d go to Chuck E. Cheese, you know, and they had this game where these alligator heads would pop up and you had this hammer and you’d chop them down, but they keep popping up. And that was to me like Eagle with a thousand heads. Like the minute you get any kind of, like there was a part of me that don’t ever get, you know, let’s say when you’re going through really hard things and you have a success, it’s easy to get, whether it’s spiritual or material, it’s like, want to give yourself credit, don’t get me wrong, but you can get puffed up easily and then it’s like I always get beaten back down. In other words, stay grounded and just keep going. You know, don’t steer it away.

Rick: And safety first. That’s a good motto on the spiritual path. Safety first.

Scott: And don’t try to make this consciousness happen. It was like, I never even think about it now, even when I go into my interior, I get these amazing, but it’s like, don’t even go there, just keep doing the work.

Rick: And it’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen.

Scott: Yep. Which is, I think a really important message to get out to people, you know, it’s just, you know, anyway.

Rick: Which is not to say that we can’t have zeal and determination and motivation, but it needs to be applied properly. It’s like, let’s say you want to be a PhD in physics. Well, you know, you wouldn’t want to just get into a PhD program at Harvard or something like that without having gone through all the requisite training ahead of time because you’d flounder, you would fail. So we have to sort of take it a step at a time.

Scott: Yeah, and one of the things I said in my book was like when I started as an accountant, I was very good at it, I hated it, and I would like, we’d go to Las Vegas or we, you know, a lot. I was in California at the time, we were on the beach and it’s like, but I wasn’t willing to do the work, you know, I wanted to just hit a home run in Las Vegas or something. I learned that on the material side, it’s the same thing, you know, you just be a good athlete, you do the work and the spiritual side is the same thing. Even when I did spiritual exercise, I looked at it, they’re just repetitions. And I would invent these different ways of, you know, I call them repetitions to grow spiritually. And it was like, just keep doing the work. Two other, one other thing on this was that I had two experiences where I was, once I was driving into Flagstaff, Arizona, and, you know, Flagstaff, I was going west, so it was ahead of me, all of the mountains, and it just, it just all of a sudden melted in this blaze of a flame and glory and it was just this bright flame I saw and I saw the same thing when I went by Disney Animation Studio in Burbank and it was like that was like to me the Bhagavad Gita’s thing and you know the world being you know burnt apart or whatever in the flame and all it meant to me was it was kind of giving me another clue of you know that gradual shift to seeing the world more as a thin layer of film on on this other thing. And it’s, you know, so.

Rick: Would it be fair to say that each time you had one of these profound experiences, it’s not like that was just a flash in the pan and it happened and then it was gone and then you got back to life, but somehow that was just a breakthrough moment in which the contrast was more evident, but then something gets integrated from it. And you go on and you’re not having the same flashy thing every day, but something from that experience has gotten imbibed into your makeup and it’s another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that you live with.

Scott: Yeah, no definitely. And I said that one of the things I wrote was that those, you know, just summarizing, you know, the first one was love and then the second one was ecstasy and then the third one was this consciousness and then the fourth one was this all is one sort of thing. I mean, I said that already. And then this titanic consciousness and the world evaporating, if you think of all those, they’re all different characteristics, I think of what to some degree the cosmic conscious mind is permanently, I’m saying. And I’m saying each one of those, except for the ecstasy thing, I mean, that is powerful in me. The other ones I feel definitely, like I can go inside and see this radiant, but they’re not nearly like so. I would imagine over time they get stronger, like Gopi Krishna, what he experienced was even more than that and he saw different layers of creation. But yeah, so it’s like just keep going and doing the work. And if it does, it’s like gradually all of those things are becoming permanently ensconced in me. But it’s like very, very gradual. And so just keep doing the work. And so in the end, and I don’t need to get into it. Really, there’s only three other things I’d want to say really and I’ll say them quickly. But one was like, I a little bit into what permanently is in my mind. And one of them was I always live in this interior paradise and it feels like I awaken from a dream. And I kind of feel like I live in two worlds at once. One is this intelligence, consciousness, and the other is the material world. As weird as it sounds, it’s not weird at all. And then the other thing I said is, I used to sit there, Rick, and one day all of a sudden my consciousness just started expanding out of my body. And the only thing I always looked at it was like the genie leaving the bottle, you know, like I dream a genie and beautiful Barbara Eden and a vapor would come out of that bottle. But, and when that happened, all I would say to my, God, the freedom, freedom. And then I thought, you know, as a younger person and most of my life, I was afraid of dying and afraid of being buried alive and claustrophobic. And I came to realize our souls are really in a sense encased in a prison in our material body. You know, and that’s what that told me, okay? So that was another one. And I would say I lost my fear of death. I have this peace. But the one other thing I wanted to say, and I think this is pretty important to me as I wrote, the good news of what I’m trying to explain with all this is that you don’t have to die and go to heaven. You don’t have to have a stroke. Don’t have to have a brain hemorrhage. You don’t have to have a miraculous healing. You don’t have to have a near death experience, all of which are wonderful, okay? But this is a potential where we can have-

Rick: Not sure strokes are wonderful, but anyway, go on.

Scott: But do you know what Jill Bolte Taylor wrote the book?

Rick: Yeah, yeah, I interviewed her a while back.

Scott: I’m saying, and then she had cosmic, what I’m saying-

Rick: Yeah, you don’t have to do that kind of thing, or Anita Moorjani and almost die, and that kind of thing.

Scott: Exactly, what I’m getting at is the message is, is that you can get to, you know, Ben Alexander, I remember asking, you know who he is?

Rick: I interviewed him.

Scott: Okay, I didn’t know that. I asked him afterwards, “Well, are you in that state of mind now? “Is this like Tyson’s Corner bar?” “No.” And he said, “No.” But it just gave me the idea that if we all do the really hard work, you know, spiritual growth is not easy, you know, and that we can get into these states and to some degree permanently, but it takes, you know, that’s the message. It takes a lot of hard work. You don’t have to have these one-time experiences where it doesn’t last, which are wonderful. So that’s one of the things I wanted to say. And then I just wanted to read a couple of quotes about love. Can I end with that?

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Scott: Okay. If I can find them here.

Rick: While you’re finding them, I just want to say that it can be relatively easy. There’s a verse in the Gita which says, “No effort is lost and no obstacle exists.” And it’s rewarding. So there’s sort of a reward at every step of the way. So go ahead and read your quotes.

Scott: Yeah, I agree. And I think we’re saying the same thing like the Tao. It’s like, just keep living life and this will come to you. You don’t have to force anything. But I did have to say like-

Rick: Christ said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Scott: Right. I was gonna read one of my poems. I’m not gonna do that. If I ever come back, I’ll do that. But I was going to say, I just wanted to end with love. Walter Russell wrote, “If love multiplies, civilization will survive and know everlasting peace. If hate and fear multiply, nothing can save it from perishing. No human or nation or world nation can work against the law of love and survive.” The second one is from Lois W., who co-founded Al-Anon, which again is for people that were affected by drinking, but I often say she talked, she saw it, her vision was it’s going to become a universal program for love and my vision is that I can see that program helping people get through Kundalini awakenings and bring them into higher consciousness, too. But she wrote, “The more one gives of love, the more one has to give. I used to believe that thinking was the highest function of human beings. The AA experience changed me. I now realize loving is our supreme function. The heart precedes the mind.” Now Gandhi, because I had to get him in here somehow, he wrote, “Love is the subtlest force in the world.” He said, “It’s also the strongest force the world possesses, yet it is the humblest.” And then just the final one I wanted to read to give a salute to Christopher, who co-wrote my book, Love’s Design: Reaching Heaven on Earth. Just an amazing human being. And in the way he, his helpers, the only way they could get down what he was thinking was through, they did it through telepathy, you know, how he was writing poems, even though he could have trouble, you know, speaking. He wrote, I wanted to end with something. He said, “I am a challenged individual, yet I have been afforded many gifts. I wish that these gifts could be used to better the lives of others, but I am grateful for what they have done to provide me with a fulfilling existence and a happy life. I am able to receive ideas from the far reaches of the glorious universe, to unverse, to unearth gems of unimaginable beauty. Look into the eyes of the ones you love. There shine the multifaceted crystals, which will forever brighten your days, the blue teardrops of joy that will lighten your heart, and the beautiful black pearls, which will enlighten your soul. It is here that you will discover riches more valuable than gold.” That’s just about loving each other.

Rick: Great. Well, thanks, Scott. That was a good note to end on. And I really enjoyed kind of getting to know you through your books over the last couple of weeks and also through this conversation. And we’ll be in touch. I’ll have a page on BatGap as I always do that has links to your books and you don’t have a website. Do you have a Facebook page or anything like that? Maybe not.

Scott: Yeah, I’m on Facebook. Okay, send me a link to that. I’m going to start doing all that stuff now. Alright, so as you do those things, send me links so I’ll add them to your page even, you know, three months from now or whatever if you put up some new page. Okay, so thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and my next interview will be with a woman named Mary Terhune, who had a profound spiritual awakening at a rather young age, which really opened things up for her, but then she had to do a whole lot of work after that. So, we’ll talk about that. Okay, thank you, Scott.

Scott: Thank you, Rick. I really enjoyed it today. And hi to your wife, Irene.

Rick: Alrighty. Have a good whatever, and we’ll be in touch.

Scott: Okay. Thanks again.

Rick: You’re welcome. Bye.

Scott: And thanks everyone for listening, who’s ever listening.

Rick: There’s 204 people on at the moment.

Scott: Okay, thank you.