Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Scott Kiloby. Scott is a non-dual author teacher from southern Indiana. You’re probably the only non-dual author teacher in southern Indiana. And he is the author of Love’s Quiet Revolution, the end of the spiritual search, and Reflections of the One Life, Daily Pointers to Enlightenment. He is also the creator of a revolutionary addiction recovery method called Natural Rest. I want to know about that. His book, Natural Rest, Finding Recovery Through Presence, is scheduled for release in early 2011. I’ll be linking to Scott’s website on batgap.com, so you’ll be able to go there and see more details. And in addition to the details of his meetings and retreats, there are many essays, quotations, and videos on his website which you can view. He also holds frequent meetings all over the world in person and online via Skype and teleconferencing. There’s a little quote from Scott here that his publicist sent me. I think I’ll just read that. He says, “We live our lives asleep. Our minds are programmed for self-centeredness. This programming causes us to spend our lives seeking the future for a sense of contentment we can’t seem to find. It causes conflict in our relationships. To say that we live in self-centeredness is not a moral judgment. It’s a statement of fact. The good news is that awakening from this self-centered dream is possible in this lifetime. This awakening reveals a depth of freedom and contentment that no relationship, job, material item, self-improvement plan, or any other accomplishment or attainment in the material world can bring. This level of freedom frees us from our endless seeking towards the future. It frees us from conflict so that our real nature as love shines through, affecting every area of our lives.” In just a few short years, Scott Kiloby has emerged as one of the clearest non-duality teachers on the planet, according to Michael Jeffries. Anyway, let’s talk to Scott now and stop reading about him. So, Scott, I had a feeling that a good way to start this interview might be, if you agree, to have you just sort of give us in a nutshell what you say, what you teach, just synopsis kind of thing, and then we’ll unpack that and elaborate.
Scott: Yeah, I actually have something on my site called “Non-duality in a Nutshell.”
Rick: Oh, okay. I didn’t even know that.
Scott: Yeah, well, it’s funny that you brought that up. Well, the way that I talk about it is, we come to this, we live in life, most of all of us, with the belief that separation is real, that when we look out into the world, that it is how it presents itself, that you’re a you and I’m a me, and this is a house, and that’s a road, and all of these things exist by themselves as separate things. And then at some point, we stumble upon something that makes us look in a different way. It could be suffering, it could be just an interest in a truth or whatever that it is. And the way that I talk about it is, we start to realize that, I use the word “awareness” a lot, because I think it’s easy for people to feel into their experience with it, is that you can actually experience this moment without any labels. And I find that when people start doing that, and they start just sort of resting without emphasizing all of their thoughts, the one thing that they find is that at the core of their experience, there’s already an undivided peace, or an undivided awareness that hasn’t yet divided the world into Rick and Scott and Mom and Dad and road and street. And the more that we sort of rest there and realize that it’s always present, it’s like we gain a confidence, but it’s not an egoic confidence, it’s not a confidence that I am recognizing it. It’s a confidence that, again, at the core of our experience, there is no separation. And that has all the confidence in the world, because the lack of confidence comes from the sense of being this separate me
Rick: Mhm that feels cut off from the world. So as we do that more and more, I think the place where you can sort of leave it is, “Okay, well, I’ve realized this, it’s very peaceful, it’s always with me.” I think people do experience that. They experience that there’s this undifferentiated awareness, or they could even say nothingness at the core of my being, and that’s just one way of talking about it. And they sort of leave it there, almost like making thought itself into a kind of an enemy, as if sort of thought is the problem and no thought is the answer. But to me, it leaves a division there that doesn’t have to be there. And so at some point you start to realize that, yes, there is this undifferentiated awareness here, but that when thought appears and it says, “Rick,” that that doesn’t actually divide the universe either, that’s just a thought. A thought doesn’t actually have the power to do that, and that we’re not really experiencing a separate thing out there called Rick. It’s just by designating a thought, designating Rick, it looks like there’s separation. And that’s sort of the sum up of the nutshell. It sounds like more than a nutshell, but…
Rick: It’s a coconut.
Scott: A coconut, right. Yeah, yeah. Is that thought and emotion and everything is included in our experience, that the liveness of being, in an illusory sense, Scott and Rick and Rhodes and all the conventional existence stuff, is all still there with us and at the end doesn’t destroy the sense of undifferentiated peace that we’re experiencing. I think that’s what I would call, if I had to define enlightenment, I would say it’s that. Whatever that is, which is what Buddhists call the middle way, I love that phrase, but that’s what I call it.
Rick: Okay, good. So you mentioned that a trauma or something might precipitate this realization. Is that what happened to you? I mean, I was addicted to drugs for about 20 years.
Rick: What kind?
Scott: Oh, just about anything I could get my hands on.
Rick: Including heroin?
Scott: Everything but heroin, actually.
Rick: Oh, okay. Because I didn’t like needles, but I probably would have gone there. But without going into a huge deal about it, there was just a long addiction process. And then at a certain point, the addiction turned towards self-improvement and then towards enlightenment. And the crisis, if you want to say, was a crisis of identity. It was like looking for myself everywhere, looking for a sense of, “What’s going on? Who am I? Why can’t I be okay?” That was the crisis. It wasn’t like an individual thing where I hit a bottom in drugs. But it was more like just a story that kept going on, but it just felt like something was missing the whole time. It was that kind of thing.
Rick: Yeah, I did drugs only for about a year, but I was fairly young, 17, 18 years old. And ostensibly I thought I was doing them because it was opening up some sort of spiritual dimension for me. I’d be sitting there reading Timothy Leary’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, trying to figure out what bardo I was in.
Scott: Take another bit of acid and find out.
Rick: Right, yeah. And then finally, one night I was taking acid for the umpteenth time and I was sitting there and I picked up a Zen book, a Zen flesh, Zen bones, and I thought to myself, “You know, these guys are really serious and I’m totally screwing around. And if I keep going on like this, I’m going to live a miserable life.” So I thought, “That’s it. I’m going to stop taking drugs and I’m going to learn to meditate and see where that takes me.”
Scott: That’s good.
Rick: Yea.
Scott: Yea. You didn’t have to go to the depths of the addiction. You just stopped it and said, “Okay, I’m going to get serious about this.”
Rick: Yeah, I definitely managed to do some damage in that year. By the time it was over, I’d dropped out of high school and gotten kicked out of the house. I was just floundering around, just a confused young kid. But fortunately I didn’t carry it on too long. I just realized that it wasn’t going to do me any good in the long run.
Scott: Yeah, that’s good to know. I think that’s good to say because I think that some people have an idea that in order to be free, you have to go through this really, really traumatic place. There’s some of that talk around here that such and such teacher went to this place of total depression and then at the bottom of the depths of the depression found awakening. But there are all sorts of other stories out there.
Rick: Yeah, it can happen that way. I know people who have led very smooth, joyful lives and they’re very much awake in the sense that you and I would use that word. We didn’t have to go through all that stuff. So who knows, karma, whatever.
Scott: Yeah, that’s a good answer actually, who knows.
Rick: But I do have a sense that the universe gives us the experiences we need in order to take us to the next step. And obviously it’s different strokes for different folks.
Scott: Yeah, because different experiences, right? Yeah, we’re not all having the same experience on the level of appearances and form and everything. We’re not having the same experience. So you would imagine that since the experiences are so different, then the path and how it happens would be just equally as diverse. Yeah, and if there’s anything you can say about nature, it’s diverse. Whatever is responsible or whomever is responsible for this universe loves diversity.
Scott: Yeah, because it’s everywhere.
Rick: Yeah, and people and things and animals and plants and everything is just unbelievably diverse on that level.
Scott: I think that’s part of the beauty of it, that level of it, so to speak.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. So anyway, you kind of hit rock bottom with your drug thing. And did a realization or a turnaround happen spontaneously or did you start, like, go to a teacher or start reading books feverishly or, you know, what was going on then? I think it was a switch from my seeking in time. I had always been seeking, like, something else. I was always moving towards something, like, as a movement. And instead I turned that in on the present moment and I looked, that energy, I directed it here. And I wanted to find out what’s actually here now instead of what’s going to be here later or what might come later. What’s actually here now? And then I started looking into the fact that when the thought would arise, it gave the impression that something was happening here. That something was happening right here, that there was a me here and that there’s a me here that seemed to have a past and a me here that seemed to have a future. But all of those seemed to be thoughts that were happening right here. And I began to just sort of watch those. I would say, oh, there’s a thought about my being ten years old and there’s a thought about me being on drugs. Oh, no, there’s a nice thought about how I got into recovery and got clean. And then I would say, oh, here’s the thought about how maybe I’ll be enlightened one day or maybe I’ll die someday or maybe I’ll suffer. But what I started to see is they all had the same thing in common, is that they would all go like this. They would arise, they would hang around a bit and then dissolve. And some would arise and hang around and sort of torture me, you know. And so they would hang around a little bit longer, but what I found is that all of them, without exception, would dissolve. So then I started to find out what, you know, I started to look at what is it that makes this experience feel like it’s, that there’s separation here. And then I found again that primarily it’s thought. You know, there’s other things involved like emotions and sensations, but I began to look at that. And I began to see that when thought was arising, it was like it would, it was like it would focus my, it would focus the wide openness of the present moment into like a contracted thing. Like it would say Scott. And as if somehow that thought, like that there was something there called Scott that could actually separate itself from everything else and be really, really, really important, you know. And that was true of everything that I looked at when I saw a bank or when I saw anything. I noticed that every time I saw something, a thought was arising. And I wanted, and that’s what gave me this sense of separation. As I rested more and more without having to emphasize all those thoughts, I just found out that like there’s a level of our experience, just to use the word level, that has never been divided, you know. And that’s the prior to thought. And once I became more comfortable with that as being always here, like I say, then I just saw how just because a thought arises after that doesn’t mean that it actually does create separation. Because again, it’s everything that, nothing is independent of thought. Nothing is independent of it. Like a bank arises because the thought bank arises, which is not independent from the consciousness that’s seeing that. So it’s consciousness, thought bank, object bank. And I realized that’s how everything is and everything started to be experienced very intimately like that, like it was all right here, you know.
Rick: Well, a dog sees the bank too, but maybe he pees on it or something. He doesn’t know of it as a bank, he’s just like this, but he has the same perception, you know, without the thought. It doesn’t give an interpretation to it. Probably thinks, you know, in his own little dog mind, he might have a, you know, obviously can maybe distinguish between buildings, which people might come out of, and trees, and cars, which you can chase and whatnot. But as human beings, we have much more complex minds and we overlay many more interpretations and judgments and whatnot. I mean, we might think bank and think, “Oh my God, I’m going to go into foreclosure,” or “Is that bank going to fail? I’m going to lose all my money,” and blah, blah, blah.
Scott: That’s it, that’s it right there. We pretty much bet that the dog’s not doing that.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Which is why we love them so much, because they’re so innocent, you know. Because it’s just sort of beauty, simple innocence in animals. So during this whole 20-year period of taking drugs and all, were you at the same time dwelling on spiritual stuff, reading spiritual books? Was there sort of a seeking component in that that you were conscious of, or did that come up more towards the end?
Scott: I think in the early stages of my addiction, I got into Eastern spirituality for about two years. But then I became so much more interested in drugs that I just kind of put that down, and then it wasn’t until many, many years later, after I got off the drugs, that I was able to …
Rick: You did a 12-step program at some point, right? And that usually has a spiritual component to it. Yeah, the 12-step program was really helpful for me in terms of just getting clean and getting support from others. And then that allowed me to look into my experience a little bit more without being clouded by all the things that go along with a drug addiction.
Rick: Sure. And so when you kind of really left the drugs behind and started undergoing this transformation that you were just describing, were you assisted by books and teachers of any kind, or were you pretty much doing it on your own and just having these realizations and kind of reorienting the way you perceive the world on your own?
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I picked up things from J. Krishnamurti and things like Eckhart Tolle and dabbled here and there, but I didn’t know what Advaita Vedanta was. I didn’t know the different schools of Buddhism and all the traditions. I didn’t realize the rich history there. I was just interested in kind of discovering what my experience was like, so I used those teachings as a guide to kind of help me look into my experience more. Yeah, they were definitely helpful.
Rick: Yeah. Did you experience at any point sort of radical shifts? Like you could say, “Okay, on the afternoon of November 13th, all of a sudden this thing happened,” or was it more a gradual kind of incremental transformation?
Scott: It was both. The way that I’ve expressed it, one way I’ve said it in my book that you mentioned, I think, Reflections of the One Life, there’s one of the meditations in there that sort of talks about it in terms of, well, it’s kind of hard to express this, but what I’ve been saying is like you often hear people speak in terms of like a gradual, like you say, and then like a sudden place where it feels like everything just is as it is, like a kind of a oneness experience. The way that I talk is that both of those viewpoints are available to us when we’re on the – and this is what I was experiencing. I was definitely experiencing a gradual kind of awakening, and what it was is that I was still very much thinking of myself as being in a story that was my identity, past, present, and future, and so naturally I was just measuring it that way. I was like saying I was really experiencing kind of an experiential peace and a knowing, but what I was doing is I was interpreting it within the story, so I was measuring back, and I was saying, “Wow, I feel so much more peaceful than I did three months ago. Isn’t this amazing?” So that little ego says, “Yeah, keep working on that,” and if you keep working on that, then you’ll be to this other place down in the future because I didn’t know any better. That’s how I had processed everything, so that’s what I think the gradual was for me. There would be these little moments where it would be just like, “There aren’t any problems. People are making all of this stuff up,” and then the mind would come back and say, “See, now you’ve really seen something. You’ve really seen something. You’ve seen something. What you’ve seen now is so much more than what you saw before. See, you’re still measuring in time,” and then there came a point where I was just like, “Oh, that whole story of coming to presence is actually absurd on its face. You can’t come here.” What was happening was that there was an interpretation, a story happening of a gradual awakening, and then boom, it was like this seeing of all that is, those are just viewpoints coming and going within a timeless awareness that says, “Oh, you were ten years old. Oh, you were on drugs. Oh, you thought you were enlightened. Oh, now you think there is no such thing as enlightenment.” All that stuff.
Rick: Yea.
Scott: So it was both for me. Personally, I have no problem with the idea of both. In other words, there’s a lot of talk in so-called neo-advita circles about giving up the search and the whole notion of progress is absurd and so on and so forth, but I can only be true to my own experience. Maybe my experience is immature or something and I’ll see it differently at some point, but I experience a continuous, very full and contented presence. Regardless of circumstances, I can be falling off my bicycle and hitting my head, which happened one time. It was interesting in the moment of that impact that the presence was solid as a rock and I thought, “Well, this is interesting.” Or running through a busy airport on little sleep trying to catch a connecting flight and the presence is just as solid and predominant, if not more so, than the chaos. And yet I feel like I’m evolving. When I say “I” I’m just using language because we have to use language, but I feel like there’s a continuous growth. And if you think of it in terms of the nervous system being that through which we experience anything, including this conversation or presence or anything else, then the nervous system is a very delicate instrument which is subject to refinement. And as it becomes more refined, our experience matures and becomes enriched. And that doesn’t mean that we necessarily are locked into a “Oh my God, I’ll feel so good when I get there” kind of thing. We can be completely content in the present, not giving a thought for future evolution or future attainments or whatever. And yet there’s a continual unfoldment, a maturation, if you will, of this spiritual dimension, if we can use that word. I’m always cautious using words for obvious reasons. But anyway, what do you say to that?
Scott: I think it’s great, and I think it’s a really balanced view actually. I talk about it a lot. There are two aspects of our experience, and they’re inseparable. In Buddhism they say nirvana is none other than samsara. So they say that there are these two aspects of our sense of just pure, timeless presence and this sense of unfolding and deepening and evolving. Both of those things are in our experience if we just look. They’re always there. I think maybe in the beginning, it’s just sort of we’re so heavily, going back to that nutshell thing, we’re so heavily in the story unfoldment that all of our attention is there. And so it’s helpful to get that sort of non-dual space as the background, which then sort of kind of loosens up the personal drama and traumas and seeking in that story. It doesn’t dissolve it away. I mean, why would you want to dissolve thought away totally, or life or family or relationships or community or evolving and changing and growing and all those things? That’s part of it. But what happens I think is that, like you kind of say, is that at a certain point it stops, for my people, it stops being so self-centered.
Rick: Yeah.
Scott: It stops being about my attainment.
Rick: Exactly.
Scott: It starts being about, well, okay, we’re really, really in this. Whatever this is, we’re in this together. And then you start, that’s what Buddhists have always said, caring, compassion for all beings, getting out of limited thought patterns that keep us in conflict. And so there’s ever deepening available. And when someone says, hey, I’m enlightened, I want to talk to them about that. Because if you talk to people long enough, you find out that we all have limited kind of ways of thinking. Even if we’re only Buddhists or we’re only at Advaita Vedanta or whatever, those are still limited kind of structures. And it’s a sense of limitation. So it’s fine to be that way, but I think there’s an ever deepening process where you just start to realize that love has no end to it. I mean, like that these divisions that we’re creating through thought, that they’re paper thin, and they don’t go away, but they really start to be kind of interpenetrating here. It’s all allowed in a way. You just sort of become deeper and deeper into this surrender. And it’s hard to talk about, but I think you and I both know what we’re trying to say here.
Rick: Yeah, and hopefully our listeners do too. And that was well put. I mean, I went through years of a sort of annoying, yearning, desperate, got to get there kind of thing. And at some point that just, I don’t know, there wasn’t a point. It just sort of tapered off and disappeared. And now I’m still very motivated. I mean, I’m always listening to this kind of thing and reading things and talking about it. And I’m doing this show, so it’s not like I’ve lost my sort of spiritual motivations. But it doesn’t have that seeking quality that it used to have. I mean, I could use the word “seeking” because sure, there’s much more to be discovered, and I’m interested in discovering it. But I could stay exactly the way I am now for the rest of my life, and that would be okay too. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Scott: Yea yea yea
Rick: But it’s sort of paradoxical. But there can be contentment and a sort of striving at the same time. But the striving doesn’t have… it’s not emptiness-based. It’s more fullness-based.
Scott: Yeah, I think that’s great. I’m glad you’re sharing all that with me because it really helps this conversation go. I was just going to say, a friend of mine was saying it the other day. The way that he was saying it, it’s sort of the difference between seeking and just exploring or investigating or unfolding or evolving. They’re really two different things. On the one side, seeking is really, like you say, it’s really personal and it’s built… there’s anxiety in it because it’s like…
Rick: Yes, based on lack.
Scott: Yeah, that has its own experience. And then there’s… when we start to recognize that sort of non-dual whatever that is, then that kind of starts to release itself, which is really… some people say, “Well, that’s really just the beginning in a way.” And I know that people will say, “Well, God, don’t tell me that because I thought I was coming to the end here.” But in a certain way, it’s like the anxiety around the personal seeking kind of dies away, which really… Here we are still. As it is, here we are. And what else do we have to do other than explore this experiment called life?
Rick: I know, and it’s such a wonderful adventure.
Scott: Yea
Rick: I mean, I’m in no big hurry to proclaim myself finished. If anything, if I’m going to err, I’d much rather err on the side of presuming I’m less enlightened than I am, rather than more enlightened than I am.
Scott: Totally, totally. I think it’s just a humility check. It’s a good humility check, just to say that, just to say. I mean, also if you question somebody who says, “I’m enlightened,” if you question them a little bit more, that whole thing breaks down. Because if you say, “Well, what do you mean I’m here?” Well, what is here? You’re having thoughts. There’s thoughts, there’s feelings, there’s an experience here, and there is a non-dual background. But what is here? I mean, here is always constantly changing, like from experience to experience. So what is it that you think that you’ve got here? So it kind of breaks down when you really go in for it and find out what is that word really pointing to. Yeah. I was listening to a conversation a few days ago between you and Jeff Foster and some other people. There’s some guy named Keith, I’m not sure who he was. And Jeff Foster was telling the story about how he and his mother were taking a walk, and she said, “Oh, isn’t that a beautiful tree?” And he went into this whole heartless, dry rap about how there’s no tree and it’s all an illusion. And somebody actually made a cartoon of that. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a cartoon on the web where there are these two characters and one of them says, “Look at the beautiful tree,” and the other character goes into a whole neo-Advaita schtick. But anyway, Jeff said in that little thing there, “I thought I was enlightened,” and he was looking back and thinking, “What a schmuck I was, being so heartless with my mother and so immature.” And he said, “Sure, on some level there is no tree and there is no beauty and all that, but in just about as real a way, there is a tree and there is beauty.” And I actually felt this wave of joy when I heard him say that, because I thought, “Wow, that’s so refreshing to hear somebody with a balanced perspective.” And I hope Scott’s that way too, because I don’t want to just have a conversation with somebody who says, “Nothing is real and that’s all there is to it.” There’s a bigger picture, and it’s almost like you have to acknowledge each level as having its own validity, even though one level may totally refute other levels. But nonetheless, the whole package is life. And you have to kind of… I’ve made the point, I don’t want to go on any further, I’ll let you respond.
Scott: No, that’s great. I think we’re both saying the same thing. Lately I’ve just been calling it the middle way, because it’s just an old traditional word that I think it’s nice to bring it back into modern non-dual talk and to say exactly what you’re saying, exactly what Jeff’s saying. It’s really not that difficult to have a non-conceptual experience. You can cultivate that, and actually you can see that when you’re not thinking, not only is there no self, there’s no tree, happiness is a concept, everything is a concept, down to the very last thing. And you can really, really see that. And that can be great and freeing and wonderful, because you’ve really seen that what you took as a world that seems so real, it just isn’t. But then it’s like, well then if you’ve really seen that, what’s the problem with all this stuff? There’s no problem anymore. And so enjoy that completely. When the thought arises that says there’s a tree, nothing stops you from actually enjoying that now, absolutely nothing.
Rick: Yeah, you know there’s these Zen pictures, and I wish I had them in front of me because we could review the stages, but there’s these ten pictures in Zen where the seeker goes through all these different stages and at a certain point the world disappears, and then finally he’s back in the marketplace riding his oxen in among the world, big smile on his face.
Scott: Right, right. And I went through a lot of what Jeff went through too, of a place where it was like a total, sort of a deconstruction, and some people have to go through that, like a deep deconstruction. But the whole irony and humbling part about all this is how the world and all of its things and forms is still… why would you ever want to get rid of that? I mean, they’re both here, they’re both here. That’s the whole thing, maybe that’s the nutshell right there, is that we think the separation is real, we see that it’s not, and then we play in the world anyway.
Rick: I mean, if you tried to get rid of it, you’d fail anyways, and you’d make yourself miserable, and you’d be a pain in the ass to everybody else around you.
Scott: Yeah, exactly. Right. Or, you know, I’ve heard someone say the formless Superman. The formless Superman is the one that has cultivated a formless awareness, which any of us can do, and there are really teachings that are really, really good at that, and I even talk a lot about that. In other words, there’s just this formlessness, I don’t know if you’d call it awareness, a sense of no-thing. But then, if that becomes your only experience in the world, you almost have to avoid any situation where you might be tempted with sex, or money, or any of the worldly material things.
Rick: Food?
Scott: Food.
Rick: I mean, you know.
Scott: Right. Anything. Yeah. So you’re formless Superman, so you’re wonderfully liberated when you’re in your place of no world and no thought, and it’s a freeing, wonderful place. Great. I mean, great. That’s part of the whole thing. But then what happens when you have to pay taxes? What happens when your wife says, “Honey, can you come out of the room and stop meditating now?”
Rick: Right. Yeah.
Scott: Where are you then?
Rick: Yeah. I mean, the key word here, I think, is integration. We are human beings and we’re alive, and we’re not going to get away from that until we’re not alive. And therefore, if there is to be some sort of realization, it has to be an integrated one. I mean, you can live in a monastery or something, but even then, there’s interpersonal relationships with the other monks, and you have responsibilities, you’ve got to bake the bread or whatever, and sweep the floor, and there’s still going to be activities, even though they may be simpler ones. So the whole key, in my understanding, is to be able to integrate this realization we’re alluding to into real life, so-called real life, where there’s absolutely no conflict between skiing down a ski slope, if that’s something you like to do, and residing in that pure awareness or pure silence.
Scott: Yeah. Right. And that’s really balance, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah.
Scott: Because if it were just one or the other, you would feel that imbalance in your life in one way or the other. That’s what we’re kind of talking about the middle way. If I was only sort of in this place where there was no world, if I was only in this place where only the world and all of its things were real, there would be this sort of feeling as if something just feels a little bit off or something. But when you start to really incorporate that, it just feels balanced, it feels good, it feels right.
Rick: And it actually enhances your experience of the world. I brought up the skiing example because for some reason it just came to mind, but that’s something I love to do. I went skiing a few years ago and it was just a totally enjoyable time. I remember sitting in the airport waiting to go home and there were these kids hanging around the airport, who were really into snowboarding and stuff. But looking at them and hearing them talk, I felt like there was a level of unhappiness there that must have not only hampered their enjoyment of life in general, but actually made skiing a lot less enjoyable for them. I thought, “Gee, too bad they can’t see the whole experience with a much more clear vision. It would have been a nicer trip for them.”
Scott: Yeah, I think you’re right. I’m really glad that you brought this up. Because sometimes when I’m having talks and interviews, we only stay on one side or the other of it. So this is good to talk about.
Rick: A lot of people listen to this stuff and come to these talks and go to seminars and whatever. We were talking a little while ago about ourselves even, having gone through phases where we were yearning and searching and craving and so on, and then eventually matured out of that. But you can’t necessarily jump from point A to point Z in an instant. If you have an audience full of people, many of them may still be at that stage. You might mollify it a little bit with this kind of talk, but if they’re still wired in that way, it may go on for some time. Either they’re going to get heavily into making a mood of having gone past that phase when they really haven’t, or they’re going to be straining or something. You know. It’s sort of like… You see my point? You might want to respond to that one.
Scott: No, no, that’s good. Make sure I understand what you’re asking. Right now, pretty soon, we’re starting something called “Living Realization,” which is a text that I wrote, and we’re starting it up with a text that’s revised with this kind of talk in it, of balance. One of the things that I’ve done with this when we have meetings, I’m toying with the idea of really breaking the meetings up into different groups. Just to say, if you’re really, really living in that sense of separation, that that’s really your world, then come to this kind of a meeting where I can just speak to you about… meet you exactly where you are in there and get a little bit of a taste of the no-selfness. Then there’s other groups where you might be stuck in a place where it’s like… you’re just witnessing everything, but it feels a little bit detached or something. Like, life is going on, but I’m somewhere over here.
Rick: Right, aloof.
Scott: Yeah, aloof, right, or detached. So then come to a meeting where we can just talk about how what you’re calling the witness and what’s happening, there’s no separation there, so we might just close that gap.
Rick: Yea
Scott: There might be other people who have gotten so far into the la-la land, like to the farthest shore, where it’s like, just there isn’t anything, there’s nobody, thought is a problem, I’ve dealt with it, it’s over. For them it might be a totally different set of talks. It might be like, “Okay, let’s examine that a little bit closer. Let’s look at that and see if that’s really…” So that way you can just deal with it in a different… Some people don’t like that, they don’t like to be grouped, but I feel like it’s hard to talk in one way about this subject anymore. That’s a great idea. I like that idea. I guess you’d have to have large enough groups to be able to subdivide the people like that.
Scott: Yea.
Rick: But I think that’s really cool. As much as we would like to be in the mature, graduated spiritual group, whatever you want to call it, you can’t necessarily jump from one stage to the other, any more than you can go from third grade arithmetic to college trigonometry. You’re just going to find yourself lost and it’s not going to help you. We have talked earlier about progressive stages of development and we’re re-emphasizing that now. That whole concept is anathema in some circles. But realistically speaking, you don’t just go to some weekend seminar for your first taste of this whole thing and walk away with the level of realization that you may end up with 20 years from now. I’m sorry, but that’s not the way it works.
Scott: I think in most cases you’re absolutely right.
Rick: There are always exceptions to every generality. For someone it may happen that way.
Scott: But it’s so rare. I think not to pick on neo-advaita because a few years ago, and some might even say that I’m that way, but a few years ago I was much more neo-advaita. The great promise that it didn’t deliver, that hasn’t delivered, not to pick on it because it has a lot of value. There really is a lot of value in just saying, “This is it.” If that works for somebody. But the great promise it didn’t deliver on that is, I think, is that it doesn’t connect with where people are experiencing themselves.
Rick: Exactly. You have to meet people on their own level, whatever that may be. And that’s not meant to be a condescending phrase, “their own level,” as if I’m on some much higher level or something. But you have to tailor the teaching to the person you’re speaking to, in any field. Not only the spiritual field, but mathematics or any other field. You speak to the level of the listener and then you lead them on from there.
Scott: Right, right.
Rick: And it may very well be that neo-advaita’s popularity is due to the fact that there are a fair number of people around to whom that is appropriate at this stage.
Scott: Yea
Rick: And fine, they’ll gravitate toward it. I suppose those who don’t resonate with it will stay away from it. So as you say, you don’t want to knock it, it has its place. I mean, everything has its place. Fundamentalist Christianity has its place. Atheism has its place. It all sort of depends on where you’re at.
Scott: Yeah, I think that’s a really, really healthy view. I think more and more of us are sort of moving in that direction, where to say that all this stuff has its place. Instead of, I think the old way, I don’t want to say the old way, but the old way is sort of like, “Well, my way is the only way.” You know what I mean? Like, “I’ve got it and if you don’t get it, I’m sorry.”
Rick: There are some teachers out there still talking that way, I’m afraid. It’s a fundamentalist mentality that they’ve applied. You find fundamentalist mentalities in every walk of life, from politics to religion to cooking and food. There are people who are fundamentalists about you should only eat raw food. And in this case they’ve applied it to Advaita. But the truth, if you read somebody like Nisargadatta or Ramana Maharshi, they were very much in line with the kind of things we’ve been saying here. Nisargadatta, both of them, emphasize the value of meditation. They also emphasize the value of selfless service, if that was what worked for you, or self-inquiry, if you’re at that level, or singing bhajans, doing devotional things, if that’s where you’re at. And that’s the way the whole Indian tradition is also. It has so many different strata and so many different facets, so that wherever you are, there’s something for you.
Scott: I think that’s really the great thing about the Internet and modern technology, is that there are all these voices out there. And I think some of us are kind of going, “What? There’s so much out there.” I think people are sort of going, “How to make sense of it all?” But I think that really, in the end, it’s going to be a good thing, because it’s going to be so many different voices, and eventually you’re going to find where you are, you’re going to find that match. And when that teaching and that method runs its course, you’re not going to need that anymore, you’re going to go somewhere else, or you’re going to stop doing what you’re doing and do your own thing, or you’re going to go be a gardener or something. But the point is that it’s really kind of an amazing thing happening right now. And I think the more that we open our arms, this is just my view of it, the more that we open our arms to other methods, ultimately, then we help this thing grow in its diversity and allow all those voices to find their place in this.
Rick: Yeah, no, it’s very good. And like you say, many people of course have spoken for some time about the notion that there’s some kind of global enlightenment taking place, or global awakening. And if that is so, and I tend to believe it is, the internet is certainly critical in that process. Jesus Christ could only walk around a few villages in the few years of his teaching, as far as a donkey could take you. But these days, I’m talking to you this week, next week I’m talking to a woman in Thailand, and after that some guy on the East Coast. I look at my Google Analytics and there are people all over the world watching this. And so it’s almost like if we think of a much vaster, more profound intelligence kind of shepherding the universe along to higher and higher evolution, then we as a planet have reached a point at which we’re ready for a quantum leap. And these technologies are instrumental in that.
Scott: Yeah, I think they are too, and the internet is. But I think part of what, if you want to say what an ego is and what it does, is it sort of wants to take ownership and kind of stake a claim in all this, like a very personal claim. And I think it’s easy to be, as a teacher, to do something like that. And I think that the further awakening is that when we open our eyes to that process and then we start to welcome in all these voices. I always feel like the wisdom is speaking to us in all different directions. All we have to do is just listen and find out that the thing that we’re ignoring or repressing or pushing away is being reminded of us by somebody else. It’s saying, “Take a look at that.” It’s like, “Get away from your extreme view and just take a look at what you’re doing.” It’s sort of just kind of teaching us in every direction. So I think that’s part of the… if there is an awakening, to me that’s part of it.
Rick: Yeah. Do you find yourself listening to other voices a lot? Do you read, do you listen to recordings of other teachers and all in order to just sort of expose yourself to different perspectives and different ways of saying things?
Scott: Yeah. Just in the last year I’ve gotten into Madhyamaka Buddhism very deeply and it’s just been an amazing thing to see what’s going on in a certain school of that and just to read it, kind of discover that. And yeah, sometimes I just like to just play music, frankly, or to just spend time with the family and kind of get away from the whole talk of it.
Rick: Sure, yeah. It can get obsessive.
Scott: Yeah, it gets a little obsessive. But yeah, absolutely. I’m always interested in voices that are kind of fresh and that are really inclusionary and anything along those lines really kind of grabs my ear.
Rick: Yeah. Do you actually do any spiritual practices? You say Buddhism, do you actually sit and do a kind of a Buddhist meditation or anything like that?
Scott: No, I don’t meditate as much anymore, but with the Madhyamaka Buddhism I’ve actually been doing that analysis just for like eight or nine months and I can tell you about it if you want.
Rick: Sure, yeah, let’s hear a bit about it.
Scott: In that school, it’s basically, we start from the idea that something has an inherent existence that exists by itself and we start to look at what it’s made of. Like it’s made of all of its parts, like my body has an arm and a head and thoughts are part of the self. I’m talking about the self has its own existence.
Rick: Sure
Scott: So there’s the body and the arms and the feet and the toes and the gut and the heart and the thoughts and the emotions and then we try to actually go find the object that we think exists as a self, like as a whole self. So we find an arm, but the arm is not the self, it’s the arm.
Rick: Sure, because you could have your arm amputated and you’re still yourself.
Scott: Right, right, right. And we find everything’s like that. I find a thought, but that’s not what I think of Scott. I don’t think of the thought as the thing that I’m looking at. And so we find out that nothing has that kind of existence on its own side. You find out that when we say Scott, that that only has a conventional existence. It’s not a really separate thing. It’s just what’s a different… all that it is is non-duality in a different way. It just sort of arrives at it a little bit differently. It’s not like an awareness teaching.
Rick: It’s kind of an analytical approach to breaking everything down to its essence or something.
Scott: Yeah, and I actually… funny you say, bring this up, or that we should bring this up, is because the reason that I used it was to deconstruct some of the teachings that I had done before. I used it to deconstruct Advaita Vedanta terms. I used it to like… so the mind can sort of start to believe what it’s saying about… and through emptiness teachings, through this Buddhist teaching, I would go and do this kind of analysis on my own spiritual insights and found that they were empty. And what it did is it just… it does just create this sense of lightness about the whole thing. It’s like… you know, it just…
Rick: Could you give an example of like a particular Neo-Advaita concept that you broke down and what process you went through? Yeah, no, I mean like oneness for example. You know, like well oneness, someone says… it’s just a word, it’s fine. But what happens is when you go look for it, under this kind of analysis, you don’t find it as a thing. You don’t find it… you go look for it, you say there’s a cup, is that oneness? Well, I guess so, but we call it a cup. We call this a cup. Is my body oneness? Well, I guess you could say that, but it’s really… it’s my body, I call it a body. Is this phone oneness? And you find out that when you really go looking for the concept oneness as a real thing, all you find are a bunch of parts. So you could say that it exists, but it’s inseparable from all the parts that make it up. It’s not like oneness as this some blanket thing that has no differentiation. It’s like a bunch of things. So it’s like a balanced view really. It sort of says there is a oneness, but it’s dependent on all of these things, these definite things like Rick and Scott and thoughts and feelings and rooms and things. So, yeah, because people often use it like oneness, as if that has one meaning. Or it’s like an undifferentiated… like you spread butter over a piece of bread. Like that’s just oneness, it’s just oneness. But when you start looking for it, you find there’s a rich diversity of things here.
Rick: Well, and if it’s really oneness, you know… I mean, let’s instead of the word oneness, let’s use one of the attributes that God has said to have, omnipresence. Okay, if he’s really omnipresent, where is he not? I mean, he’s not isolated off in some corner and then there’s all this other crap out here. It’s like, take anything, take your thumb. If he’s omnipresent, then that thumb is thoroughly permeated by God, as much as is the lamp, the table, a pile of dog poop. Anything is completely permeated by that divine intelligence we refer to as God. And so, you know, I once heard Maharishi say that… Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was the founder of Transcendental Meditation, he once said, “God is omnipotent, but there’s one thing he can’t do. He can’t take himself out of your heart, because he’s omnipresent.” And so where can you find him? The most convenient place would be where you are, you know and then maybe you’ll find him everywhere after that. And we’re speaking in more religious terms here, or spiritual terms, which we might actually touch upon, we might want to get into in this conversation, the whole notion of divinity as opposed to just this sort of impersonal flavor that Neo-Advaita talk often has. And it might be worth noting that the founder of Advaita, Shankara, was as much a devotional person as he was an intellectual, analytical one. He wrote these beautiful devotional hymns and poems and so on and so forth. Anyway, that’s a kind of a riff that I just went off on.
Scott: No, I think it’s beautiful, because this brings up something for me, is when I was really sort of in my more Advaita stage, so to speak, which I still use all that terminology, and I think it’s a beautiful, beautiful tradition, and I love it, but one thing I was doing at one point was I was using it actually to one-up my Christian brother. My brother is a Christian Catholic, and I was using it almost to suppress his language, his story of the divine, in a way, because I was experiencing a peace beyond– that felt like it was beyond all concepts. So in a way, I was doing violence to his story. I was destroying his God and his Jesus, because I was trying to tell him that they were just ideas, not realizing that I was actually also just spouting ideas. It was a very violent thing, and it was a humbling thing to come back to him years later and say, “Hey, look, you know what? I’m sorry. Actually, I’m really sorry for that, because I didn’t realize the arrogance in it.” At that point, I became more open to actually know more about his story, the story of his Jesus Christ and his evolution, and all these other stories, too, in the world that are telling. There’s lots of different stories, and that’s part of being in the world part of it. Stop doing violence to each other by pretending that my way, my concepts, are somehow transcended, all of your concepts, they stomp out all of your concepts.
Rick: It seems to me that if one is thinking that way, the ego is still very much in control.
Scott: Yeah, I think so. I think it was. That’s why it was humbling, humbling, humility, seeing that that was very much ego in the name of – I was calling it something transcendent, but it was really just ego kind of hiding out in another place. Yeah, that’s really sweet. I would suggest that, speaking of God and Jesus and all that stuff, that eventually that’s where this realization heads. I’m not saying that we’re all going to become religious people, but I think that there’s a divine aspect. Look at anything. Look at a housefly under a microscope or a cell under a microscope or look at pictures of the galaxies out in space and you get this sense of this vast intelligence which is far beyond our comprehension, which we must be completely immersed in, like I was saying before, just as a fish is immersed in water. But we’re only dimly aware of the grandeur or the significance or the profundity of it. And I would suggest that this whole evolutionary process, whatever you want to call it, is heading us in that direction to an eventual experiential appreciation of that. Not a faith, not a belief, not a story, but an experiential living of that, just as we now have an experiential living of maybe presence or silence or a sense of oneness. That’s what the richness will eventually evolve into.
Scott: Yeah, and that’s why I use that word “living realization” because it’s a lived realization. We’ve been saying a lot of things about it, but it really is quite a mystery actually. Yeah, good word.
Rick: And I’ve had the privilege of meeting a couple of people. I was away this week, I was up in Michigan with Amici, the hugging saint. And some people, when they first hear about her, might trivialize the whole notion of what she’s doing. She’s hugging people, isn’t that cute? But when you actually tune in on where she’s at, and the level of realization and strength which would enable a person to sit and do that for 24 hours without getting off the couch, even to pee, and the transformational effect that has on maybe the 10,000 people that she sees in a single day sometimes, you get a sense of, wow, a human being can be much more than I realized or than I am. It’s humbling, and it makes you appreciate that there is in fact a vast scope of possibilities that human life is potentially open to. And that we may in fact just be in kindergarten, however much progress we’ve made.
Scott: I think that’s a really, really healthy approach, because I think that’s the danger of saying, or even implying, somehow one has arrived. Because love, what is that? It goes so deep, there’s no end to it. It goes into every nook and cranny of our life. That’s the way I think of it, is that the love does. And someone like her doing that, look at how easy it is for us to stay within our walls of separation and division between each other. It’s so easy, it’s so lazy, but it’s what we’ve been doing for years and years and years. And to think that there’s no end to the depth of how we can actually see through that. And then why would you ever want to say, I’ve arrived? at what? What have you arrived at?
Rick: Yeah, right. And when you think of the major league examples of compassion in this world that we’ve seen, and what is actually possible to express and to transmit to others in terms of love and compassion, I really just feel like I’m in Little League. My heart is like a rock compared to what it could potentially be. And again, you know, some people would hear that talk and they’d think I was really screwy for talking that way. Because it sort of implies a sense of seeking again, and future development, and all this stuff which is so off the program in certain circles. But once again, I feel like there’s no conflict between having a realistic understanding of the range of possibilities and being completely content at the stage you’re at. That’s where I’m at.
Scott: I totally understand. I think the conflict only comes from the mental position that it’s one or the other. Because what they’re saying is that in simple being there’s just this profound love of just being, which is true, actually, because that’s what we experience in the simple presence of love. But at the same time, there’s this other part of our experience where the mind continues to buy into divisions, and those can be seen through, and then this greater capacity to love and development happens. And both of those are actually available. The only thing that keeps that from happening, in my view, is believing that it can only be one or the other. It’s a viewpoint. If you look at it, it’s really just a mental viewpoint that says it has to only be timeless being, or it only has to be development.
Rick: Yea, I suppose we should all get t-shirts that have the word “only” on them and one of those diagonal lines through it. Yeah, that’s great. It’s all possibilities, you know? Syracuse, a candy mint and a breath mint. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember those commercials. What was I going to say? Anyway.
Scott: Tell me more about the practices that you do and where you are. You kind of explained it all, but what stuff do you do?
Rick: Well, as I mentioned, I learned Transcendental Meditation when I was 18. That was in 1968. I practiced that regularly. In fact, I still meditate. I use a mantra. I was chatting with somebody the other day and he was saying, “Oh, a mantra, that’s just a thought.” But it’s a thought which transcends its own activity. It’s like you might say, “I use a car.” “Oh, why would you be in a car? You want to be in Los Angeles.” “Well, yeah, but the car can take me to Los Angeles and then I’ll get out of the car.” That’s what happens when you meditate, actually. You have a mantra, the way I do it. You pick up a mantra and you’re thinking it in a certain effortless, natural way. And next thing you know, it’s not there and you’re just sort of resting in silence. And then maybe some thoughts bubble up again. And then you pick up the mantra again, next thing you know you’re resting in silence. And through repeating that process over time, that silence just gets sort of integrated and anchored into the nervous system or into the awareness and is lived in the midst of all circumstances and just continues to grow. So that’s it in a nutshell. I do a little yoga and stuff. And then I also obviously always am talking and reading and thinking about this kind of thing with people.
Scott: Yeah, that’s part of it, is just kind of communicating, because you can always hear something from somebody, I think, and I do all the time, that sort of balances my viewpoint about all this. Yeah, that’s the great thing about the Internet too, is that there’s just, again, so many voices. No, that’s good. I think a lot of the stuff is like that. In one way or the other, we’re recognizing, like you say, people call it a silence, or you could say it’s awareness, or the sense of everything that’s okay, a sense of well-being and presence. That, plus this other aspect of what’s going on here in terms of thought and emotion and sensation, and how can I recognize more deeply that underlying presence, sort of underlying, just to use a word,
Rick: Yea
Scott: and then also see that this other part is always happening too, this thought. And I think that’s really, to me, that’s the middle way, the way I’ve been talking about it. So your practice is really the same thing.
Rick: Yeah. And obviously, I’ve gone through all sorts of phases with this over the years, very fundamentalist in my thinking at a certain point, like everybody should be doing this, and so on. And I’ve come to appreciate the value of diverse paths and approaches. So I kind of cringe when I think of things I may have said or done in the past, just like you and your brother, you know?
Scott: Yes.
Rick: I think, “Oh my God, what an idiot I was.”
Scott: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: But the whole thing is a great adventure and a lot of fun. Do you do this full time? I mean, is this like a profession for you, or do you have a regular job?
Scott: I’m an attorney, actually.
Rick: Oh, are you? Okay.
Scott: Yeah, that’s what I do. That’s my day job, they say. And so I just meet with people one-on-one on the phone at night, two or three people at night will call, and then I travel around and do talks and things. But it’s really not the way that I make money, although I’m not opposed to doing more of it. It’s just that right now it’s not happening. Yeah, it’s not. Because I’ve just been doing so much writing more than anything else, and really that plus work kind of takes up my time.
Rick: Yeah. Are you married?
Scott: I’m in a relationship, not married.
Rick: Okay. Any kids in the trail behind you?
Scott: Three dogs.
Rick: Okay. Yeah, you’ve got a couple of them there.
Scott: So yes, I have three hairy kids.
Rick: Yeah. Well, that’s good. I mean, I sort of feel the same way. I’d love it if this thing somehow evolved into a profession. Some radio station calls me up and says, “Hey, would you do this for us? We’ll pay you.” But in the meanwhile, I do other things. I do search engine optimization, getting more traffic to people’s websites. Oh, yeah. So I spend a lot of time in front of the computer.
Scott: Yeah, yeah. So we can get, they say, keep your day job until…
Rick: Yeah, as they say, don’t quit your day job.
Scott: Yeah, right.
Rick: But if it happens, it happens. It’s sort of like you start a thing and it has a momentum. I forget who it was, Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln or somebody talked about how the important thing is just to sort of start, and then all kinds of unexpected opportunities and aids and assists come along and move the project along in ways you would not have foreseen, but you just have to start.
Scott: Yeah, and I think that’s also the value of seeing sort of the non-dual as the… The value of the non-dual is sort of kind of emphasizing less and less what I’m going to get out of it personally. And once that kind of falls away, that’s my own experience, is once that kind of falls away, and it can kind of linger around for a while, yeah, well, I would still like to do… Once you kind of make room and you’re kind of like… You’re really just sort of open to however it’s going to unfold without feeling a sense of anxiety about having to control that a whole lot. I find that it just opens it up. It’s like the next thing happens, and it’s very, very natural, very, very natural.
Rick: And you’re still going to have desires. I mean, you’re a human being, so you might have the desire, “Oh, I’d really love to do this full time,” but it’s sort of like your fulfillment in life doesn’t hinge upon whether or not that happens.
Scott: Right. You absolutely have desires. I mean, how else would we choose what we eat?
Rick: Yeah, you go into a restaurant and the waiter says, “May I take your order?” You don’t say, “Well, it’s all the same, and besides, there is no me, and there is no order.”
Scott: Right
Rick: It’s like you could get kicked out pretty fast.
Scott: Yeah, yeah. If people think it’s all the same, then let me take all of your money away. And take all of your vehicles and your computer, and then see if that’s the same as having all that stuff. I mean, on the level of appearance, it’s not the same.
Rick: Right.
Scott: And I guess the most we can do is, like you say, is recognize that at the basic level, we’re already free, that our well-being is perfectly and always present here, and at the same time sort of navigate through this life with that knowing in hand at all times. And I think that does actually change the level of appearances in our life. I think it changes us.
Rick: Yeah, very much so. There’s an analogy which I find useful. Imagine a building that has like ten stories or something, and as you go up to each story and go and look out the window, you see what you saw earlier, but you see a bigger picture, a bigger circumference. And the bigger circumference, it contains the previous one, and therefore it doesn’t conflict with it at all. And eventually you get to the top of the building and you see a muccch wider view, and all those narrower views are completely compatible with that wider view, even though they’re very different and much more limited, but they’re completely compatible and you’re comfortable with all of them.
Scott: That’s really, really, really nice, actually. That makes me think of something you said earlier about the fundamentalist, when we were talking about that, because your first comment about that was that actually has a place in our world, and I know it does, because in some ways, if you think, if I don’t have access to that sort of sense of well-being and presence that feels like that deep, deep okay-ness, it’s almost a certainty, but it’s not mental. It’s like a certainty of everything is really at the basic level is okay. If I don’t have that, then I’m going to have to, at some place, try to find some sort of certainty and structure and order. One way to do it is just to really grasp on to something in a fundamentalist way, because if I don’t have anything else, I might fall into complete nihilism if I don’t have my fundamentalism. I might believe that life is totally meaningless. So it does serve a purpose. What I think was nice, I was envisioning that, and I was thinking that I’ve had my fundamentalist streak. I mean, certainly have, and certainly that can come back at any point in little ways, because it’s still a part of the view. It’s still a part. There’s a little fundamentalist inside me that I can hear that voice come up, you know but I don’t have to push the voice away. I can just sort of see that it’s — and therefore, when I see it out with other people, I don’t have to attack it so much. I can sort of own my inner fundamentalist in a way and say, “Yeah, I understand that voice, but it doesn’t have to dominate because I’ve got this little wider view about things.” I thought that was nice, the way that you said it. I think the other way creates all the problems. The other way would be, now that I feel like I’ve overcome fundamentalism, I’m going to now push it out of my view, and it has no purpose on the earth. Now I’m going to be at war with it, or any other view that I might have had along the way.
Rick: Then you’ve just adopted a new fundamentalism.
Scott: Yeah. That’s a little self-deception. Yeah. I read a thing last night in a book by Marianna Kaplan. If you’ve never read her books, you might really enjoy them. Have you ever heard of her?
Scott: Yeah, I’ve read her books. I like her.
Rick: It was a quote from somebody, and he said, “The bad news is you’re in free fall, and there’s nothing to grab onto. The good news is there is no ground.”
Scott: That’s good, yeah. That’s good. She has a good book, Halfway Up the Mountain.
Rick: Yeah, I read that. Now I’m reading Eyes Wide Open, which is her next one. It’s called Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, is the subtitle.
Scott: Yeah.
Rick: Great book.
Scott: Well, I often quote her. Actually, I butcher her play, which I don’t even know the name of because I’ve searched on Google, but I was at a non-dual conference, and sometimes I’ll use her play in order to talk to people who were kind of in that no-self place as a fundamentalist.
Rick: Her play? What do you mean, her play?
Scott: It’s a play on, again–
Rick: She actually wrote a play, literally? Or are you saying just her way of speaking?
Scott: She wrote a play.
Rick: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Scott: I apologize to her if she’s listening right now because I’m going to butcher it, but you need to go to her to hear the right version of it. I saw her at a conference, and she was saying something about my Zen boyfriend. She was explaining about how she had, in the fictitious character, she had dated the Advaita boyfriend and the Zen boyfriend. Again, I’m paraphrasing, but she would go up to her boyfriend and say, “You’re so emotionally distant. I feel like you’re not there.” He would say, “Well, there is nobody here.”
Rick: Right, right.
Scott: “There’s no self, and there’s no other either.” She was trying to get it across to him that that’s fine in one sense, but I’m here, and you’re here. Eventually, in the play, I think she breaks up with all of the boyfriends. Her point being is what we’ve been saying all along. I use that play with people as a way to distance myself in a conversation, to listen to her play, what she’s trying to say. That sometimes will reach somebody, and sometimes it won’t. Just kind of jar them out of that idea that there is nobody and no one, as a total absolutistic way of thinking.
Rick: Remember that song by Donovan, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is”?
Scott: Yeah. I think he actually took that from some Zen thing. Both are right. Fine, there is a mountain. On some level, there is no mountain. Yet, there is a mountain. You really don’t need to make it one or the other. You can sort of embrace both realities, and they all fit. In fact, the word “Brahman” in the Hindu terminology, actually, I don’t know the literal translation or the roots of the word, but what it implies or what it signifies is a complete embracing of both the absolute and the relative, the unity and the diversity. It’s sort of a synergistic thing where it’s more than the sum of its parts, and its parts include all the diversity and the unified state.
Scott: Right, and I think that I don’t want to lump all the traditions together and say that they’re the same, but I think that most traditions are the ones that I like end up there. They just end up there. How they get somebody there may be very, very different. It’s not like it’s one place that they end up, because again, I don’t want to say that… I know how that is to try to do violence to a tradition by reducing it. I would say, I know what it is, because I’ve not really studied some of these things deeply. I think to really appreciate a tradition, you really have to get into it and understand what it is that they’re saying. But from what I can tell, there’s lots of similarities in these traditions about that. The Zen marketplace, the Shankara where Brahman is the world, the world is illusory, which is how I say the world.
Rick: Right, Brahman alone is real, the world is an illusion, the world is Brahman.
Scott: Brahman is the world, right. And in the middle way in Buddhism.
Rick: Yea
Scott: You start to listen, what are the traditions really trying to tell us? They’re trying to tell us something.
Rick: And of course within each tradition you have a whole spectrum. In Christianity you have the Bible thumpers and then you also have beautiful mystics who understood the things we’re talking about here. In Judaism you have the Kabbalah, which is a very mystical, insightful tradition. In Islam you have the Sufis. If you ever listen to Llewellyn von Lee, I’ve got a lot of his recordings that I listen to. Brilliant, very conversant with the kind of concepts we’re discussing here. So you have the whole spectrum in every religion. Again, catering to people according to where they’re at, and then they move along the spectrum hopefully.
Scott: Yeah, I think so. Just for those who are listening, if you come and you talk to me, one thing I might do is I might say, forget everything that Rick and I said. Forget that, because all that we’re going to do here, that’s what I say in my addiction book, all we’re going to do here is we’re going to just take moments in which we’re at rest without having to know anything. And I might start something so simple, and then somebody might say, well that’s not what you and Rick were talking about. And I might say, but let’s just keep it really, really simple though in the beginning, and just start looking very, very basically. So yeah, and then all the traditions, they do it differently, how they progress through that. That’s where I sometimes start.
Rick: Yeah. So what are you doing with the drug addicts? You’ve got some kind of recovery program. Is that actually underway, are you still developing it, or what?
Scott: Yeah, I mean the first thing that’s coming out is the Living Realization website, which I kind of want to talk about that a little bit more first because the addiction is coming up. But the Living Realization website, and if you go to my newsletter, I’ll announce it when it’s ready to go, but it’s going to be its own site, and it’s really, really kind of taking, it’s like kind of a combination of, it’s exactly what we’ve been talking about, is kind of recognizing that the non-duality, moving beyond the belief in separation, but then incorporating the world, incorporating duality and all that stuff. So that’s coming out first, so kind of really excited about that.
Rick: Before you go on to the next thing, let me ask you a question about that. When you talk to people that way or present that information on your website, do you find that a lot of people just get frustrated because it’s conceptual for them and they’re not able to kind of link into the experiential dimension of it, or does the concept trigger that experience for most people in your experience?
Scott: Well that’s a good question, because in Living Realization, the first chapter is devoted to just recognizing basic everyday awareness. It’s like it peels it down to its basic source, and it just invites people to like, to just go check and see whether awareness is here at all moments. So you might be having a peaceful moment, and you might see that there’s just awareness, aware of that peaceful moment and the thoughts and the feelings, but it’s just sort of a basic awareness. Then you might be like really frustrated later in the day, and it might feel uncomfortable, but can you see that there’s still awareness there? It invites people to take moments in the beginning where they’re just not thinking, but they’re just doing that very, it’s like an old Dzogchen practice where it’s short moments, where you’re there, it’s like a living meditation, and you’re doing that all throughout the day. So there’s really no conceptualizing in the beginning, it’s just very, very experiential. So people start to get a feel for that.
Rick: Now isn’t there a danger that people might sort of divide their minds by trying to sort of introspect throughout the day and check in on that awareness while they’re at the same time having to work on the phone or whatever they do in their job? I mean, there could be a bit of a… Because ultimately this realization of this awareness is not something you have to think about or put your attention on, it’s just there. It’s always there. And if you try to make it a mental practice where you’re sort of conjuring it up through attention, it could be a bit divisive, wouldn’t you say?
Scott: Yeah, and so right, so all the rest of the chapters talk about inseparability. So in other words, the rest of the chapters are devoted to seeing that when a thought arises, it arises inseparably within the awareness. So when a phone call happens at work, that’s actually… all of that is happening right there within that basic awareness. So you’re there and there’s that awareness and it’s listening. And there’s that awareness and there’s thoughts happening in the awareness. And then there are emotions happening, all inseparably within the awareness. So it bridges… through the whole text it sort of bridges that gap, and it sort of says there isn’t a gap from the very beginning. It just sort of doesn’t give you the gap in the beginning. So the short moments without labels, we say in the text, are just an initial practice just to kind of recognize that there’s awareness here. And then once you get a feel for that, you start seeing that all thoughts and states and sensations and emotions and experiences in the world is happening inseparably within that.
Rick: I see.
Scott: Yeah, so it moves that way.
Rick: Good. Okay. Because I have seen people make that sort of a practice where they become rather odd in their behavior because they have to keep pausing and checking in, you know, “Am I here? Where’s awareness?” And then they can say another few words to you and then they have to pause again. You don’t want to develop that sort of thing.
Scott: No, no, absolutely. And that’s why we try… Inseparability is a big part of that whole teaching, which means that a thought happens inseparably within awareness. It just goes “shhh” like that. It’s always awareness here, it just goes “shhh” like that. And so when you talk that way, people just automatically start to look and see whether that’s true. I mean, is there awareness here? Yeah. And then there’s a thought, and that’s fine. And the thought’s happening and then it’s gone.
Rick: Do you ever have people say to you, “Scott, I’ve heard everything you’ve said. I’ve read your books, I’ve listened to your talks. I just don’t get it. I’m totally frustrated.”
Scott: Yeah.
Rick: I have dogs too, you can… Do people say that sometimes, and what do you say to them?
Scott: You know, it’s individual, because sometimes there might be issues where I say to people, “You know, go try some psychotherapy. There are some issues from childhood that I think that you might benefit by just go talking to somebody.” I might just start that. Or I might say, you know, I do shadow work with people, which is really ego work, because there are people who come to me that are really at war in some ways with things, and sometimes it’s good just to sort of like do some shadow work with them so that they can see that really you’re kind of at war with yourself in a way. It’s really not non-dual. It’s sort of ego work. So I might go there, or I might get them into a particular investigation that makes them sort of really, really feel what’s happening in their body, because people are sometimes just up here.
Rick: Good point, yeah.
Scott: Or some people are just down here in the emotions. They’re so disconnected from their intellect that they’re just in the body. So you kind of have to feel as an individual. So I’ll kind of listen to them, and I’ll see that they’re really sort of really heavy in the intellect part. So I might say, “Feel into your body. Feel that, and let that be your guide.” Or there are some people who will say, “The intellect is a bad thing, and I’m only interested in feeling.” Well, I’ll say, “Well, then, let’s go into the intellect a little bit.” So just kind of feel it out a little bit and see where they’re at. And then eventually, you work them into the middle way of sort of really the place where you and I have been talking about, where you want to bring them into this place where they feel like there’s an aspect of their experience that is just really, really okay, always. And that’s really, really important. And then that has no independent existence from everything, every thought, every emotion, every experience, this interview.
Rick: That’s great. You sound like you really have a gift for this and for really tuning into people and helping them along. I just wanted to mention a couple of quick things that your previous words evoked. One is, you were asking about my own practice, and I forgot to mention that for me, these days, meditation is largely a matter of exploring the body, investigating what may happen to be noticed somewhere – heart, head, whatever. And it’s like this healing process, and on a real subtle level, I can sort of feel knots dissolving. And if there’s some emotion, it has a physiological counterpart, and you can feel that physiological counterpart,
Scott: Yea
Rick: and that sort of resolves something that’s causing that emotion or whatever. So that’s just one thing I wanted to add because I hadn’t completed my answer. And another thing is, this thing about therapy, I think, is very interesting. Mariana Kaplan actually mentioned in her book that I’m reading, that that boyfriend who was, “There is no me, blah, blah,” is actually in therapy now, having realized that he’s not enlightened and that there might be some stuff he could work on. And this woman I interviewed a few weeks ago, Leslie Temple Thurston, even after very profound awakenings, did about four years of Jungian therapy with a really good therapist, which she feels was profoundly beneficial for her. So I think we should just mention, since you brought it up, that there are all kinds of ingredients that can be thrown into the soup that can really be of use to people.
Scott: Yea .I think it’s really good that you’re saying this because somebody mentioned that we kind of have the McDonaldized version of enlightenment, whereas if you’re supposed to get it in one drive-by, what it does, it’s over-simplistic thinking. And it’s great if you get it, if you’re wonderfully free completely, but in the McDonaldized version, it only has to be Eastern, everything Eastern, or only Buddhism, or there’s no room for therapy, or there’s only room for therapy, there’s no room for non-dual, or only intellectual, not emotional. It’s like compartmentalizing our experience in all these different ways. It’s only emotional, it’s not intellectual, or vice versa. It’s only awareness, it’s not appearances. And all of that is in complete contradiction to how we’re actually made up. There’s all these components. Right, inseparably. And obviously you can work on one particular thing and it might help everything else. You can pull one leg of a table and the other legs are going to come along, but it can help in many cases, those other legs are really stuck. And it can often help to take a multifaceted approach.
Scott: And I can just hear people listening to this, because I’ve heard it before, they’ll say, “Oh my God, they’re just talking about more seeking.”
Rick: Yeah, Kiloby has lost his bearings, he used to be so right on.
Scott: Yeah, no really, there’ll be people saying it. And you know, I think we’ve already said it all. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There doesn’t have to be a lot of anxiety, seeking. One of the first things I help people with is just to see through the seeking from the beginning. We deal sometimes just with that. Therefore, it feels like there’s just this openness within your experience that you can really explore all of these different divisions. And sort of break through all these divisions, but once you experience that openness and presence, it’s like you really, really have exactly what you need to explore. And the seeking just starts to die out in that, once you realize that presence, I think.
Rick: Or as we said earlier, it does and it doesn’t. Seeking in the sense, with the connotation of yearning, striving, craving, kind of dies out. But still the enthusiasm for progress on a basis of contentment continues.
Scott: Yeah, we don’t want to kill enthusiasm.
Rick: Yeah, or enthusiasm even sounds too agitated. It’s just like this, there’s an evolutionary momentum in the universe. There’s a force of evolution which is just carrying us all along. You’ve probably heard of Chuck Hillig. He’s been at some of these non-duality conferences and everything. He gave a very beautiful interpretation to the nursery rhyme, “Row, row, row your boat.” Have you ever heard him say that? It’s like, think of it, “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.” Okay, so there’s a stream and you’re going along with it. And you’re going downstream, you’re not trying to row upstream. And you are rowing, you’re not just sort of coasting along and drifting into branches and things like that. There’s some sort of initiative taking place, you’re rowing. And then, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” emphasized four times, you’re doing this with joyfulness, “Life is but a dream.”
Scott: Right. It’s a very profound little song. (Both laugh)
Scott: I didn’t realize that. I have to give Chuck some props for that one.
Rick: Yeah.
Scott: That’s pretty good.
Rick: That’s a good one. So did you finish telling me about the new website and that whole phase? Because then we were going to talk about the addiction thing after that. Did you finish talking about that?
Scott: Yeah, I just wanted to let people know about that because the living realization really does capture both of these two things that we’ve been talking about. And I think it’s been really important in my own path, and I think it will be for more people as long as they come open to it, that these two things, which are not two things.
Rick: Two sides of the same coin.
Scott: Right, two sides of the same coin. Yeah, so the Natural Rest book is a book about addiction. You were asking me about that. And Natural Rest is just really very similar to living realization, but it’s just put in language, I think, that people who struggle with addiction can understand. The thing that I found in my own recovery was that I – one thing that I found in myself in almost every addict that I met was a sort of kind of an avoidance of – kind of a wanting to move away from negative and uncomfortable feelings and thoughts towards something that would cover that up.
Rick: Blot them out, yeah.
Scott: Blot them out or medicate them or even get rid of them if we can find a way to get rid of them. And I found that in my life, that’s the thing that continued me in the kind of seeking of the bad kind that we talked about. The seeking that comes from lack and it’s like this constant personal momentum towards future that’s not the healthy kind of exploring and unfolding we were talking about.
Rick: Right.
Scott: Addictive seeking that I found that by very definition of trying to get rid of things, whatever they were, we were trying – I was constant in that addictive seeking mode. So what I began to experience in my own life is that when fear or anger would arise, if I would simply just let that be there, which means to let it not mentally, not with a thought that says I’m going – I mean that might be the first thing that helps me. But to really, really let it be there as its own arising without having to place any viewpoints on it about whether it’s good or bad or whether it’s – I should get rid of it or anything. When I started to let some of those energies be there, I found that they just all have a temporary lifespan.
Rick: Right.
Scott: And they’re not the big monsters that I thought they were.
Rick: Yeah.
Scott: So the monster aspect comes in when I start telling stories about them and whatever else the mind is doing. So natural rest is just this invitation to – it’s really to recognize presence and to allow all those energies to be there finally, to actually allow them to be there and to notice the ways in which we are trying to get rid of them, cover them up, neutralize them, seek something better, just kind of illuminating all those things through different words in the text. And then it also incorporates shadow work and some other things just about relationships and the importance of group support. Like we want to – in natural rest, the thing that’s so wonderful about some recovery groups is that people get together and they actually support each other.
Rick: Yeah, sure.
Scott: They say, “I know where you’ve been. I’ve been there. Just stick with this. We’re here for you.” That kind of thing is – I think is good in addiction, especially when you’re first getting clean. So it incorporates that of how to set up a group, a natural rest group where people are together. And what you’re talking about in the meetings is how to incorporate presence into your life. That’s kind of the focus of the whole book and all the groups.
Rick: So I presume you’ve actually worked with some people, some addicts, and used this approach and you found it effective and so on.
Scott: Yeah, I mean I found it effective in my own life with obsession, obsession of all kinds, and then I found it effective with people that I’m working with, yeah.
Rick: Have you ever – what kind of law do you practice?
Scott: It’s a small town practice, so anything that comes in the door, basically.
Rick: Did you become a lawyer before or after your 20-year drug period? Oh, it was right at the end there. So it was about three or four. Luckily, the state bar knows about this.
Rick: Yeah, so you must have been like 35, 40 years old or something by the time you went to law school.
Scott: Oh, no, I was 28 when I went to law school, graduated when I was 31, continued to be a lawyer for about three years during my addiction, and then got clean.
Rick: Oh, okay. So you actually went to law school and all that while you were taking drugs.
Scott: Yeah, and there was a period of law school where I was able to stay clean enough to focus, but then at the end of there it got kind of bad.
Rick: I don’t know why I wanted to know that, but I was just curious. Have you ever worked in prisons or anything like that, gone in there and tried to apply some of this work?
Scott: No, but I know a guy by the name of Kenny Johnson.
Rick: Oh, I know Kenny, yeah. I’ve met Kenny. He’s been in prison himself, I believe.
Scott: Yea
Rick: In fact, the last time I saw him was at an AMA thing out in California, and he came to my town here, Fairfield, Iowa, also one time gave a talk.
Scott: Have you ever done anything like that?
Rick: Like what?
Scott: Going to prisons.
Rick: No, I was in one a couple of times just for a couple of nights for marijuana possession when I was a teenager.
Scott: Yea , me too.
Rick: But I’ve never actually… I really haven’t worked… well, actually, come to think of it, when I was teaching TM, I did go into a prison one time and sit with somebody and check their meditation. I guess they were already a meditator. And some of my friends who are still in the TM movement, which I’m not, offer programs in prisons and so on. So that kind of thing goes on. And of course, Vipassana meditation is also used very successfully in prisons. There’s a movie called Doing Time, Doing Vipassana, a documentary about it being taught in the prisons in India. But anyway, the reason I guess we’re talking about this is that it indicates that all this talk that we’ve been having is not some pie in the sky, highly abstract, ethereal kind of thing. I mean, it can really be brought down to the most nitty-gritty level of life and can benefit people who are seriously suffering and encountering severe problems. It has a significance on all levels.
Scott: I think it does. I think if one takes an absolutistic view of it to say that all there is is sort of a pure awareness or all that there is… That’s an Advaita way of talking about it, but if someone sort of takes it all there is is the absolute, then they might not agree with what we’re saying. But I think that once you get off of that viewpoint and you start to really look at how it actually does change, the world of change, how it actually does transform people’s lives and their relationships and their sense of peace and lots of other things, and how much conflict one has with other people and things, then I think it does. It really is very practical, actually. It goes into all sorts of areas of life, addiction and, like you say, prison. There’s a lot to be said for relationships, frankly, that when we start to kind of incorporate a little bit of this, not really incorporate it, but sort of bring this into our relationships. It naturally comes into our relationships because this is what we’re discovering in our lives. You can’t keep it out. But when you really start to look at… Just in my own relationship, not only with my partner, but with my father and my business associates, all of that, it does change that stuff.
Rick: Yeah. It infuses it with some deeper value of life. I think you’re more tuned into the Neo-Advaita world than I am, and I hope that term is not an insult, but you know what I mean. I mean, all the Jeff Foster and all these people that are out there teaching. Earlier on in this talk you alluded to the fact that a lot of people seem to have moved out of a more fundamentalist stage, as you have, and come to embrace a more holistic view of life, including both absolute and relative. Is that fair to say? Is there a general trend among the so-called Neo-Advaita world toward that, or are a lot of people just as ensconced in that absolutist view as ever?
Scott: I mean, someone like Jeff, if you talk to Jeff, he very much these days tries to meet people where they are. I think he’s got, for example, the reputation of being Neo-Advaita, but it was never anything that he would call himself. I think he’s gone through sort of an evolution in the way that I have. I think it’s real easy to kind of have real absolutistic thinking in this. I think it’s just something that happens, because in one way you really do see that separation really isn’t real, that it isn’t what we thought it was. So that leaves such an imprint in the mind. It’s the mind where it’s leaving an imprint. It’s leaving it as a thought, and therefore if it’s a thought, it has the possibility of becoming absolutistic. So I think that Jeff has gone through a process where he’s finding it – I can’t speak for him, but he’ll say this – he finds it’s just easier to sort of just meet people where they are, to talk about their life and all this stuff that we’re talking about. But Jeff, you know, others aren’t actually. Others are sort of sticking to the kind of “all there is is this, no method, no practice, no investigation, that all implies a doer,” and all that stuff. And you know what? I hope that does work for some people. One of the traps of it is that people walk away believing that there’s no self. It’s sort of left only in the intellect, or they have a nice experience that feels good or feels free, and somehow the experience, the memory of that becomes really important. Instead of more like a lived realization where you’re open and you’re not landing solidly on all these little ideas and insights. I think a lot of people are kind of… it’s very, very, you know, I’ve noticed it’s just really, really seductive to talk about this in terms of “all there is is this.”
Rick: Yea
Scott: It’s just really seductive. It’s very sexy, you know? It’s like, “Man, that’s it. Yeah, he’s saying it. That’s it.” But if you’re experiencing separation and suffering, then it’s almost dishonest to sort of…
Rick: Yeah. I went through a big phase of that myself back in the 80s when I was teaching TM. I would give these sort of analytical talks, kind of breaking everything down to the point where I could demonstrate that the universe never actually manifested. Nothing ever existed, nothing ever happened. In one sense that was true, but it was lopsided, the way I was presenting it. And I was also showing up in my life as lopsided in terms of the way I was behaving.
Scott: Yea
Rick: So I was just curious, because I’ve actually felt some… I want to interview all these people, Jeff Foster and various other people, but I’ve actually felt a little bit of trepidation because I’ve thought, “How am I actually going to deal with this?” If they really are locked into a fundamentalist perspective, am I really going to be able to make any headway in an interview, talk them out of it, or at least somehow find a common ground where we can have a conversation? So it’s been a great breath of fresh air to talk to you. I had no idea exactly what I was going to encounter, but this has been fabulous. I got in touch with this other guy, who I won’t name his name I suppose, but he’s in charge of one of the websites where they play a lot of interviews with neo-Advaita people. And boy, just a few emails and we were stuck. It’s interesting, there are no levels of awareness, all the gurus and teachers and whatnot are just fooling people.
Scott: mm
Rick: I thought, “I’ll have to wait on this.”
Scott: Yeah, because I’ve had those conversations, and what I say is, like you say, in one sense that’s actually totally true, in one sense it’s true, and you sort of just agree with him that’s true. But then, the problem is, it’s not the view, it’s the stuckness of the view.
Rick: Yeah, and it’s funny actually, because I was listening to one of those interviews, and one of the other people who helped produce it was saying, “But everything is so ordinary, is this it? Is this all there is to it?” There’s this sort of wistful tone in her voice, like, “Have I really reached the ultimate realization, or could there possibly be something more?” And I kept thinking, “Yes, there is more.” It doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your realization of the significance of now and non-seeking and all that business, but if you think this is all there is to the possibility of life in terms of this spiritual development, you’ve got some pleasant surprises awaiting you at some point.
Scott: Yeah, one way or the other, you’re going to wake up from that one way or the other. You could probably go to your grave with an absolutistic view, but if you just… there was a girl on Facebook the other day that says, “If you think that you’re enlightened, just go. There are plenty of people who will let you know that you’re not. Just go dialogue with them.”
Rick: Well, as Ram Dass put it, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”
Scott: Right, right.
Rick: That’ll dig up some old impressions.
Scott: Yeah, and as you were talking, I was thinking that sometimes it’s just like a psychological thing, because I think a lot of us have been seekers for such a long time that if we actually experience a sense of an absolute ground or whatever we want to call it, that it’s really enticing just to hang on to that, because the idea of having to get back involved with seeking in any form is just really scary.
Rick: Yeah, it’s like, “God, relief. I found a refuge. Let’s leave it at that.”
Scott: Yeah, and let’s dismiss anything that would come threaten that in any way, too.
Rick: Yeah. I just was brought a cup of tea.
Scott: Well, that’s nice. I wish I had some.
Rick: Well, you’ve got to get married. Yeah. Well, that was a good point, and we probably won’t go on too much longer, but I was a little distracted by the tea. Could you just reiterate that, because I realize it’s important and I want to dwell on it a bit.
Scott: Yeah, I was just saying that when you look at it, there are often personal psychological reasons why people hang out in certain viewpoints. In other words…
Rick: Security, like you were saying earlier.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, security.
Rick: Like a sense of desire for an absolute to hang on to, some certainty.
Scott: Yea
Scott: Not only that, but I think there’s also… You and I probably both had, at one point in our life, lots of seeking energy, which is not really very pleasant, actually.
Rick: Yea.
Scott: Because there’s always this sense that something’s missing. But if you find this place where it feels like everything is… that outside of thought, there’s just no problem, I can see how it would be tempting, psychologically, to hang on to that, because of the fear of, “What if I let thought… What if I start to entertain some stories? What might happen here?”
Rick: Yea.
Scott: I might go back into that old seeking…
Rick: Might sink back into my old…
Scott: Yea.
Rick: This even can have an impact on… If a person meditates, this can have a major impact on the way they do it, or the way they’re experiencing meditation. Because if you sit down in meditation with an attitude of, “I’ve got to get somewhere, I’ve got to stop my mind, I’ve got to reach nirvana,” or something, there’s going to be a whole manipulation. It’s like when you were saying, when you were suppressing certain things, they only got stronger. So it’s going to be unnatural, there’s going to be control, and so on. But if you sit down and meditate with a complete acceptance of whatever is happening now, and no tendency to coerce your mind one way or the other, it’s a much more beautiful experience.
Scott: Yea yea.
Rick: And of course this applies to life as well as to meditation. Meditation is just a more focused period of doing the same thing that we really do 24 hours a day. As Byron Katie is always so good at saying, if you’re trying to argue with reality, change what is, then you’re always going to lose. But if you can somehow just have this complete acceptance, which is in no way incompatible with initiative or ambition or changing the world, but complete acceptance of what is at the same time, life is going to flow much more smoothly.
Scott: That’s right. I think that’s right. It’s almost like the mind says, “Well, no, come on, you’ve got two different things going on.” And it might say, “Well, those are both ideas.” And so therefore they’re, you know. But, you know, that’s again a little bit too simplistic, and I don’t think… But the thing also that came to mind is that one little technique that I started using with people who were in sort of an absolutistic place was like, if a guy who emailed you and said, you know, that there are no teachers, there are no levels, if that person all becomes open to shadow work, it usually almost never is, okay? Because at that point they’ve transcended the whole thing.
Rick: So they’re not open to it, you mean?
Scott: Not open to it at the beginning, but if there’s an opening, I’ll start doing shadow work and I’ll say, “Look at all of these others that you’re actually shadow boxing.”
Rick: Yeah.
Scott: There are all these people out there that are these pesky gurus and teachers and people. And look what you’re buying into a separation. You’re really buying into a separation in the name of non-duality. So let’s re-own that voice. So the voice of the one that you like that feels comfortable is no-self. That’s the one that feels comfortable to you. I said, “Well, just… if you’re that free, entertain your story.” How would that destroy this freedom? How could it ever destroy this freedom?
Rick: Yeah. And at that point, you know, if they’re open, they might say, “Yeah, okay, so I’m a person and my name is Joe, and I have this story.” And they start to realize, you know, that actually doesn’t really destroy the underlying freedom. It doesn’t actually do that. But very few do I find people who are open at that place to go there.
Rick: That’s interesting.
Scott: Yeah.
Rick: That’s sort of part of Byron Katie’s work is, you know, where would you be without that thought? I mean, what’s it going to do to you if this is not true? Are you familiar with…
Scott: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Scott: Good sense.
Rick: Great. Well, I have a feeling you and I could go on all day, but we probably shouldn’t.
Scott: Yeah.
Rick: We’ve been going on for almost two hours. Is there anything that you’d like to say that maybe we haven’t managed to bring up, or anything you’d like to announce, or anything? I don’t know.
Scott: You know, only that if… just tell people if you come and you talk to me, the thing about it is that… I guess to say is that the best thing I’m trying to do these days is to really listen to where people are. You know, that’s really the thing, because I think we’ve really hit on that in so many angles here. And I think that that’s the value of it, is sort of not treating this stuff as sort of a one-size-fits-all way of talking about it. And I think that in some ways you probably would agree that… I’ve written recently, is that I might say something to somebody and then say something else to somebody that sounds like two completely contradictory things. And I think that that’s why just more and more it becomes about sort of a tailored dialogue to somebody, just an individual dialogue to somebody. And so I would say that if you come to me, like I said, kind of in some ways… don’t try to make sense of what we’ve said, because you’ll find this out in your own experience. Everything that Rick and I have talked about is going to be your experience. It’s not like you have to kind of come to our meetings saying, “Okay, Scott, now let me see if I get this concept right.” There’s something called the middle way, and then I say, “Well, hold on. We might start somewhere else. We might start somewhere else and get to that later at some other point.”
Rick: Yeah, different strokes for different folks, as Sly and the Family Stone sang.
Scott: Yeah.
Rick: Well, there’s so many fascinating things, interesting stories we could get into and all kinds of stuff. It’s really enjoyable to do this, but we should probably leave it for another day so we don’t…
Scott: Bore people to death.
Rick: Yeah. Most people don’t mind the fact that it’s long. I was speaking to a guy the other day and he said, “I just listen to it in 20-minute chunks.” And I said, “Yeah, that’ll work.”
Scott: Yeah, that works. Well, thanks Rick for having me.
Rick: Yeah, we’ll do it again sometime. So far I’ve got a big long list and I haven’t repeated anybody. But sooner or later I’d like to come back and talk to people again, whom I’ve already spoken with, and see how it’s going. I just do one of these a week. I’m not like Richard Miller, who seems to be a full-time professional.
Scott: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: So let me just conclude by saying that you’ve been listening to or watching Buddha at the Gas Pump, which is a weekly show in which we have a conversation with someone who has had a spiritual awakening, loosely defined, all kinds of possibilities there. And there’s a number of ways of listening to or watching this. It’s on Facebook. I’ll be uploading the videos of this and then tagging you in them, so they show up under the videos on your Facebook page. It’s on YouTube. And there’s a website, batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. That’s the place to start really, because you can see the whole list of interviews there and links to the Facebook and the YouTube and so on. And also to the podcast. There’s a podcast. So if you like to listen to things in your car or while you’re jogging or something, you can put it on your iPod. So go there. And next week I’ll be speaking with someone named Kranti Ananda, I think her name is, who had an awakening in a Japanese prison. She seems to have a very fascinating story and has a great deal of settled awareness from the interview I saw. The interviewer was all over the place, interrupting her and everything. She just kind of sat there like a rock. So I’ve been speaking with Scott Kiloby. And if you go to batgap.com, you will see links to Scott’s various websites. And Scott, I really have enjoyed this talk and thank you so much for the opportunity.
Scott: Thank you, Rick. You’ve been great, great as a host.