Sharon Landrith 2 Transcript

Sharon Landrith Second Interview

Summary:

• The interview covers topics such as the maturation of the non-dual community, the relationship between silence and expression, the implications of spirituality for ecology and social issues, the unfolding of consciousness and its infinite possibilities, and the role of love and compassion in awakening.
• Some of the main points discussed are:
  • Non-dual maturation: Sharon observes that the non-dual community has become more inclusive, human, and diverse in its expression of the truth, rather than rigid, formal, and one-dimensional. She also notes that more people are recognizing their true nature through love and alignment, rather than pain and suffering.
  • Silence and expression: Rick and Sharon agree that silence and stillness are the constant and unchanging background of everything, but they do not negate or exclude the dynamic and creative movement of life. They also share their experiences of how silence reveals itself to itself, and how it permeates and transforms the body-mind structure.
  • Spirituality and ecology: Rick and Sharon explore how higher consciousness can result in solutions to the global problems of environmental degradation, social injustice, and violence. They suggest that when one sees the interconnectedness and oneness of all beings, one naturally acts with care and respect for the whole creation.
  • Consciousness and infinity: Rick and Sharon reflect on how consciousness is unbounded and infinite, and how it contains all levels and dimensions of reality. They also discuss how self-realization is the beginning, not the end, of a never-ending journey of discovery and exploration. They acknowledge that there is always more to learn and experience, and that there is no place to land or stop.
  • Love and compassion: Rick and Sharon emphasize the importance of love and compassion in the spiritual path, and how they are expressions of the true nature of consciousness. They also talk about how love can open up and heal the deep conditioning and fear that prevent one from realizing one’s true self. They cite examples of saints and teachers who exemplified love and service to humanity.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Sharon Landrith.

Sharon: Yeah, so glad to be here.

Rick: I interviewed Sharon a couple of years ago and then a couple of months after that interview, I came to a retreat with her down in Missouri. And this year I decided to come again. It’s close, the price is right, and I got a lot of benefit out of that last one. I noticed tangible benefits for six months, I would say. Not that they didn’t continue, but it’s like, full confession here, I have this lifelong habit of kind of picking at my fingers, nervous energy, and I’m on the computer all the time, and I get a little vata deranged, if you know Ayurvedic terms, and that totally went away after that retreat. And it started to creep in again after six months, so I figured I better come again.

Sharon: Get a repeat. Get a refill.

Rick: Get them fixed up. Although it’s a lot less than it used to be. It’s a measure of my degree of enlightenment.

Sharon: I don’t think it’s appropriate for this interview, but I have always remembered we had a partial kind of conversation at the retreat, and I always kind of kept something over here that I wanted to share.

Rick: Okay. You want to start with that?

Sharon: I don’t think it’s appropriate for this. No, I really don’t.

Rick: All right, now you’ve got everybody like, “What was it?”

Sharon: Yeah, but it happens like that sometimes. It’s like you’re with someone, and something pops in, and there’s like an informing or an assistance, but yet for whatever reason, the opportunity didn’t present itself for it to be fully given. And my memory is like this long. I don’t remember.

Rick: Like a goldfish, right?

Sharon: Exactly. And yet there are certain things that will stay crystal clear in my memory, and it’s always in some way with this kind of an exchange, hopefully of being of benefit in some way.

Rick: Well, I’m a pretty public person and pretty difficult to embarrass, so, if anything comes up during the interview that you think maybe I should say this, maybe not, you can say it. I won’t care.

Sharon: Well, I’m that way too, so go for it.

Rick: Good. So, I listened to our first interview on the way down here today in the car, and I really enjoyed it. And I thought, “Wow, I was better at this back then.” I mean, asking all these questions, how did I come up with that?

Sharon: I had fun.

Rick: Yeah. So, I don’t have like a really clear agenda for what we’re going to do today differently that will make this distinct from the first interview, but I think we’ll be able to just wing it and all kinds of good stuff will come out. We won’t totally repeat ourselves from the first time.

Sharon: I do too.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: You know, one of the things, and maybe you’ve already written this down, is that I was interested in, is especially in the non-dual community, how has it matured? Because it really has. I’m sure you’re seeing that, aren’t you, in your interviews with people?

Rick: I am. Yeah. I don’t know, how are you seeing it?

Sharon: If I look back, our first formal introduction, and you and I have talked about this, was Jung Klein.

Rick: Your first formal introduction to spirituality, you’re saying?

Sharon: Not spirituality, to the non-dual.

Rick: To the non-dual, okay.

Sharon: And so it was very, almost a formal kind of a dance, right? And there were certain ways of presenting it that, in some ways, I don’t know quite how to say this, was a little bit one-dimensional. There’s emptiness, there’s stillness, there’s nobody here, there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing, all of that.

Rick: I’ve heard a lot of that.

Sharon: Absolutely. And all is true. But what I’ve observed now, just watching it through, that was 25 years ago, is a much more of a humanness. It’s coming through the human life, right? It’s not separate, which for thousands and thousands of years, it was all kind of separated out. That there’s much more of an allowance and a tolerance for the unique voice to come through, rather than, “It has to look this way, it has to sound this way.” You know? It’s love and life and all the experiences of that are much more open to and allowed and included. Love is coming up in a way that I’ve never heard. I mean, my background mostly is Buddhism, and you don’t talk about love in Buddhism much, right?

Rick: Someone told me that a few weeks ago. They said there’s actually a phrase, “There’s no love in Zen.”

Sharon: compassion.

Rick: Although the Buddha was regarded as very compassionate, obviously.

Sharon: Exactly. But not in the way that somehow, maybe it’s a Western interpretation, I don’t know. But anyway, love is much more included, and it’s showing up in people’s lives, and it’s opening up deep conditioning and deep, kind of a fearful rigidity in personalities in a very beautiful and quite easy way. People seem to be more open to recognizing their nature more through love and kind of a support, like aligning to the current of life, rather than where most of us, it was usually pain.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: We learn through suffering, and I’m seeing that people are more moved and opened by love, by informing.

Rick: That’s interesting. I was a student of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi for many years, and he had kind of an outline of stages of consciousness or states of development. It was a road map, and I think like all road maps, it didn’t provide maybe as much detail as the actual territory if you were to explore it, but it was helpful. And one thing he always said was that self-realization is really the beginning, not the end, of something really significant happening. And he said it’s the foundation upon which you can really begin to appreciate creation and for the heart to really grow. He said before self-realization, the heart really can’t grow much, because if it were to do so, it would be like a small pond trying to rise up in big waves. It would only stir up the mud at the bottom.

Sharon: Ah, beautiful.

Rick: But once that depth has been established, then the heart can begin to rise in tidal waves without stirring up any mud, and the appreciation can grow and grow and grow to the point where you begin to have a really significant desire to know the Creator, to know God. And then that desire becomes significant, it becomes meaningful. And when it becomes significant enough, then he said it was like an artist who hears that there’s someone in some town who really appreciates his work, where very few people do. And he keeps hearing, “This guy really gets what I’m trying to do.” The artist will come and knock at that guy’s door to meet him, because he wants to meet someone who can appreciate his work. So, he said at a certain point, “God will reveal himself to you.” And we hear stories of Anandamayi Ma, or some of these great saints who just seem to be such exemplars of love, who just seem to have oceanic love. And perhaps we could see them as pioneers, and as indicators of where a larger population of us might be heading.

Sharon: Yeah, beautifully said. There was a point where here, there was a little bit of, what’s the word? Confusion maybe, because there were such deep, deep recognitions, true recognitions, essential shifts of an entity. And yet, you could look at their lives, and the way they were dealing with each other, and their mates, and their friendships, and their community, and…

Rick: Still schmucks.

Sharon: Still schmucks. And then, you just started to watch and wait, and then like you just said, the self-realization really is the beginning. And if it’s allowed, it will move through the life in this wise and unique and perfectly designed for this body-mind structure. If there’s no grasping, right, of the last concept, or the last experience, or how it should be, or what one has read, the wisdom is stunning.

Rick: And if there is grasping, it will be let go eventually. Something will cause one to let it go, I think. I mean, it’s sort of like there’s a force of evolution.

Sharon: There is, though I’m surprised at the length of resistance.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you know, Jesus said you can’t pour new wine into old wineskins.

Sharon: Maybe that’s it.

Rick: And if there is this huge infusion of consciousness that comes with self-awareness, self-realization, and if the wineskin is still kind of old, then you need a new wineskin. And that doesn’t necessarily mean dying, it means transmutation. And a lot of times people say, when they have a profound awakening, that they really start to go through the ringer after that.

Sharon: I see that more often than not. Though I must say, and you and I were kind of talking about that a little bit before we started, that there’s a gentler, lighter, kind of easier way now, I think, that people are moving through that embodiment phase.

Rick: Well, we were talking about our generation having gone through the 50s and the 60s, and a lot of the casualties. And I was almost a casualty myself, at least one of the walking wounded for a while. So, we were like shock troops that kind of came in when things were much more dense than they are now.

Sharon: Yeah, I think that is the sense, it was much more dense. Because for a while I was starting to watch people, because my particular recognition, when that central shift happened, it was like a bomb went off. It was huge, and it was profound, and it was the whole thing that you hear about. And now I see people, it’s just much gentler, and just easier, and especially the young people coming in. They just have these very genuine, beautiful shifts of identity. And it’s almost like they just kind of go, literally wake up, they just kind of go, “Oh.” And then they just start their lives from that. There’s not a lot of confusion. So that’s the great good news. I think that’s a huge shift in the last 15 to 20 years.

Rick: Well, you know how when you go to a satsang ,or something with Vajrashanti or some really great teacher, generally, there’s an atmosphere that’s quite palpable, you know? It’s thick, you can almost cut it with a knife. And it can build up even more during the course of a retreat or something. Well, it seems that, and I think many people listening to this will have had that experience and understand it, but there’s a sort of an ambient collective consciousness, like a field effect, a field of consciousness.

Sharon: Absolutely, that’s the gift of coming together.

Rick: Right. And so where is the limit of that field? Does it just end at the windows? Obviously, it must be more concentrated in a situation like that, but it must also spread.

Sharon: Absolutely.

Rick: So if we look at the 1950s during the Cold War and contrast that with today, there’s still a lot of problems, but it seems like the ambient field throughout the entire world has risen or become lighter or whatever.

Sharon: I think there’s no doubt about that. And those that can see those things talk about that. Yeah. Fortunate, huh?

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And here we are, and that we get to witness that. You have a long spiritual history, as I do, and hearing that the chances of this recognition and living it was so rare, that at least here the movement wasn’t so much towards enlightenment, it was just some very potent movement towards what I thought was union with God. But enlightenment was never even in the mix. But the longing and the movement, maybe it was for you, because it was within your language more.

Rick: It’s the terminology thing.

Sharon: But here it was just, it was the first thing I remembered, and all the way through my life. But to witness at this point, literally hundreds and thousands of people that at least have made the essential shift of identity, It’s unfathomable.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: I think we’ve sort of gotten used to it, but if you really stand back and look, in this extraordinary short period of time.

Rick: Well, nature abhors imbalance. And there’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita where, I forget how it goes, something about Lord Krishna says that “when adharma prevails, I take birth.” When things get too bad, then the Divine has to come to reset the balance. And I think, certainly there have been bad times, the Middle Ages, all the horrible things that people did to one another, and the world wars. But now we’ve gotten to the point where we can actually snuff out life on earth, at least human life. It would be fine for the cockroaches. But there’s a new report that at the rate Greenland is melting, by 2050 the sea levels may rise 20 feet, which would pretty much inundate most of the major cities in the world, which would result in a huge disruption of agriculture. We can go on, you can listen to whole lectures on global warming, but it seems like the threat is dire. And so, what would be nature’s response? It would be, not Lord Krishna necessarily, but the Divine coming and infusing itself into collective consciousness.

Sharon: And that we’re all connected. Right. That’s the only antidote.

Rick: Right.

Sharon: Right. Beautiful. Yeah.

Rick: And people like yourself are happy, willing participants in that process.

Sharon: Well, I think the maturation of the essential shift, and then it has to come back for itself, right? It has to move through the body, mind, and it has to illuminate all that has not been touched by this love, by this nature, right? That seems to be what happens, if allowed. And then there’s a sense, and I’m speaking of my experience and what I’ve observed by talking with hundreds and hundreds of people, is something begins to, out of the stillness, out of something that is the constant, something begins to permeate literally everything, right? And it recognizes itself in literally everything. It was one of the Buddha’s main teachings, it’s the true interconnectedness, but it was not what we thought intellectually. It’s this actualization, it’s this being, it’s this living of it. And then, how can we destroy the earth? How can we tear down other races?

Rick: Right, because it’s our own flesh and blood.

Sharon: Yeah, it’s that.

Rick: Yeah, that’s beautiful.

Sharon: It’s that, it’s the is-ness, the essence, the suchness, the beingness. And so, the whole way of moving becomes really quite different. It isn’t a morality; it just simply doesn’t move in a way that is separate and destructive. It’s before, right? Morality, being good people, being conscious. All being conscious and good helps, but this is before.

Rick: This is the fuel which fuels consciousness.

Sharon: Absolutely.

Rick: And goodness.

Sharon: This is the fuel, perfect.

Rick: “No man is an island, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

Sharon: Exactly.

Rick: What you said actually gives us a practical illustration of how higher consciousness might result in solutions to offset global warming, for instance, or child pornography, enslavery, and all the horrible things that happen. Because if you see things as other than me, then you can do what you want with it.

Sharon: You can rationalize it, you can do what you want.

Rick: Yeah, it’s just dead matter. But if you begin to see it as identical with me on a deep level, then you would no more damage the environment than cut one of your fingers off or something.

Sharon: Exactly, exactly. So maybe it was the only antidote that is possible for this kind of destruction. You know, we’ve taken it as far as it’s going to go.

Rick: Yeah, the pendulum has swung.

Sharon: As far as it’s going to go.

Rick: Nice, well I’m glad this theme is coming up. It seems to be coming up in a fair number of my interviews these days. And I see it also in the spiritual community. A lot of people, like at this conference, the Science and Non-Duality Conference, there are speakers who are getting up and talking, like David Loy, a Buddhist teacher, talking very fervently about the spiritual ecology. And Llewellyn von Lee just wrote a book about spiritual ecology.

Sharon: Oh, is that right? I’d like to read that. I like his work. Good.

Rick: Well, this kind of relates to what you were saying in the beginning, where maybe a couple of decades ago teachers were just talking about absolute, nothing going on, all that.

Sharon: Absolute, empty, nothing matters, no one’s there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Rick: Yeah, now people are saying, “Well, how does this relate to global warming?”

Sharon: Exactly, exactly. My partner, my children, the food that I eat, it’s all one thing. What I bought into, it’s all one thing, but it took a while for that to really permeate.

Rick: I think some people hearing this might say, “You’re getting sidetracked, stick to the essence, stick to the core, and you’re just going to get yourself off on tangents.” But I feel that this spirituality that we’re all so hot and bothered about has practical implications.

Sharon: It includes everything.

Rick: It includes everything, and it’s what we’re looking for in terms of solving a lot of these problems. It’s not like the politicians are going to solve them.

Sharon: Oh, right, or we’re going to check out, so the poor slobs are going to have to deal with it, or whatever it was that we thought.

Rick: We’re all going to ascend to heaven and be the chosen ones.

Sharon: Exactly, exactly. So, something about, in fact, it’s the ordinariness, it’s the everything. There’s nothing that it’s not. I think that that’s what basically we all incarnated for. It’s no longer separated out, it’s no longer the transcendence and the material. It never was, and maybe we had to do that in order to, because it was so dense, you had to step out of it. But I think now, as Jesus was saying, it’s heaven and earth are one. This is it, right here. That deep, constant, beautiful, the Tibetans call the view, or the silence that permeates everything. But it does not negate or exclude anything.

Rick: And speaking of Jesus, a lot of saints, by example, have shown that it’s not just about your own subjective experience, it’s about loving people and feeding them, or clothing them, or healing them, or whatever they may need, on a very mundane level. If they’re hungry, you don’t just say, “Oh, close your eyes, let’s meditate.” You say, “Here, have some food, and maybe we’ll talk about meditation or something.”

Sharon: Exactly. And again, it’s not the helper mode. That was another phase. It’s good to help people if you can, but it’s that you’re not separate from them. That’s what really, I think, is starting to arise collectively.

Rick: In fact, some people who are just in helper mode, without that sense of unity, get burned out, or depressed, or whatever.

Sharon: Or the missionary thing, where you imposed on another culture.

Rick: Which is not to say that it’s not to diminish the helpers in any way. I mean, Doctors Without Borders and all these great things, all the people are wonderful. I totally admire what they’re doing.

Sharon: No, no, no. It’s just that there’s that difference between it flows and moves, because it recognizes what is, and the other is, “I have something here that you don’t.” And so, it’s separate, just in the way that it moves. Yeah, “Oh, no, no, none of that’s negated.”

Rick: I think Mother Teresa actually had that orientation, as I recall, where she saw herself as feeding Christ, and bathing Christ, and just everything she was doing; she was serving the body of Christ. Here we are in a Catholic monastery facility.

Sharon: And that’s their motto here, “Everyone is received as Christ.”

Rick: Great. And there’s a deep significance to that.

Sharon: There’s a deep significance to that.

Rick: “Love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself.”

Sharon: That’s right. Yeah, it all starts to be recognized with what we’re really raised with, and what we’ve heard in these sacred writings. It all starts to go, “Oh, it isn’t just this beautiful idealism, it’s the actuality.” And that’s the beauty of it. So going back to our original beginning of the maturation of the non-dual, that’s what I’m seeing.

Rick: Nice.

Sharon: Now there’s a struggle going on there, of course.

Rick: In what way?

Sharon: Well, the hard-liners, you know, that it’s going to be this way.

Rick: Like I was saying, I’m off on a tangent.

Sharon: That’s right. Or the ones that, it’s only everything, and, silence is nothing. But there’s this unfolding, this revealing that’s going on, that’s happening. I don’t know how to say this exactly. There are wonderful teachers that have discovered that within themselves, and so they’re sharing that. But what I’m seeing is the “individual” unfolding. It’s revealing itself, and so you can’t negate it. You can’t buy into the Advaitist view, or the everything view. It’s true. It’s revealing itself. So, you find the truth and the actuality here. And then it may be confirmed by certain teachers that you’re drawn to, or certain writings that you’re interested in.

Rick: Yeah. Revealing itself is nice. Quoting the Gita again, there’s a verse in there which says, “The self-reveals itself to itself.”

Sharon: It does.

Rick: I mean, what else can that be?

Sharon: How else? Exactly.

Rick: It’s not like it’s something that you can stand apart from, because who’s standing apart from it?

Sharon: Exactly.

Rick: And so, there’s this sort of infusion from within, a bubbling up.

Sharon: I’ll have to write that down. Infusion from within. That’s exactly what happens.

Rick: Yeah. And like sap in a tree, kind of.

Sharon: That’s right. It’s natural.

Rick: And you don’t see the sap in the tree necessarily, but you start to see, “Oh, the leaves are getting greener, the buds are coming out.”

Sharon: Perfect metaphor.

Rick: There must be sap.

Sharon: Perfect metaphor.

Rick: Yeah. And even within one’s own life. I think it was St. Paul to the Corinthians said that the kingdom of God sneaks up like a thief in the night. It doesn’t come from without.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: It doesn’t come with bells and whistles. It’s like this subtle infusion.

Sharon: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Exactly. And so, it’s that simple turning in and not comparing yourself with anything you’ve read, which is challenging, you know, because we all love those stories.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And not comparing yourself with anyone that you know that’s in this unfolding, and then just that deep listening, and then naturally and beautifully and perfectly it will come forth here. It’s called forth. It reveals itself, whatever you want to call it. And so, when this starts to happening massively, then, those old ideas that were still holding a position, even though they called themselves non-dual, they were holding a strong position, right? It has to break up. There are those holding that. Maybe that’s their job. But massively, something else is happening. And it’s including everything. It’s including life as it is. And at the same time, the silence, the stillness, the constancy, you know, that is the only constancy. Everything else dies and births and creates and dies again, right?

Rick: Yeah. There’s something you said towards the beginning that reminded me of something I’d like to talk to you about, which is that, you were talking about John Kline a couple of decades ago, and how the emphasis was and still is with some teachers on absolute silence and nothing’s happening and all that.

Sharon: And of course, it’s true.

Rick: Yeah, very true. But I thought of it in terms of the analogy of an ocean, where you might say, “Yeah, there’s the ocean, flat, a lot of water there.” But if you start really getting familiar with the ocean, there are millions of kinds of fish and seaweed and corals and all kinds of currents and all kinds of interesting things happening within the ocean. And so, the point I’m alluding to here is that within consciousness there’s a lot going on.

Sharon: Everything.

Rick: Yeah, everything. And if consciousness is really unbounded, as it’s supposed to be, then obviously this room is within consciousness, this planet is within consciousness, this galaxy, everything is within consciousness. And not only on the observable level, the ordinary observable level, but there are strata upon strata of subtler levels of realms, we could say, of stuff that’s going on, and it’s all within consciousness.

Sharon: And physics provides a nice analogy, if not description of it, with its description of levels and going all the way down to the string level, the vacuum state and all that. But I wonder if you care to comment upon the spiritual implications of that thought.

Sharon: Well, again, that’s what’s discovered, if one just listens here, listens deeply, is that the vast body, the vast oneness, it includes, using that analogy, the silent floor, which is always silent. And as you said so beautifully, all the different expressions of self, the fish, the currents, the movement of the waves, it’s silent sometimes and still, and sometimes it’s chaotic, but yet it’s not ever affected, the silence is not affected. Nothing that ever takes place fundamentally affects the body of consciousness. So that’s discovered. If one just comes home and listens, that’s discovered. And so, one can see that something may arise, say, for whatever reason, maybe it’s my age, I’m around a lot of people that are losing their parents, just everywhere I look. And so, there’s this expression of grief, but does that expression of grief affect at all the body of consciousness, the silence? Can the silence and this grief simultaneously exist in the same body? So, there’s no denial. We sort of thought we had to deny certain parts of the human life, right? Because it wasn’t, whatever, spiritual, or,it was part of a dream or whatever. But there’s no denial when you open to the vastness of your own nature. All can happen simultaneously. It arises, it dies, it expresses, but there’s nothing also that identifies and grasps and holds. Do you hear what I’m saying? So, it’s the perfect analogy, because that’s what you discover.

Rick: Right, if you really are the totality, then totality means it includes everything.

Sharon: The whole thing, the whole human spectrum. And it also includes the recognition that the human spectrum is like that.

Rick: We know that even from physiology, our senses perceive this much of the electromagnetic field, and that’s what visible light is. We perceive that much sound that a dog can hear up there, and so on, bats. But this is also true in terms of not only the senses, but…

Sharon: Well, the siddhis, you and I were talking a little bit about the siddhi

Sharon: how they just naturally happen. Well, it isn’t because you’re mad… Oh, yeah, please.

Rick: Explain.

Sharon: Well, the siddhis, from my viewpoint, is just that the spectrum, again, of the ability to perceive. So, you perceive subtle sounds, you perceive subtle energies, maybe subtle life forms that we were taught that didn’t exist. And so, all of a sudden, all of that is available. It doesn’t mean anything. It just means that before we had this little tiny sense door, and now it’s as vast a space that contains everything. So, they’re not magical, or they’re not miraculous, or anything. And some pick them up, and some are wired that they don’t. And it’s where your attention goes, and what your lineage or your karmic background is.

Rick: Yeah. I have something to say about that. Before I do, though, I just want to elaborate a little bit more on this ocean metaphor, which is that maybe self-realization is like realizing, “Oh, I’m the ocean. I’m not just a wave. I’m the ocean.”

Sharon: I’m that that the ocean arises from.

Rick: Right. Well, depending on what we want to do with the metaphor. But how much can there be within a wave? Not too much. Maybe a fish every now and then, or a little bit of seaweed or something. But then within the whole ocean, there’s all possibilities. And so, once you realize you’re the ocean, then the possibility for exploration has actually just begun. That’s not like, “Okay, I’m done on the ocean.” It’s like, “All right, whoa, what’s in here? What can I discover?”

Sharon: That’s a beautiful way of saying it, exactly.

Rick: And so that relates to the siddhis.

Sharon: And yet there’s nothing that attaches to any of it, either.

Rick: Sure, because if it does, then you’re back into wave status.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: And there can be a vacillation between, “Oh, I’m only a wave,” or, “Oh, I’m the ocean. Oh, darn it, I’m just a wave again.” There can be that phase.

Sharon: I think that goes on really much longer than most of us would actually like to say or even admit. But here, and I don’t even know how quite to describe that, is there something that has so dropped out, and that’s really since you and I’ve talked to each other, that that coming and going no longer takes place at all, subtly or not subtly. So that, too, right? It’s sort of interesting how you think, “This is it? No.” That falls out. And then, “This is it? No.” That falls out. And then something deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and more still and more…

Rick: Yeah. To no end, probably.

Sharon: Well, I think it can’t, of course, it’s infinite, so it’s impossible. And yet there was something else here that there was a… I don’t know what the word is, really. A completeness.

Rick: There’s a completeness.

Sharon: There’s a completeness.

Rick: But you know how in mathematics they have infinities?

Sharon: Yeah.

Rick: And you can take an infinity and add one to it, or you can square an infinity. And so, there’s kind of infinities after infinities.

Sharon: Oh, absolutely.

Rick: Any infinity is complete, but then you can square it or cube it or take it to the tenth power. So, I think there’s sort of a correlation here. You know how holograms work? You can take a hologram, which is basically a laser light shown through a film in such a way as to take a photo of an object in sort of 3D. And let’s say you have a rubber duck that you’ve taken, and you shine a laser through the film, and you see the rubber duck. Now you can cut the film in half and shine a laser through it, and you still see the rubber duck. And you can cut it in half again and you still see the rubber duck. The rubber duck is there in any portion of the hologram, the holographic film. And so that’s a totality, but then there’s a bigger totality and a bigger totality. And it sounds absurd in a way to say bigger infinities or bigger totalities, but I think experientially that’s what anybody’s going to find.

Sharon: Absolutely. That’s what infinity is. Yeah, one of the great mantras that many Buddhist sects use, and it’s “beyond, beyond, beyond to the other shore.” And if we could just keep that constantly going, there is no place to land, there is no place to stop. And yet there does appear to be a sense of still abidance right here.

Rick: Maharishi used to say, “The goal is all along the path.”

Sharon: Ah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: And words like “path” and “goal” and all that, if somebody is just suffering and they just want it to be over with, they don’t want to hear words like that.

Sharon: I know.

Rick: They’re like, “Get me out of here, I’m done, I’m through.” But when you’re brimming with fulfillment, those words don’t have a negative connotation.

Sharon: Not at all.

Rick: And you think, “Bring it on, more.” And you can feel totally fulfilled, and yet the next day you wake up and there’s another wave of it.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah. It’s the great good news.

Rick: And this again relates to what you started talking about, how the spiritual community is maturing. I think maybe it’s maturing into the realization that it’s not a black and white thing, like you’ve arrived, and you’re done. To me, that’s much more interesting.

Sharon: Much more interesting.

Rick: Kind of never-ending possibilities.

Sharon: Much more interesting. And I think we become much more open and interested in one another. We’re not so locked or stuck or grasping or whatever it is that really was starting to … Well, maybe it’s always been true in the spiritual communities, but it seemed to really be pretty prevalent in the non-dual. And so, it was a very lovely thing to see it start to grow up.

Rick: Well, you know that phrase in the 23rd Psalm, “My cup runneth over”? When your cup isn’t full, it’s like, “Leave me alone, I’m trying to fill my cup. I’m not interested in you.” But once the cup is full, it starts to run over and then, “Ah, you!”

Sharon: Yeah, exactly. I have a friend, a very beautiful friend, and he’s passing in transition. It’s exquisitely conscious and beautiful in both him and the community around him. But he was just saying that. He was saying, “You know, I only bought into the spirituality that was all about samadhi and the silence and almost being a hermit, not really wanting to be in relationship or community or whatever.” And he said, “I have discovered the exquisiteness of this moment and of this bird singing and of the adoration of my wife, which I hardly ever told her, and just the beauty of the ordinary and all is that, and I’m leaving. It’s a bummer.”

Rick: Tell him he’s not leaving.

Sharon: That’s what I said, “Well, better late than never.” And at the same time, just like you said, where would he go? But it’s just that he just wanted to sort of take it in.

Rick: But in the famous world of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ll be back.

Sharon: Right. Only he wants to come back this time.

Rick: That’s another interesting thing. It gets into metaphysics, and I don’t know what’s what, but there’s some spiritual traditions that say you’re like a drop in the ocean, you’re just going to disappear, and when you reach enlightenment or something, you’re out of here. I have another friend, I was talking to you about him before, Harry Alto, whom I interviewed a couple of weeks ago, who says in his experience and his understanding, and he speaks from very deep experience, he’s been awake for 65 years, once created -anything that’s created never ceases to exist ultimately. And that we are eternal, not just in terms of absolute being, being eternal, but we as individuals in some sense are eternal.

Sharon: That’s an interesting view. Who knows?

Rick: Who knows, it’s not for me to say.

Sharon: No, who knows. But there is a deep, deep sense of when that silence does actually wake up and begins to permeate through everything. And that includes before birth, that includes through life, and that includes after death. That it isn’t like a sense of faith, it’s some recognition of itself, some recognitions of its continuance and its constancy. So, if there’s great people there to greet me that think I’m wonderful, and I think they’re wonderful, fantastic, right? If it’s just dissolving into the suchness, fantastic, right?

Rick: Yeah, I remember seeing a YouTube video of some yogi in India, I don’t know who he was, but he was saying, “There was a time when I really wanted to check out, I wanted to be done with the cycle of reincarnation.” He said, “But now, I don’t care what happens, it’s in God’s hands. If He wants me back here, fine. If I’m out of here, fine.”

Sharon: That’s right, that’s it. And that’s not just this kind of intellectual, kind of sweet thing to say. It’s this actual recognition. You know it. It’s known, but not here. Known.

Rick: That’s beautiful.

Sharon: I remember when that first came through here, of like, I don’t want to be homeless. Sharon would rather be warm and like her comfy bed. But if that was what was happening, if that’s where God moved this life, it would be the very best life possible. When that recognition happened, the relief and the letting go and the openness and the curiosity, and the availability to however it plays out. And I’m not saying, I’m not romanticizing homelessness, but you hear what I’m saying. Wherever God is, is the best that this possibly could be.

Rick: Yeah. And if it did happen that you were homeless, you’d probably be trying to figure out a place to sleep, and trying to sort out the situation. But you’d be sort of recognizing also that all is well and wisely put, that will be done.

Sharon: Perhaps, yeah, right. And it would find, such as, it would find Christ where it’s at. The Christ of life, whatever you want to call that. Yeah, I mean, if I have a preference, I’d rather not.

Rick: Freezing cold, you come in out of the cold.

Sharon: That’s right, exactly. And it’s the same way with abundance. It’s like, there’s something about living in life, which is fundamentally abundant, that then life becomes abundant, whether there’s a lot in the bank or whether there’s not a lot in the bank. It’s just, life is abundant. Right? It’s the actuality of it. And so, all of the positive thinking and the mantras, and they all can be helpful, but there’s a certain point where it’s before all of that, right? It just is. It just is.

Rick: Something you said a minute ago really struck my interest. You were saying how there’s a knowing that whatever happens, this presence will continue or something. And you can contrast that with believing, where I believe that I’m going to heaven. How do you know that? Well, it says it in this book. Well, how do you know the book is true? Well, the book says it’s true.

Sharon: Right, exactly.

Rick: Something like that, where, and I think there’s an underlying, I mean, some people, it might be real visceral knowing, but there could also be a very, in many cases, an underlying insecurity, because you don’t really know it in your bones. It’s not like a living experience. It’s more like something you’ve been taught.

Sharon: Taught.

Rick: And it gives you hope and kind of makes this bleak world seem brighter in some way, because it’s going to be my pot at the end of the rainbow. But it’s interesting that you described your experience, and I think it’s the experience of many people who are awakening, that there’s a deep sense of “Mother is at home,” a deep sense of security.

Sharon: That’s right. Mother is at home.

Rick: And rest and ease and acceptance of whatever may come along, because you have kind of become grounded in something which you know experientially to be indestructible. There’s a verse in the Gita, “Know this to be indeed indestructible, by which all this is pervaded. None could work the destruction of this immutable being.”

Sharon: Oh, you’ve got a great memory. Right on. True. It resonates through your bones. Because it recognizes itself. Whatever you want to call it. Silence, love, life, is-ness, such-ness. It recognizes itself. And in all things, faith, hope, falls away. They’re superfluous. And until then, they’re helpful.

Rick: Do I have faith that my hand is here, or is it my experience?

Sharon: There you go. That’s it.

Rick: I just want to emphasize, we’re talking about experience here. We’re not talking about metaphysical niceties.

Sharon: No. And they’re inspirational, and they’re very helpful. I’m certainly not negating it. But then there’s just a certain point that all of that falls away. And that’s why I think it’s so beautiful, because there’s a certain kind of, whatever you want to call it, maturity that’s happening, ripening that’s happening, that it’s being recognized in this more of a mass way. And so, the authority, or the written word, or the concepts, or the interpretation of the concepts and the written word, are, again, they’re falling away. It’s the actual, actualization.

Rick: Yeah. And that is not to say that written words, great traditions become irrelevant, but they become more like confirmations, rather than something you have to hang your hopes on, or believe in.

Sharon: Love, respect.

Rick: They confirm your own experience.

Sharon: They confirm your own experience.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: No, I love beautiful poetry, and the sacred writing, and the scriptures, and great inspiration, great respect. And for much of my life, it also created an inspiration, and something to look for, or maybe recognize when it happened. I would go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what that teaching was saying.” So, I’m not negating that at all. It’s just the actualization of it is so much different than the hope, and the faith, and even the inspiration.

Rick: Yeah. And there actually could be certain scriptures which are actually a waste of time to read, until your experience has risen to that level. The Brahma Sutras, for instance, it’s said that, don’t even bother with them until totality has begun to dawn. And then the sutras stitch together Brahman for you. Sutra means actual stitch. And they stitch together the wholeness for you. Sutra, like sutra, like how a surgeon does sutures. Yeah, that’s what it comes from, the Sanskrit word sutra, which means like a stitch. Then when that totality is actually dawning in your awareness, you read the Brahma Sutras and the various verses kind of stitch together the wholeness that is dawning and kind of confirm it for you.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah. That was also my experience. It was almost like just a key turned on, and you could just hear what was trying to be expressed. Before, maybe there was a resonating, that that was awake within you, that just hadn’t become conscious, resonated with the truth. Truth recognizes truth. But it didn’t permeate all the way through. And then I just started to notice that I could read the very same thing, and it was recognized. And like you said, then it was just kind of an affirmation, of what already had taken place.

Rick: Yeah. So, people might be wondering at this point, we’re talking about the importance of experience, as opposed to belief and understanding. Some people might feel like, “Yeah, that sounds great, but my experience seems deficient. How do I get more experience? I want to have it. I don’t want to just believe. How do I enliven experience?”

Sharon: No one ever really likes this response. I used to hate it. It’s to be totally where you are in this moment. Meaning, if there is whatever is arising, is to bring the attention, and attention is awareness pouring into what’s arising, be with what’s arising. Right? Do you hear what I’m saying?

Rick: I hear you. I don’t think that that instruction would have been sufficient for me.

Sharon: I know. I hated it. I hated it.

Rick: Because I like to do spiritual practice. But I think that throughout the day I’d be with what’s arising. If that were all I had to do, or had as a tool, I’m not sure if it would have been sufficient for me.

Sharon: Here, and I think you found this in your own life, meditation is a profound teacher.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: So it was through meditation that there was an actual felt sense of this presence. Right? You found that?

Rick: Sure.

Sharon: Right?

Rick: From day one.

Sharon: So, when that started to be recognized and prominent, then the attention started to naturally fall back to more what we call the witness state. Right? Didn’t it?

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And then you started to live your life more from that. It may go back and forth, but you really started to see life more in this broader, more open attention.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Until it collapsed. So, the open attention, if that could be, then what is arising? Right? Emotional patterns, mental patterns, conditioning, whatever it was. But it was received by this more open witness attention. That’s all you would ever need. There would never be another practice or insight that would ever be required. Because what then would happen was there would be a deeper, more open presence, brighter and brighter. You would see more deeply what was arising, and there would be wisdom, insight. Love would start to become more prominent, because love is the space, is the vastness, right? Is the openness. It all would take place right here. But what happens is we look outside of ourself, we look over here, we look in a book, we look wherever. And so, we’re literally moving away from just coming back and being open, available, right here, with what is. But no one likes that and hardly ever pays any attention.

Rick: Well, there’s a word in Sanskrit, the “hamkar,” which means the “eye-maker.” You didn’t pay attention. You didn’t like it.

Sharon: I didn’t like it at all. I wanted something much flashier.

Rick: Well, there’s kind of a description-prescription kind of conundrum here, which is that what you just offered was a very beautiful description of a way of being, a state of living, a condition which some people are in. But I question whether that is necessarily an effective prescription for everyone. It might be necessary to do A, B, and C to arrive at the state where that description begins to fit your experience.

Sharon: Perhaps.

Rick: So, you go to an Adyashanti retreat, for instance, and you do a lot of silent meditation during the retreat. And the very fact that you’re at the retreat is something that is supposedly conducive to culturing more of that state that you just described.

Sharon: Well, and then the transmission. The atmosphere is huge, and it activates that.

Rick: Not only from Ajah, but the synergistic kind of influence that takes place.

Sharon: Exactly. But it’s that, that it just gets brighter and more open, and it recognizes itself. And then pretty soon the witness disappears. The whole thing disappears. But it’s always just, “It’s here. It’s here. It’s here.” When that really starts to get recognized, then all the informing, the wisdom, the transmutation, the insights, the “Aha,” the reorchestration that happens energetically in the body, it all happens spontaneously and automatically and perfectly. But we get distracted.

Rick: So, when you say, “It’s here. It’s here. It’s here.”

Sharon: The attention is back here.

Rick: Yeah, self-referral.

Sharon: It’s self-referral.

Rick: Right, I thought that’s what you were saying.

Sharon: It’s self-referral.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Because we do this, because the mental patterns are all projected on the screen of consciousness. It’s the nature of the senses. And it’s all out here. That’s right.

Rick: It’s the nature of the senses to be out or directed.

Sharon: That’s right. So, you just shift that attention. If we just did that, there would be a huge shift that would go on.

Rick: Like a tortoise withdrawing its limbs, as the Gita says.

Sharon: Oh, is that it? How beautiful. That’s it, exactly. But most of us need a little more.

Rick: Yeah, it does happen spontaneously to some people and whatnot, but whatever, what was that John Lennon said, “Whatever gets you through the night.”

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: Whatever works.

Sharon: That’s exactly it. And you’ll find your own dharma that way too, by listening, right? Won’t you?

Rick: Yeah. So, you know how you were saying in the beginning that there’s a tendency to maybe mature away from this attitude of “It’s only this” or “It’s only that.” From my perspective as someone who interviews hundreds of people, I kind of feel like whatever floats your boat, whatever works.

Sharon: Yeah, you’ve really had that big view of seeing that. That’s beautiful.

Rick: And so I would never tell anyone, if someone says, “I’m doing such and such a practice and it seems to work for me,” I would never say, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that.”

Sharon: No, it’s just…

Rick: I would say, “Great, go for it. Do it.” And five years from now they come back, and they say, “That stopped working. Now I’m doing this.” I say, “Great, probably you got everything you could out of that one and I’m doing this.”

Sharon: And again, that can only be recognized if you tune in to and you’re true to that, right? You aren’t listening to someone who says, “Well, that’s just bunk and I’ll do it this way.” “Well, thank you very much, but this is what this is saying.”

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: I think that’s, “Be true to thine own self.” That’s really a… And yet, guides, teachers, books, videos are extraordinary, and the inspiration, and I don’t know how we could do it without them all.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that saying, some gurus say this, they say, “Take one step toward me and I’ll take a thousand steps toward you.”

Sharon: Haven’t you found that to be true?

Rick: Yeah, and I think it’s true of God in general.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: Christ said, “Knock and the door shall be opened. Seek and you shall find.” I think that when there’s a sincere desire, then that desire is met with whatever is useful for you, for this person or that person. And God is not a fundamentalist. He’s not a one-trick pony. There are so many different petals in the variety of flowers in the garden of God. And so, whatever people are doing, it’s not only a big world, it’s a big universe. NASA says there are 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies. So, who knows how much is out there, and how many different varieties of spirituality and paths to the universal consciousness.

Sharon: Yeah, I know. Here, everything, there was just a certain point that everything became God. All voices, whether someone was yelling in my ear, or whether someone was giving praise, or a clerk, or someone, it’s just all of a sudden. I remember it seemed like it was probably happening for a while before there was full recognition, and everything was speaking itself. Everything was the voice of God. And I think it was, what’s his name, Jeff Foster, I like his writing. And he was just saying that no wave is ever against you, ever. Ever. It’s impossible. So, it’s a total shift. It’s like, when we started out, saying that you used to learn by suffering, and now you’re learning by love. You’re learning by the offering of itself. It’s offering itself continuously. It’s speaking itself continuously.

Rick: And occasionally a little smack upside the head.

Sharon: Oh, well, absolutely. But again, is that against you, or is that, like a kid running out and going to get run over, and someone runs out and grabs the kid? Right? It’s like, stop. Listen. Right? So, it’s actually a very unconditionally loving movement of itself.

Rick: There’s a beautiful principle here, which is that, and I’ll use the word “if” just to sort of set it up, but if God is omnipresent and omnipotent and omniscient and all that, then there’s really nothing other than that.

Sharon: Yeah.

Rick: Great. And so like you were saying, everything is the voice of God.

Sharon: Yeah.

Rick: Now, some people have a hard time even believing in God at all, because of the Holocaust and cancer and all these horrible things that happened. But if we perhaps zoom out just a little bit farther and see the universe as being this giant evolution machine, in which the oneness is creating forms through which it can know itself, and through which it can have a living experience, then there’s a kind of an evolutionary purpose at the heart of everything, at the core of everything.

Sharon: And it’s a mystery.

Rick: Right. But then nothing is arbitrary. Nothing is capricious.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: Nothing is accidental, and nothing is cruel.

Sharon: Yeah.

Rick: If there’s life, there has to be death. If there’s hot, there has to be cold. But it’s all kind of part of an overall expression toward greater and greater self-recognition of the divine.

Sharon: And again, that can be so misunderstood. Like you said, the Holocaust, how could that ever be God? But yet we still think there’s a personal God somehow.

Rick: Yeah, like some big old dude.

Sharon: “There is no personal God.”

Rick: Well, there is a personal God, but there are also personal expressions of God to which one can be devoted.

Sharon: Exactly.

Rick: But it’s really ultimately one big ocean.

Sharon: Exactly. Yeah, I meant there’s no entity over there.

Rick: Yeah, like a puppeteer.

Sharon: “This is good, and this is bad. If you pray, this will happen, and if you don’t, this will happen.”

Rick: whole bit about the jealous God.

Sharon: Yeah. I don’t use God very much. I like to use God, because here there’s a very intimate, brilliant, wise, loving, “God is love.” But I do also honor that there’s so much baggage in history that it’s an uncomfortable thing.

Rick: There certainly is.

Sharon: But I like to use God.

Rick: The reason I like to use it is just that if you try to use words like “consciousness” or “absolute” or words like that, they sound so inanimate. They sound so dead, in a way.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: But to me, the creation is just brimming with intelligence.

Sharon: Oh, absolutely. And intimacy.

Rick: Yeah, and so God seems like a good word to imply that.

Sharon: Yeah, I know.

Rick: Yeah, what else can you do?

Sharon: I was glad you were using it. I thought, “Oh, I can use it all I want.”

Rick: As long as you define it. As long as you’re not saying, “Guy in the sky with a lightning bolt,” but this all-pervading intelligence that has this evolutionary impulse in it, and its nature.

Sharon: And its love itself.

Rick: And its love itself. As long as you kind of qualify it that way, then maybe we can use the word.

Sharon: Yeah, it’s hard to find the right words, isn’t it? I know, trying to explain and describe, it’s really challenging to find the words that don’t just either evoke, like you said, kind of a deadness and an emptiness, or we just become so used to them that they mean nothing.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And so, words are a real challenge.

Rick: They are. And actually, words can really only be used if they refer to something in someone’s experience, really. If we say “red,” we’ll try to describe it, but we know what it means because we’ve all seen it if we’re not colorblind. And so, when you say “God,” unfortunately for most people you’re describing something that’s merely conceptual, and that this or that or the other book or teacher has given them some idea about, and there might be a million different ideas out there. That’s why you have to define it. Maybe we could come up with a new word.

Sharon: I know, I’d like to come up with a new word. I think that’d be great to come up with a new word. And then someone would say, “Well, as soon as you speak it, it’s gone.” Yes, that’s right. And speaking and describing is an act of love. We’re trying to share that.

Rick: This interview would be pretty boring if you and I just sat here with our eyes closed and kind of enjoyed sort of an inner experience. Nobody would watch it.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: So you have to use words.

Sharon: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. I had a woman, and she was just realizing it. I mean, I really could see that, and I honored that. But it was all about, if you speak, it’s separate. And yes, that’s right. And…

Rick: And yet, all teachers have spoken, most of them. I mean, there are some teachers who’ve maintained silence or written on a chalkboard or something.

Sharon: And they’re beautiful.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: They’re beautiful. But most of us, at least at this point, words are… it’s a loving sharing.

Rick: And now you’re talking about transmission with guys like Adya. For some teachers, speech is a form of transmission. It’s a way of getting darshan, actually, through words.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah. And then others, I mean, here, that’s not the way. I stumble along and do my best with words. But here, it is more, there’s a sharing of something. And when I would go to teachers, I appreciated the words, but what I really tuned into was the transmission. So, I was surprised when I started to kind of go out and about that many, many, many people never paid any attention to the transmission, and totally was unconscious of it. Adya is one of the teachers, I think, that has the brilliance that darshan comes through the words, but also the transmission is really also quite brilliant.

Rick: I’ve been going to see Amma for a long time as well, and I go every year. She doesn’t speak a word of English.

Sharon: That’s right, that’s right.

Rick: I don’t know what she’s saying, but there’s this transmission.

Sharon: But the transmission, right? I walk in the hall and it’s like, I begin weeping. So yeah, that’s a beautiful example. Nothing is lost, that’s just the way that it is.

Rick: And if Jesus were here, we don’t speak Aramaic, but I’m sure we’d get zapped totally by His transmission.

Sharon: That’s right. Did you ever sit with Papaji?

Rick: No, I didn’t.

Sharon: I didn’t either, but I’ve seen videos and talked to people, and they would just be weeping because the transmission was so incredibly potent.

Rick: Yeah, Ramana too.

Sharon: Yeah, right. But we’re wired in North America to listen to the words, so we’ve got to play that game.

Rick: It’s okay. But it is cool. A lot of people haven’t actually sat with a great teacher. And if you have the opportunity, you should do it, because you think, “Holy mackerel, I didn’t realize a person could radiate that much and could fill the room with such energy.” It’s like, “Wow, this is a hint of what a human being could become.”

Sharon: Yeah, that’s right. I’ve seen videos of Anandamayi Ma, and that too you could just sense by watching the video what was happening within her atmosphere. It must have been really quite remarkable. And she would literally lay down and go into samadhi, completely disappear, and then the whole blessing could pour out unhindered at all.

Rick: Yeah, and you know a good analogy for understanding this, is electricity. Electricity is a field, and that field can be expressed through various instruments. You can have a 25-watt bulb, a 100-watt bulb, you can have a powerful searchlight that they use to open new car dealerships or whatever. So, it’s the same electricity, but the transmission varies according to the instrument. And so, there are certain instruments who shine more brightly than others. And if you can be in the company of such an instrument, then it’s a great blessing.

Sharon: And hopefully, again, the more we mature, we’ll be more and more and more sensitive to that. That’s really what’s happening. The words are an act of beauty and love, but what’s really happening is this.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you know how you were saying at a gathering like Adya’s or something, where it’s not only Adya’s transmission, but it’s the coming together of all those people, there’s a mutual reinforcement that takes place.

Sharon: Oh, absolutely. It’s that that is awake, that’s the same that’s awake in him. It’s that that’s awake here, and we’re all sort of singing and resonating together.

Rick: Yeah, so this mutual reinforcement is actually a global phenomenon.

Sharon: It’s a global phenomenon.

Rick: There are some trouble spots, for sure. But it’s happening not only in little clusters, but it’s happening on a larger global scale. And so, it’s going to influence everybody.

Sharon: Maybe the increased grace, the increased light, whatever you want to call that, the increased truth that seems to be happening on the planet, is that that’s pushing up what seem to be terrible problems, right?

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Just like when the essential shift happens, and instead of this little trickle that goes through the human life that is not awake to the wholeness of their being, and then when that wakes up, there’s this vastness that starts to move through the life. And sometimes all hell breaks loose. Your life goes to- it’s a disaster.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve known people who’ve had a profound awakening and the next day woken up with lupus or some kind of serious situation.

Sharon: Exactly. So, I think that’s just the microcosm of the macrocosm that’s going on on the planet. And, again, it looks edgy. But watching the young people come in, and the babies, I think it looks like maybe the human species might make it. Have you noticed that?

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Sharon: I mean, the young people are extraordinary, that I’ve been meeting. Extraordinary.

Rick: Yeah. I don’t maybe meet as many as you, but, well, in Fairfield, Iowa, there’s the university there where everybody meditates, and there’s a preschool and a grammar school and everything. And they just had this state science fair competition, right, for the state of Iowa. And the top prize in both the two main age groups were won by students from that little, tiny school.

Sharon: Is that right?

Rick: Yeah. Now they’ve got a free trip to Los Angeles for the national competition. But, I knew one of those kids before when he was in his mother’s womb. So, the school tends to turn out these really brilliant little souls who are kind of meditating from the age of four and so on. And, of course, that’s just Iowa, but this is happening all over.

Sharon: It’s happening all over. Yeah, I’m meeting them everywhere.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And so, hallelujah.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Because there for a while, I was wondering.

Rick: So don’t let the turkeys get you down.

Sharon: Well, if the human species can’t get it together, then maybe it’s time to go, right? It’s not, it’s just that you would rather see the human species be able to flourish on this gorgeous planet.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: It looks like it might be.

Rick: But along the lines of what you were just saying, I think more and more, and perhaps in an accelerating fashion, there are certain things which won’t be tolerated anymore.

Sharon: That’s right.

Rick: Which couldn’t possibly exist in an enlightened society, whatever that may be. And therefore, really have to somehow cease to exist. And that ceasing to exist could be fairly traumatic to those who are deeply invested in them, financially or otherwise.

Sharon: Yeah, I’m sure this show is going to get more intense.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: But again, that’s even more important than to, where do you rest?

Rick: Hold on to the self.

Sharon: That’s right. That deep sense of stillness and stability, seeing solutions, seeing in others the beauty, rather than what’s wrong with them. Because then that nourishes and feeds the collective.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: It’s the greatest thing you can do, really, for all beings, is to recognize this and live from this. It’s not checking out and ignoring the whole thing, it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s just not as visible.

Rick: The reason I’m laughing is that when I first learned to meditate in 1968, I was staying with this family that had seven kids and an Irish wolfhound and a pet raccoon and a bunch of stuff.

Sharon: I can imagine.

Rick: And it was really hard to meditate in that house, so there was a tree fort out in the back, and I used to go and climb up in the tree fort to meditate. And they composed this song, it was like, “Hey dude up in your tree,” it was a song to the tune of “Hey Jude,” “Get out of you and into me.” It’s like they thought I was being self-absorbed and sitting there with my eyes closed in my tree house. But it’s really the best thing you can do for the world. I think I’ve done a lot more for the world than if I hadn’t gone up in that tree house and remained a drug addict or whatever I was going to be.

Sharon: Absolutely. It’s both. But until you know the silence, you can’t be free. And until you enter the world as silence, you’re only halfway home.

Rick: They’re getting you some water, so maybe I should fill in until it arrives.

Sharon: It’s coming from a high desert to moisture and wet wind, and my system kind of reacts sometimes.

Rick: Well, maybe we should wrap it up since you’ve been…

Sharon: Thank you so much, I appreciate that.

Rick: Let me see if there’s anything else I wanted to just bring up here. I took some notes in the car on the way down. Well, there’s one thing, if you have a little bit more steam. You and I were talking about this as we were walking over here. I have this bee in my bonnet about litmus tests for realization. I sort of have this tendency to want to standardize it or define it in a way that can enable people to more clearly understand the stages and where they might be. So as not to prematurely assume they’re done or whatever.

Sharon: It’s helpful, it’s a map.

Rick: Yeah, and I think we have to kind of keep a little bit flexible with it and not get too…

Sharon: Right, there’s always exceptions.

Rick: But for instance, this whole idea of pure awareness remaining awake to itself throughout the night during sleep. That’s one that a number of my friends… I’ve had experiences of it sometimes and a number of friends say it’s for them, been going on for years. That’s an interesting one. And another is this thing of refined perception. We’ve alluded to it a little bit during this interview. I have friends who say that routinely they see subtle beings all over the place. Whether they’re angels or what they are, I don’t know. But they seem to be as numerous as human beings in physical flesh and blood form. And so there seems to be this whole dimension of creation that for some people is as real in their experience as the ordinary dimension. Okay, so I wonder about things like that, whether those sorts of experiences are unique to certain types of people and not necessary criteria of awakening, or whether everyone in the ultimate course of their evolution is going to progress through stages of experience like that. I wonder if you have any opinions about that, or would it just be a matter of opinion?

Sharon: I think it’s probably just a matter of opinion. Like we were saying, depending on how you’re wired, I’ve seen angels and beings all my life, but I’m sort of wired that way, right? But it didn’t mean I was awake. I just was wired that way. I had senses that were wired that way.

Rick: It’s like you might have perfect pitch and another person is bone deaf.

Sharon: Exactly. But what we were saying, when you open to the vastness of being, all of that now is available. There isn’t this little pinpoint, looking through these pinpoint senses, seeing reality. It’s like this vast view, and so all of that’s available. But I think it’s according, again, to how you’re wired. Some really tune in to that and see that, others don’t.

Rick: But maybe Joe Truck Driver, if he somehow gets awakened, maybe his wiring is going to start changing sooner or later than he also will have that.

Sharon: Exactly. That, again, is my experience, is the wiring does change within your body-mind structure. I’m sure you experience that with meditation. I mean, you literally.

Rick: Oh, I can feel it. I can feel the brain changing. And neuroplasticity, they say the brain does change every time you do anything.

Sharon: And so, all of that does change, I think, because of the vastness. My teacher used to say, “Do you want to walk around with this little flashlight in the middle of your head, or do you want to walk around with a thousand and a thousand and a thousand suns shining?” That’s the difference. And also, I think it’s not only your past lineage, how you’re wired, and so you have certain tendencies, but my sense is, too, it’s how – and again, we’ll use this word – how God wants to express through here.

Rick: Good one.

Sharon: So, if seeing angels are going to assist that, go for it. That’s what’s going to happen. If you’re going to need this, it’s going to wake that up, and it’s going to use that to serve all beings. So that’s also my sense. Maybe you have an ability to write. I mean, I think Adya’s exquisite in his poetry and his writing, but he barely got through the beginning of school because of dyslexia. So, who knows? But this was used. This brilliance was used, is used, to be of benefit. So that’s my sense. But there do seem to be different hallmarks, if you want to call it that. I know here, one of the things that I started to notice was my sensing changed. My whole senses woke up. And so, if I hear music now, it’s like I hear music in, like, quadraphonic, right? Or if I see, I don’t see here, I see here, right? So, I think everything changes. And so, you could qualify that and put that down, but there would always be exceptions. Sleeping, you brought that up once before when you were here at the retreat, and I thought about that. And I thought, well, yeah, this black, vast, unfathomable, whatever you want to call it, is always prominent. But dreams happen, and thoughts float through, but this is prominent. It doesn’t shut off at night and only happen in the day, or only, you know what I’m saying? It’s continual.

Rick: Yeah, so that would be my example of some kind of a litmus test.

Sharon: That’s right, it’s continual.

Rick: And in the Sanskrit, they call this vast, dark thing, you recall, “Tiriya,” the fourth, the fourth state. And waking, dreaming, and sleeping being the first three. And it’s said that when the fourth wakes up, then it’s there as a continuum, while the waking, dreaming, and sleeping roll along.

Sharon: Perfect, beautiful. That, I would say, is exactly my experience. And it doesn’t matter what’s happening. This personality may be, , kind of grouchy, or it may be this, or it may be, whatever, or tired. But it doesn’t affect anything. It’s just now, it’s a configuration that’s passing through the vast being. And maybe even there’s an identity, but the identity is just a configuration that got triggered because there’s this appearance. But it doesn’t affect anything. Nothing is touched. Nothing is altered, right?

Rick: There weren’t an identity, they’d have to wheel you around on a gurney. There has to be an identity to live.

Sharon: That’s right, that’s right, exactly.

Rick: That’s another misconception in the spiritual world, that your identity is going to completely vanish or something.

Sharon: Yeah, one of the hardest things here to give up was the perfection of the human being. That somehow the human being was going to look a certain way, because I’d read all the text and all the stories and the whole thing. And then somewhere along the line, everything has changed, and yet, this human being, still a human being, doing her thing. And it’s not perfect, but that’s what’s fueling it, that’s allowing it to dance and express itself.

Rick: You have a habit that a lot of spiritual teachers use, where they use the word “here.” “Here it is seen that such and such,” it almost seems like it’s an attempt to avoid just using the first-person pronoun. “The way I see it is da.”

Sharon: I know, I kind of forget. But that’s how it is. It’s “here,” “here,” and “so I” … I know, it’s kind of silly when you hear people say that.

Rick: You don’t do it too much. Some people like, you know, it’s like,

Sharon: “This one sees it this way.”

Rick: I know, it’s hard to talk. And I like to be, like to just, like we’re having here, I just like these really beautiful, rich kind of exchanges. I’m enjoying you, and I’m enjoying what’s happening.

Rick: And it’s not diminished to any extent by the fact that you just used the word “I” a couple of times in that sentence.

Sharon: Noo! Yeah, who cares?

Rick: Otherwise you would have had to say something like, “Well, here this is being enjoyed.” Not by anyone, mind you.

Sharon: No, no, there’s no one here.

Rick: No one actually enjoying this. Some enjoyment is happening.

Sharon: There. No, I’m not interested in that at all.

Rick: Let me see if there’s anything else here. We’ve covered quite a bit. Here’s this thing you said in our previous interview. You said, “Teachers often become a lightning rod for everyone’s ideas and projections.”

Sharon: Boy, that’s the truth.

Rick: What do you mean by that?

Sharon: I just had this conversation with a beautiful man in where I live, Crestone. And he’s a ceremonial leader, and he trained for years, and then he trained as an apprentice for seven more years. And so, he’s serious, and he really has given his life to this. And so, we were talking about that, and he said that in his initiation, when that happened, that was one of the vows that you both recognize, and you accept that you will be a lightning rod for all the projections and concepts and ideas from those that you’re serving.

Rick: Give me a specific example of that happening.

Sharon: People may adore you, and so this adoration is projected on you. It belongs to what and who, you know? Or people hate you, and so they lay all of that on you. Or you’ve triggered something about their mother, and that’s being brought out, and so that’s being laid on you. So early on, when I figured out that that’s what was happening, I just thought, “Well, there’s no way that you can continue this role unless you just get real, real clean and clear with this.” So, people can adore me, and that’s nice, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It comes in and it moves out. People can hate me, you know? I’m a human being. Sometimes I’m confused of why, or there’s been misunderstanding. But it just moves through. And so, what I started to see, by just letting it move through, there also was a transmutation. So, there’s actually a service.

Rick: A transmutation means what exactly?

Sharon: It’s burnt up.

Rick: For them? For you?

Sharon: Period. For them. Because you have to let it go in order for it to actually move through you. If you hang on to it or believe any of it, the love or the hate, then it’s going to stick, right? And we all know teachers that that has happened to. And so, I just somehow saw early on that it had to be just like the wind. It just had to move through. But then I also saw that by nobody there, except just this sort of open awareness, that then it could lighten it up. It could actually transmute it. Now, that can be accepted or not. That’s none of your business. But it’s just the way it is. And that’s what happens. And I can remember being quite shocked about it. Because with my teachers, Anya is the beloved. I embarrass him because I love him so much and appreciate him so much. So, I didn’t really project, but I noticed people in the Sangha, they would project certain things and certain ideas and disappointments. He was saying one time that he gets all of these emails about people saying, “Well, I know that you didn’t call on me because…” And it just goes on and on and on. He said, “I don’t think anything. It never even comes up. I just see a hand and I go there.”

Rick: And yet there is actually some kind of cosmic computer going on, which causes him to call on that hand.

Sharon: There is. But it’s not because he likes him, or he doesn’t like him.

Rick: No, it’s not a personal proclivity.

Sharon: And so, you just start to see that it’s the openness and the allowance of that and not buying into any of it. And if it does trigger something, then see what here still wants to be loved, to be seen, to be made aware. So, it can dissolve, right?

Rick: Yeah…

Sharon: So it becomes a gift, if there is a trigger, to free it up. But I found that in most cases it just flies through. But, it wasn’t just an exercise for me. I realized it was for the Sangha.

Rick: Yeah. So, yeah, it’s interesting because we were walking over here, and we were talking about how many teachers there seem to be out there these days, maybe a couple thousand.

Sharon: Yeah, that’s what I heard. I don’t know if it’s true.

Rick: And when you take on the role of a teacher, I think you do take on some karma for what you do.

Sharon: You do, and I never really bought into that.

Rick: You become like a washing machine.

Sharon: There you go.

Rick: Yeah. And you better be ready to do that.

Sharon: You better be ready to do that.

Rick: And if you’re not ready to do that,

Sharon: Leave.

Rick: Yeah, there have been problems.

Sharon: There have been problems.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And they’re actually fairly frequent, pretty frequent.

Rick: Which is why I don’t get up and, well, you were talking about this too, you were saying maybe you should teach, and I was thinking, I just don’t feel qualified.

Sharon: Yeah.

Rick: And maybe I am qualified. Maybe I’m more qualified than some people who are out there teaching, but for me, I feel like it’s not my role.

Sharon: Yeah, it’s good to see that. I think we need more examples of living in the world in the way that you are, and the vast numbers that you serve by your willingness and your generosity of your time, of your resources, of everything else, just the service that you have brought.

Rick: I’m the prime beneficiary.

Sharon: Well, we always are.

Rick: I love it.

Sharon: We always are.

Rick: It’s so fulfilling.

Sharon: But…

Rick: It’s not like a sacrifice.

Sharon: Well, you’re giving.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And the benefit is tremendous. But I think that we need a little more example of that. Because for a long time, we didn’t have any other model other than, you woke up and you taught.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: Because that’s what they always did, you know.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And so we need many, many, many more examples of living life, living your dharma perfectly, whatever that is.

Rick: And there’s a saying in the Gita, again. The verse goes, “Because one can perform it,” that’s a key phrase, “one’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the dharma of another. Better is death in one’s own dharma. The dharma of another brings danger.”

Sharon: Hmm. I’m going to have to get out the Gita again.

Rick: There’s a lot in that little verse there. Yeah, because it can be dangerous if one is taking on a dharma that one is not yet capable of performing.

Sharon: It can be very dangerous.

Rick: Dangerous for you, dangerous for those who gravitate toward you.

Sharon: Absolutely.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And we see many, many, many, many examples of it.

Rick: Yeah. So, humility.

Sharon: Bottom line.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: And gratitude.

Rick: And gratitude. And perhaps, with gratitude point, always sort of recognizing that there’s someone to whom you can look up, or to whom you can be a student. No matter how good a teacher you may think you are, if you don’t see anyone higher than you, or more qualified in some way, then that could be dangerous, I think.

Sharon: Very dangerous. I am so grateful. Both this inner teacher that’s constantly awake, but to have this beautiful, also outer teacher, and such an example, and he’s so generous and so willing and so available.

Rick: Yeah.

Sharon: I am more grateful, than less in all this time.

Rick: So, three cheers for Adyashanti.

Sharon: Three cheers for Adyashanti. And for you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Rick: You’re welcome. I’d hug you, but our mics would go… So let me make a few concluding remarks that I always make at the end of every interview, just to put it all in context. I’ve been speaking with Sharon Landrith. I’m looking forward to this weekend retreat with her. Maybe we’ll have a couple of follow-up questions at the end. I don’t know. This has been pretty thorough, so maybe not. But if so, we’ll splice them in here. So, the retreat is over, and I just wanted to tape a couple more minutes, because there are some things I wanted to add, maybe Sharon wants to add, and some things that maybe need a little clarification from the main body of the interview. One was that I made the comment towards the beginning of the interview, that after my last retreat with Sharon, I had stopped picking my fingers for six months. Afterwards I thought, “That’s going to sound weird. It sounds kind of trivial.” But I think it’s a habit I’ve had for 60 years. It’s just tapered off to a great extent, but it’s symptomatic of some underlying agitation or something. I thought it was kind of cool that I just stopped cold turkey after that last retreat. So, yeah. I also didn’t want to give the impression that because I’m here on a retreat with Sharon, that I’m giving some kind of exclusive endorsement to Sharon.

Sharon: God forbid.

Rick: There are probably a lot of people whom I’ve interviewed with whom I’d love to spend time on a retreat or whatever and would benefit from it. But as you may have been able to tell from our conversation, I think Sharon and I have a sort of a resonance and a mutual understanding of things, a common affinity for the way we tend to see things.

Sharon: Yeah.

Rick: So, I’ve really enjoyed this weekend. I just want to say that I think that Sharon is a very mature spiritual teacher. By that I don’t mean white hair and a few wrinkles.

Sharon: Oh, yeah.

Rick: I mean that she’s kind of like an ocean into which all rivers and streams can enter, whether large or small, pure or impure. And here we had a group of 20 people or so from very different backgrounds, different ages from the 20s to the 80s, some with a Hindu background, some a Christian, some a Buddhist, some perhaps none. And we all felt like family. There was just this sort of affinity that we settled into very quickly. And I think Sharon facilitated that very nicely. I also neglected to mention during the main part of the interview that, as always, I link to people’s websites from their page on Batgap, and I’ll be linking to Sharon’s website. And if you go there, you’ll see something about dokusans, and you might not know what a dokusan is. So, I thought I might invite Sharon to explain what that is.

Sharon: From this view anyway, it’s a beautiful way to– what it really means is just private interview. And so, it’s a beautiful way to have this quite intimate conversation. And just through many, many, many years of looking in that way, often, we can see certain patterns. We can see where perhaps there’s an imbalance within the awakening unfolding. So, it very much is a way to really almost like a surgical scalpel kind of a thing. We can go in and look deeply and provide that mirror, and it can be recognized and therefore freed up. So, I think it’s a very valuable way to explore your deepest nature. I’m really quite grateful to have the opportunity. And, of course with the phone and the Internet, it’s really very simple. We talk to people all over the world.

Rick: And unlike a scalpel, there’s no bleeding or pain.

Sharon: Yes, painless.

Rick: So anyway, just wanted to add those little things to the interview. Is there anything else you want to say before we conclude?

Sharon: I am so grateful to you, and what it is that you have been giving so really selflessly and enthusiastically and with impeccability. You have served so many, and it continues to do so. I’m deeply touched by that, and I talk to people all the time, that literally their lives have been changed because of Backgap. And it’s your vision and your heart that drives it. So, thank you.

Rick: And it’s not selfless. I mean, I’m the prime beneficiary. I just love it. It’s like it’s my sustenance.

Sharon: Yeah, you always receive more than actually you give. But thank you.

Rick: Okay, thanks. But in any case, this interview has been one in an ongoing series. There are a couple, 225 or other ones, that you can find if you go to www.backgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. You’ll find there an alphabetical index, a chronological index. We’re actually working on a geographical index. We need a volunteer to help with that, actually. Because I get emails from somebody in Poland saying, “Where’s the closest teacher that you’ve interviewed?” And I say, “I don’t know.” So, I’d like to have a geographical index. Sharon would be Colorado and other places you go. And it’ll also include whether they do Skype interviews, Skype consultations, and all that. So, you can just sort of look at it geographically.

Sharon: Brilliant.

Rick: There’s some other things on the site there. There’s a discussion group or forum, and each interview has its own little section that is linked to, from the page of that interview. There’s a donate button. Buddha at the Gas Pump is registered as a 501(c)(3), which means it’s a non-profit organization, and donations are tax-exempt. I don’t understand all the finances, but–

Sharon: Donate.

Rick: But I do need the finances. Then there’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. You’ll only get about one email a week, so that’s as many interviews as I do. And then there’s a link to an audio podcast, so, you can subscribe to this in iTunes, and every time a new interview is posted, it’ll automatically come into iTunes. You can put it on your little iThing and listen to it. So that about covers it. Go to the site, check it out. There’re some other menus with some other tidbits there. So, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Next week is going to be a fellow whom I’m just getting– actually, next week is going to be Prajna Ginty, who is also a student of Adya, and had a profound awakening, and then gave birth to premature twins, and her life became very difficult. And it’s really interesting to see how the rubber met the road in terms of– So, stay tuned for that, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks. Thanks, Sharon.

Sharon: That was fun. I always like talking with you.

Rick: Yeah, we really roll, don’t we?

Sharon: We really roll.