Stan Kendz Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. After much deliberation and conversation with friends, I settled on that name for this TV show, or YouTube show, as the case may be. And I actually didn’t think of the name. A friend of mine named Isaac Nevas thought of it. So Isaac, if you’re watching this, get ready for fame and fortune. And if you don’t achieve it, Isaac made a really great movie in which he plays a dancing zombie. And if anyone would like to see that, there will be information on how to contact me at the end of this show, and I’ll send you a link. But the implication of the title “Buddha at the Gas Pump” is, if it’s not obvious, is that ordinary people are awakening to states of consciousness or states of enlightenment, or whatever you’d like to call them, which previously were thought to be extremely rare and difficult to attain. Now, I don’t so much like the term “enlightenment” because, to my mind, that implies a perfected state, which may actually be rare. But there are very many gradations or degrees of awakening which people undergo. And many people in the Fairfield community, Fairfield, Iowa, have traversed quite a number of these degrees, or these stages of awakening. So, anyway, we thought that would be a good title, “Buddha at the Gas Pump.” Tonight’s guest is Stan Kendz. And I’ll let Stan tell us a little bit about himself. But I thought I would start… It’s my understanding, Stan, that your awakening was somewhat abrupt. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes people ooze into it so slowly they don’t even realize it’s happened. But in your case, it was unmistakable, right?

Stan: Yes. Rick, thank you so much for having me as a guest. I really appreciate an opportunity to share what my experience is. I don’t know if it’s everybody’s truth, but it’s what happened to me and how I understand it. It was an abrupt and very quick and spontaneous experience for me, but it was led up to by years and years and years of desire and interest and spiritual seeking. The actual event itself happened during a meditation period. I was meditating as I usually did every day, twice a day, and this was in the evening. I think it was sometime in October around 1994. And what happened was that I just became awake in my meditation or alive in consciousness, and I realized that I wasn’t breathing and that I hadn’t breathed for a very long time. So I kind of observed that and I thought, “Well, what does that mean? What’s happening to me?” And then the thought crossed my mind, “Well, maybe you’re not going to be here physically very much longer.” And at that time in my life, I’d fairly been comfortable with what my achievements were, my parenthood, my spousal relationships, and I wasn’t really hanging on to trying to stay in the physical form. And so it would have been okay with me to let it go. And what I decided to do was just to stay with my mantra very innocently and just to watch what happened and just observe it. And so that lively observation quality was very prominent in my awareness. And as I continued my mantra, I guess there was a sudden rush of fear, like, “Well, if you really push this, you might not be in the world anymore and you might be physically dead.”

Rick: It reminds me of a Stephen Wright joke. He said he broke up with his girlfriend because he wasn’t really into meditation and she really wasn’t into being alive. But anyway, go ahead.

Stan: So I just stayed with my meditation and my mantra and then I started to experience some really profound physiological sensations and they were based on different senses. I think the first one I experienced was the sound in my ears and I can only relate it to the most intense noise that I have ever heard. It’s kind of like if you could imagine your head being inside a Saturn rocket when it was launching. It was an amazing noise, so much so that I don’t believe human ears could hear that.

Rick: And you were sitting in a quiet room.

Stan: I was just sitting in a quiet room. And so my intellect kicked in and said, “Well, maybe that’s the part of your brain that’s associated with hearing and maybe it’s being starved of oxygen and the nerves are sort of all firing and that’s your last thing you’re going to hear.” And then it subsided, but the awareness didn’t subside. And then came vibration and I really felt like every cell in my body was vibrating to the point where it was going to disintegrate. And then again —

Rick: If someone had been looking at you, would they have seen you vibrating or was this all on a subtle level?

Stan: I didn’t really feel that my whole — I didn’t feel a relationship with my physical body, but they were very, very profound. They were more powerful than physical feelings. So I kind of felt that they were sort of at an absolute level or some level that I had never been to before, but it was extremely profound. And I, again, rationalized that maybe my senses of touch, those nerves were dying, they were all firing, and I was just going to let everything go. So this is the experience that happens now. And then so that proceeded and then it calmed down and then there was still awareness and then there were explosions like one amazing, intense, continuous explosion of light brighter than anything you could ever see with the human eye. And then there was nothing. Absolute nothing. There was nothing but awareness. But that awareness seemed to be infinite. And it didn’t have parameters around it. And then something very, very, very unusual happened that I had never experienced prior to that and don’t very often experience since that time. There was sort of a questioning and an experience and a knowing simultaneously in my awareness. Years later I would find out when I came to MUM to go to school that that state —

Rick: MUM being?

Stan: Maharishi University of Management — that that state is called Sanghita, where there are three states of awareness simultaneously occurring.

Rick: And that’s a Sanskrit word which means three states of awareness simultaneously occurring.

Stan: And so we’re used to thinking in a very linear way and we have the past and the future and the present. But in Sanghita there’s only now and everything is known in now. So as the desire to understand what I was, what was happening to me, as that was arising in my awareness, so was the explanation of what it was or the knowing of what it was.

Rick: The answer was coming.

Stan: Yeah. And so the answer was when I thought, “What am I?” and I understood just at that simultaneous moment — it’s not one before the other, it’s simultaneous — this is being. And this is what you’ve always been. And this is the nature of everything that is, is being. And being doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It can’t be destroyed or created. And it goes on ad infinitum.

Rick: And this didn’t come like some verbal thing. It was more like just a knowledge.

Stan: It’s a knowing, and it’s a total knowing. It’s a knowing beyond any question or reasonable doubt. And it’s a deeper knowing than anything that I had ever experienced before in any state, in waking state, dream state, in any of my experiences in life. It was a knowing that transcended doubt or went beyond doubt. So then I realized, well, I’m being. And in that instant –and I call that instant of that cognition or the awareness of being — there’s a great and incredible release of bliss for me, I experience.

Rick: Release meaning experiencing bliss. Yeah, but it was in the state of awareness, not necessarily in the state of physical –I wasn’t aware. There was no relative world left at that time.

Rick: So it’s not like your body was blissful. It was more like bliss.

Stan: It was just pure, pure state of bliss.

Rick: Bliss in and of itself. Just pure, absolute, abject bliss. And eternal bliss. And not only that, but it seems to expand simultaneously with always being. I kind of refer to it later on as though it were an atomic explosion, expanding in bliss in every direction simultaneously without end. It just goes on with such incredible fulfillment that you would never, ever, ever, ever choose to leave that state voluntarily. So that was my experience. And then at that moment of bliss, it seems like everything happens –in that state of being to me — everything happened now because there is only now. But now is eternally now. So it’s very difficult to talk about it here in the waking relative state because when I was being in that fully cognizant state of being, there was only now and now was infinite. And now, of course, although I’m speaking to you, I’m in the relative and it’s a linear reality, so it’s very hard to give an explanation. But in that unboundedness, there was such great joy, and I call it the “mahahaha.” I’ve always referred to it as the “mahahaha.” Because it’s such a great laugh.

Rick: “Maha” means great.

Stan: Yes. And what the joke is, the joke is at multiple, multiple, multiple levels of cognition. So the joke is, first of all, there’s no such thing as death. We’re all immortal. So that’s a great release. The second is that nothing can ever harm you. And so that’s a tremendous freedom. And every single thing that my intellect had interpreted throughout a lifetime as suffering or pain was seen to be nothing more than a misinterpretation of who I’ve been. And so it instantaneously relieved me of all the things that had happened up to that point in my life that I thought were so important –the suffering in my childhood, or the struggles as an adult, or the friendships and relationships that I had that seemed to be challenged. I knew all of that was just as though it were somehow playing within my infinite nature to give me the experience and richness of a point of view. And yet, from this more expanded, infinitely expanded state of being, the transparency of an individual just faded away. It just dissolved.

Rick: So I have a lot of questions for you based on what you just said. But I want to –since you were just mentioning things that happened in your life, a mutual friend of ours told me that you had quite a hellacious childhood and upbringing. And, you know, mine was no picnic at times, but yours sounds like it was a real –quite a wild ride. And I think it would be interesting to juxtapose that with what happened to you. And it might actually encourage some people who feel that they’ve been damaged by life and have no hope of experiencing something like this because of all the traumas they underwent. So maybe we could go into that, and don’t spare us the gory details.

Stan: I don’t really focus on the gory details. I appreciate you have a lot of questions. And one of the things that I came away from that experience with, or retained, is that I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t have any more questions. So that was a really big insight for me. My childhood was quite an interesting childhood. I had a mother that was mentally challenged and had to be hospitalized several times. I lived with in-laws that had, you know, various –in-law or relatives — that had various dysfunctional behaviors like alcoholism and things of that nature. And yet at the same time, when I look back, I feel extremely grateful for that path because I remember my mom’s illness kind of always made it very important for me to try to seek some spiritual resolution to see if I could assist her in some way. So I think that I kind of look at them as aspects of infinity that took a form to give me a path that allowed me to achieve what my life’s goal was when that was to understand the true nature of myself and to try to understand the nature of God and how things can appear to be so broken on earth and yet be perfect love. So I think without those challenges, I would have never taken the direction that I actually took in life and never wound up where — where I became fully, completely satisfied with understanding that everything is perfect.

Rick: Interesting.

Stan: Yeah, it really is.

Rick: I went through some similar things. My mother was in and out of mental hospitals and my father was an alcoholic and everything. I remember saying to my mother at one point after I had been meditating for some years and I said to her, “You know, whatever my upbringing was, you must have done it just right because I’m really happy with the way I ended up.” She was happy to hear that.

Stan: Oh, that’s great. That’s really great.

Rick: Yeah.

Stan: So –and I think that what happens is that we –we’re very, very fortunate. From my understanding, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, when we have that beautiful experience of being and then a desire comes up in forever and the desire isn’t the individual’s desire, but it’s a desire that feels like it belongs to you because we identify with our own individuality. That desire in the mind or the awareness of being precipitates out into a whole universe and the planets and all the molecules and time and space and the atoms all take position necessary to create the scenario or the stage in which that life can be fulfilled. So, if we wanted to become enlightened in this lifetime, then all those players have to go into the play that allow us to take that path. And it’s really a wonderful gift of love. I always say everything’s perfect and if you don’t think so, you haven’t seen it over a long enough time period.

Rick: Or from a broad enough perspective, perhaps.

Stan: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Now, when you told the story about your awakening, you related something to us that happened in 1984 or so, I think you said.

Stan:Yes.

Rick: ’94. But the implication is that you were changed permanently as a result of that experience. It’s not like you went back to the way you had been. So, maybe we can take it from that very day when you had that experience you eventually opened your eyes. What was the world like at that point?

Stan: Very interesting. Well, what happened was, prior to that experience, I used to think of myself as Stan Kens, the person that was born on my birthday and lived the life I had remembered up until the time I had the experience. After that experience, I was being who misidentified itself with my point of view. And so I sort of convoluted. I became where I was something in the world before, now the entire universe was within me. It reversed itself. And I’ve always known that since. And that knowing seems to be available to me pretty much 24/7, even at night. I do still have periods of stillness in my awareness. But when I am aware, I’m aware that I’m — It’s just like that is my nature. That’s the origin of my nature. And so there’s nothing to forget because everything I am is identified with the origin of my nature as being.

Rick: So when you look at the camera or the lights, what do you see?

Stan: I see myself in that form. So there’s never a misinterpretation anymore that this is something other than me. As a matter of fact, I can’t even fantasize something that wouldn’t be me. The air, the sky, the clouds. And I don’t mean me in the little sense that Stan has all that within him. Not at all. The person Stan, the body Stan, is within that unbounded being. But it has its awareness focused here.

Rick: Would you say that you identify more predominantly with that unbounded — I think you just said so — with that unbounded being as being what you are than this body as being what you are?

Stan: Yes. There’s no fear. Well, I know death is impossible anymore. So there’s no attachment to the physiology. But there’s a love for it. And there was a question, I think, on something that you shared with me about how does it affect — Initially, I lost one hundred pounds within 3 months after the first experience.

Rick: Yeah, “How does it affect your diet?” was one of the questions.

Stan: And because I had such a beautiful regard. But there was also a tremendous flatness that my intellect had to deal with. Because everything was inside of myself as being, there was very little motivation to do anything and take any action. Because I saw it all as a net sum gain of zero in the long run. And I had to almost intend myself to re-engage. And that re-engagement took me about 4 or 5 years. And I also had to learn about myself as being. And just because I had the knowing and the experience of being, I didn’t have the intellectual comprehension of what that really meant and how to really function as being. And so I’ve been spending, ever since then, developing more and deeper appreciation of what I really am inside this beautiful universe, as a universe.

Rick: Eckhart Tolle said that when he woke up, he basically just sat on a park bench for a couple of years and fed the pigeons. Because there wasn’t much else he felt like doing. And then people started asking him questions, he started answering them, and things started rolling.

Stan: It was very challenging for me. And I can just remember reading in the Gita, “Take action.” And so I didn’t want to take action, but I knew that that was the proper thing to do. And it was that engaging in action again that I think brought me back in. Because there’s very little attachment to anything at all.

Rick: Now, let’s say you’re repairing something and you whack your thumb with a hammer. Doesn’t your identity as Stan become rather intense at that point?

Stan: I feel the pain on a physical level, but then I also sort of laugh inside and think, “I wonder what message I am giving to myself.” And because I see everything now as intelligence. Everything that happens, whether it’s a car accident or an illness. I recently had a bout with prostate cancer, which I had to have my prostate operated on. And I went through non-attachment to the physical form. I thought, “I’ve already been through death, there’s nothing to worry about there.” And do I really want to stay in the body? And so I kind of went around and did a little canvassing and asked some friends, “What’s the deal here?” And I had a lot of people that wanted me to stay around, especially my children. And so I decided to stay. But I went through it in sort of a noble way. I went through and said, “Okay, well this is part of my karma. And for whatever reason, let me bring to the experience as much charm and understanding as I can possibly intellectually muster.” And so I wasn’t perfect at it, and I felt all of the physical challenges with weakness and the pain of the operation and so forth. But mentally, I was sort of in a much more peaceful and harmonious state and trying to make it meaningful. I often joked and I told jokes to the people that were going to operate on me just before they put me under. Things like that. So it was much easier for me than I can imagine other people may have gone through.

Rick: Do you find that your awareness of being or your appreciation of yourself as being kind of oscillates or comes in and out of focus at all? Like sometimes it’s less predominant, sometimes more predominant? Or is it really a solid, steady thing which nothing can overshadow in the slightest?

Stan: I’d like to say it was a steady thing that nothing can overshadow. But I had an experience about three years ago where I had finally found an individual that I could communicate very, very deeply with and that understood that state of being from a personal experience. And it was almost like two parts of myself alive in the relative. And I became very dedicated to trying to do experiments and to see if we could really work that relationship in a very unique way. And then something happened and that relationship was severed. And for about three days I went through a kind of a —

Rick: Is it a romantic relationship?

Stan: It was a different thing. It was an intellectual and a heartfelt because I can’t separate myself anymore. Whatever I decide on the intellect or on the heart, it’s all one thing. Or the spirit, it’s just one wholeness maybe with different qualities of expression. And so it was extremely challenging. And then I met a friend that said, “Well, why don’t you look into this reaction and see what it has to tell you?” And I realized that there was some psychological healing in my memory that I hadn’t really come to complete fulfillment in. And it released that. And then I felt that I had gone — Then I went to another level of accepting myself in the relative as an infinite being. It was a very interesting thing. Prior to that, I felt like I had left the relative and experienced being. And then after that cleansing or stress release or whatever you want to call it, I felt that I was more integrated in the relative in my body and in being at the same time. And that’s remained very clear since then.

Rick: So it’s almost as if the relationship with that person was an impetus that was given to you to kind of —

Stan: It was.

Rick:  –have you work through this thing.

Stan: Because we did experiments. We said, “Well, we’ll reflect the deepest parts of each other that need to grow and we’ll embody that so that you can give each other a mirror to see what you have to work on if there’s anything left.” And I think that really happened.

Rick: Do you mind my asking why there was a falling out with the person who had such a deep affinity?

Stan: It wasn’t a falling out. They became extremely ill and I thought they probably were going to pass away. And I was like, “Wow.” I was just getting to a point where I was going to work into the future on some very deep spiritual paths. And then that was taken away. And why was it taken away?

Rick: I see.

Stan: And that’s why.

Stan: That was why.

Rick: Did the person pass away?

Stan: No, they didn’t.

Rick: Oh, good. Were you married at the time when you had your awakening in ’94?

Stan: I was, yes. And it was a very difficult thing for my relationship with my wife because after I had that complete understanding of my true nature, I couldn’t be attached to something and be in love with something. And I tried to explain to her in the best way I could that I am love with you but not in love with you as an individual person. And all my wife heard was, “I don’t love you.” And I really wasn’t very good at explaining the difference because I was still –it was very challenging to try to understand yourself that way intellectually. It was wonderful when the being was just unbounded, but when I sort of got fooled into coming back into the relative, I attached to a desire. And the desire was to give back to the teacher that I thought was most responsible for my becoming aware of being. I wanted to come back and give that person a gift of my life in some way. I thought, “I can’t give them money, but I can give them service.” And so that desire welled up until it became almost like a very, very great idea, but it was still in being. And then I heard again that sound and the rumble. And what I felt in my –I was still unbounded awareness, but I felt in that awareness as though I were churning within myself. It sounds very strange, but if you could take a big container of, like, whipped cream or shaving cream and if you stirred it, even though it was transparent and you couldn’t see it, there’d be a sense of churning. And that’s what I felt. I felt that all the molecules in the universe were repositioning themselves to create an experience in time and space that would allow me to give the gift to this person that I wanted to give. And then this raw started again, the one that I had experienced on the way in, and it got so loud. And then what I realized when it was towards the end of the absolute experience was that it was breath filling my entire physical body again with oxygen, and it was my inhalation that I was hearing at a very, very subtle level that sounded like all the roar of all the covalence of atoms and molecular forces in the entire universe, and it cognized back into just air coming into my own lungs. And then the world was relative again.

Rick: And this was during a particular meditation again this was all happening?

Stan: The whole thing was the same experience. I stayed in that state of being forever, and then an idea arose in infinity, and the idea sounded like it just felt like it needed to be expressed.

Rick: So are you referring to the meditation period in ’94 in which you had this whole thing?

Stan: I would call that a continuum from here, but from there, there was just infinite being forever, and then that welled up and came into relativity.

Rick: Now you kind of made it sound a minute ago that an awakened person would have a hard time having a close, personal, loving relationship with a wife or something like that. I’m sure you didn’t quite mean that, but I know plenty of awakened people who are married and happily so. So maybe you could comment on that.

Stan: I don’t think it’s very difficult. What I think what I was trying to convey was there was no individual attachment, but there was infinite love without individual attachment.

Rick: So would you say perhaps that — There are so many songs that say, “I need you,” so the need element wasn’t there.

Stan: All of that was just taken away.

Rick: Right. In fact, think of it, all the songs that are written, and it’s all about wanting and needing and going crazy because the person has left. So what you’re saying is that all that drama kind of dropped off, and out of a state of fulfillment, love was perhaps more than it had ever been.

Stan: I understood that the whole universe is nothing but love. So I wanted to try to share that I am love with you, but not in love with the person that’s in the body necessarily.

Rick: She wasn’t able to understand that, Stan.

Stan: I couldn’t explain it very well either. [laughter]

Stan: But that didn’t just happen in my relationship with my spouse. That happened with my career, with my children, with everything in the relative field. So everything fell away very, very, very quickly.

Rick: You lost your career.

Stan: Well, I didn’t lose it. I just had no more interest in it.

Rick: You had to sort of shift gears. And children?

Stan: My children still say, “Dad, you’re not who you were before,” but I don’t have any memory of who I was before.

Rick: Do they like who you are now? I mean, I met your daughter a couple of times.

Stan: Yeah, we seem to have a very, very good relationship, at least with one child. My son’s still not sure, but my daughter and I get along really wonderfully.

Rick: Wow, you seem like a nice enough guy.

Stan: I have to be.

Rick: I’m not sure what you were like before.

Stan: I don’t remember that. So my whole goal is to be as kind and as generous and life-supporting to every part of the relative field as I possibly can. That doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t get frustrated, but it means that always my deepest goal is to be as nurturing and as supporting as I possibly can.

Rick: All right. Well, I have some questions here. This is the third of these interviews that I’ve done, and we’re building quite a list of people who like to watch them on YouTube or on F-PAC. And there’s actually a chat group that’s been established where people are just chatting all day long about these points, and about half the people who’ve joined the chat group have themselves awakened, so it’s really a high-caliber discussion. But in any case, some of these people have submitted some questions, and I’d like to run through some of them with you. So these are not in any particular order, but since you awoke or shifted or whatever you want to call it, how has the experience of certain human emotions changed for you? You’ve kind of touched on these, but let’s go through some of them. So happiness, for instance.

Stan: Happiness has expanded tremendously. And I would say that almost all the time, like 99% of the time, I’m very, very happy. I do have occasional moments when I can intellectualize for some reason, but then it doesn’t last very long because I can’t forget my nature. And so maybe just for some small minutes or some cases, I can start processing why did this happen or that, but it really doesn’t last very long, and it’s a very, very short life.

Rick: Maybe you could even feel a little wave of depression or something like that,

Rick: but it would dissolve.

Stan: Yeah, but it just dissolves fairly quickly. I think over the last several years, maybe if I’ve had 6 or 8 hours total, or 10 hours, maybe that’s…

Rick: All totaled over the last 6 years.

Stan: Yeah, yeah. At least that’s what I’m remembering.

Rick: How about fear? Fear is very interesting. Before my experience, I’d been a very, very shy person. I’d gone to seventeen different schools before I went to university level, and I never was able to make friends. I always felt insecure and not good enough to be who I am. I couldn’t even go shopping and pay the grocery clerk for my wares. I just felt –and so public speaking was impossible for me. I used to dread –I used to be one of the people in the classroom that would count all the students and try to remember where I’d be and learn that word because when the teacher called on me, I’d draw a blank. I was just incapable of –just various things like that. And then afterwards, I can remember immediately joining Toastmasters because I felt I had something to share, and I wanted to be able to share it fairly coherently and convey my message clearly. So I joined them, and they asked you to give sort of an introductory speech, and I said, “I’m the universe.” And they kind of laughed, and they said, “Wow, what are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, that’s who I know I am, and that’s why I can stand up here now is because I’m not afraid of that at all, and there’s nothing here but me.” And then I went and I actually got some speaking engagements like at Lily Dale, which is a spiritual community in western New York State. And I remember speaking in front of an auditorium that sat, I think, and it was kind of funny. At that time, it was such a new experience for me that I was in unbelievable joy all the time, and I would just look around and go, “Wow, this is myself.” And here I am on the stage of myself. It was a very funny thing to see.

Rick: There’s a verse from the Upanishads which says, “Certainly all fear is born of duality.”

Stan: Yeah, I can believe that.

Rick: Duality dissolves, fear can no longer be found.

Stan: My experience holds that to be true.

Rick: And it makes sense the way you explain it, because if there’s nothing other than yourself, what is there to be afraid of? I’m not afraid of my own hand. I might be afraid of somebody else’s hand, because I perceive it as separate from me, but not my hand.

Stan: But there’s also something… I’m not going to walk across a tightwire between two buildings either. There’s a rational sense of taking care of my physiology.

Rick: There’s a physiological response. If someone hung you from the Golden Gate Bridge by your ankles, you’d probably be getting some adrenaline.

Stan: But what used to happen was I would talk myself out of things because I was afraid of my predicted outcome, my imaginary outcome. And that doesn’t happen anymore. As a matter of fact, I’ve found that if I have some residual resistance, I usually go after that thing because there’s some more freedom and growth and empowerment that I’ll absorb.

Rick: How about compassion? Have you become a more compassionate person?

Stan: I believe I have, tremendously. I can remember before that having a big discussion with a friend about how relationships weren’t very important in life. That was my point of view. Now I think they’re the most important. Because I can see that everything is contained in an infinite continuum, and that’s my own nature, then every single thing that happens, whether it’s a thief or a murderer or a sick person, that’s all part of my own nature and my own being. Even though I might not agree with that point of view or what’s happening, I try to absolutely be non-judgmental to that at all. I don’t have to try, it just is non-judgmental. And just have a compassion. And I say, “Thank goodness that soul took that path because it freed me up from having to take it.”

Rick: There’s an interesting thing here, which is that people hear someone like you saying these things, and I think they have to be reminded that when you say, “I am the universe” or “I see myself in everything” and things like that, you’re not referring to the body that most people identify themselves as being. Even historically, Christ said, “I and my Father are one. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” If you take the “I” or the “me” in those phrases as being the individual who lived two thousand years ago in this particular place and walked around for 3 years and did those particular things, then it gives a very different interpretation to the whole thing than if you understand that the greatness of such an individual lies in his being much more than an individual, in his realization of his universal nature.

Stan: And it’s beautiful. As much as I can say that the air is part of my body, the air that I’m breathing, but if I were to be identified with the air, then I could say the air is part of everybody’s body. And I identify with my own awareness being part of everything that’s relative. So I’m not certainly taking it personally, but I do really know from the level of being that there’s nothing outside of itself.

Rick: Do you ever get angry?

Stan: I don’t know. Well, it’s kind of interesting. If somebody cuts me off, most of the time I’ll think to myself, “Where’s the opportunity here for me to do some kindness?” I had an interesting thing. I was driving around with some people in the car a couple of –maybe 2 years ago, and I went to get into a parking space, and somebody almost slammed into my car, and he rolled down his window, and he was screaming at the top of his lungs. I hadn’t seen him heading for it, and I didn’t even know. And he had children in the car, and I thought, instead of being responsive to his anger, I just said, “I’m very, very sorry that I’ve come and interfered with your plans.” And I saw that as an opportunity to present to the children some point of love because I immediately felt compassion for them, that they had to live with a parent that didn’t have a fuse at all. And so that’s a way that I tend to respond more often than I mean — and I’ve had car accidents where I’ve gotten up and shaken the hands of a person and say, “Well, nature has gone to great lengths to put us into contact. What is it that we can share from each other?”

Rick: You can share your driver’s license and registration, buddy.

Stan: But sometimes it’s been really fascinating, and they’ll open up or they’ll have some information or something that’s very important or something that I’ve been looking for.

Rick: Interesting. You mentioned that you lost one hundred pounds after you had this awakening. Was that kind of spontaneously lost in the desire to eat so much? Or you had a taste for different things?

Stan: I kind of felt my body was this wonderful temple, and I wanted to let it shine forth and to be as healthy and radiant as I could enjoy it. And then this is an interesting thing that happened. Very slowly, I was absolutely energized, incredibly so, right for months and months and even into years after the experience, but almost as though sand trickling out of an hourglass. I felt as though my energy was very, very gradually declining, that incredible extra bliss. And for several years that happened. And recently I went up to the medical center. I’m a veteran, and they diagnosed me with sleep apnea. And since I’ve been able to get a deep night’s rest — I thought I was sleeping all night, but from that point on, it feels like my energy is being re-energized. So I think I physically just sort of ran out of energy. And now I’m back at the gym, and I’ve lost thirty pounds recently. I don’t think that that ever changed. It’s just that I didn’t have the energy to maintain it, and on a physical level.

Rick: If you could talk to the Stan Kens of 1985 or 1975 or some such thing, some earlier points in your life, what would you like to tell that person?

Stan: Even five minutes before I had the experience, I would have said, “Don’t worry.” And I tell my future self now that whatever we are now is very, very finite compared to the expansion of who we’re becoming. And just enjoy every minute. I think the thing that I have the most respect for is that every minute is the only time in all time that that moment will happen. Like this moment we’re having together. In all time, this is the only time this will happen. And it’s to be cherished as something wonderful. And so that’s how I approach the moments of the day.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a nice take on the whole “living in the now” thing that so many teachers teach. I mean, just sort of relishing each moment and getting the full value of it.

Stan: Yeah.

Rick: In my experience, or my understanding, it’s not contradictory to make future plans at all, or even to think about your past, if that’s appropriate. It doesn’t mean you’re not living in the now. You’re living in the now thinking about what you’re going to do next week, making your plane ticket reservations or whatever.

Stan: That’s an interesting point. And I think that people misunderstand that. They think living in the now doesn’t mean having any future plans. And certainly, I have a lot of future plans. I know that right now that anything I desire or intend is fulfilled. I don’t have a time frame on that fulfillment, because I have virtually forever. But I know it is fulfilled.

Rick: Fulfilled meaning?

Stan: Meaning that…

Rick: Well, potentially you should phrase it that way. Because, I mean, for some reason I’m thinking of these Bible quotes, but another thing Christ said is that whatever you desire, believe that you have it and you shall receive it. And so, you know, the way you phrased it was, “It’s fulfilled now.” Not like it’s going to be fulfilled, but it’s fulfilled.

Stan: It is fulfilled. And I might not be experiencing it right now, but I know it’s done. And so I’ve tried to really expand my capability for what do I want fulfilled. Well, one of the things is that the world has become a cherished gem experience for me. And I’d like to be able to stay in the relative for as long as I choose. And that means really a really long time, I think.

Rick: Right.

Stan: So I’m intending…

Rick: Well, you may very well stay in the relative, but not necessarily in this body?

Stan: You never know.

Rick: You never know. In fact, I once heard Maharishi say, “If we want to be immortal, there must be much better bodies than these in which to do it.”

Stan: Yeah, that’s possible. So I’m experimenting with and intending and holding that intention. And things are changing. I mean, medical science is now promising us very long lives. And I believe that that has an influence on my entire world. And so I believe it’s sort of — Here’s another very important thing that I’d like to make very clear. It’s only been for the last two years that I realized that I probably never thought anything in my life, that this unbounded intelligence has been —

Rick: Doing the thinking?

Stan: Doing the thinking, and I’ve identified it with myself.

Rick: You’ve co-opted the thoughts.

Stan: Yeah, I thought it was mine. And so I don’t take responsibility for them any longer. But what I do do is find some charming, and I like to entertain them.

Rick: But there is, I mean, isn’t there sort of a localization of thoughts? I mean, you’re having your thoughts, I’m having my thoughts. The guy in the control booth is having his thoughts. And we’re not necessarily privy to each other’s thoughts, nor would we want to be. There is sort of a focal point in the individual structure in which thoughts and perceptions and desires take place.

Stan: Well, how I understand that, and it’s my own understanding, having thought through it, is that we all have a whole history of life experience, cellular experience, socialization, and that becomes sort of a filtration mechanism. So maybe the original channel broadcasts the same signal, but we all understand it through our own kind of cultured awareness. So I’m not so sure there’s a real separation at any level.

Rick: So what you’re saying in a way is that there’s this, clarify this if I misstate it, but that there’s a, as if a frequency, like you get from a radio tower, and there can be many radios around town picking up that frequency, and each radio, to stretch the analogy a little bit, could change the frequency somewhat to broadcast it, or to emit it in its own unique way. Some may be kind of out of focus, a little bit off the beam, others tuned in nicely, and some with nice big speakers, others with little tinny speakers, and so on. So what you’re saying is that each of our individual thoughts, desires, and so on, are kind of channeled or localized expressions of a much more cosmic intention. Of an infinite field of intelligence. And we just kind of co-opt them. A friend of mine likes to use the phrase that we’re all sense organs of the infinite.

Stan: Well that’s really nice.

Rick: Just as we have our eyes, our ears, but like that, you’re a sense organ, he’s a sense organ, I’m a sense organ.

Stan: I have no argument with that. As a matter of fact, many times I sit in a field or something in the summer, and I think of the millions and millions and millions of sets of eyes and ears, of all the insects and the animals and the trees and the cells, and they’re all perceiving itself. It’s really an amazing thing.

Rick: Perceiving itself. Elaborate on that phrase.

Stan: Well, there is only the being of the self, and it’s expressed in the relative, but they’re witnessing from their perspective what being is in that form.

Rick: Now that’s the interesting thing, because being seems to get localized and lose itself. The cricket probably doesn’t appreciate being the way you do. He’s just got his little cricket nervous system, and he’s living his little cricket life. And as a cricket, he has no clue of what the bigger picture is. And it seems like an awakening to an enlightened state is… The awareness. It’s a transition beyond the localized bound state that crickets and frogs and hedgehogs and dogs and cats and monkeys and elephants, and up the evolutionary scale, all of them thinking that they’re only this flesh-bound individual, and suddenly you realize, “I’m the source of all those things. I’m the self of all those things. I’m the soul of all those things.” I don’t mean to put words in your mouth or take over the dialogue here.

Stan: No, that’s absolutely true. And I think that it’s our great gift to have an intellect and an awareness, and that through meditation in my life, I’ve been able to cultivate that awareness so that it’s on most of the time. And so it doesn’t go back to that state of non-awareness and just doing. It becomes awareness in doing.

Rick: Now I have friends who have a meditation, or had a meditation background, but who eventually kind of rejected the whole thing, and decided, or thought it through, and decided that meditation ultimately causes you to lose your uniqueness or to lose your individuality, because you kind of read these stories of people saying, “I have no ego anymore. There’s no individual self. Nobody’s home.” There are people who write books with titles like that. And that, to these friends I have in mind, is a very distasteful idea, not something they would aspire to. And they kind of feel that the whole Eastern approach to enlightenment is misguided and possibly dangerous. What would you say to that?

Stan: I’d say two things. First of all, don’t reject something you haven’t got a good understanding for.

Rick: But they were meditating for some time.

Stan: I meditated for pretty close to 20 years before I had this experience. And I would have never, ever, ever in my greatest imagination, cognized that that was even possible.

Rick: Even though you’d read descriptions of it?

Stan: I read everything. Until you experience that unboundedness, you can’t even comprehend it with your intellect. There’s no way in the world. And I don’t feel anything reduced at all. If anything, I feel expanded to infinity. And I still have a personality, because I’m in the relative. There is a personality associated with my physiology.

Rick: Do you feel like there was anything whatsoever in your life that was worthwhile, that was lost?

Stan: No, not at all. Well, there are some things. I remember when I started to not lose my consciousness during sleep. Actually, I kind of mourned it for a few weeks. I thought, “Oh, I can’t just go unconscious anymore. I’m awake.”

Rick: I’ll have to explain that a little bit, because you mentioned sleep apnea, and people might misassociate what you’re saying.

Stan: No, it’s very different. It’s like the dreamer is awake, whether it’s in the daytime or during the dream at night. There’s somebody behind the dream watching what’s going on. And there came a time where that was just on all the time. And I thought, “Wow, I don’t get a chance to just go off anymore.”

Rick: And you might have been snoring like a sailor, but inside you’re awake.

Stan: Yeah, I was in silence, just watching.

Rick: Same thing happens to me sometimes. My wife will wake me up and say, “You’re snoring.”

Stan: Really? I know. It’s so interesting that it happens. So that’s very, very important to understand.

Rick: So you kind of missed going unconscious.

Stan: I kind of missed it, yeah, when I realized, “Oh, I just can’t be totally innocent.”

Rick: Just out like a light.

Stan: No, there was something that I felt was lost. It was like the innocence of ignorance was lost. And I couldn’t just do things any longer in ignorance and get away with it, because I was watching myself all the time. So I became responsible.

Rick: It’s like you graduated from law school and became a judge, and the judge better watch out, can’t get away with the things that the ignorant man can get away with.

Stan: Well, it could do anything it wanted to, but it no longer chose to do anything, and it was watching all the time.

Rick: Again, reminded of a biblical phrase, “Forgive them, fathers, they know not what they do.”

Stan: It’s really amazing, yeah.

Rick: Alright, so let’s take a little break, and we’ll continue this in just a moment.

Rick: You’re watching Buddha at the Gas Pump, an interview show in which we discuss awakening or enlightenment or self-realization or whatever you’d like to call it, but we’re not discussing it in the abstract. We’re not discussing it as a sort of metaphysical entertainment. We’re talking with people who have actually undergone such shifts, such awakenings, which makes it a whole lot more interesting, in my opinion. My name is Rick Archer, and in this interview I’m talking with Stan Kemp. What do you do these days, Stan? What is your profession or activity or whatever?

Stan: This is an interesting thing. I’m actually formally engaged as a student at Maharishi University of Management in the business department, and I’m researching the ability of a person at different stages of consciousness to achieve meaningful results, with the idea that perhaps in management, if we had people with certain ideal states of consciousness, they might be able to get things done much more readily for an organization. So that’s my formal, but what happens on a daily basis is that I realize that the whole universe is extremely… everything is intelligent because there is nothing but intelligence and love. And so usually, and this happens quite often, something will come to my awareness, and I have a rule that people first and things second.

Rick: Sounds like Suzy Orman. She says people first, things second.

Stan: And then plans third or whatever. And so very often, nature will come and I’ll get really right to the minute where I sit down and pick up my pen, and then something will happen. And I just laugh because I think to myself, wow. I’m glad I’m not trying to run this show with my intellect, because it’s something much more expansive and holistic is managing that intelligence.

Rick: Are you doing well as a student? Are you able to write papers easily and all?

Stan: All my academic work is finished, and I’m just doing my research right now.

Rick: You’ve got to write a thesis of some kind?

Stan: Yeah, and I’m coming up with wonderful, wonderful anecdotal stories, and we’re able to then take a look at a person’s consciousness and triangulate their state from a self-report, from EEG readings, and also from peers, and we can say, well, that person, although you can’t really tell what state of consciousness a person’s in, with certain different psychological testing and so forth, we can get a good indication. And if their peers are saying that and they’re feeling that something’s happened, and the EEG equipment is confirming that, then we can say, well, they appear to be at this state of consciousness, and here’s how easily or difficultly they’re achieving results.

Rick: I might mention that Marshall University of Management, where Stan said he’s a student, is a university here in Fairfield, Iowa, which was founded in the early ’70s by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he was the founder of the Transcendental Meditation program, and everybody on the campus of this university meditates twice a day. Many of them come together in large domes to practice their meditation and related techniques as a group, in groups.

Stan: Now, in Vedic science, they mention that as a person’s consciousness expands, then their ease with which they get their desire fulfilled also quickens. And so I have a very quick little story that I’d like to share. I was doing a book review with a class, and I asked them to get this particular printing of “How to Know God” by Alistair Shear. And I had heard that Alistair Shear had a deep insight into the translation from Sanskrit, and that it was a very good translation. Well, when the class came together, everybody informed me that that book had been out of print for several years. And I had never met Alistair. I didn’t even know what country he came from or anything. And I said to the class, I said, “Well, let’s intend to get his permission to use a reprint for our group.” Well, that was on a Monday. Thursday, I got a call from a gentleman who’d come in from another country and was a visiting professor in the town that I was living in. He’d taken a book from the library, and my business card fell out of it. And there must be something on the card that he found interesting. And he asked me if I’d meet him for coffee. And we had a very, very wonderful conversation. And, in fact, we closed the coffee shop. It lasted for several hours. And as he was leaving, he said, “I come from England.” And he said, “I went to school with a fellow that I think would really like to meet you.” And he said, “I’m putting his name on this business card for you with his phone number. He’s in India right now, and he’s staying at this hotel because I talked to him earlier tonight.” And he said, “But he’ll be leaving tomorrow on tour, and he won’t be available for several weeks.” And when he handed it to me, it was Alastair Shear’s phone number. And out of 5.5 billion people on the planet, within three days, nature had given me, or somehow I got the support of something organized, and had given me the name that I was asking for. So the next time the class met, I had reprints with the permission. And it was just so amazing. Very, very beautiful. And it just fills you with bliss when something like that happens.

Rick: I was on a meditation retreat one time, staying in this facility that was kind of out in the middle of nowhere, quite far from the nearest town, and I didn’t have a car with me or anything. And I needed a bunch of things. And I didn’t see how I was going to get them. Because they weren’t available there at the facility. Some of them were of the nature of office supplies, and one of them was like Brasso for cleaning brass things, and like that, a little bit of an unusual thing. I also had a pair of Florsheim shoes which had gotten wet, and then I dried them with shoe trees, and the decorative buckles had snapped and broken. And so I didn’t know how I was going to get those, but I wanted to repair my shoes. And so I was moved from one room to another, and in the new room into which I was moved, I found almost all of these things. There was a jar of Brasso and some kinds of office supplies I wanted, but no decorative shoe buckles. But I was walking to dinner that night, and I was walking past an air conditioner in the hallway, and something caught my eye on top of the air conditioner, and I reached up there, and there was a pair of decorative shoe buckles that fit my shoes.

Stan: Oh, isn’t that amazing? Oh, that’s amazing. That’s really amazing.

Rick: And they weren’t my original buckles. I don’t know how they got there.

Stan: I want to touch on one more. Last year, somebody very, very close to me had had to surrender their car because they had lost their job and they didn’t have an income and they couldn’t make their car payment. And they came to my house, and they were kind of really sad and depressed, and what are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? And I said, “Just don’t worry. Nature will take care of that.” And as we were having that conversation, somebody came into the yard that I had gone to school with. They said they were leaving the country and going back to their home country, and did they know of anybody that they could give their car to. And it just worked out. It was like in minutes, you know?

Rick: Cool.

Stan: Yeah, really fun.

Rick: Now, shifting gears here a little bit, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of people in our town, Fairfield, Iowa, who have undergone spiritual awakenings such as yours. And not only Fairfield, I mean people all over the place these days. All over the world now, yes. It’s really becoming kind of an epidemic.

Stan: It is.

Rick: We should be making news much more than swine flu.

Stan: I think so.

Rick: Yeah. But some of the people that I know who fit this description have concluded or felt that it’s no longer necessary for them to meditate. They feel that they’re permanently established in the state that meditation aspires to get you to. And so they see no point in it. It’s like a waste of time. I take it that you still meditate.

Stan: I still do meditate.

Rick: So why do you? And what would you say to those people who don’t do it anymore?

Stan: Well, I’d encourage them to reconsider. And it’s my personal experience that my evolution continues and continues to get richer and richer and richer. Very often now when I come out of meditation, this started happening about a year and a half ago, my body is saturated with a sense of bliss that’s absolutely exquisite and it lasts for a very long time. And I walk around like that for hours sometimes. And that never happened even after my experience of being. So I think there’s a purification. Until you’re able to fly through the air and walk through walls, I think you can still evolve.

Rick: It’s funny you should mention that. I want to get to that in a second. The people I’m referring to, I have a couple of people in mind specifically, I won’t mention their names, but they feel they’re progressing. One breakthrough after another every week it’s something new, very interesting. It’s just that they seem to not feel that meditation is a necessary part of the mix anymore.

Stan: Well, I’ve tried to understand on an intellectual basis and I have a take on it. I believe that when we transcend, it’s just like going into a theater. And when we transcend, our molecular structure disperses and becomes being. And we don’t have a memory of that because there’s no sensory experience there, it’s just awareness. And most people don’t have enough awareness at that stage of unboundedness to really cognize what’s happening. So they have no awareness. And then we re-coalesce. But in the process of doing that unbounded expansion, we sort of become the hard drive that runs the intelligence in all time and space. And that hard drive gets tweaked a little tiny bit every time we do that expansion. And it corrects or it re-coalesces into a universe.

Rick: Defrags.

Stan: Defrags and writes in parts of the new program to fulfill the new desires. So if we see the world is doing this or that, instead of focusing on it, just being in our awareness, our molecular cellular awareness at the deepest levels makes a correction for it. And unless we plug into that program and unbound ourselves, I believe the correction doesn’t have as much effect.

Rick: So what you’re saying in simple terms is that meditation still serves a function as an opportunity to kind of fine-tune and facilitate readjustments.

Stan: I go into unboundedness, the corrections are spontaneously occurred, I don’t have to think about it at all. And I come into the relative and I enjoy a richer more evolved state of the relative.

Rick: Aren’t you already in unboundedness before you sit down and meditate?

Stan: Yes, but there’s still an intellect that overrides that awareness.

Rick: Overrides means it overshadows?

Stan: Well, in other words, it doesn’t overshadow it. It’s simultaneously in the program and I just take that out. So it has no influence on it anymore.

Rick: So you might say that when you’re not meditating, when you’re engaged in your daily activities, like right now, there’s the unboundedness and then there’s also the intellect, the senses, all this other stuff going on. But when you do meditate, all that stuff kind of relaxes back into unboundedness and you just enjoy unboundedness by itself for a while. And that has its own value.

Stan: It has a value. It rewrites or redirects the universe. I remember one time a very, very profound teacher of mine made a statement and he said that the mind of man was the organ of order for the universe. And without having to mind about it, we just transcend the minding and then the organization happens spontaneously.

Rick: It’s interesting because the mind of man has created an awful lot of disorder.

Stan: Yes, it has. But I think the man he was referring to was the man that was awake to his own nature.

Rick: Which is an interesting point because more people who are awake to their own nature may be just the antidote to all the disorder that people have.

Stan: It’s very possible. And really when you think about it, even though the disorder is only the orderliness with a mistaken point of view, it’s still functioning. It’s still manifesting the relative field.

Rick: I got an interesting email just about the day before yesterday from an old friend of mine who is on a program that’s called the Purusha program. What that is, is it’s a program where single men who have chosen to become single in order to completely dedicate themselves to attaining enlightenment, do just that. And this particular group that this fellow is on is way up in the Himalayas in Uttarkashi, India with a fairly large group of guys. And for years they’ve been spending, I don’t know, maybe 8, 9, 10 hours a day meditating and doing related practices. Just pedal to the metal. What’s that phrase? Doing everything. But what he said was rather poignant. He said that a lot of his friends in that group are going through a sort of mid-life crisis now because they’re beginning to feel like, “Hey, we’re getting older and I don’t know if we’re going to get enlightened.” And I find it ironic that out here in the so-called mud, there’s all kinds of people getting enlightened. And I imagine that a number of them are, and maybe for some reason just don’t quite realize it. But one thing he said was that his criteria were that being able to levitate or perform rather miraculous things were the benchmarks or the criteria of established enlightenment. And if you couldn’t do those things, then you just weren’t there. And if that is the case, in my opinion, although I’ve heard great teachers say this, he’s setting the bar rather high.

Stan: It is rather high.

Rick: Because I’ve never seen anyone do any of those things, but I’m sure I’ve seen quite a few enlightened people in my life. So what do you say to that?

Stan: Well, I also don’t readily levitate and I don’t walk through walls very often. But I’ve had other more most amazing experiences and I just say that maybe my physiology isn’t refined enough yet to be able to do that. And so even though my awareness, you know, there’s a very interesting precursor to the relative. I think it’s soul and then emotion and then mind and then relativity or something like that. There’s a staging of things manifest. So on the level of mind, we have a lot of people that are enlightened and I think it’s just a matter of time now before that becomes a level of the relative. But their own awareness is already at the level of mind and it’s already there.

Rick: So to clarify what you said, it’s only a matter of time before what becomes a level of the relative?

Stan: Well, before that unboundedness.

Rick: People levitating and stuff like that?

Stan: Yeah, I think that’s really, really very, very close.

Rick: And you think when that happens, if it happens, that people who are doing such things will be any more enlightened than people are now?

Stan: I think they’ll be just saturated in bliss 24/7. I think enlightenment for me is waking up to my own true nature. That’s like the threshold.

Rick: That’s the bottom line.

Stan: Yeah, and being awake to that all the time. And then the icing on the cake is how long can you live to enjoy the relative expression of that? And what happened, Rick, this is important too, I re-read or first of all I get rid of my whole, I had a monstrous library of spiritual work and so forth. And I realized that all of it was written by people that didn’t have the experiences.

Rick: All of it?

Stan: Very, very large percentage. And the small percentage that was written by people that did have the experience, I didn’t have the experience when I read it the first time. So I had to re-read and re-learn every single thing that I held to be valuable after I had my experience. Because I saw it from a completely different point of view. And I think that that’s like that. I think we’re going to see that as people bring into their relative that unboundedness, that we’ll see the relative respond very, very directly to that.

Rick: Yeah, and you’re speaking a little bit abstractly, but what you’re saying is that as enlightened states become more common, and even perhaps the norm, at least in some areas, that things which were once considered miraculous, the performance of cities and so on, will become more commonplace also, and will be considered perhaps normal manifestations of these higher states of consciousness.

Stan: There’s a book that I hold, that Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, it’s kind of like a bible for me, and it talks about how a person evolves and what they’re able to do. But one of the most important statements in it is that a person has to be in integrity in order to have whatever they want in the world. And to me that integrity means that they have to actually experience and believe what’s happening. So you just can’t say to yourself, “Okay, I know that I’m all there is, and I’ll be able to walk through walls,” because you still have residual intellectual values that don’t really believe that. They can’t be honestly supportive of that attempt. And slowly, through very, very gradual loosening and expansion of what you feel the relative is, the relative becomes a much more flexible and interactive media of your own awareness.

Rick: Would you say that you’re really altering your beliefs, or would you say that that’s putting the cart before the horse, and what’s really happening is that your experience is changing, and naturally when your experience changes, your beliefs alter themselves to accommodate the new experience?

Stan: I really can’t separate the two any longer.

Rick: They go hand in hand?

Stan: They’re both hand in hand, and there’s more than just both. There’s several things. There’s the desire, there’s the fulfillment, there’s the witnessing of it, there’s the integration of it, there’s the metabolization of that integration, and then there’s a greater expansion. So it’s not as though something new is being learned, but the resistance is being dropped, because you’re witnessing and you’re experiencing and you’re believing a greater truth. So the greatness has always been there, but the filters have always been tight, and they’re just relaxing and becoming transparent.

Rick: I just want to dwell on this point a little bit more. Everything is happening simultaneously.

Stan: On all levels.

Rick: Yes. And obviously you’re doing different things. You’re meditating, you’re doing spiritual practices, you’re reading books and perhaps thinking and talking about these things. Those are different facets of our activity. If we thought of our makeup as being like a table with four legs, you can pull any one leg and the rest of the legs are going to come along, along with the whole table. So like that, would you say that there can be several different factors which can move our evolution toward enlightenment along? The intellect can have its effect, and you can actually, through some intellectual clarification that you might get from talking to somebody or reading a book, some change can take place in your understanding, which in turn will pull the leg of your experience along, or it could happen the other way around.

Stan: It happens just the way you said, but also the hand that’s reaching out for the leg is the same as the material of the leg now. So you’re witnessing that all of that, the whole action is the Self. So that makes it much more…

Rick: Simultaneous.

Stan: Much more integrated. There is no “this” any longer. It’s a part of my being that appears to my intellect and my senses as “this”, but I know that I’m one with it. So that knowing gives me a different relationship with the whole relative field.

Rick: Is the knowing just as predominant or more so than the intellectual and sensory evaluation of this thing?

Stan: Yes, the knowing is more real for me than the intellectual and sensual.

Rick: So primarily you know this as yourself, secondarily you know it as a notebook.

Stan: That’s correct.

Rick: And that’s spontaneously the case all the time as you walk down the street, drive your car, eat lunch.

Stan: Absolutely. And if I can just share, it’s like a king knowing he’s a king, he commands the kingdom. But not knowing he’s a king, everybody can boss him around if he doesn’t know who he is. So when you know that you’re part of the entire kingdom, it’s part of your own awareness, then you have a different relationship with the entire environment and with the world. It’s not the same as a person who doesn’t know that.

Rick: Here’s a question out of left field. A lot of people consider celibacy important for gaining enlightenment. Do you have any comments on whether or not it is?

Stan: Well, I’ve never been celibate for major periods of my life. I’ve had some short periods, months or so of celibacy. And I found that in some of those periods, my actual spiritual experiences were enhanced. And then when those periods were over, maybe there weren’t as many flashy experiences happening. So I did find some relationship. But I can’t talk from a life of celibacy because I don’t have that experience.

Rick: Yeah, well it obviously didn’t seem to be a problem. When you had this awakening experience in 1994, was there anything leading up to it? Looking back, you feel that it might have been symptomatic of the approach of that transition? Or was life pretty much exactly as it had been and all of a sudden, kaboom, kaboom, you had this thing?

Stan: Yeah, actually there were quite a few things leading up to it. Two very important things that come to mind. The first one is, ever since I was a little child, I wanted to sort of love the world. I come from a Christian background, so St. Francis of Assisi was able to talk to birds and animals. I wanted to have that relationship with the world. And also, Christ was one of my mentors and spiritual leaders. And I wanted to have that unbounded, compassionate love. Well, there was a time then that I became so open to love that whatever I put my attention on, I almost fell absolutely in love with. Whether it was a tree or a cloud or a person or whatever it was. And I actually felt broken. I can remember crying and sobbing because I didn’t feel like I could live with that kind of love.

Rick: Almost too much for you to handle?

Stan: It was totally overwhelming.

Rick: Was it before your awakening?

Stan: Yeah. And so, I had heard that there was a place where there was sort of a spiritual shrine that I could go. And I wanted to go and sort of bare my soul to God or whatever. And I went there and I sort of said, “Look, if there are such things as saints or God or Buddha or Jesus that have attained mortality, I hope you can hear this prayer because I feel broken. And I feel like I can’t live with this kind of love in my life.” And I stayed there. It was quite an emotional thing for me. I cried and I laid on the ground and I spent as long as I wanted to there. It was a very private little shrine. And then the curator came in and he said, “How did you find this place?” And I said, “Well, I had just heard of it.” He said, “People don’t hear of this place.” He said, “This place brings people to it. People don’t find it.”

Rick: It was up in New York State?

Stan: Yeah. And I said, “Well, I’m here.” And he said, “I know you are.” And he said, “We’ve been preparing for something for five years that we’re starting tonight. And you’re here. And we feel that somehow nature or spirit or God has brought you here. Would you like to be part of it?” And I said, “I don’t think I can.” I said, “I’m kind of a broken person and I don’t think I have anything to give. What would you want me to do?” And he said, “Well, this is going to last for seven weeks. We’re going to do a rather extensive ceremony that’s only attempted about every 500 years.” It was called the Sri Chakra Initiation. And I said, “Well, what would I do? What would you want me for?” He said, “Just come as often as you can, every day preferably, and just sit here and radiate love.” And I thought, “Oh, I’m the man for this job.” I’m off the streets. I’m much better not even being in the world. And so I went and I sat there. And I sat there and I sat there and I sat there, mostly with my eyes closed, ignoring everybody, just trying to deal with this unbounded love. And then the weeks passed and the night came when they were going to install this chakra. And over the time period, it came to my attention like, “Well, what is a chakra and where is it?” And it’s an energy center. It’s sort of a metaphysical energy center. And I thought, “Where are they going to install it?” Because nobody was telling me any of these answers. I wasn’t even asking the questions. I just was thinking about it. And I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be installed in the people that are here.” And that kind of dawned on me. And so the last night, as they were doing the final ceremony, he addressed the entire gathering. And by that time, there were hundreds of people there. I was one of the few that stayed the whole period. But the last three days, many, many people came, thousands actually. And he said what this was, is that there was an ancient spiritual leader who gave a gift to humanity. And the gift that he had given was that he would break the bond of the individual with the thing that they were attached to. So in other words, that bond of love that I had to everything was absolutely severed that night. And I was free. But with that freedom came something that I hadn’t anticipated at all. And that was absolute non-attachment to everything. I didn’t care about my body, my children, my wife, my family, my job. Nothing at all could I really feel that I wanted to live for. And that’s why some days later, when I went through this experience in meditation, I didn’t have the desire to hang on to my life any longer. I had already dropped it. So I think that those two events, the ceremony that was being planned for three years that only happens once every five hundred years, my showing up, and that unbounded attachment that was so painful that I couldn’t live with it, and it was just severed.

Rick: And I want to re-emphasize, in case people have just tuned in or haven’t heard this whole interview, that you have certainly not lost the capacity to love or feel compassion or anything else.

Stan: No, not at all.

Rick: All you’re saying here is that the attachment component was broken.

Stan: Yes, the need to hang on.

Rick: Right. And “need” is the key word there. What’s in it for me? I need this. Instead of giving.

Stan: Right. It is what it is. And just love it for that. But it felt absolutely empty at that time in my life because up to that point I had lived with attachments to everything. To relationships, to jobs, to career. “What are you?” “I’m my job.” And when you can’t say that any longer, I didn’t have anything to replace it with. I hadn’t experienced being yet. I just wasn’t attached to anything at all.

Rick: It’s true. If you come up to somebody and say, “Who are you?” They’ll say, “Joe Smith.” And, “Tell me more.” “Well, I have a wife and three kids. I work here. I live there. I like skiing. I do this. I have my appendix out.” They go into all these little specific things, but are any of those who they really are?

Stan: So now, if somebody asked me, I’d say, “I’m more than I can even imagine myself to be.”

Rick: Are you very open on campus about the fact that you’ve had this awakening?

Stan: I don’t actually broadcast it. I kind of fly below the radar. Going on television here is going to change that. But I’m not trying to hide it either. I just feel that if it’s necessary, nature will ask me to share that. And if it’s not, then I don’t have the need for my ego to share it.

Rick: You must have talked among your fellow students and friends and so on about these things.

Stan: A lot of people aren’t too interested, actually.

Rick: Really? On a campus where education for enlightenment is the motto?

Stan: I’m in the business department, so a lot of people come from non-meditative backgrounds. And there are certain people that are very interested. I’ve made those friends.

Rick: Do you ever encounter people who are skeptical about it?

Stan: Well, yes. And I don’t feel a need to convince them of anything.

Rick: When I first brought up the concept of doing this show, some people were really enthusiastic, and others said, “Oh, yeah, right. You’re going to interview people who think they’re enlightened.” The emphasis is on the word “think.”

Stan: Right. So, before I started tonight, I was going to open by saying, “I don’t know if this is the truth, but it’s what I believe to be my truth. And I don’t know if it’s real, but it’s what I remember happening to me.” That’s all I can really say.

Rick: What can anybody say? Well, that might be a good note to end on.

Stan: Okay, wonderful.

Rick: We’re here with Stan Kendz in a show which we have newly entitled “Buddha at the Gas Pump.” You look a little bit like the Buddha. Yeah. Hopefully, I won’t so much. And I hope you’ve enjoyed this show. We plan to continue doing them weekly. They will be broadcast on FPAC, and at some point we’ll be telling you the exact time. They’ll be broadcast every week, so you can set your DVR. If you don’t get FPAC, which is the Fairfield Public Access TV station, which I think you have to have Mediacom in order to get, then they are also on YouTube. There’s a YouTube channel where I will be uploading these interviews. I’ve already uploaded one. At the end of this show, there will be some titles that will stay on your screen for some time, which will give you the web address of that YouTube channel, also the web address of a chat group where people are discussing the kinds of things that Stan has been discussing, and maybe Stan will join it himself, and we could ask him questions. Also, I think my email address will be there, Rick Archer, in case you’d like to get on an email notification list to be notified of future interviews and changes in schedule or anything of that nature. Thank you very much for watching, and we’ll see you next week.

Stan: Thank you, Rick. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you, Stan.

Stan: I really enjoyed it. Thank you.