Stephen D’Amico Transcript

Stephen D’Amico Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 400 of them by now, and if this is new to you, please go to the past interviews menu on batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, where you’ll see all the previous ones. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page of the site, and we really appreciate and rely upon the support that we have been receiving in whatever amount, large or small.

My guest today is Stephen D’Amico. Stephen is a spiritual teacher, mystical poet, and author. At the age of 22, he went through a profound spiritual transformation that culminated in a permanent realization of his true nature. Since then, his life has been devoted to understanding the spiritual path from an evolutionary perspective and helping others reconnect with their true nature to help bring about a global awakening in human consciousness. The main way he does this is through the direct transmission of the enlightened state of being, which connects others with their own true nature. In the past, Stephen has worked in the field of conflict resolution and restorative justice as a mediator, facilitator, trainer, and project leader for youth social action groups. He’s also taught at both the elementary and high school levels, focusing on the special needs of students with learning disabilities.

Currently, he and his wife, Aniko, run Millwood Melt, a lively grilled cheese restaurant in their beloved community of Leesdale in Toronto. And in honor of that, I had a cheese sandwich for lunch, but it wasn’t grilled. I needed Stephen for that, and he wasn’t here. Customers and students playfully refer to Stephen as the grilled cheese guru. When not feeding bodies, Stephen lives and breathes to feed souls. He currently hosts transformational gatherings, satsangs, and offers individuals enlightened guidance and support via phone, Skype, or in person. He’s the author of two books, The Incredible State of Absolute Nothingness, A Personal Account of Spiritual Enlightenment, and Heaven on Earth, A Guide to Enlightenment and Human Unity.

I managed to read both of them cover to cover in the past week, and I enjoyed them a lot. One of the things Stephen did when he was in college was take creative writing courses, and he’s a good writer and conveys his experiences very, very clearly, as I’m sure you will see in this interview. So, Stephen, thanks, welcome.

Stephen: Well, thank you Rick, it’s really a pleasure to be here.

Rick: Yeah, good to have you. I’ve got a few questions already that came in from people, which I’ll be asking in the course of the interview, but maybe for starters, your book The Incredible State of Absolute Nothingness is a nice, I guess we’d say, biographical account of your life, and it might be good to start on that note. You say in your book that it’s kind of unique that you knew your true nature as a young person, as a child, but actually it’s maybe somewhat rare, but not altogether uncommon among the people I interview. There are quite a few people I’ve interviewed who relate a similar thing, and then like you, they tend to lose it in their teenage years. Then generally among people I interview, they have regained it, which is why I’m interviewing them. And one fellow, who, incidentally, was also from Toronto, said he only had a 15-minute period in his whole life where he lost his awareness of his true nature and he said he didn’t want to live, but he managed to recover it after 15 minutes. In any case, I guess you were saying that you knew who and what you were from your earliest recollection.

Stephen: Yeah, there was a connection for sure, but let me just quickly qualify that, because my view is that it happens for all human beings. We all lose it. It’s just to what degree and how long does it last.

Rick: You think we all have it at some point during our lives or do most people come in totally blotto, that they have lost it from birth?

Stephen: No, I don’t think so. I think we all come in sort of still connected to Source as awareness, but we’re learning to identify with the body as we do that. And the more identified we become with the body, then often what happens is, as we’re developing human egos, we lose all connection to true nature.

Rick: Right, and do you see that as a necessary evolutionary progression, that you have to lose it in order to regain it, in a way, so as to actually be able to live it as a human being?

Stephen: Probably, for now, as a human being at this stage in our evolution. I don’t know about the future, but it seems to be the way it goes now.

Rick: They say that people who come in totally self-realized and never lose it aren’t actually people, they are avatars, who are here for a specific purpose, but the common lot tends to lose it. Now you also mentioned that later on in your life, you remembered having chosen your parents. I have heard that before. I have heard spiritual teachers say that we choose our parents according to the sort of karmic fit that a certain pair of individuals will provide. Do you want to just elaborate on that a little bit?

Stephen: Well, I think it happens. I think it happens for all human beings, for all human souls as they incarnate.

Rick: Well, some people might say, “I would never have chosen my parents if I had been given a choice.” Or “Why would some poor soul who is born in Sudan or something choose to be born in those circumstances?” What would you say to them?

Stephen: Well, those are heavy questions, right? Usually there is a karmic reason for every decision as you prepare for incarnation. I cannot say what that would be for any particular individual, but it seems to me that that is the way it works.

Rick: Okay. Now I’m going to just refer to some little notes I took while I was reading your book, and if I’m jumping ahead too fast and there are things that you want to say to fill in the gaps, please just contribute that. But one thing you referred to was, that as a child, a subtle vision arose in your mind’s eye every night before falling asleep. That sounded significant. What was that vision?

Stephen: Well, the vision itself was what I call vehicles of transformation. These are all the little subtle forms that can arise as part of our inner journey. All kinds of things can happen. But that particular form was what many traditions refer to as the Divine Spark. And as a child, and as a baby really, I was able to perceive that through my mind’s eye before I fell asleep every night. And what it would do was expand my beingness into both what I now call the luminous nirvana or the light of God and also the formless presence that is God before manifestation.

Rick: So how would you describe it? You say ‘Divine Spark,’ was it just like a little glowing ball of light or what?

Stephen: Yeah, it would start as a tiny spark off in the distance, but then, as I focused on it, it would grow and expand until my entire field of awareness was gone. And in fact, I just lost all sense of identity and merged with the light.

Rick: And that would be your nightly experience as a young child?

Stephen: Every night.

Rick: Nice. And then would you retain that as you were sleeping or would you sort of black out when you actually went to sleep?

Stephen: No, I would not retain it. It would be a process of expanding and becoming one with this luminous dimension. And there was another part of the experience that is what I refer to as a contraction phase. So, the light would then return as a form in my mind’s eye, until it became just a tiny point and I myself would actually have to merge with that point and dissolve all sense of self. And that would lead to the formless dimension.

Rick: So, every night you dissolved all sense of self, merged with the formless dimension and then went to sleep?

Stephen: Yeah, pretty much. Sometimes it was this process of going through the inner light, expanding into that and then dissolving into the formless and then into the light again, over and over again. It was always wonderful, so sometimes I’d let it go for hours.

Rick: Wow. Is that something that you could have described to friends back at that time, or was it something you remembered later on in life as having happened?

Stephen: Oh, I’m sure I could have tried to explain it, yeah. I don’t think it was beyond my ability to explain it, but I didn’t think anyone would believe me.

Rick: Yeah, but you were well aware of it and enjoyed it and welcomed it every night.

Stephen: Yeah, I’ve spoken to seekers since then and it’s not an uncommon experience, it does happen for people.

Rick: Yeah, to me that suggests that the connection with your true nature was very lively and very strong and very clear and that it wasn’t overshadowed to a very great degree, so that even the sort of diminishing of sensory input that happens when we go to sleep enabled it to just blossom forth naturally. Would that be a fair description, you think?

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, sure. It happened quite naturally.

Rick: Yeah, and when you woke up in the morning was there a similar thing where the sensory input hadn’t begun to impinge upon you yet and so there was this flood of pure awareness before you got into your day or what?

Stephen: My mornings were unique in the sense that I would also have a state of awareness throughout sleep, particularly during dreams. So, people describe having the witness throughout waking.

Rick: Lucid dreaming, yeah.

Stephen: I would have that as well. And so, often when I woke up or as I was waking up, I’d be aware that I was returning to my little body, to being a person in the world. But I would still retain an awareness of true nature as I was waking up. Often, during that time, I would have a quick review or a scan of my dreams from that night and just seem to naturally understand what they meant, how they related to me as part of my own inner work as a kid.

Rick: That’s pretty neat. I was going to ask you about that, maintaining awareness during sleep, because I have a file on my computer that is a compilation of quotes from a whole lot of different spiritual teachers, going to some ancient ones and some modern ones, things from the Bible and everything else, all related to that very experience that in the awakened person, however you want to describe it, there is a continuity of pure awareness underlying or continuing throughout waking, dreaming and sleeping, and that nothing overshadows it. You know that term “turiya” – fourth, right? And waking, dreaming and sleeping are the first three, one, two, three. And then “turiya” – pure awareness is the fourth. It is said that, once attained, clearly and stably, that fourth state is perpetual as the other three rotate around. So, I guess you are saying that was pretty much your experience?

Stephen: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and then you lost it during your teenage years and then did it return? Is that your experience now, pretty much?

Stephen: Yeah, pretty much, not to the same degree. There was a period where I focused on establishing that the fourth state is true, three is true, and so I worked very diligently at it to ensure that in fact it was possible. And for months I had 24-hour witnessing awareness. But now it comes and goes during sleep and dreaming, for sure, but it doesn’t concern me all that much.

Rick: Yeah, I have friends who say something similar, they say it went on for years and they got to a point where they thought, “I’d rather just conk out, I don’t want to be awake, I’d just as soon sleep.”

Stephen: Yeah, I mean there was a period where I was sleeping, as an experiment, for something like 16 hours a day to see if it was possible to maintain uninterrupted immersion in the formless state. And finally, I heard a voice, which I referred to as the Divine, which implied, “Enough already.”

Rick: There was a sage in the Vedic literature named Durga Thomas and his whole thing was, he liked to sleep. He would sleep for around six months at a time, but at the same time, he was this great saint.

Stephen: Yeah, I used to like to sleep a whole lot. I have memories of my dad trying to wake me up, grabbing, that’s Ronnie Guy, a truck driver, and he would try to wake me up and I just wouldn’t wake up. So, he would actually grab my mattress and shake it like a sheet, and I would just be like a piece of uncooked spaghetti just rolling around. I knew he was doing this but it didn’t break my sleep.

Rick: That’s funny. Some yogis do that with samadhi, you do it with sleep. Okay, well we’re going to continue on, let’s stick with the autobiographical a bit more before we get into some of these other points. So, what else is there that is significant to recount about your childhood years, in terms of spiritual experiences, spiritual thoughts and aspirations, before you got to that point where you started to lose it and knew you were going to lose it and were kind of dreading and resisting the inevitable loss?

Stephen: I guess maybe the only thing that’s really significant is that I had discovered these little ways of reconnecting, whenever I felt as if I was becoming a little too identified with my sense of personhood or individuality or just being a person or body in the world and not feeling connected to the trans-personal or witnessing state. So, I discovered these little techniques that I would use as a way to reestablish that connection while I was going about my everyday life.

Rick: Like what?

Stephen: Probably the most significant one was just staring at myself in a mirror. And as I would do this, my awareness would just naturally expand and I’d be aware more of the witness simply by just gazing at my form in the mirror. That would always lead to a total immersion in beingness itself and I would realize that beingness, not only my beingness, but that beingness is the source and the substance of everything in existence. Then that would be a little too overwhelming at times. I just couldn’t believe that this was the truth, so I just pulled back and just abided in the witness.

Rick: And how old were you at this stage, when you had these realizations?

Stephen: Four or five. I mean, it was there before I had conceptual knowledge. As I was developing a conceptual understanding of my own experience, which happens as we develop as human beings, I would start to understand it in a self-reflexive, verbal kind of way, that we comment on our experience.

Rick: That’s pretty cool. I mean, when I compare that to the kind of things I was concerned with when I was that age and during all those years, man, you really got a jump start.

Stephen: I had the same concerns too, though. I was still a boy, you know.

Rick: Yeah, but it’s remarkable. Maybe it will become more and more common now as society, as the world wakes up, but I think it’s neat. So okay, you mentioned some techniques. Well, you said the mirror gazing, and you said some others. I don’t know if these were things you were doing in your childhood, like tracing back the witness, quantum gazing, things like that, or was that stuff you developed later on?

Stephen: I think the quantum gazing thing was more in my teenage years, but tracing back the witness, which was sort of just allowing myself to shift into that observing state, I would just ask myself, “What is the source of this?” I was doing that from quite a young age. That is a form of self-inquiry. I mean, everybody knows Ramana’s, but the main method or technique that I teach people is simply, to allow yourself to get in touch with the witness. And then, as you are abiding in that, probe deeper into what is the source of this witnessing. That leads to beingness, the fullness of beingness, true nature, many different things.

Rick: A question just came in from Jan Essman from Copenhagen, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times actually, and he said, “If he was experiencing the witnessing that is associated with self-realization, he would experience dreamless sleep as bliss.” Is or was that your experience?

Stephen: Bliss, not as much. It was more peace, equanimity, but there was definite bliss during the light.

Rick: Yeah, you did mention a stage at which you didn’t even dream, that might have been later on, after your big awakening at 22, right?

Stephen: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and we’ll talk more about that and about bliss, but let’s dwell a bit more on the witness thing. I know you do advocate witnessing as a practice and I must admit that I have an ingrained bias that was drilled into my head by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was my teacher for many years. He was really emphatic that witnessing is not something one does or should try to do. That an attempt at witnessing will divide the mind and that witnessing is actually more of a quality of awakened consciousness, where there is a natural contrast between the silence of pure awareness and the dynamism of activity. And you don’t have to do it any more than you do “being clean” after having taken a shower, you know? It’s a natural condition that just is with you or it is not. And he cautioned against trying to do anything, because he said it would divide the mind and make you less effective in activity and create an inner strain. But you do advocate some sort of practice to try to culture or develop the witness, so maybe you could help me reconcile that discrepancy.

Stephen: I think what he is describing can happen, you can set up a mental position where you think, “Oh, I’m observing my mind. So, this is the witness.” But really, you’re just dividing the mind between a partial amount of your awareness, which is now looking or attempting to see what’s arising.

Rick: Yeah, because when you say “witnessing,” you don’t mean some little part of you over here is witnessing the rest of you over there, you mean a contrast between the unboundedness which is your true nature and anything in the relative world, right?

Stephen: Yes, but in terms of understanding the dynamics of this, from a psychological perspective, you have awareness, I have awareness, we all have awareness. So, although there are things we can do to think that we’re getting in touch with our own awareness, we can get in touch with our own awareness, you can do it now, I can do it now. And so, the process or the technique of connecting with the witness is to actually abide in awareness. And at first, you are just aware and feel, “Okay, so yeah, great, I’m aware, that’s not a big deal.” But if you let that pass, the dissatisfaction with the non-significance of the fact that you have awareness, and actually continue to keep your attention on your own awareness, it naturally expands into the witness.

Rick: Yeah, here is a passage from your book, you said, “Subjectively, it felt as if my identity was dividing into two parts, an impersonal side on the one hand and my personal sense of self on the other.”

Stephen: Yeah, that is the experience when you connect with the witness. You zoom back or zoom up or zoom out and you then realize that you have a body, but you’re not a body. You have your mind but you’re not just your mind, that there is something about us that is bigger than our own personal selves in the world.

Rick: Yeah, and that is, by its nature, at least at one stage of our experience, not involved in activity, right?

Stephen: It’s our beingness.

Rick: It’s our beingness, yeah.

Stephen: We are human beings, so the human part is the doing part and the being is the part that is inactive, yeah. It’s the bird on the tree in that Upanishad, one bird flits about and the other one sits idly.

Rick: Right, Chandogya I think. And in the Gita, there are a lot of verses about this, how in acting and sitting and walking and standing and drinking and whatever, one maintains that “I do not act at all.” And that is not an attitude that is being advocated, that is a natural spontaneous                                        experience.

Stephen: Natural and spontaneous, but also not obtainable through actual techniques.

Rick: Right, that’s the point I was trying to make, that if you’re going through your day trying to manipulate your experience and get into this witness state, I’m just not sure how advisable that would be, but it may be a condition that after a certain amount of spiritual development you find yourself in naturally.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s why I tell all my students, listeners, anyone who wants to hear me talk about this stuff, that that is the importance of meditating at the beginning of the day. And if you meditate properly and you can drop into beingness, you are naturally going to witness. You may not maintain it throughout your day, but I’m telling you, it’s going to emerge.

Rick: Right, and over time, it will stabilize and become more clear.

Stephen: Over time it does, this is the case for most people who are on the path, I think.

Rick: Yep, and would you also agree that, as interesting as this whole witnessing thing is, it actually is a stage, it’s not the ultimate state of development.

Stephen: Yeah, what is that, the ultimate state?

Rick: Yeah, good point. Well, we will get on to that a little bit.

Stephen: It’s an important part of spiritual development for sure. In a way, it’s when the soul finally comes online.

Rick: Yeah, okay, flipping back to your childhood a little bit, you mentioned also, in addition to this thing that would happen when you go to sleep, there was a stage at which subtle beings would visit you. And there was one that you actually felt was a representation of the devil. And as a child you saw it as the count from Sesame Street. And then, in addition to that guy tempting you and trying to entice you to follow him in order to gain certain abilities, there were these – this may sound far out to people but I think it’s worth discussing, they’re going to find it in your book anyway – there were these gargoyles. They were almost like bats hanging upside down, that you felt had a protective function. So, whenever the Sesame Street guy showed up, they would also show up and watch over you. So, just so that doesn’t blow people’s minds too much, maybe you should elaborate on that situation a little bit.

Stephen: Now, how do I convince people that I’m sane?

Rick: Yeah, just don’t start trying to pick bugs out of the air and we’ll be convinced.

Stephen: You know, in our contemporary culture, when we hear stuff like this, we have a hard time understanding it from anything other than a psychological perspective. And from a psychological perspective, it can only be understood as manifestations of the mind, the imagination. So that’s it, whatever you think it is, it’s not that, it’s just your childhood imagination, “Oh, you were dreaming, don’t worry about it.” But my own understanding of the spiritual path and of that actual experience is occult. And there are occult phenomena, and I encountered an occult phenomenon as a child.

Rick: Yeah.

Stephen: And look, there are not just negative forces, there are positive forces, positive and negative beings as well, subtle beings, and some of them tempt us and some of them help us.

Rick: Yeah, well I’ve brought up this point many times in interviews. I’ve even devoted whole panel discussions to this topic, because, even though it puts some people off, I feel as if we ought to really know the story, we ought to know what is going on. And I feel that for many reasons, as you said, there is a whole realm, or many realms in creation which are heavily populated with all sorts of subtle forms of life. And it is common for us to encounter those on the spiritual path, the spiritual literature is full of such encounters, so we might as well gain some understanding of it and not just pretend it doesn’t exist, because it doesn’t fit our philosophical viewpoint at the moment.

Stephen: That’s right, yeah, and there is a connection between madness and mystical awareness and development. That whole zone is part of that. I mean, you know, schizophrenic individuals aren’t necessarily just having aberrant thoughts. There could be beings and forces that are interrupting and interfering with their cognitive functions.

Rick: Yeah, they could even be … and those beings may not be unbeknownst to them. They may perceive them and see them and everybody else just thinks they are crazy and gives them Thorazine, but they could actually be opened up to stuff, astral realms and so on, and yet not have the capacity to deal with it, not have the inner strength or whatever it takes.

Stephen: That’s right, that’s right. And a large part of those beings are from what Aurobindo referred to as the intermediate zone. There are sort of half-realized, half-corrupted beings all throughout the universe. And you can encounter them. Oftentimes, they want you to follow them, there is a desire to have you follow and listen to them, but they are not immersed in the truth completely. And so, what he said is that you can still learn from them, but it’s a realm of half-lights and half-truths and it’s all mixed.

Rick: Yeah, Patanjali talks about this in the Yoga Sutras. He actually says that at a certain stage you may be tempted by certain celestial beings or whatever, and they try to allure you with certain promises. And you should just say, “Thanks, but no thanks,” and move on.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it is an important distinction, because the most important part of spiritual development, at least in my understanding, and although this view isn’t necessarily as accepted or it’s going through some kind of debate in spiritual conversations, the whole point of the spiritual path is to awaken to the absolute truth. And so that is why, in many traditions, they say, “Never mind all of that visionary stuff. Move past that, because it is all a distraction at this point. Until you get established in your own true nature, don’t worry about any of that stuff.” But then afterwards, you begin to distinguish between benevolent beings and malevolent ones. And on the path, the benevolent ones can certainly be helpful.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, to reference Maharishi again, he always used this example of a territory which had all kinds of interesting things in it, diamond mines and gold mines and stuff, and then there was a fort at the center of the territory commanding it. He said, it might be tempting to go after this diamond mine or that gold mine, but what you really should do is capture the fort, because then the territory will belong to you. Then you can safely explore it at your leisure, without getting into a dicey situation because you’re venturing into something that you have no command over.

Stephen: That’s right, orders from headquarters.

Rick: Yeah, so while we’re still on this point, you just said that you felt as if these subtler beings, some of them anyway, could be helpful on our path. And it’s worth throwing into the mix here, that there is not only the astral level which is still relatively gross, but there is a celestial level, which is more refined, much closer to the absolute level. And in what way would you say that these subtler impulses of intelligence, which are functional in the universe, could be helpful to human spiritual development?

Stephen: They’re always helping us, or trying anyways. I think that is part of their divine purpose. But if we open up to this possibility at a certain stage in your own spiritual development or just from curiosity, maybe the religious people aren’t all wrong. Maybe they have discovered something beneficial here and you open up to it and invite that influence in. Miracles upon miracles.

Rick: Yeah, and New Age people are always talking about ascended masters and guardian angels and spirit guides and all this stuff. I guess you still have to have a little caution. When you say “invite something in,” that has some scary connotations. But at the same time, you want to keep a balance, I think, and not just dismiss out of hand all of this stuff as hogwash. On the other hand, don’t just be undiscriminating and open and “anything goes” and “I’ll invite whatever comes along.” It’s as if there is just this balancing thing.

Stephen: That is spiritual maturity and a lot of New Age people don’t necessarily have it. They hook into this stuff and again, they get trapped in the intermediate zone.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Safety first.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so as you got a little older you realized that you were going to have to disconnect from this formless dimension that had been so predominant during your younger years and you were just going to have to become a wild and crazy teenager for a while. You said that there was actually something intentional you did to precipitate this. You began breathing from your upper chest rather than the belly. Do you want to talk about that a little?

Stephen: Yeah, well one of those little techniques, that I discovered when I was a young kid growing up, was to really focus on breathing. I naturally breathed fully, which is what we learn in yoga, to have full breath. And so, by breathing into my belly, I would first dissolve into my own sense of beingness as an individual, but then from there, from the belly center into beingness itself. So that was another technique that I used. And I knew that I had to give up my connection. So, I dropped all my practices and it was that one in particular that I focused on deliberately not doing, by only breathing into the upper part of my chest as a way to forget about the absolute truth. But I stopped all the other practices, tracing back the witness, looking in the mirror, those are the two main ones aside from deep breathing.

Rick: Yeah, and you actually became agnostic then, for a period of years. So, it’s interesting, because most people that I’ve spoken with, who felt like they had some degree of awakening during childhood, really didn’t want to lose it. They did almost everything they could to prevent themselves from losing it. But you, it seems as if you realized, as if you walked willingly into the fire. You realized, “I’m going to have to go through this phase, and all right, I’m shutting it down.”

Stephen: I’m trying not to be so extreme, as I mature as a human being. Yeah, I think that was just the way it unfolded for me and it was something I knew I had to do. It was sort of demarcated by a very time-bound event that happened. I knew it was going to happen, that it had to happen and I said, “Okay, well let’s do this completely.” Maybe my dad had some influence here. He would say, “but don’t do anything half-assed. If you’re going to do it, do it all in.”

Rick: All right, that’s funny. So, how many years did you go in that phase of being shut down?

Stephen: Four or 5, till I was about 16 or 17.

Rick: That’s not too bad. And then, what was it that began to egg you to wake up again? Was there some little voice inside that said, “It’s time to remember”?

Stephen: Well, yes, but it happened after having my heart broken.

Rick: Oh, romantic breakup or something?

Stephen: Yeah, I was with a girl and it was a real good learning experience. I didn’t waste time exploring human sexuality either, so when that ended my delusions ended very quickly. I’d been, in a way, at the very young age of 15 or 16 sort of broken down by this tumultuous romantic sexual relationship and that prompted me to realize, “Okay, now you have to get it back.”

Rick: Huh, interesting. What do you mean, you “didn’t waste time” exploring human sexuality? You mean you were in this sexual relationship when you were 15, 16 and then the girl broke up with you and so you didn’t get to explore it that long or something?

Stephen: No, no, I did everything. It was like all you could possibly experience in a relationship, all the insanity of it, I experienced all of that.

Rick: You just compacted it into a short period of time.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, okay, so you went through all that and then at the tail end of that you thought, “There’s got to be more,” and “Oh yeah, there is that spiritual thing that I forgot about four or five years ago.”

Stephen: That’s right, yeah. So, that reignited my journey as a seeker again. It reignited, made it the central focus of my life from that point on.

Rick: Yeah, so what sort of things did you do as a seeker to get the train rolling again?

Stephen: Well, I was really asking myself all of those spiritual questions that we ask as teenagers, too. It coincided with that, with questions like what’s the purpose of life, why am I here, why are we here, what’s the meaning, is there meaning, all of that. And so, it was really a search to find the answers to those questions, not really realizing that the answers to those questions were states of being that I had lost touch with and had forgotten how to get back in touch with them.

Rick: And did you start doing various kinds of practices again?

Stephen: I had no idea about spiritual practices, not really.

Rick: So, you were just seeking intellectually and emotionally.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m sure this was before the internet, so …

Rick: Right.

Stephen: It’s like what you could find at your local library.

Rick: Yeah, and you mentioned that you somehow realized the importance of selfless service and started doing a lot of that.

Stephen: Yeah, as I got going with the search, with the inquiry into the answer to these questions, I began to have experiences again. And one of those was discovering that engaging in selfless service kind of gets rid of your own personal desire for satisfaction from life, getting that out of the way and realizing that if you just give yourself to others, you actually gain your true self. That is what I did all the time.

Rick: Cool. What forms of service did you do?

Stephen: Just everyday stuff. I put myself through high school and university, so I worked as a waiter at a restaurant up here in Canada. I don’t know if you have them down there. We have a restaurant called Swiss Chalet. It’s a rotisserie chicken place. I still enjoy it from time to time. It’s pretty good. Anyway, at work, predominantly, I would help my fellow employees. I’d clear their tables for them without being asked, the drivers in the back, if they or anyone needed my car, I’d just throw them the keys, take it, don’t give me back anything. I don’t want anything in return, I just wanted to do things for other people. So, I did whatever, it didn’t matter. Pour them a drink, get their coffee, light their cigarette, whatever. Whatever somebody needed I would try to provide it.

Rick: Yeah, and you felt that was sort of effective in helping to attenuate your ego and your sense of self-importance or something.

Stephen: Yeah, it was good practice. Still to this day, I do it.

Rick: Yeah, and I’m sure most people know that this is considered to be an important thing in all forms of spirituality, really Eastern and Western. They call it Seva in Sanskrit and I’m sure that in Christianity there are words for it and certainly, examples of it. It is kind of a time-honored method of helping to diminish self-centeredness and put one more in service of the Divine.

Stephen: Yeah, and awaken the soul, put someone in touch with the soul and from the soul you get more accurate intel, better orders from headquarters.

Rick: So, from the time you were 15 or 16 you got on the seeker train again and then you had your big awakening at 22, so that’s about 7 or 6 years or so. Was there a lot of intensity during that whole period, as if, “Whatever this is, I’ve got to get it,” or “I can’t stand living like this, I’ve got to achieve.” You mentioned that the last few months prior to your awakening was one long, dark night of the soul, but, so what was going on during those years?

Stephen: Yeah, there was an intensity. I was also going through all kinds of transformations, inner transformations, changes as we do, just being a human being. But as part of those, I was getting back in touch with certain realizations, but it wasn’t connected to an understanding of the absolute truth. So, I was moving in and out of the witness, but I had no idea what the witness was. That is why I felt sort of disassociated. You have to remember, I’m a materialist, I’m an agnostic at this point, and as far as the world is concerned I’m disassociating. That can’t be good, I wondered what’s happening? Am I becoming schizoid?

Rick: So, you were trying to make sense of your experience. And so, what was the nature of this dark night of the soul that you were in for a few months before your awakening?

Stephen: So, part of going through these changes of state and not really understanding them, there was some confusion. And along with the confusion, depression, because of not knowing, not understanding, and not feeling very grounded. I was also in university and it was quite challenging, the first few years often are very challenging, so there was that. As a result of the witness emerging and me not really understanding it and sort of being dissatisfied, too, with my own life and lack of knowing, I began to suffer from what we call existential ennui, or the sense of, “nothing matters,” which can be a universal experience. I’m sure you have come across accounts of people having that feeling of not understanding and then being very dissatisfied with conventional life and knowing that there has to be more, but not understanding what that “more” is. So it was that, it was like that.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know what the percentages are, but a large percentage of the US population and probably the Canadian is on Prozac and Zoloft or whatever these drugs are called, that try to provide some kind of solace because they feel so miserable. So, I think it’s almost universal that people don’t feel satisfied, whether they are still thinking that they are going to get satisfaction from the relative world or have given up hope in that.

Stephen: Either way, “What? What is this? How come I’m not happy?” This is perennial, but this is just how it’s showing up in the modern world and people are medicating.

Rick: So, I have a little passage here that you wrote about the moment of your enlightenment, which I could read, just a few sentences, but is there anything you want to say about the events leading up to that moment that would be interesting for people to hear?

Stephen: Well, let’s hear what you want to read and then maybe we can …

Rick: Okay, so here’s what you wrote. You said, “Every remnant of my personal identity was gone, obliterated. It was like amnesia, but even that fails to fully convey the sense of emptiness. It felt as if I had never existed. There was nothing. No more life, no more memories, no more me. Nothing. All that remained was my disembodied awareness and this endless realm of nothingness, a vacuum devoid of any features, forms or qualities. No formless bliss, no absolute truth, nothing.” So, you fell into this void, apparently, and you identify that as the big watershed moment.

Stephen: Yeah, that was part of the transformations I was experiencing on the night of my awakening. But there were definitely, as you read in my autobiography, things that happened or occurred before that, as well as after that.

Rick: Why don’t you fill us in a little bit, tell us about some of those things.

Stephen: Hmm, my wife told me to prepare for this question.

Rick: Well, you wrote a book about it.

Stephen: And she said, “Don’t tell people to read the book, you have to be prepared to give them the details,” so I’ll do my best. Well, let’s just move from there. On the night of my awakening, what was occurring was … I don’t know where to start. Probably just, I’d spent the evening out with a friend and something happened. We went to a bar and something happened at the bar that got me really turned off with wanting to be out at all anymore. I was suffering from existential anxiety and ennui and all of this, so I just wanted to go home. I went home.

Rick: And it was really cold that night, as I recall.

Stephen: Yeah, it was a cold night, sometime in the middle of January. I’d just gotten back from Florida with my girlfriend, my mom had bought me a ticket to go, because she knew that I was sad. She wanted to send me to Florida to try to help me get happy again because she didn’t understand what was going on. And I came home that night and there was an intensified longing for a final resolution to my search. I wanted to understand the answer to the questions that I had about life and meaning and purpose and all of this. What am I here? Why are we here? And I went into the house, I ended up sitting on the couch and just sinking back into the witness and from there got the impulse to get up and go to a room I had in the basement of my parents’ house at the time. So, I went into the basement which was pitch black and I laid on my bed. I sort of felt something kind of big was about to happen, but again, I didn’t really have any conceptual understanding for any of this, so I didn’t really know what was going on, but something was going on. And, in my room, as I was sinking more and more fully into the witness, I felt this presence actually come into my room. And that enveloped the entire space. That presence had this quality of the voidness that you just described and it said, “If you want to find the answer to your quest, you have to let go and become what you’re feeling emanating all around you.” I was terrified, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, so I was sort of apprehensive. Then I had a subtle vision arise in my mind’s eye of a vortex, just sort of opening up in my mind’s eye. From that unfathomable presence in the darkened space of my bedroom, I felt it urging me, “Go into that.” I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did, but felt as if this is pretty significant and I know I’m not getting the answers any other way, so I’ll let myself dissolve into this vortex. As soon as I did that, that’s when what you described happened. My entire sense of self was obliterated, it was shattered in a kind of a psychological, shamanic dismemberment. It wasn’t bodily but it was psychological, my entire sense of self was obliterated and dissolved into that void. And as I was in that void I thought, “Oh, this is a mistake, this can’t be the absolute truth, there’s nothing here! And am I going to have to stay here in this? If so, I’m done. I’ve made some kind of cosmic spiritual error and I’m just going to have to sit in this limbo-like place of void and nothingness.” It was a limbo without any indication of ever getting out. But now I understand that that is a part of the transformation we can even go through during meditation, but was more confabulated during this experience. And it was out of that voidness that I then was brought into a state of unity with the formless plenum, the fullness of that emptiness.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, I mean there’s sort of this interesting collection of terms that are used in spiritual literature, Vedic and otherwise, about whether it’s a fullness or an emptiness. The Buddhists talk a lot about emptiness and certain Vedic or Hindu texts talk about fullness, Purnamadah, Purnamidam, and Maharishi used to talk about it both ways. He would talk of fullness of emptiness and fullness of fullness. So, I suppose there can be different flavors to that experience and different understandings. Would you say maybe it could be thought of as empty since there’s nothing, no “thing” there to be found, and yet it’s full in the sense that it is the field of all possibilities, it’s the source of all manifestation, everything exists there in seed form?

Stephen: Yeah, that’s all part of it, it’s flavors and it’s also stages. Yeah, there are facets and stages of it, right?

Rick: So, you went through this thing, it was the evening, it was cold, and then what? Just go to sleep and wake up in the morning or was there more like, “Oh my God, what has happened to me?” so that you sat up half the night coming to terms with it?

Stephen: No, I mean the experience sort of finished off and I realized that I’d been brought into a state of reconnection with Source and with my own true nature. So, that was good, it turned out to be good at that point. And it was at that point that I was sort of immersed in the bliss of the formless and also had all kinds of realizations about the significance of the formless. It is a necessary part of manifestation, all kinds of realizations were occurring as I was immersed in it. And there was again, a voice from that presence that said, “Okay, do you want to stay here or do you want to go back to your life?” And I thought, “Well, I’ll go back to my life.” I felt pretty confident that I had rediscovered the absolute truth I had been searching for and I understood it by becoming it. So, I decided to come back. And when I came back, that process of actually deciding to return to my body, allowed my mind, my sense of self as an individual to go through a transformation that completely changed my psychological makeup and also my understanding of who I was, both as an individual and also as more than an individual.

Rick: Yeah, when you describe that in the book, it actually sounds like a near-death experience. You say, “I remember being in this same dimension prior to incarnating, which is when I recalled undergoing the afterlife phenomenon known as the life review.” So, it sounds like you actually went through some kind of life review even right there in the basement, as you were deciding to come back, right?

Stephen: That’s right, yeah. It was a full-on psychospiritual conversion with elements of near-death experience, visionary experiences were part of it, mystical, formless dissolution. So, the entire experience lasted about 10 minutes, but there were many features, many components to it. And the near-death experience that I subsequently read about, as part of my own research, I realized, “Oh, that was part of my awakening, I actually went through a near-death experience,” and I also understood that human beings go through the exact same process at the end of life, a return to the void, which can be very disorienting if you don’t understand it, as I was disoriented. But that is only a preparation to then go through the life review. So, we have to completely lose our life, the life that we lived. In a way, we have to completely let it go or drop it, in order for us to extract out of it the wisdom that we’re supposed to gain as we go through that process.

Rick: And so, did that happen to you? It is as if you transcended so utterly that you had pretty much dropped your life, almost like dying. But your body wasn’t dying, and because it was so complete it put you through a life review?

Stephen: Yeah, I went through a total life review, completely. And, I don’t know if you recall, but in the book, I describe it the way that it happened, which was, I had 360-degree vision and I was just looking through all of these screens at the same time, just getting replays of my entire life. Sometimes people talk about their entire life flashing before their mind’s eye. I had that, but on multiple screens all around me, all at once. And I just didn’t resist, I accepted the truth of it all, and it wasn’t always pretty.

Rick: Right. Did you feel as if you learned a lot from it? Such as, I was a schmuck here or I was a good guy there, that kind of thing?

Stephen: All of that, all of that, but it’s stalled. It’s incomprehensible in a way, to think about how much I understood, because we go through life and we have experiences and we learn from them, but it was like that.

Rick: Do you feel as if it really had a function or a purpose that changed the way you operated thereafter?

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, my entire life was changed at that point.

Rick: Yeah, you mentioned that you completely changed a lot of things. I mean, you became a vegan or something, you lost a whole lot of weight, you stopped smoking, I guess you had been smoking, and there is a picture of you in your book, you are all skinny and bright looking. It’s as if you completely changed, your friends thought maybe you had anorexia or something, but you completely rebooted your system.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, or it got rebooted and I just did what I had to do to make sure that the install stayed.

Rick: Yeah, I think I remember you saying something though, that saying from the Bible, about not pouring new wine into old wineskins? It’s almost as if you felt like this vehicle needs some house cleaning before it’s fit to hold this new awareness and therefore, I’m going to radically clean house.

Stephen: Yes, it did, and I did.

Rick: You mentioned in the book that you changed your whole orientation of your self, you said that “the location of my new self was no longer in my body, instead it hovered mysteriously above my head.” So, you felt as if you were hovering up there just viewing your life from a few feet above your head or something?

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, sort of like being in the zone, as athletes sometimes get into the zone and they have that perspective and it allows them to control the game, really.

Rick: Yeah, and that was going on all the time?

Stephen: Yeah, for about three years.

Rick: And so that’s what you mean when you say “it was going on for about three years,” that’s what you mean by you were “in a transcendental state of awareness and you needed to eventually come down from that and embody.”

Stephen: Yeah, we all do. I think this is also something that is being understood more and more in the contemporary spiritual world, that awakening isn’t just a transpersonal experience. You’ve heard about people who have these experiences and they do transcend. And you will hear teachers refer to “the body” and “the mind.” They’re talking about themselves, but in the third person, because they are fully immersed in the transcendent perspective. But as part of spiritual maturation, as I understand it, then it has to become embodied.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed a woman named Jac O’Keefe and, I don’t know if she’s still doing this, but she always used to refer to herself as the “Jac character,” and this used to drive another friend of mine crazy. I did a panel discussion with them at the SAND Conference and the other friend is Francis Bennett and he was saying, “Why are you calling yourself ‘the Jac character?’” It’s just as if there is this detached implication to using a phrase like that to refer to oneself that he couldn’t relate to.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, well you know, I’m sure he met some friends who referred to themselves in the third person, but that’s a different thing anyway.  It could be irritating, because sometimes your friends might see it as, “it’s evil” or whatever. But I think in O’Keefe’s experience it is still at that transcendental stage of realization where she really feels, “This is me, but it’s not me.”

Rick: And yet, you weren’t a space cadet, you were in this transcendental state for about three years but you were going to school, you were working as a mediator, you were even planting thousands of trees. I believe that was in that same stage and was a physically demanding job. You’d be out in the bush planting even a couple of thousand little trees a day and commuting long hours on a bus and all that stuff, and yet you say you were in a detached, transcendental, aloof state during all that. Did people regard you as being transcendental and aloof or did it seem as if you were pretty integrated?

Stephen: Maybe aloof.

Rick: Dispassionate, maybe?

Stephen: Yeah, maybe aloof, but I don’t think they understood or had any way of knowing that the seed of my consciousness wasn’t in my body. How would they? I think definitely, people would pick up on the aloofness quality, but I wasn’t completely aloof either, I was still very personable. But at that point, my own experience was similar to Jackie O’Keefe’s, it was just the character responding to people. We need response, because my body has to continue functioning in the world and it has to do what it has to do and take care of the things it has to take care of. And also, just because, as you said, I was engaged in all of these other activities, all of that was optimized in a way.

Rick: Optimized, meaning it was performed efficiently?

Stephen: Very efficiently.

Rick: Yeah, it almost sounds as if you had the perspective of a puppeteer or something, being above your body, and the body is functioning, but you’re not really the doer or the chooser.

Stephen: Well, we can get into that, but yeah, I was above, and that’s where the real chooser is and the real doer.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, interesting. But then at a certain point, for whatever reason, after about three years you felt like you were prompted or you decided that it was time to integrate.

Stephen: That’s right.

Rick: And I don’t know where this quite is, in the sequence of things, but you say in your book, “During my waking state, I was plagued by ancient fears and primitive reactions to life, and countless nights were spent fighting sadistic and tormented beings in recurring nightmarish dreams.” Was that during the reintegration phase or what?

Stephen: Yeah, that was, but that was part of a deeper process that I engaged in. In a way, I had agreed to engage in, as part of my own unfolding. So, most people, as they reintegrate with the body from a transcendental perspective, they just have to come back into the body and learn how to become sensitive, feeling, normally functioning human beings. That was the main purpose, but I also did some deeper spiritual work as part of the same process of descending. When I descended, I didn’t come back actually into my body, I went past it down into a deeper level. This is an occult thing, this is very occult what happened at this point.

Rick: I wouldn’t get a little occult. Is that related to what you say here? “At more advanced stages of spiritual evolution, the overall karmic inheritance of humanity is confronted and transcended.”

Stephen: It can be, yeah.

Rick: Is that why you were having all this sort of nightmarish stuff? You were taking on the collective karma or something?

Stephen: It sounds crazy, but yeah.

Rick: No, it doesn’t sound crazy at all, and it’s something that I’ve been hearing periodically for decades, that once we have cleaned up our own shit, so to speak, then we take on the humanity shit and we become a washing machine for that.

Stephen: I have heard you use that analogy, yeah, we do. I mean, to live as a self-realized or somewhat realized human being in the world, you become a sensing, heart-centered, but pure individual and you feel other people, you kind of take it on. That’s how we end up existing.

Rick: A lot of people have said that to me, in fact, Maharishi said that in 1970. Someone asked him, “What happens when we get rid of all of our own stress?” They used to call it stress, you know, the vasanas, the impressions, the gunk clogging us up, and he said, “Then you start taking on cosmic stress.”

Stephen: That’s right.

Rick: Yeah, interesting.

Stephen: Cosmic and personal.

Rick: Yeah.

Stephen: Really.

Rick: Well, this might be a good point at which to throw in a couple of questions that people have asked. A couple of people asked about free will, and someone named Lynn from Toronto asked about free will. You mentioned in your book, The Incredible State of Absolute Nothingness, that God only allows evil to exist as a necessary consequence of giving the ability of free will to beings like us. So maybe you could comment on that and just elaborate a bit for Lynn’s sake and for other listeners.

Stephen: Okay.

Rick: And let me just preface this with one more bit, which is that I’ve had discussions about this with various people I’ve interviewed, who don’t feel we have any free will. They feel as if everything is automatic, and we have no choice, it appears we have choice, but we don’t. They quote these scientific studies where the impulse to move your arm actually happens a few seconds before you actually move the arm, but you appropriate the ownership of it and think you’ve actually done it, but there’s no choice and so on and so forth. It’s a sort of a perennial debate.

Stephen: Yeah, well I think that is kind of connected with right brain and left brain integration and how the brain functions and works as a receiver for consciousness. But the question of free will is one that often gets raised on the spiritual path. Many non-dualists say that there is no free will. My own understanding is that that view comes from the absolute perspective. From the absolute perspective, there is no free will, because all of this is happening as a simultaneous manifestation of the Divine in form, so it’s unfolding exactly as it is meant to. But if you change your perspective and you zoom in closer into what actually happens here in the world, and you look at what the experience is as a human being, we make choices all the time.

Rick: It sure seems like it.

Stephen: It sure does. You can choose to not take out the garbage today and leave it until next week, but then you’re going to get maggots. Or, you take out the garbage and you take care of that. So, we make choices all the time and those choices lead to outcomes, right? But from the absolute perspective, which is where I think that view comes from, when you get in that state, you realize that everything is happening instantaneously. So how can there be a choice? But choice is programmed into the structure of the universe.

Rick: Yeah, it seems to me, that from the really absolute perspective, if you want to really get extreme about it, nothing ever happened, there is no universe, therefore there is no choice or free will. But as soon as you acknowledge that there is a universe, then all these relative considerations come in which you have to take seriously.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m sure even the empiricists or scientific people agree that different laws operate at different levels of reality. So, it’s the same, from the absolute, the realization is that everything is happening exactly according to Divine will. But as you come out of that and move into the relative, you realize that, well, there is actually free will as part of this great unfolding.

Rick: Yeah, I heard an interesting discussion from a panel at the S.A.N.D. Conference the other day, I was listening to this, and they were talking about whether there is a self. And one of the panelists, who I think happened to be a physician who studies livers and does liver biopsies and stuff like that, but is also a spiritual guy. He was saying, “Well, it’s all really a matter of scale and perspective. At a certain scale and perspective, you have a liver, and at a certain other scale it’s just molecules which have no quality whatsoever of liverness. Go even deeper, you’re down to the atoms and then the quarks and so on.” So, you could say the same with a sense of self, you could say the same with a sense of free will. It just depends on the level you want to tune in on and consider.

Stephen: Yeah, but even at the level of a quark, let’s say, there is some agency. There is a quark that wants to connect with an antiparticle, or I don’t understand quantum physics as well as I used to, but there is agency there and it wants to do its job, right? And so, it’s seeking out its complementary opposite.

Rick: It’s true, it has certain tendencies and proclivities and roles and functions. Now some would argue, “Well, the quark can only do what a quark can do, it has no choice.”

Stephen: Yeah, but they are all making choices that are leading to all kinds of outcomes. Some realize their full potential and some don’t. Some return back into the formless, they self-annihilate.

Rick: Okay, so I think that is a pretty good coverage of the free will issue. You know, philosophers have been debating this for millennia and we’re not going to resolve it here, but I think that gives a good perspective on it.

Stephen: I’ll just add, just because I feel I want to say more about it, that we all have circumstances in life that limit our options, but we still have choice. And the more we understand that we have choice, and the more we are willing to make good choices, then it seems that freedom increases, that we get better and better opportunities.

Rick: Good point. It’s as if there is an analogy we could find with growing up. When you’re a little child you have no autonomy, no freedom, you are completely under the control of your parents. And then you get to be an adolescent and you have to start making choices. You start gaining autonomy, you have to start cutting loose from your parents. And it can be kind of reckless at that point, you’re making all kinds of crazy decisions. And then eventually, hopefully, you become a mature adult making wise decisions. But it almost seems as if, in the whole span of evolution you can compare that to animals who are completely in tune with natural law and can only behave as monkeys or zebras or whatever they are. And then human beings who have this kind of freedom of choice and can get themselves into trouble. And then enlightened sages who are again completely in the lap of the Divine doing its bidding, but have come full circle. You like that analogy?

Stephen: Yeah, it’s great. That covers everything.

Rick: Okay, good. Someone just posted a question of how do you ask a question during these interviews. There’s a form on the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com. If you scroll down on that page, you’ll see the form at the bottom of the page and you can submit a question through that form. Okay, here’s a question from a guy named Patrick in Gatineau, Quebec, you may know him. He wants to know, “Can a person be happy, spiritually aligned, and maybe even enlightened without meditating, reading wisdom books, or having a metaphysical experience? If so, what is the role of effort on a spiritual path?”

Stephen: Yeah, it can happen, sure. But oftentimes, at least what I’ve seen, is that people have awakenings, they realize it is effortless, because there is a certain effortlessness to it. You realize when you already are the thing that you seek that you don’t have to go anywhere to get it. You just have to stop trying so hard and realize that it is already the case, right? You really get that, you fully get it. Then no, not necessarily, you don’t have to do anything, you got it.

Rick: But then, many, many spiritual teachers have said that the desire for God or the desire for enlightenment is very instrumental in the likelihood of your actually realizing. Patanjali says this too, the more vehement you are in your intensity of desire, the more rapidly or quickly you are going to realize. You being a case in point.

Stephen: Yeah, and anyone, really. This is the most important desire to have, and with that desire, that desire is what drives the soul to evolve more and more. Now, the realization of the non-dual perspective, not needing to find it because you already are that, that is just one realization. That is not the full process of spiritual maturation. And so, you can have that realization and just stick with it. Oftentimes, what I see happening, is that people either let too many things go because they realize nothing ultimately matters and so their lives fall apart a little bit, which I don’t think is advisable. Or they lose it and then they become seekers again and don’t know why they have lost it. And it is at that point that you have to have desire or you have to have practices. There’s some discipline that is involved to develop, cultivate and maintain any kind of ability, including spiritual abilities.

Rick: Yeah, as in that old famous saying that enlightenment may be an accident but practice makes you accident-prone.

Stephen: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Yeah. Here’s a question that came in from someone in Toronto. She said, “Stephen, you mentioned that as a child your father was trying to wake you from sleep to the point of pulling a mattress out from under you or shaking it as you slept. As a child, you existed in realms outside your body. Was there any trauma in your environment that made you not want to be in your body?”

Stephen: No, no, it wasn’t that. It’s a fair question. My parents didn’t have the greatest marriage, but there was a lot of love in our home, so it wasn’t …

Rick: You weren’t trying to escape from something.

Stephen: … an emotional defence mechanism to avoid the trauma of my upbringing. My upbringing was fine.

Rick: Yeah, you just liked sleeping.

Stephen: It was pretty ideal in some ways, but no life is perfect.

Rick: Sure, okay. I’m going to get back to some other broader issues and philosophical questions in a minute, but I’ll take care of a few questions that have come in. Here’s a challenging one. This is from a guy named Mark in Santa Clara, California. He said, “Okay, you followed a vegan diet for a time, yet your restaurant, the Millwood Melt, serves tuna, ham and bacon. Does compassion for animals slaughtered for food production figure in the awakened perspective? Or is it somehow a moot point?” By the way, the Buddha was reputed to have died from eating rancid pork, but go ahead.

Stephen: Oh, geez. Yeah, you know, it’s a serious question. Obviously, I myself am not vegan anymore but I was vegan for many years. I don’t eat a lot of meat. Meat that I do eat, I try to make sure that it’s been raised humanely, it’s organic. So those are all … I mean, as you become more spiritually sensitive, you realize that when you’re eating pork, you’re eating a fairly sentient animal as opposed to a carrot.

Rick: Right.

Stephen: So, that’s a thing now. I understand and I am grateful for the food that I eat. I know that this is all for food, in a way. The material universe and our own experience here on earth, this is food for us to unfold in the experiment of consciousness becoming the physical. So that is how I understand it now.

Rick: Do you serve organic or humanely raised meat in your restaurant if possible?

Stephen: Yeah, we do at times, not all the time. Our bread is organic, it’s made by a church which I love, but if I were to be completely organic what little amount of money I do make doing this, I wouldn’t even be able to make that. It’s just not financially possible.

Rick: Fair enough. They say the Native Americans, at least this is the story, used to have a sort of a reverential attitude when they killed an animal, they would thank it for its life and for helping to sustain their life. It was not just killing for the sake of excitement or sport or anything like that, obviously.

Stephen: And how could you not, as you become sensitive to the importance of sentience, you feel that. And I know that both my wife and I have that reverence. When we prepare food, we prepare it with love. It’s done with reverence for the food, we’re not just throwing things together. It’s done in a very reverential way.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s get into talking a little bit about your teaching activity. You mentioned that the most inspiring revelation you received during the transformation you underwent in ’96 is that humanity is on the verge of undergoing a collective awakening. And you, yourself, have seen yourself as an instrument in that, in wanting to serve in that capacity to help facilitate the awakening. In the intro I read at the beginning, you mentioned, let’s see where you said it, “the main way that you do this is through the direct transmission of the enlightened state of being which connects others with their own true nature.” And a couple of people, one in particular, Lynn, I believe it was, from Toronto was asking about Shaktipat, wanted you to talk about that. And someone else asked, actually, also from Toronto, maybe they’ve been to one of your satsangs, “What if somebody who attends your satsang is basically unsure about whether a deliberately directed energy transmission from another is personally helpful for them?” So maybe let’s talk about Shaktipat a little and whether one’s attitude is important and if one is going to get Shaktipat and what Shaktipat is for those who may not know and so on.

Stephen: Yeah, I mean, I try to be as clear as possible about what I’m offering before people show up. But what you get from Shaktipat, or energy transmission is … it’s really a process of resonance. As the transmitter, I am immersing myself in beingness as much as possible, so that it becomes amplified and then I’m locking into you often through the eyes to bring you into that same state of being. People may be unprepared for that. People cry, some people break down sometimes, it doesn’t happen that often and I try to be very sensitive and almost psychic in terms of figuring out where is the person at and what can they handle. You know, if you come and you get a transmission and I give you a transmission, you’re going to get something.

Rick: What are you experiencing while you’re doing this?

Stephen: Me, personally?

Rick: Yeah, well let’s ask both. What are you experiencing? How did you begin doing this? What made you feel you could do this? How did you know you had this ability? And also, the second part of the question would be, what do other people report experiencing when they’re doing this with you?

Stephen: I discovered it gradually, in a way. I would sometimes notice that if I just sat and manifest or tried to amplify my own connection to Source, then people around me would feel it and then sometimes just say things so authentic to me, just blurt out things. So, I knew something was happening. That was the first inkling that something could be transmitted, received and then, out of that reception, a response could come. And my own process of discovering that I could do it happened really in a more profound way shortly after I started teaching. When I began teaching, it just started happening in a pretty powerful way, which, I didn’t even understand really what I was doing, it would just happen. I was just meditating with the people who were in the room and something would feel as if it was taking over and allowing a flood of all kinds of energies to come through me that would pour into other people around me. And so, I knew this was happening, I wasn’t sure that it was happening, but I felt like it was happening and I didn’t tell anybody what I thought was happening, but I would ask people, “What was your experience? How did you feel?” And it just developed in that way, as I was sitting with people and discovering that it was occurring. And then eventually, I discovered exactly how I make myself available in the right way so that it is a much more conscious process today.

Rick: We were talking earlier about higher beings who are instrumental in human evolution and concerned and wanting to foster human evolution and so on. There are these people who are channelers who say they are channeling Saint Germain or somebody like that. In the case of Shaktipat, do you feel as if there is any sort of higher being involved that is transmitting through you or is it more like “being” itself, presence, pure awareness, the universal consciousness that you’re providing, or being like a conduit or a transmitting station or something?

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, now it’s just, I feel that I’m a conduit and so I lift myself up in the way that I now know how to. But it was Jesus who showed me how to do it.

Rick: Oh, there you go.

Stephen: That was the higher being.

Rick: Yeah, talk about that. Now you’ve opened that can of worms, you better explain it.

Stephen: Yeah, well, as part of the discovery that I could be used as a vessel this way, that got precipitated by a direct encounter with Jesus, Jesus’ light or the light of Christ consciousness.

Rick: Okay, the obvious question, how did you know it was Jesus? Did you actually see Jesus? Explain that, elaborate on what you just said.

Stephen: Well, there was an historical component to it. I knew, as I was going through this process of feeling like I was being visited by a luminous entity, that the particular entity was Jesus, the historical Jesus. But at this stage in my understanding of Jesus’ development, that personal self is not even a part of the makeup anymore. That entity, that enlightened entity exists as a function of the Divine.

Rick: That’s an interesting point. I’ve had conversations with people, for instance, I had this whole conversation with Adyashanti and Susanna Marie about a year ago about the falling away of the sense of personal self. And one of the points I made was that it seems as if there are all these higher beings like Ramana and Jesus and various others who visit people, or those people have cognitions of them, in some cases without ever having heard that they existed. You know, Ramana has come to people who had never heard of Ramana before and then later on they see his picture on a book. And so, the question was, well, if there’s a complete cessation or dissolution of any sort of semblance of personal self, how is it that these people are showing up? Are they still functioning on some higher plane? And one argument is that, well the Divine Intelligence, no they don’t exist anymore in any way, shape or form, but the Divine Intelligence knows what it’s doing and it sort of creates an appearance of that form which, later on you’ll encounter on a book cover or something and you say, “Oh, that was Ramana.” So, what is your understanding of those mechanics?

Stephen: Yeah, I’m not sure.

Rick: That’s a good answer.

Stephen: It could be that way, or it could be that these are highly evolved beings who, in a way, knowingly continue their work on behalf of the Divine.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know.

Stephen: I lean more towards that understanding even though both are true. I think they’re both true. Again, it’s a matter of scale or perspective.

Rick: Okay, that is one of those other interesting questions that is fun to touch on every now and then, but I don’t expect to achieve any sort of certainty or resolution.

Stephen: I’ll let you know when I have the whole answer.

Rick: Okay, great. We’ll have to do another interview then. Maybe you can bring in Jesus and Ramana.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s right.

Rick: Okay, so here are some other points. From your second book that I read, Heaven on Earth, A Guide to Enlightenment and Human Unity, I thought it was a nice roadmap of stages of development and so on. And here’s one passage in which you said, “Every great religious tradition testifies that there is one experience that towers above all others as the ultimate spiritual goal, traditionally called enlightenment.” And you referred to your awakening at the age of 22 as enlightenment, and yet you went through all kinds of stuff afterwards, continued growth and adjustment and integration and purification and so on. It’s because of that, that I hesitate to use the term enlightenment, and a lot of people hesitate. It has this static, superlative quality to it that implies that you’re done, there’s nothing more. And yet for you, even after that experience, there was a heck of a lot more and there is still stuff going on. So, what do you think about that?

Stephen: Enlightenment is really just when the soul comes online.

Rick: Okay, if that’s how we want to define the word.

Stephen: Yeah, but the experience of merging with the Absolute often does lead to a complete cessation of all other activity. Take Ramana, how long did he sit and do nothing?

Rick: Oh, years.

Stephen: Right?

Rick: Yeah.

Stephen: It could happen. But then he ended up getting help and then he became a teacher and a server of people. And I’m sure it sounds also as if, as he became more identified with the particular body that he inhabited, he also became more compassionate, more loving. It seemed as if, as he matured throughout life from a younger awakened soul to an older one, he became far more loving and caring in his outward behavior. So that, to me, shows some evidence that the process of maturing continues.

Rick: Yeah, he had a worldly function to perform which wasn’t being served by just sitting in a cave. And the performance of that function had an impact which is still being felt, and sent out ripples which are still washing up on various shores. Whether or not that means his own personal inner development was continuing, some would say that it’s still continuing, that he and everyone else who ever existed are still somewhere, still evolving, but it’s another one of those issues.

Stephen: Yeah, I think evolution continues. It’s also unending in a way, or it’s still happening, we’re still evolving. Even we, as human beings do awaken and then, after we awaken, there is still development that can occur.

Rick: That’s my sense of things. I’ve interviewed a few people who, when I ask that question about, “Well, how do you sense further development happening for you now?” They look at me as if, “What kind of question is that? How could there be anything more?” But most people have an answer, they say, “Yes, it’s still unfolding.” You have this X sign on the wall behind you and I guess that’s the cover of your book and it was very significant for you. You had this whole experience of an X and I don’t know how much time we want to spend talking about that, because I’ve never heard anybody else who had that experience, but to the extent that you think it might be relevant or interesting to people, maybe you could explain what that was all about.

Stephen: So, the X is, or that form that you see behind me and on the cover of my book, that was another one of those vehicles of transformation we were talking earlier about the Divine Spark. This was one that showed up in that period, where I hadn’t yet gone through that major awakening that I experienced at 22, but leading up to it, all kinds of subtle experiences were occurring that I didn’t quite understand. One of them was the emergence of this luminous X that just appeared while I was in a writing class at university.

Rick: Just in your mind’s eye.

Stephen: Yeah, it was instigated by the poem I was reading, the poem I thought was written by a Canadian poet named Christopher Doudny. I asked him since then and he responded, “I don’t know, maybe.” But in any case, this poem, as I read it, it launched my consciousness into an altered state. Again, I was in the same higher dimensional level, my consciousness sort of zoomed up and out and above my head. And then it was from that place that this form emerged. And I didn’t quite know what to make of it at the time, but I came back down into my body and finished the class. I was in a quasi-state, but this X continued to emerge as I was going about my daily life. So, whether I was in school, at home studying, or working at Swiss Chalet, it would just appear. And I began to realize that it wanted something from me, it was trying to show me something, so I became more curious about it. At the same time, I was very uncertain about it, because it’s an X, it’s a striking symbol with different associations. But I learned to trust it and as I did, it would lead to the transformation of my ordinary state of consciousness into the non-dual state. And it did that by, as it would emerge in my mind’s eye, I would just allow it to appear and then I would focus on it. And as I did, pulses of light would move from all four corners down to the center, almost as if it wanted to pull me into the center. So, it was training me to do this, and I would just watch it and allow it. And if I allowed myself to become fully drawn into where the courses of light were suggesting me to go with my attention, I would actually merge with the form. And at that point I would have an experience of the luminous nirvana that I experienced when I was younger. I would have that experience, but only for a flash. And then right after that, the yantra, the light would dissolve, but I would realize, “Oh, I’m in the non-dual state.” So, it would precipitate, it became an inner tool or vehicle of transformation that precipitated the transformation of my own consciousness into the non-dual state. But that didn’t hold. It wouldn’t stick, it would fade away. And now I have put it out in the world because it is what is considered a yantra. I now know that it’s a yantra and you can use it in the same way as a device.

Rick: Yeah, a yantra is like a mantra, but, whereas a mantra would be auditory, a yantra is visual and it’s a tool for transcendence.

Stephen: Yeah, and you know mantras are considered emanations of the Divine, direct, so are yantras, this came from the Divine.

Rick: That’s interesting. Yeah, and mantras are said to have been cognized too. It’s not as if somebody just dreamed them up and experimented, it’s as if they actually cognized seed sounds that are intrinsic to creation that are conducive to transcending. And perhaps the same is true of yantras, and all kinds of archetypical symbols.

Stephen: That’s right, yeah, they’re revealed through the inner journey.

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting. Well two questions have come in from people in Toronto, you have got a fan base up there. One is an elaboration of what we were just talking about, and it’s a little bit of a semantics thing. How would you distinguish between an awakening and enlightenment? Keeping in mind that those are words and we can assign whatever meanings we want to words, but how would you differentiate between awakening and enlightenment, if you would?

Stephen: Just in the way that I use those terms, awakening usually is some sort of momentary or temporary glimpse, and it may not be a glimpse of the full truth. So, we can have all kinds of spiritual awakenings, we can awaken to the nowness of reality. And we react, “Oh, everything is now, we get it.” And so, that awakening leads to that. But enlightenment is the complete – and this can happen in meditation or through spiritual experience – the complete dissolution of the ordinary sense of self and a return to the primordial, eternal, infinite dimension of beingness. That gives rise to your own awareness but transcends it and in fact is the source and substance for everything in existence. The more we go through that experience, the better, because sometimes one time is not enough. For most people the process of spiritual awakening leading to some kind of a permanent shift in consciousness, to that enlightened state, happens gradually over time. It is usually, with spiritual teachers or people who have made significant enough process on the spiritual journey in previous lifetimes, that they go through these more dramatic ones. For the average human being it is much more gradual, so we have to understand, “Okay, so, what is the transformation that we have to experience?” And then, the more you experience it, the more it leads to a permanent change in your overall sense of self, such that you realize you are no longer just an ego or a personality or your particular body, mind, emotions, thoughts, all of that. Those are still all intrinsic parts of you as a human being, but who and what you are is more than that.

Rick: Yeah, there was something good in there. I mean there’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I want to make sure people caught it. Sometimes people wonder, “How come some people just have these amazing experiences as children and then they wake up, apparently so easily without a whole lot of practice?” And I think you just nailed it, in terms of development in previous lifetimes. Some people don’t believe in previous lifetimes at all, but I think that is really a thing where people have … it talks about that in various scriptures too. In the Gita for instance, Arjuna asked Krishna, “What happens if you don’t make it in this lifetime?” And Krishna basically says, “You pick up in the next one where you left off.” So, I think there’s a lot of that which happens when somebody is a child protege spiritually, maybe even in other fields, like musically. How come Mozart was so good at the age of five or six?

Stephen: Of course, it has to be, has to be.

Rick: Yeah, all right, well I guess that covers that point. A couple people asked a question along these lines, both again from Toronto, one asking if you have met other enlightened sages and another elaborating a bit and saying, “Have you had any personal interaction with a living master or any mentor, have you been a student of some mentor, who could question you or hold you accountable?” I think it was Adi Da who said that “dead gurus don’t kick ass.”

Stephen: He said what?

Rick: “Dead gurus don’t kick ass,” but the implication is, that if you have a close association with a living teacher, they can sort of put your feet to the fire and really make sure you don’t get off on tangents or help to work out kinks in your personality and so on and so forth. And they say that good students make good teachers. But have you ever really had a studentship phase under the tutelage of any spiritual teacher?

Stephen: No.

Rick: Okay, at least not in this lifetime.

Stephen: Not because I didn’t want one, not because I didn’t look for one, but I never …

Rick: Never found one that worked for you?

Stephen: No.

Rick: Okay, so if anybody wants to ask any follow-up questions on that, they can. Okay, anything in the back of your mind at this point that you want to say, that I haven’t been bringing up? Is there any interesting point that we haven’t been touching upon?

Stephen: Not that I can think of. I think we’ve gone into some pretty interesting stuff.

Rick: Okay, no problem. I just want to give you a little opportunity to jump in there. I have a few more points here in my notes that we can talk about. This is a nice one just to throw in, we can maybe just dwell on it for a moment. In your Heaven on Earth book, you quoted Hildegard of Bingen as saying, “Everything that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.” It kind of reminds me of that notion of the net of Indra, you know, Indra’s net, where every point in creation is infinitely correlated with every other point in creation, and that it is all just divine intelligence interacting within itself in a completely holistic or, I think it is called complementarity in physics. Everything is connected with everything else. You want to elaborate on that, particularly in light of your experience?

Stephen: No, just that her words are based on a direct experience, which is something that we can experience as, again, one of those flavors or facets of awakening. At this point, one of the things I’ve come to understand is, there are so many different realizations, so many different states of being we can enter into and there are different practices that are more conducive to experiences of non-dual interconnectivity, like one you just described. And then there are other practices that are more conducive to states of realization of the absolute, inherent emptiness of everything or its formless potential.

Rick: Do you feel that, as we go through these stages you just alluded to, that we are like the blind man feeling the elephant, where we are kind of getting different perspectives on a larger reality? And that, eventually, still using this metaphor, if we become sighted, if we are no longer blind, we can see the whole elephant? Will we all see the same thing? And so that, in the sense of all these spiritual aspirants having all these different experiences, some are emptiness, some are fullness, some say there is no free will, some say there is free will, we go on and on, many, many different flavors of experience. Do you feel as if, if there is a state of spiritual maturation which potentially everyone could reach, and eventually will reach, perhaps, in which we’ll all be in accordance with one another in terms of our view of reality?

Stephen: Maybe not in the way that you’re sort of suggesting, but I’m not really sure. I’ll just say, with all of these different experiences we can have, all the different kinds of spiritual experiences we can have, what is more important is to just legitimate them. They are real, they can happen. And because one teacher has an experience of love and another one has an experience of peace or another teacher has an experience of bliss, it is in the nature of that particular individual to emphasize the different facets of awakening they have experienced. So that becomes part of what they share. You say, Rick, “it’s all love! There’s no love in the universe, it’s all just peace and nothing actually exists, this is all a dream.” These are all different perspectives that come from states of being, and the realizations that go with those states of being. But all of them are the elephant, because it’s all the Divine.

Rick: Yeah, that is a good point. I suppose another way I might have asked that question is: if Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, and Lao Tzu and a few others walked into a bar, would they all agree with one another in terms of what the reality is? I think your answer brought out a good point, and I’ve heard this said, that we all have different nervous systems and different make-ups, different predominances of “doshas,” as they call them in Ayurveda, and according to our different make-ups, even if we are all experiencing the same reality, we are going to express different facets or flavors of it differently. Just as even the Vedic rishis, they had a certain cognition of one portion of the Veda, another rishi would have another cognition, and no one had all the cognitions because it just doesn’t work that way, we have specialized capabilities.

Stephen: I think that is part of it. I think also a meeting of all those great sages, probably after they got over the difference in semantics, assuming they all spoke the same language, would probably all agree with what I call the absolute truth, that all of this is happening as an expression of some transcendent mystery, which nobody really knows where it came from, and yet it created all of this. Where they might differ is, “well I’ve experienced that,” “I had a vision of a donkey,” and “I went up into heaven,” “I didn’t write,” “I didn’t see any visions,” so they might differ on those particular details. But I think they would find agreement in an understanding of the actual mystery of existence.

Rick: Yeah, and they wouldn’t be killing each other over their differences, as their followers tend to do.

Stephen: No, I don’t think so.

Rick: One thing that is an important theme to you, and to me too, is the notion that there is some kind of global awakening taking place. You can read things, I was just reading something the other day about the sort of worst-case scenario of global warming or climate change and how it could be way worse than even our most pessimistic projections, that sea level rise will be the least of it. And it can make you feel as if, “Whoa, I don’t even know if the human race is going to exist in another couple of generations.” But on the other hand, there is this spiritual upwelling taking place and people all over the world are having spiritual awakenings, which a lot of people aren’t aware of because it’s more beneath the radar. But personally, I find it extremely inspiring and conducive to optimism. So, what is your sense of that, from either just a personal opinion or some kind of cognitive realization?

Stephen: You know, the evolutionary impulse and what’s happening now, it is forcing humanity to awaken, in a way.

Rick: How so?

Stephen: Well, it’s sort of like crunch time, in a way. We are continuing on with our current level of development, participating in systems that we helped co-create, because of our own either lack of understanding of any other alternative or just because this is the way we experience and accept that the world is. We are all participating in our human shared experience. But yet we are also beginning to realize, and more and more people are beginning to realize, that the way we are doing it is killing the planet. We are potentially going to create a situation that is so irreparable, that we may not be here. I doubt that very much. I think some of us will squeak through the worst-case scenario, but it is a case like Easter Island – are we going to continue to do this? Why haven’t we stopped? Why are we not even barely tapping the brakes? And really, according to the ecologists, we should be hitting full stop and reversing.

Rick: Yeah, it’s scary. Maybe people are not aware of what happened on Easter Island, but basically the civilization there wiped itself out, by cutting down all the trees and eliminating the basis of their sustenance. And we are doing that on a global scale. But there is this sort of hope. It is not accidental that there is some kind of spiritual epidemic taking place and it may be actually in direct response to counterbalance the devastation that we are doing by persisting in our un-life-supporting ways.

Stephen: Yeah, we are like this, as human beings. We put off what we know we have to do until it becomes situation-critical. We do this in our own individual lives and it seems we do it collectively.

Rick: Winston Churchill said of Americans, he said, “They always can be counted on to do the right thing, after having tried every other possibility.”

Stephen: Right. And I must say, I’m very optimistic just because of our level of technological development. I just think, when push comes to shove, some whiz kid is going to invent something that is going to reduce the carbon imprint. I just think it is just a matter of political will, too.

Rick: The capability is already there. I was reading an article about Elon Musk the other day. He was giving a presentation to, I believe it was actually oil company executives, showing that putting solar panels on a hundred square miles of desert out in Nevada or someplace could power the entire United States. And you add to that localized solar panels so that they are not totally dependent on big transmission lines and batteries, which are getting good enough to hold a charge for a long time, and we’re completely off fossil fuel, pretty much completely off. It’s just a matter of will and political and economic …

Stephen: Competency, yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Here is a good question that came in from Manuel in Toronto. He asks, “Today everyone wants to become a teacher. How do you distinguish a true realized being from a fake guru?”

Stephen: Oh, you need a good bullshit detector.

Rick: Yeah, how do you get one of those? Amazon.com?

Stephen: Life experience? You get burned a few times. I think there are all kinds of teachers, in any human endeavor. There are people who are really good at it, then there are people who are average, and then there are people who are complete frauds. Sometimes you hire them to do renovations on your house. The same with spiritual teachers.

Rick: Yeah, I guess that’s a good enough answer. I’ve interviewed so many hundreds now and if I had to answer that question I would just say, look for sincerity, what-you-see-is-what-you-get feeling from the person, not putting on airs, not claiming to be something super-duper special and holding themselves above people, and walking their talk. Very often, it can be just a natural down-to-earth-ness. They are not afraid to say they run a grilled cheese sandwich shop or are struggling to make ends meet because they are raising a couple of kids as a single parent or something, and yet they have a wisdom and a sincerity and an intelligence that really comes through.

Stephen: Yeah, and I think it takes a while to get to know the answer to that. You have to spend time with anybody. It takes a while to get to know a person, and the more time that you spend with them the more you get a feel for who they really are, not who they want you to, how they want you to perceive them, if that is, in fact, something they are trying to do, right?

Rick: Yeah, yeah, it’s like falling in love with somebody versus having been married to them for a few years. You know, really getting to know them. I suppose one answer we could give to that is: don’t drop your critical faculties. There is no harm in asking questions and scrutinizing and expecting rational answers. And if someone is offended by your doing that, not that you should be confrontational or rude, but if someone appears to be trying to maintain a facade and is threatened by any challenge to that façade, then be very wary.

Stephen: Yeah, see what happens when you give them a poke.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen: Do they giggle?

Rick: Right.

Stephen: Or do they scream you out of the room for breaking the illusion of what it is they’re trying to get you to buy into?

Rick: Yeah, also other points are coming to mind. Are they kind, or are they abusive? Are they doing weird things with money? Is there some kind of inappropriateness going on with sexual relationships with students? Anything like that is a real red flag. Do they rationalize that kind of stuff by saying that, “Well, my ways are inscrutable and you shouldn’t question them,” anything like that? All those things.

Stephen: It’s crazy wisdom.

Rick: Yeah, I’m very leery of this so-called crazy wisdom thing.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Rick: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Okay, well we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. Unless there are any further questions that come in the next few seconds, we could probably wrap it up. Or, if there’s anything else you feel you would like to add. Obviously, let’s talk a bit about what you have to offer. You are there in the Toronto area and obviously you do things locally. You also, I guess, do some webinars online, that people can tune in on from around the world.

Stephen: I’ve just started using Facebook Live, so here in Toronto I offer satsang. I’ll probably start broadcasting that on Facebook Live. As you know, I just recently launched that project of Walking in the Woods on Facebook Live, so I offer presence and guidance in real time and you can tune into that. I’ll be doing that probably once a week after this episode. I just spearheaded it last week, to see if it would actually work. It’s something I’ve been dreaming about doing for a number of years.

Rick: Yeah, I listened to that today while I was walking in the woods. Another thing you might want to consider which some friends of mine have found successful is: you set up a thing with Zoom and then you have 20 or 30 people or even more who can join in and you give a little satsang, you can talk for a while and then they can ask questions. You might want to consider something like that.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, thanks for the tip. It’s a matter of learning the technology and using it.

Rick: Well, my friend Jerry, who sets my guests up with their equipment and all, says you were easy to set up, you seem to be technically proficient.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m okay with this stuff, YouTube is great. It’s also a matter of time, time to do these things.

Rick: True.

Stephen: And I also am available for one-on-one Skypes and there is information about that on my website.

Rick: Okay, and your website is stephendamico.com, right?

Stephen: Yep.

Rick: Okay, which is s t e p h e n d a m I c o dot c o m.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, great. So, thanks Stephen, this has been a lot of fun.

Stephen: Likewise, I really appreciate the opportunity, Rick. It’s great to actually, finally meet you. I know I mentioned, I’m not sure if I mentioned at the top of the interview, but it is really like a dream come true for me. As a spiritual teacher, after my awakening, I didn’t say anything to anybody for 10 years, because I knew I wasn’t in any way ready or equipped to guide anyone, anywhere.

Rick: It’s funny you should say that, because I often mention that apparently in the Zen tradition, they say that after your awakening, you shouldn’t do anything for 10 years.

Stephen: I’ve heard you say this, I’ve heard you say this recently, and so, that was confirming. I got the timeline right, according to Zen. And ever since I discovered your work I thought, “You know, one day it would be great to be on your show,” and here we are today.

Rick: Yeah, well I got the sense that the timing was right. I heard you say in your Walk in the Woods that you had just, I don’t know, you had reached some point at which you felt as if, “All right, now it would be a good time for a wider audience,” and then Irene got in touch with you.

Stephen: That’s right, yeah.

Rick: That’s cool.

Stephen: Yeah, it was, yeah.

Rick: Well …

Stephen: So yeah, thanks again for having me on the show and also for doing this, because what you are doing is really providing a platform for us spiritual teachers who are trying to convince people of these very subtle and esoteric truths, for people who react, “I don’t need that, why do I need that?”

Rick: Yeah, well it’s as if we are all serving each other, you know. This is a great blessing for me to be able to do this, and it helps the teachers who do it, and it helps the people who watch and listen, so it’s this kind of mutually supportive endeavor.

Stephen: Yeah, well, that’s why I called you the incomparable Rick Archer. You spearheaded this, you have been there since the beginning, really.

Rick: Yes, in the beginning God created Rick Archer.

Stephen: To back up, yeah.

Rick: Then on the second day he …

Stephen: He smacked me on the back of the head.

Rick: Right, yeah. All right, let me make a couple general wrap-up points. You know, people pretty much know what I’m about to say. You’ve been watching an interview with Stephen D’Amico on this show, Buddha at the Gas Pump, and I’ve been doing this for about seven years now and intend to continue doing it. So, you can go to the site, www.batgap.com, to check out the previous ones. You can sign up to be notified by email of future ones. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel, which actually helps a lot. I mention this once in a while, but there is this sort of magic threshold you cross when you reach 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. They really sit up and take notice, and I’ve already been getting a lot of help from them. It’ll be even greater if I ever reach that point. Right now, I’m still in the high 20s of thousands of subscribers, but if you haven’t subscribed you might click on the subscribe button and then you’ll be notified by YouTube every time there’s a new interview. Then there’s an audio podcast of this, if you would like to listen to things while commuting or walking in the woods or whatever, and a bunch of other things. So just go to the site and explore the menus. There aren’t too many things, but what you’ll find there, I think you’ll find useful. And again, as I said in the beginning, we appreciate any financial support you care to offer, large or small. So, thanks for listening or watching, and we will see you again next week, I hope. Next week I’ll be interviewing Sri M for the second time, the very sweet saintly man from India who has a very interesting story, and he has written a sequel to his first book, which I intend to read in the coming week. The subtitle of it is “The Journey Continues.” So, I’m eager to see what he has to say and to talk to him again. So again, thanks and we will see you next week. Thanks Stephen.

Stephen: Thanks Rick.

Rick: All right, good luck.

Stephen: Thanks.