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. There have been over 300 of them recorded now, and if you go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you can see them categorized in various ways. As they say on public television in the United States, “this program is made possible by the support of generous and appreciative listeners and viewers.” So I want to express appreciation for those who have supported it, and if you feel inclined to do so, there’s a donate button on batgap.com. My guest today is Steve Ford. Steve lives in the UK. Welcome, Steve.
Steve: Hi, Rick.
Rick: London? Or no, some place called Slough or something like that. Where is it?
Steve: Slough, yes. But at the moment, I’m living in a place called Egham in Surrey.
Rick: They have cool names for things over in England.
Steve: It’s not far outside London on the Thames.
Rick: Great. Oh, you’re living on a boat, somebody said.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
Rick: On the Thames?
Steve: On the Thames, yeah.
Rick: Great. I didn’t know people did that. I know that in Holland people live on boats, but I didn’t know that that happened until recently. Dan O’Keefe told me that you were living on a boat.
Steve: Yeah. I was in Holland, Amsterdam, not long ago and I saw some great boats over there.
Rick: Yeah. So as people know who watch this show, I’ve done over 300 interviews and I think that your particular awakening story is one of the most interesting ones I’ve ever heard. Quite unusual and we’re going to hear about it in a minute. In fact, we’ll start about it just about right now. Firstly, there’s one thing you mentioned, which I find comes up quite a bit in people who have, especially people who have spontaneous awakenings or unsought awakenings, is that they had stuff going on when they were little kids, you know, that are a little bit out of the ordinary. So maybe we should start there.
Steve: Hmm, what a place to start.
Rick: I think, wasn’t it you who said that you had some kind of profound experiences looking at the stars or something?
Steve: No, I did. I’ve got an amazing memory. Very visual. And I can remember things going as far back as to when I was in the cot, you know.
Rick: In the what? In the cot. Oh, like a crib, you mean?
Steve: Yeah, in a crib, actually, in a blanket, you know. And as I got older, I remember my early reflections, contemplating as a child. I remember contemplating on existence because it fascinated me what this was all about, you know, what appearance was, what the world was. Why were there people. Why was there existence, why, You know? And I remember thinking, “What if this had never happened?” Because it’s quite an interesting thing. It’s quite an interesting phenomena, appearance and existence, because that in itself is strange, you know? Why is this here? And I tried to imagine what it would be like if there was no appearance, if there was no world. What would it be like? And I remember there was a real sense of just the mind falling away and there being just absolutely nothing, emptiness. And it was really strange, very odd, of feeling, of coming away from… Yeah, just imagining that was quite a funny thing.
Rick: Yeah. I don’t know if this is true or not, but trying to rationalize or understand why people have profound experiences and then eventually have profound awakenings without having done any spiritual practice, so to speak. I kind of rationalized that as, they must have done some work in past lives or something, you know, they must have been…. And sometimes people do remember that. They remember, “Oh, yeah, I was sitting on my butt in a monastery for five lifetimes or something.” I mean, have you ever had any recollections like that?
Steve: No, I’ve no recollection of a past life. I’ve kind of had some strange memories that I can’t account for.
Rick: That didn’t seem to be from this life?
Steve: Yeah, no, it doesn’t seem to be from this life, but it could be from a collective consciousness. You know, consciousness is a very, very, very mysterious thing anyway. I mean, like you said, you know, it’s hard to rationalize. But as a child, I had a very free mind anyway. It was never fixed in any one way. I was kind of just moving all over the place, just daydreaming, really. I was a big daydreamer.
Rick: Were you a halfway decent student?
Steve: No, not really. No, I’m dyslexic, and it wasn’t picked up at school, so the only thing I was good at was art. So my attention went more into that, and I ended up leaving. There was part of my life going to college and studying art. But academically speaking, I never really ventured into that much, not growing up anyway. Later on I did,
Rick: Yeah. As I recall hearing your story, you rather emulated or admired your father, and then he turned out not to actually be your father, and that was a big shock for you.
Steve: It was a shock, yes. I did want to emulate my father. He was a very important role model in my life, and at the age of 18, he was very much the standard of “man.” And I had a lot of… I don’t know if it’s this way for a lot of people, but I invested a lot of my masculinity, in who I thought I was, in my father. So when I found out he wasn’t my real father, it was a huge shock. Incredible, just being told, when you’re 18.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: It was a shock, and that really was the end of my life up until then. That’s when my life came to a point and everything changed rather suddenly at quite a young age. It answered a lot of questions. Obviously, when you’re told something like that, the first thing you do is you look back over your life and think, “Ah, of course, that’s why I’m who I am. That’s why so-and-so treated me like that.” Not badly, but my relations with certain people in the family weren’t as close as, say, my brothers and sisters, who were the legitimate children. Me, being the illegitimate child, kind of pushed out a bit.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: And it answered a lot. Obviously, it made me realize why I was so different. Because genetically, when you’re different genetically, sometimes you still follow a genetic code, even if you’ve never met the real parents or whatever. There’s a code within you.
Rick: Sure.
Steve: My code, I’ve always been very philosophical, I’ve always been artistic, I’ve always drawn and stuff like that. That seems to be how I was. Yet, I existed within a family that bore none of that. And so, although I really loved my father and wanted to emulate him, it was quite frustrating because I couldn’t be like him anyway. So, when I was told he wasn’t my father, there was a certain relief. I thought, “Okay, I don’t have to pretend anymore. That makes a lot of sense.”
Rick: Yeah. Speaking of the genetics, I’ve heard cool stories about twins who were separated and didn’t know of each other’s existence, and they went through all these remarkable things synchronistically.
Steve: Absolutely, yeah. I did twin studies when I studied psychology as well, when I went to college in later years.
Rick: Yeah. Didn’t you say in one of your interviews that your father was a bit of a drinker, that he had a drinking problem?
Steve: I don’t think he had a drinking problem. He just liked drinking.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Steve: No, he was not an alcoholic or anything. He just liked drinking. And growing up -it’s awful, isn’t it, I’m talking about my family here, but just in a general sense? My father was great, but years ago when he was very young, he just liked going out drinking. He’d come home sometimes, and it was the typical case of, “Where have you been?” The wife’s saying, “Where have you been?” And sometimes there’d be an argument. And I was just very sensitive and I’d be upstairs in bed. And I just remembered, sometimes I did remember the fights or the arguments, and that kind of did occur.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: It didn’t happen all the time, but when it did happen, I do remember it. And I remember my reaction to that.
Rick: Was what?
Steve: Well, it was fear, and I just isolated more, really. I kind of went into my own world of exploration, really.
Rick: Yeah, I had that kind of background, but even much more so. My father was an alcoholic and would come home drunk several nights a week and keep the whole family up until 3, when you mentioned it.
Steve: Yeah, it’s really baffling because I did end up becoming an alcoholic in later years. And yet, it baffled me that my father wasn’t, because he drank much more than me. But there’s a difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic. He could get up and work the next day, whereas when it happened to me, I couldn’t.
Rick: Well, back to genetics, I mean, some people just have a proclivity toward that disease and they can’t handle alcohol in the same way.
Steve: I would agree with that, yeah, definitely.
Rick: And I would have become one myself, or a drug addict, but I fortunately learned to meditate when I was 18 and got on a better track.
Steve: You got addicted to meditation.
Rick: That’s right, [both chuckle] yeah, more wholesome addiction.
Steve: Oh, for sure.
Rick: So, okay. Then you’ve alluded to the fact that you became an alcoholic. I guess this was somewhat in reaction to the revelation of your father not being your father, and it threw you into a tailspin and you started drinking.
Steve: Yeah, that’s right. As soon as I found that out at the age of 18, I kind of, if I’m to be really honest, I was more embarrassed than anything. I just found it shocking that …
Rick: All these people knew about it and you didn’t.
Steve: Exactly, exactly. It really boiled down to that and I thought, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Why didn’t you just say to me when I was eight, I could have integrated it.
Rick: Yeah, [joking] and yet, the whole family was black and you never picked up on it.
Steve: Yeah, [laughing] they were black Hindus.
Rick: [laughing] God, I’m so dumb.
Steve: [laughing] Exactly, right. Yeah, so, what was the question? Where were we?
Rick: That it threw you for a tailspin when you discovered this and then it precipitated your alcoholic phase.
Steve: The biggest thing, the biggest thing that it – you know, that my reaction – but the biggest thing that it did was destroy my identity. I then went through an identity crisis. That’s really what happened. There was an identity crisis. I’d identified with my father so much, there was the ideal of working towards being like my father and suddenly that was gone. And in the absence of that, in the absence of that, it left quite a void, quite a space where I could say, looking back, I just didn’t know who I was in this space. You know, there was certainly a sense of absence, really. And I remember thinking at that time, “I really need to know who I am. I need to find out who I am. If he’s not my father and I’m trying to be like his father, then who am I? Who am I in that absence? Who am I Steve for?” Because one of the things that really helped mess the identity up was not just being told that he wasn’t my father, but also because it came about by me asking for my birth certificate. I’d never seen my birth certificate before because when I got to 18, it was the first time I was going to go abroad on my own. And so, of course, when I asked for the birth certificate, my mother said, “Oh, you know, don’t you?” And I said, “No, no, no, what?” And she said, “Well, your father’s not your father.” And then she said, “You need to know this because when I give you your birth certificate, it’s actually got a different name on it. You’re not who you…” So not only was he not my father, I was given a piece of paper with a different name on it. And his name was Steve Ford, well, Stephen Ford. And I thought my name was Stephen… I won’t say the name, but Stephen whatever.
Rick: Portoplatt.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. It’s Portoplatt. And I thought, “God!” So suddenly, not only is he not my father, but I’m not even this person anymore. I was just a different name and I was given my true identity.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: Suddenly I thought, “Wow, this is incredible.” That was just, it really messed up the identity.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, on the point of themes common to spiritual awakenings, I also notice that very often some kind of shake-up like that precipitates… well, in your case it was a decade later before the spiritual element came in, but it very often does precipitate in people either intense seeking or A spiritual shift or something. They’re just knocked out of their complacency by something and then some kind of quest begins.
Steve: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, for me, I wouldn’t say it’s not spiritual. I mean, drinking was a great sadhana, you know. I wouldn’t say it’s a great sadhana, but I experimented very much with then, “Who am I?” You know, this weird world of drinking.
Rick: There’s this thing that goes around on the internet of yoga asanas and drunks assuming various poses as they droop off park benches and all this kind of “alcohol yoga” or some such thing. [laughing]
Steve: Yeah, there’s an art to drunkenness. So, Yeah, there was… it did precipitate… I mean, I don’t think I would have been the seeker that I was if I had not been told my father wasn’t my father and then given a birth certificate with a different name. I think it broke me. It broke the identity, principally speaking, looking at the principle of the situation and what happened. It broke the identity. It broke me in terms of who I thought I was and who I could be as a person, that got smashed, and I was left on my own and left in a very abstract place as well, this absent place of “him, not your father.” So, this place was very abstract, you know? Nothing had landed in there. I didn’t know who I was, of course. And then with drinking, drinking became a very distorted kind of reality in a sense, and trying to experiment with reality, trying to find out who I was.
Rick: Hmmm.
Steve: I tried to be the artist, the poet, the whatever. I was quite pretentious.
Rick: How about drugs? I mean, that’s a much better way of experimenting with who you are than Drinking, in my opinion. It really opens up some weird places.
Steve: No, it can do, but I didn’t do drugs. For me, drink was really good for getting you out of it. I was one of those guys that just wanted to get out of it. When it comes to drug addiction, I’ve met people. The people that I equate to most with drug addicts are like heroin addicts and people who take downers, people that just want to get out of it. I wasn’t into stimulants or what’s the other one?
Rick: Psychedelics.
Steve: Psychedelics. I certainly wasn’t into that. I don’t know why that was. I was an absolute Bog-standard alcoholic. I just absolutely loved drink.
Rick: Interesting.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. I’m getting euphoric-recall as we speak. I’m joking. I’m not really.
Rick: Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, just jumping ahead a little bit, I always have the attitude that someone who is really spiritually awakened, to some profound degree, wouldn’t find drugs or alcohol appealing anymore because the state that those things produce in you is so far inferior to the state you’re in all the time that there wouldn’t be any enhancement. It would be like, “Oh, I don’t like this. Get it away from me.” I mean, could you say that now or is there something about your nature that would actually still find it appealing, if you tried it?
Steve: Oh, I think, well, there’s two sides to it really. It’s a fantastic question. Really good question. The permanent state of self-realization, or whatever you want to call it, is the most amazing thing, of course. It’s wonderful. But you can lose, that if you used to take drugs or drink.
Rick: Sure.
Steve: Sure, it would be fantastic to get absolutely drunk, but the next day it wouldn’t feel good at all. And if you were to start doing that again, you’d lose a lot.
Rick: And just to press the point, even if you did get drunk and it caused you to lose the state of self-realization or to muddy it up to a great degree, how would that in any way be desirable or interesting? I would want to sober up as quickly as possible because I would feel so much less well or happy or clear than I’m accustomed to feeling all the time.
Steve: Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? You would feel contaminated, you wouldn’t feel clear, you’d lose the clarity and you’d really feel it. And yeah, you’d be experiencing states of consciousness that are not reflective of what’s really real. It would become, I’d imagine, quite horrible really. I’ve never really thought about it to be honest.
Rick: Yeah, well it’s an interesting point because there actually have been some spiritual teachers who do a fair amount of drinking and even drugs, and I always wondered about the profundity or genuineness of their realization, if they’re carrying on like that. And also it brings in the point, and I know we’ll talk about this, but you have been a professional drug and alcohol counselor, it brings in the point that spiritual development, or in whatever way it’s approached, might be a good part of your toolkit to help people get straight, because it can show them a natural way of feeling high, in a sense, all the time, without having to resort to harmful things.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Rick: Okay, so, alright. As I recall, you also entered an artistic phase, got into college, started studying art and stuff as part of this shake up in your comfy notion of who you were.
Steve: No, no. Yeah, I did art, it’s something that I’ve always escaped into since I was very young. When I left school and everything, I got into work, I ended up being self-employed with a partner running an air freight company near Heathrow and I found it awful, very boring and I wanted some kind of outlet, so I went and studied art, art college at night school. And then, unfortunately, I lost, I lost my business due to drink. And then I tried to carry on with the art, but it’s just a nightmare. My life got very unmanageable, where I would turn up at classes a little bit drunk, and then after a while, I wouldn’t turn up because I’d be drinking, and then it just went away. But it kind of… yeah, yeah,.. it was just very unmanageable, you know? I tried to get into the artistic, but I could never complete it. I couldn’t complete the courses and all of that, drink just got in the way.
Rick: So what was the turning point for you? How did you finally snap out of all this?
Steve: I snapped out at the age of 27. I thought, “I don’t want to join a 27 club.”
Rick: What’s that? Oh, like Jimmy Hendrix and Janice Joplin?
Steve: Yeah, yeah, because I was playing the game of, I was playing the game of, I’ll say pretentious, I thought I was a pained poet not understood by the world and all of these things.
Rick: I think Jim Morrison died at 27 too.
Steve: Yeah, he did.
Rick: That’s the three I can think of, yeah.
Steve: Yeah, and I loved Jim Morrison. He was a huge influence in my early 20s.
Rick: I saw the Doors live, actually, back in the day.
Rick: Really? That’s great. Lucky guy. But yeah, the book, “No One Gets Out Alive,” what a great book that is, if you ever get a chance to read that. Very funny.
Rick: Now what’s that book? I’m not aware of it.
Steve: Oh, “No One Gets Out Alive.” It’s just a book. It’s by a reporter who knew Jim Morrison.
Rick: Oh, I see. Okay.
Steve: He hung out with him. He wrote this book. It’s a good book. So what happened, at the age of 27, I found myself always drunk, drunk all the time and I had this epiphany one day. I wake up and I – as I was saying, I was trying to work at art college and all of these things. I even went to, I even studied photography, tried to become a photographer, but I kept selling all my equipment just to buy booze, and then I’m trying to buy it all back. I was filming bands and doing all sorts of stuff and getting drunk. And it was just a nightmare, really. I thought I was off to become some amazing photographer, or whatever, arty person and everything. And then one day, it all just diminished. The equipment went. life got very boxed in. I wasn’t going out much. I was just drinking more. And then one day I woke up and I thought, “Oh my God, I just like drinking.” It was an epiphany.
Rick: Hmmm.
Steve: I thought, “This is it. I drink.”
Rick: I drink, therefore I am.
Steve: Exactly. And I absolutely thought, “Well, that’s it. I’m a drunk.” And I was very accepting of it. There was a moment of clarity. I thought, “Well, that’s it. I’m a drunk.” There was no more trying to do other things to, what’s the word? I wasn’t doing that.
Rick: To justify or rationalize?
Steve: Yeah, that I was trying to improve my life. In fact, I was so boxed in. I thought, “That’s it. I’m a drunk.” And that was it. And there was a point where I ended up with nothing. I asked my mother, I said, “Can I just come stay with you for a few weeks, just to sort myself out?” She said, “Yes.” But when I got back there, I realized, “Moving back in with your Mum’s not a good idea.” A friend of mine at the time, he saw the problem I was going through and he said, “Look, I’ve got a place. You’ve got a room there. And if you come to stay there, as long as you go to a 12-step fellowship and sort your problem out, you’re more than welcome to stay.” Which is something I did. I went there. I found myself getting into recovery, getting into the 12-step program, the 12-step fellowship.
Rick: That’s great.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. That was it. That was the turning point, really.
Rick: Yeah. I actually have a category on our category index page for 12-step as a spiritual practice. Which it is. It has a very spiritual origin to it, doesn’t it?
Steve: I think it does, definitely. I mean, you can trace it back to the co-founders, one of them being Bill Wilson. In his life story, in the book – well, I won’t say, but – I can’t speak for AA or 12-steps or anything, really – but it all came about from a spiritual awakening that he had. And they deviseD a program that educates you towards letting go of everything so that eventually you come into a spiritually-awakened way of life.
Rick: Yeah. So did you pretty much sober up from the time you joined the 12-step?
Steve: Not straight away, no. I was quite resistant. They called it “in and out,” basically. I was in and out of recovery for about nine months. After nine months, I went back, having fallen off the wagon. I think the problem was I was young. I was 27 and it’s really hard to deal with that problem when you’re 27, because you’re looking at the pack running out to the pubs and everything, even though I ended up drinking on my own. It doesn’t take long for you to start feeling good and then get the old feelings back and thinking, “Well, it’d be nice to go and hang around, see the girls, hang out with the guys in the bars.” And I always thought I could go into a bar and drink coke or lemonade or whatever soft drink, but that was never the case. And then in the end, I was very lucky. A good friend of mine who was in AA -sorry, I keep mentioning AA. I shouldn’t really be doing that.
Rick: Why not?
Steve: Well, it’s anonymous.
Rick: I mean, everybody knows about AA. You’re not naming names or anything.
Steve: Well, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. But the thing is, there’s a fine line. I really don’t want to speak for others. So this just ties into my timeline that leads to the explanation of awakening and stuff like that.
Rick: Yeah, that’s understandable. I mean, when you say “12-step,” most people assume AA.
Steve: Of course, of course.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: So a good friend of mine, I came in after about nine months well, yeah, after nine months, I had my last drink and it really surprised me, in fact, the last time I had a drink. I’d been sober six weeks, and I thought I’d cracked it. And I walked in, and I was so embarrassed and ashamed of myself and I said to my friend, I said, “I’ve had a drink. I drank last night.” And he looked at me and he said, “Yes, that’s what we do.”
Rick: Ah ha.
Steve: And that’s how I got it. That was when I got it. I got the “I’m powerless over alcoholism,” when he said that.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: I think before then, I’d been trying to get sober. I’d been trying to do this. I’d been trying to control it. But in the end, I realized I was absolutely powerless. And when he said that, I’ve not had a drink since. That was over 20 years ago. So yeah, it was really good.
Rick: You have to come over to the States. We’ll go out and celebrate.
Steve: Yeah, sure. But then there was an interesting thing where, all right, you had stopped drinking, and you were in some philosophy class or sociology class, and there was some tutor who said something that just was another wake-up call for you. That sounds like the next important thing.
Steve: She said something amazing. She totally changed my life. It wasn’t for this woman. I don’t think I would be here today, in the way that things have evolved, or maybe. I don’t know. But I was studying at college. I was doing a few A-levels to get me into university to study theology and philosophy, because two years into recovery, I’d really gone into what the program was about. I was really studying the principles of recovery, applying them to my life, and really trying to expand on the spiritual basis. And after two years, I went to meetings pretty much every day for about two years. And then after that two years, I decided to go to college full-time, and I studied these A-levels. One of the things I was studying was sociology. The wonderful tutor who taught us the sociology, she got on with me. I really got on with her. I was always asking questions, you see, and I was always interested in the study of society because it very much explained a lot about reality as well. For instance, looking at Marxism and false class consciousness, I just found that incredibly fascinating. What do you mean by false class consciousness? I want to know more about that, you know? Consciousness, you know, false class consciousness. And so I’d be asking questions, and there’d be people in the room saying, “Oh man, just take notes. Don’t keep asking questions. It’s a pain in the ass.” But I couldn’t help it. There was a compulsion in me, even after two years of recovery. Actually, it happened in the second year of college. So I’d been sober like three, three and a half years or something, and I remember, again, being very intense, asking questions, and the class ended, and all the guys had gone, and I was left standing there with the tutor. The tutor and I were talking, or I think I was talking really, and I was just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she talked about something, and she just looked at me, and she held her hand up, and she just said, “You’re not your thoughts or your feelings.” Like this. And I remember looking and being stunned. I didn’t even think. I was stunned, absolutely stunned. What do you mean, “You’re not your thoughts, or your feelings.” Now, the way I negotiate life, the way I negotiate my recovery, the way I negotiate life, is through my thoughts and how I feel. My emotional paradigm of reality, the mental paradigm or structure or whatever, is how I negotiate. And as far as I was concerned, you know, that was a tool to discern reality. And she’s saying, you know, “You’re not your thoughts or your feelings.” So she kind of disarmed me of everything that I was trying to use to find reality.
Rick: I wonder if she had had some kind of Buddhist or spiritual background or something and she’s speaking from that.
Steve: I don’t know. I would love to maybe meet up with her again and ask her, because I’ve never seen her since that day really. I left college after that.
Rick: Yeah, you know, I bet you she’d really appreciate that. I’ve had people whom I taught to meditate 20, 30, 40 years ago get in touch with me and it’s so good to hear from them. And there’s one fellow who will be listening to this who has become one of my best friends and we hadn’t been in touch for 40 years. So I bet you she’d really appreciate hearing from you and hearing what an impact she had on your life with that simple sentence.
Steve: Yeah, it was a very simple sentence and it’s the biggest impact because there was something in me that was very receptive to that. It was very receptive. So when I walked out of the room, I actually walked out not even saying anything. It’s very rare I do that. Usually I would say, “Oh, thank you” or “Goodbye.” Anyway, seek her. And I actually just walked out of the room and it stayed with me and it impacted me so much that it totally, totally took away the whole basis of my recovery up until that point. It became shaky after that. I thought, “Oh, my God.” She totally pulled the rug from under the basis of what I thought was recovery.
Rick: Interesting. So did you feel vulnerable again, like you might relapse based on that when you say you’ve pulled out the foundation?
Steve: No, absolutely. No, no. It’s a good question. I did, yeah. I found myself suddenly not able to function as easily as I could up until that point. There was a real ease before. I’d learned the recovery. So there was a real automatic, mechanical almost, meaning to my recovery that kind of appeared very good. My life seemed very manageable. I seemed okay. But as soon as she said that, it went in, it blew it. And suddenly I was going to meetings and in meetings, they encourage you to talk and they call it “sharing,” talking, and I would share something and then suddenly I would stop halfway through what I was sharing and feel very self-obsessed, very dis-eased. it felt like I was right back at Stage One of my recovery and I felt really dishonest.
Rick: Is part of the reason for that, that when you took yourself to be your thoughts and your feelings, when you took them seriously, there was a sense of control? “Yeah, I’m thinking this, I’m feeling that, I’m kind of in charge here.” And when she shattered that, then all of a sudden, you realized you weren’t in control, which to my understanding is actually a key part of AA, is that “I am helpless, I am not in control.” So in a way it got you closer to the ideal of AA?
Steve: Yes, it did. It brought me into my powerlessness.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: It brought me into a place of powerlessness over my recovery because I was quite powerful in my recovery in the way that I’d analyzed it, the way I’d embodied it, the way I’d structured it in some mental and emotional way of functioning. Suddenly there was a sense of dishonesty where I’d been quite willful, I’d done this myself. And then I really sensed that I didn’t know who I was behind it. Taking away the thoughts and feelings and that not being me left a massive gap of, “Then I don’t know who I am.”
Rick: It’s interesting, because it’s like the first thing when you’re 18, you didn’t know who you were because your father was not who you thought he was. And then now again, there’s this another shift into, “Once again, I don’t know who I am.”
Steve: There you go.
Rick: The rug pulled out from under you twice.
Steve: There’s a parallel process going on. I thought, “Hang on, here we are.” And it’s always been about identity with me, as you say, when I was 18. And then certainly when I was, I think I was 31 then. I was 31. And I felt very vulnerable and I felt fearful. And I felt a self-obsession, a very acute self-obsession, a real disease in me, very dis-eased. And it frightened me. So after three and a half years, I found myself walking away from my AA, walking away from this fellowship that saved my life. And it wasn’t that the fellowship itself had let me down. It’s just that I knew what I’d done with it. I knew that there was something wrong in the way that I responded to the program or the way I’d managed it. Basically, I got rumbled. I got tumbled. And in that, there was a thing. And then I became dysfunctional. Suddenly my life was very dysfunctional, and so I stopped going to college as well. I couldn’t function there either.
Rick: Wow.
Steve: Yeah.
Rick: It’s interesting that such a simple comment could throw you for a loop to that extent, you know? I mean, it’s like a little Zen colon or something that just …
Steve: Well, it’s strange, isn’t it, because I’ve just announced that, talking to you? You’re interviewing me and I’m saying this, and will it have a profound effect on someone else? Maybe, maybe not. But for me, it was absolute timing. It was that crucial time where the pressure was so great, what I was looking for and what I was seeking with was so great, and she just popped that balloon with the finest pin.
Rick: I think timing is a really important point because everybody reads all these spiritual books and hears all these spiritual talks, and for the most part, people get all kinds of inspiration and benefit and whatnot. But there’s something about timing, for a really radical shift, the person has to be ready for it. And when they are, then the very same words, which they might have heard a year ago, have this potent impact which they didn’t have before.
Steve: That’s very true, actually. You can hear something, think you’ve heard it, and then a year later you really don’t hear it, then something changes. Something changes in the person, you know? Just learning it in your mind doesn’t always change you as a person, does it? It sometimes needs to drop and land in you, you know?
Rick: Yeah, it’s really important. One point I harp on a lot on this show is that there’s a lot of people who read a lot of books and get familiar with all the terminology of this stuff and they jump to the conclusion that that’s it, they’re living non-duality because they can quote Ramana Maharshi or something. But if they could actually step into his shoes, so to speak, see the world through his eyes, they would probably discover that there’s a huge radical difference between their intellectual understanding and his experience.
Steve: That’s very true, to be honest. It’s so easy. There’s a saying, isn’t there? “You don’t know what you don’t know.” You can think you know, but you really cannot, you don’t know. That’s how it was with me when there was self-realization. It was like no one could have shown me the way, absolutely no one.
Rick: Yeah, so you’re segueing us into the happy ending of this story, which is that you didn’t just remain dysfunctional and unable to go to school and all that stuff. There was a watershed moment for you, which I think we’re just about getting to now.
Steve: Yeah, we are. We’re getting to the point now where, you see, the thing is, if I came from a school of philosophy that led to enlightenment or awakening, I could explain it, couldn’t I? But no, you get my life, don’t you? My miserable, messed up, unmanageable life. And I’m really sorry, but that’s how it was for me, you see. So when it got to that point of walking away, which was quite scary for me, because up until that point, I saw the fellowship as the savior, so to speak. It totally saved me, and it did. There’s no doubt about that. And of course, walking away from college, and suddenly I felt so alone, so dysfunctional. I remember walking around Windsor, just really, really knowing that I need to know who I am. I need to know what this is. It is the most crucial thing in the world, really. And I was cornered. I felt I was in a corner. There was nothing I could do, really.
Rick: And you weren’t putting this in spiritual terms yet, were you? You didn’t kind of recognize, “Oh, wow, this must be what all of Buddhism and Hinduism and all these spiritual traditions are all about, knowing who you are.” You were just doing it in your own terms, trying to figure out what was going on.
Steve: That’s right. And I had never heard of Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta or Krishnamurti. I’d not heard of any of these people. So for me, what I was looking for was honesty, because I felt so dishonest. I was looking for honesty. And believe it or not, honesty is authenticity, and authenticity is realization, really.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: It’s just that I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what the missing link was. I had no idea what … but I just felt so dishonest.
Rick: With yourself primarily, not like you were running around lying to people, but you felt like you were just disingenuous in and of yourself, right?
Steve: Yeah, the way I felt was, I didn’t know who I was. Even though I’d formulated this good recovery, I’d made this better Steve, it just felt … there was no lights on, so to speak. I could not speak from a sense of authenticity.
Rick: Right.
Steve: I lacked that. Yeah.
Rick: And so?
Steve: So, what happened? What, that evening?
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: Yeah, it all happened one evening. I had no idea what was going to happen. It was quite spontaneous, really. I found myself in my apartment, and I found myself not being able to deal with this anymore. I knew that if something didn’t change, I was going to drink again, you see. And that was my fear. To me, that was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to drink again if this doesn’t fix itself.”
Rick: Sure.
Steve: So, you know… And I did a thing. I did a thing. I asked myself, “What is it I have not done,” you know? “What is it I have not done?” Because I’d been very thorough with working the 12 steps. And so my response was to go through the 12 steps. I thought, “Right, Step one, Step two.” Going through my mind, “What are these things?” And then when I got to Step three, I then realized, I thought, “Of course, Step three is “We hand our will and our lives over to the care of a God greater than ourselves.” And I had the most profound realization that I hadn’t done that. What I’d actually done is I dived into the 12 steps very keenly, and I’d come to understand all the principles. I’d come to apply them. But I’d applied them from a mental basis in relation to a prescribed program, you see?
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: Now, between these two places, there was no Steve, you see? Now, I can say this looking back, because I’ve had to reverse engineer all of this to understand, because the awakening changed everything completely. Once it happened, I thought, “What just happened?” Even though – I’ll get to that in a minute – But anyway, so I realized, I thought, “Oh, right, I have not handed over my will.” And of course, Sheila Jervis, the tutor, the wonderful sociology tutor, came into my mind again, and I thought, “Of course, I’m not my thoughts and my feelings, and I’ve not handed over my will and my life. I’ve not let go of the perceptual field of reality. I’m still hanging on to it, managing it, trying to create a better perceptual field or whatever, a better Steve.” I just absolutely realized in that moment that I’ve got to let go of it. I’ve got to let go of this. It was the only thing left to do. I tried everything. Three and a half years, I’ve been working this program, working the inside of it and the outside of it and applying it and understanding everything, you know? suddenly, I just found myself in the middle of the floor, on my knees, as if in front of God, you know. And I knew that I had to hand over the mind and my feelings. And I had no idea what would happen, you see? I hadn’t been doing meditations to transcend the mind or to have the perfect emotional insight to things or whatever, you know? I had no idea of how to transcend or anything or what would happen. I really had no idea. So I found myself just in the moment thinking, “Okay,” because of the fear of going to drink again or what have you, it really was, “Okay, here I am. I will just give all of this to you now, all of this to you now.” So on my knees on the floor, I consented to let go of my thinking. Now, this is something you can’t just go and do. This is something, again, to do with timing, to do with pressure, to do with, in that moment, what was going on inside of me, what was going on. I mean, I was falling apart. There was absolutely no sense of authenticity. I knew that if something didn’t work, I was going to drink again. For me, I just thought then, “Okay, I’ll let go of my thinking.” And for some strange reason, it worked. I had no idea why it worked. I could tell you now, Rick, or tell someone else, “Go get on your knees now and hand over your thinking. It will just go away and you’ll be fine.” It doesn’t work that way, does it? Because then the ego comes and says, “Right, I’m going to get it now.”
Rick: Yeah. What direction were you facing? What had you had for breakfast?
Steve: Exactly. [laughing] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rick: When I said, in the beginning, that I thought yours was one of the more remarkable awakening stories I’d heard, what I was referring to there is that there’s this perfect confluence of everything you had been through and your sense of desperation at that point, and the kind of realization that you had to surrender your volition to some greater power. It all just came together and it actually happened.
Steve: Yeah, it did. And the bed of that happening was my utter powerlessness and helplessness. From the age of 18, I realized that my life had been a lie in my endeavor to create a recovery. That didn’t deal with that lie. I still remained dishonest, not knowing who I was in terms of identity. And now, at the age of 31, all these years after being 18, it just felt, “I cannot do this anymore. This is it. I’m on my knees.” So I put my hands down. I don’t know if that’s an important detail, but my hands came down. I stood there with nothing and I prayed to God because I was a Christian. I’m not Christian as in identity, but at that time, the understanding I had of spirituality came through Christianity. And so I stood before God, which to me was never a guy with a gray beard or a big stick on a cloud. God to me was always an omnipresent sort of reality, whatever. And that evening, I just, with the true intention, handed over my thinking and there was a prayer position and there was a point where, as I let go, there was a slight sense of sadness, a slight sense of disappointment that I had with myself, having to give the Creator my thinking back because it felt like I’d done nothing with it. I felt very sad. I felt, “I’m sorry, but take the thinking back because of me. I’ve not done much good with this.” And I felt I’d disappointed God. In fact, that was one of the big things in my drinking, was I really disappointed God. And so at that point, the mind began to open. It was at a point where I’d let go of the tension, the tension of identification. Now, I didn’t know this at the time, but what I did was I just totally did not identify anymore with the mind because I knew the mind was not real. Sheila Jervis had told me that, you see, and I totally believe that. It’s as simple as that. And at that point of knowing it’s not real, it was still the scariest thing to let go of, right?
Rick: Ah hmmm.
Steve: So letting go of that, I felt where I disidentified with it, where I let go of the attachment to it as a reality principle, it started just to open because the mind, when you’re attached to it, becomes contracted. It’s like an energy, a tight contraction. And of course, where I was no longer attached to it, it just began to open up. And as it opened up, it went beyond the coordinate that I’d set on it, you see, which is the egoic mark, isn’t it? The control you have on the mind is the contraction, the idea you have. And so as it started to open, it went beyond the idea of who I thought I was in the mental construct. And so it started to go beyond the mental construct of who I thought I was. And there was a fear. There was a fear of, you know, “Oh, don’t know what’s going to happen here.” But I was so broken, so broken, absolutely broken, that I just stayed with it. I just thought, “Okay, well, wow, let’s just do it.” And it dissipated. And I describe it as birds flying out of a tree, a flock of birds suddenly, “Bush!” You know, when you shoot a gun, you know, and all the birds, “Tush!” And it felt like my thoughts just dissipated. All the thoughts in my mind just flew away like a flock of birds. And just at that point, there was this opening. The mind opened up, the thoughts went, and suddenly the mind just became this blank screen. And there was this perfect observation of a blank screen. And I remember, for the first time in my life, coming to know peace of mind. I’d never known peace of mind before. I’d heard people say it, and I may have even at times thought I’d felt it or sensed it, should I say, not felt it, sensed it. But there was peace of mind. And it was like, when they say the mind is the sky and the thoughts are clouds. It really is. That’s exactly how it was. Suddenly, there was this infinite sky of mind, which became like a projection screen. But what is observing that is this pure awareness, this pure consciousness. And at that point, I realized, “I’m not mad. I’m not dead. I’ve not disappeared. I am observing this.” And I am observing from this – I couldn’t have said this at the time – but now, from this undifferentiated awareness and the mind there. And suddenly, the mind became the perfect reflection of what was observing, which was nothing, emptiness, you see? This happened. And I didn’t have time, there was no thinking, ok? So at that point, I remember suddenly being pulled into a deeper idea, a deeper idea which was an emotional idea. Because we have layers of thought. We have the thought that is very abstract. We have the thought that is emotional. And we have the thought that is very physical, the body, you see? Now, I didn’t know this then, but this is what happened. So suddenly, there was a pull, a pull to a deeper aspect of contraction within my body. You see, the mind opened up. Suddenly, there was nothing keeping me from entering into what I call the heart area. And then suddenly, there was a pull. And I felt myself as formless consciousness coming down into this area, into my heart area. And as I was going down, I wasn’t expecting that, but I just stayed with the formless consciousness. There was no egoic “I” anymore, no mental construct of doership anymore. So there was just like a, “Oh, I’m going into my heart,” you know? And suddenly, as I’m going into the heart, the heart is now, where there’s no contraction set on the heart, the ego setting the contraction, keeping it in its emotionally contracted identity of Steve on an emotional level, suddenly that starts to imitate pure consciousness. And so suddenly, the heart begins to open because I’m not doing anything with it. And as it begins to open, there’s a very, there’s a pain. There was a pain, but it was a clean pain, a pain where there was no suffering. Because suffering is in the mind, you see. It’s the mental attachment you have with things. Suddenly, as the heart was opening, I felt this pain. And as I felt this pain, it was like the pain of the world. I’m putting it on a biblical scale now. It was the pain of the world, you know? And there’s this pain. And this kind of voice came from nowhere. It was like a voice from within this just said, “You’ve been running away from this all your life.” And I understood then. I understood. I’ve been running away from my heart opening. I’ve remained in what I knew all my life, you see. Suddenly, I’m going beyond what I knew. I’ve done that now mentally, with the mind. But now on this level, the emotional level, this is on a much deeper level. The attachment, the emotional attachment we have for things is much deeper and is much stronger, you see. And so as it began to open, he said, “This is what you’ve been running away from all your life.” And then it opened up, and all there was was a void. There was going beyond the emotional contraction of my identity. There was just this absolute void. It was absolutely black. And I don’t want to appear too dramatic, or I don’t want to frighten you, but for me, I then was facing this very dark void, and this void was pulling me in. And as I was being pulled into this vortex, this void, there was another voice came in. It said, “You’ll either go mad or you’ll die.” And I consented. I said, “Okay.” I consented, “Okay.” Not verbally, but in the most. Intentionally. Intentionally, I said, “Okay.” And I was pulled into this vortex, this very dark vortex. And as I got pulled in, it just felt like the whole thing opened up. And as I got pulled in, there was a point where I truly did not exist. For no time, it was like a boom, boom. As soon as I got pulled in, I could then see from, if you understand.
Rick: Hm hmmm.
Steve: I could see from. And at that point, there was a point of absolute death, complete death of attachments. There was no attachment anymore to the mental structure, the emotional structure. So much so that everything had opened up, and it truly reflected what was directly observing. And the void was in fact the reflection of the “Absolute.” I got sucked into it, and then I came to, I could see basically. I could see, and I could see from a completely, completely different reality base to what I was before, totally.
Rick: Well, that’s really cool. I didn’t want to interrupt you because it all came out so beautifully, but a couple of questions occurred to me as you were speaking. Maybe just elaborate a little bit more on the comparison between the peace you felt when the flock of birds dispersed, you know, the thoughts, and there’s that peace for the first time in your life, and this void that you’ve just been speaking of. Is the void like a deeper level of the same thing, or how would you compare those two points that you made?
Steve: That’s a good question, Rick. There is a difference. The mind opening is a more superficial opening of reality. When the heart opened, because the heart is very much linked to your body as well, so it was the emotional attachment or emotional construct of identity that’s in the heart is very much connected with the body as well. So when the whole thing opened, it even felt like the body opened and even dying to the body, so to speak. The difference was when the heart opened, it was the complete surrender. The mind, that was just a portal. What was observing was just pure consciousness, but pure consciousness had not yet fully died to the whole construct, had not come into full realization of what is beyond all of this, beyond all appearance. It’s only when the heart opened that suddenly there was going completely beyond all appearance and there was a coming to and a complete relating, a complete self-realization of Absolute. So you’re relating from Absolute rather than just from peace of mind. I mean, the peace of mind stuff was just the I AM, the I AM consciousness in its transcendence of what we call the modification, the conscious modification we call mind, you see. But when you go beyond the modification of the heart, when that opened, you’ve actually gone beyond all location, you know, you’ve gone beyond all location and that’s where the I AM then totally goes beyond the body and then comes back into the ultimate reality of Absolute.
Rick: A couple of thoughts come to mind. One is you may have heard Adyashanti talk about awakenings in the head, heart and gut and you’ve just described head and heart. How do you relate to his saying that? Have you also moved on to a gut realization or is that something you expect to have happen eventually or what? Or maybe you don’t buy into that model?
Steve: No, no, I said to you the heart links into the body.
Rick: Oh, so that’s how you would … that would be gut. I see, okay.
Steve: I don’t know what gut is actually. I mean, maybe if I’ve got awakening to happen, maybe that’s the final one.
Rick: I guess maybe, well, I don’t know, I don’t want to speculate, but something, like you say, into the body, something more visceral, fundamental, primordial, you know.
Steve: Yeah, there is, I mean, when I consented to going beyond the attachments to the heart, it was the body as well. It linked into the body. You either go mad or you’ll die, you know. It really felt that the whole thing could just go, really.
Rick: Yeah, so when this happened, again, you didn’t have much of a spiritual background aside from 12-step. Did you have a feeling like, “Ah, okay, I have a feeling for what this is. I maybe can’t describe it yet, but something good has happened and everything’s okay and I’m not going to go mad or die and I’m going to have to learn more about this.” But it looks like, you know, it felt like great relief and something profound had happened.
Steve: There was tremendous relief. I cannot tell you. It was profound relief on such a level. I was very lucky that I had the grounding of the 12-steps, without a doubt, because that allowed for this very thing to fall into some perspective, you know. But the main one I got in spiritual terms or conscious terms or whatever, it was Jesus who, at the end of it all, it was from my growing up in Christianity that the revelation, when it all opened up and I could see, was, “Ah, Jesus was right. This is the Kingdom. This is the Kingdom.” And there’s a lovely distinction here I want to tell you, Rick, is that the Kingdom is this unmanifest, Absolute. It’s everywhere. Everything’s of it, right? And it’s alive, but it’s unmanifest. It’s not here. It’s not asleep. It’s not awake. It’s just, I can’t say words. There’s nothing I can say. I can say a few things, but it’s awesome, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: But what was observing it is the I AM. I as the I AM became detached from all the mental and emotional constructs and the physical construct, and suddenly the I AM comes into perfect abidance to that that’s beyond that and this unmanifest reality of Absolute. And I could see that that was the Kingdom, and the observation is the Christ. I realized that Jesus was right also in the Christ, that the Christ is pure consciousness, is absolutely pure consciousness with no attachment to the world for meaning, because it’s not of this world, and it’s of the Father. Jesus lived his life in complete recognition of the Father, of the Absolute, living in relation to that. So for me at that time, it was Jesus. It was through Jesus, through that.
Rick: Nice. It must be kind of cool now having, well you’ve just alluded to it really, but having had this realization, to look back on the Bible and also delve into other spiritual texts and realize, “Oh, so that’s what they were talking about.”
Steve: Exactly.
Rick: It’s like a totally different appreciation than you could have had before.
Steve: You get it all. You understand everything, even the Upanishads. The Upanishads are wonderful. You read them, it’s like, “Oh, this is God speaking…”
Rick: Right.
Steve: “…This is the words of the Absolute,” and it’s wonderful. I became like a genius overnight. [laughing] I understood the theological, deep things.
Rick: Cool. And you didn’t even have to go to theological seminary or whatever you were planning to do.
Steve: Exactly. Yeah.
Rick: Save yourself all that tuition.
Steve: Yeah.
Rick: I have conversations with friends sometimes, who go through a shift, or have gone through a shift, in which they insist there is really no longer any sense of a personal self. And I can’t understand or relate to that, in terms of my own experience, and I acknowledge that their experience is probably well beyond mine. But then again, there’s other people, like for instance, our friend Francis Bennett, whom I think you spoke with or gave a presentation with over in England, who say, “You know, you’re always going to be a person. You’re just not only a person. I mean, the fact that you’re not only a wave does … the fact that you realize that you’re now the ocean doesn’t mean you’re not still a wave but also the ocean.” Yet I say things like that to such people and they say, “No, there really is no person. There’s no wave. It’s just the ocean.” And I don’t know how they can function as human beings if that’s really truly the case, or how they would react if you whacked them in the shin with a hammer or something. It seems like to me there would be kind of a person there feeling that. So, I mean, what’s your whole orientation to that argument? I know over there in Tony Parsons’ land there are a lot of people running around emphasizing that point, that you are not a person. What do you say?
Steve: Oh, wow. Wow, that’s a big one, isn’t it? I really don’t buy into that at all. Just in my experience, Rick, just in what’s happened for me, and just by saying it to you, I’m sure there’d be someone saying, “Oh, you can’t see me,” you know.
Rick: You’re right.
Steve: Or these things.
Rick: Please pass the salt. Who wants the salt?
Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rick: There is no one here.
Steve: No, no, no, I can’t. I can give examples of what I’ve experienced with people that do believe that, but I can’t. They’d know who I’m talking about.
Rick: So, Mr. X has said such and such, how does Steve respond?
Steve: No, because this person is quite well-known and they’d know. Honestly, they would.
Rick: But just dealing with the philosophical principles here, what would you say? Well, what’s all that about? I mean, what I’ve come to see was, I didn’t come through any physical… I didn’t come through Tony Parsons, I didn’t come through anyone, really. No one. I had a very basic 12-step and very Christian basis. And all I can say is that there are waves. Yes, of course, there are waves. There are outer bodies of existence that we call the mind, we call the heart, we call the body, all of these things. Where they get confused, or dare I say that, is that the body of illusion that is the I, the body of illusion we call ego, is nothing more than identification with the capacity to think or the capacity to feel or the capacity to jump around in a physical body. The body of illusion is identification, you see? So that evening, when I detached from all of this, it was the body of illusion that died. It dissipated. And in its dissipation, okay, and that false tension that’s keeping it all closed fell away. And what opened up was the mind opened up, the heart opened up, and all of it. This is the really interesting thing, is the mind, everything opened up to what is truly experiencing that. And when we look at the mind, I know you know this, Rick, but you know that the mind does not experience itself, does it? And that the heart doesn’t experience it. None of this experiences itself. So form doesn’t experience itself, yet it does not live outside consciousness. So what’s happening is, it is consciousness appearing as form, and it’s consciousness directly experiencing the mind. And the mind can reflect that that’s not here. Now this is what Nisargadatta speaks about. Nisargadatta says, “I’m not here.” What does he mean by that? He’s not attached to the world for meaning. He’s not attached to the world, there’s no body of illusion, there’s no tension that he calls the “I.” So what he’s saying is, “So this is happening,” but it’s happening to what he’s observing. What he’s observing is not here. So there is no you, in that sense, you see. There is no false attachment, so there’s no false identity. But what there is, is of course there are these things. These are happening within consciousness. There is a person within consciousness, but what’s directly experiencing the person in consciousness is not here. I agree, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: But there is a personal body, there is even a “me” body, an “I” body, you know, that you have these personal things. But I can assure you, for me, that there’s just no attachment to it for meaning. The meaning itself is in a direct experience. And what is directly experiencing that is pure consciousness. And then pure consciousness itself is of that that is observing that you can’t even explain. So I don’t agree with this. I mean, when you start going around saying, “Oh, there is no one, there is just this happening,” and all that, I just find it really, well, where’s the beauty? Where’s the love? Where’s the poetry? What’s all this about? I find existence an incredible phenomenon. But I understand what they’re saying. I do understand that there is no one here. And I understand that no one here, even the awareness of not being a body, is a consciousness that also is transient. If you want to be an absolutist, you can say that the only thing real is this knowing that that is, and everything else is false or is illusion. But I don’t find that that’s what’s the illusion. I don’t find creation the illusion. I find the attachment to the creation, assuming an identity, the illusion, which is what we call the ego. So that’s where I come from.
Rick: One helpful way that I’ve found to explain it is to say, “I’m here, I’m everywhere, and I’m nowhere.” And all three things are simultaneously true. You know what I mean? Can you relate to that?
Steve: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I spent two years looking at that very question. It was upon Awakening, there was the most profound revelation of the Self, or the Absolute, and all of these things. But we don’t live in a world that really explains the science of that consciousness, unless you live in India, where they have the wonderful words that describe things that we don’t, regarding this conscious phenomena. But I spent two years looking at this. For me, it’s not enough to say, “I am abiding in nothing, everything is transient, it just falls away.” That doesn’t make a cup of tea or get a job or pay the rent, you know. So I wanted to learn how does one, as the realized state of consciousness, continue to live in relation to what is observing, the overall observation of Absolute? How does one live in relation to that, so that one is always abiding as that? And that abiding factor of “I am,” how does that then become a flow that comes into all appearance, directly experiencing appearance, so that all appearance is just reflecting what is observing? I wanted to learn this so that I could be more integrated and so that I could maintain this integrity of pure consciousness. But at the same time, allow the “I,” the “me,” whoever, all these flavors of modified consciousness that make up the person, enjoy that as well. There’s a beauty in that, there’s a life in that. And of course, it will go and it all comes back to the “I am,” the “I am” even recedes back into the Absolute.
Rick: Yeah, and that kind of brings us back to your story, which is that you had this awakening that evening on your knees and then you went to bed and next morning you woke up and, “Oh boy, it’s still here.” But then obviously you had a life to get on with, and probably money to earn. I think you have a daughter and relationships, and there was somebody named Hannah in your book, and all kinds of human stuff that you had to deal with. So let’s talk a little bit for a while now about the reintegration process and the ongoing development that has taken place since that awakening.
Steve: Well, with the job, I found myself… I’ve got two daughters, and I found myself in a place… I just had the awakening, I left college and I knew I couldn’t go on to university because my daughter had just been born, and there was no way I was going to go back and try and redo things and everything. I just wanted to go out and work. So I went out and I got a job part-time setting up an outreach project in Slough, just walking around, helping anyone that’s homeless or addicted or whatever, to be referred into drug services, drug and alcohol services. So I found this job really good, just to walk around, talk to these people. And I was earning money. I wasn’t earning loads of money, but I was earning money. And it was good. It was a really good project to do. I was able to integrate whatever recovery I had from sobriety to then start with this. And I did that for two years. And then after that, I got a job for a company, working with addicts in prisons, young offenders. I got the job and I got the job whereby they fully trained me up to become a therapist, working with drug and alcohol.
Rick: Great.
Steve: I worked there for three, three and a half years, I think, possibly more. And while I was there, I really began to come back into the world from this abstract place of self-realization, of hanging out in “Oneness” and just reading it here and there or whatever.
Rick: Had you gone through a phase of really being sort of out of the world and wanting to just kind of be withdrawn and close the curtains and not have anything to do with anybody?
Steve: Yeah, I did for the first few months. Yeah, it felt … I think it happens, doesn’t it? Because the awakening was so profound.
Rick: Yeah. Well, that may be entirely appropriate, actually, to just sort of chill for a while.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. No, it was so profound. The dissipation was so great that I really felt that there was no one there. There was no one there. Because nothing had started to move back in again. It was so new that I was just in this place, walking around Slough, seeing people and seeing people caught up in this little projection in their mind. I remember thinking, “Wow, I’m not there. I’m not here.” And it really felt I wasn’t here. People were caught up in … Because most people are. They’re caught up in what they think, the idea of themselves. And when they communicate, you can see that tension in the faces and this communication or whatever. And I was totally invisible. I was totally formless. But within that formlessness, I could see just … I could just relate from the … see from the Absolute. Thoughts would come up or things would happen, but it felt quite disembodied. But it was natural because I wasn’t attached to it anyway, for Meaning, so it didn’t matter if a little thought would go across the mind. I would think, “Oh, I was just thinking that. I must have want a cup of tea,” or whatever.” And that happened for a few months. Then suddenly, everything starts to come in again. Your functioning self starts to come in, you see?
Rick: Um hmm>
Steve: There’s a new tension starts to build, the new tension of functioning. Because function itself is a tension. If you brush your teeth, you can feel the tension doing this, you see? It’s just that there was a complete dissipation and for a while there was like a honeymoon period of having no tension whatsoever. And then suddenly it started to come back. And yeah, that’s kind of what happened really.
Rick: Did you ever go through a phase where you felt like maybe you were in some more intense circumstances of some nature and you felt like you kind of lost it and you’re just back to being plain old Steve again for a while?
Steve: Yeah, not lost it, but it got more intense, yes. I never lost it. There’s always been a little aperture, you know?
Rick: At least.
Steve: A little aperture that you can look through and see the whole world, you know?
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Steve: Your I Am-ness can always be small, you see? And the I Am-ness always knows the non-location, okay? What we call the “Absolute.” And you can be there and you can have all your dysfunctions continuing within patterns that may have not completely died because that stuff never awakens the patterns. They don’t awaken. It’s unconscious stuff. That stuff comes in relatedness to what it’s observing and then in the relatedness it starts to transmute, starts to change. That’s a whole different chat, so I’ll go into that.
Rick: Yeah, we should actually, as long as we’re not skipping past something we should be talking about.
Steve: I’ll stay with you.
Rick: But the whole thing about “that stuff never awakens,” it seems to me that almost everybody has layer upon layer upon layer of conditioning and impressions and what not. And perhaps a certain amount of that has to be worked out before awakening happens, but not necessarily. I mean a lot of times it seems that people awaken without having worked out very much of that and then it has to be worked out.
Steve: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: So what’s your take on that?
Steve: Exactly that, what you just said, funny enough. For me it was, coming where I come from, the growing up, the identity, all of these things, there’s a lot of stuff that happened. I think for most people we all have our bag, don’t we? And it was when I began working in the prison, I began working with a team of therapists and I began to train as a therapist. And I’ve always had a natural bent for psychology and philosophy and stuff like that. So by the time I’d got to working with these therapists I could hold my own, so to speak, I had my own way of understanding. I began to learn all of the techniques of how to therap people. And that’s when it hit me. That’s when I realised I was learning this position of a therapist that didn’t seem integrated, it seemed mechanical and it didn’t seem to be aligned with the true nature because the awakening was still quite fresh then, and I hadn’t yet realised how rare the awakening was in most people’s lives. And of course, looking at what it took for me to awaken, it was a complete dying. I mean that terrified me but there was just no option, you see?
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: Working with these therapists, I realised I thought, “How come we’re not talking about this state? How come no one’s talking about I AM and all this True Self and this true self that knows Absolute? Why isn’t anyone talking about this?” I was looking and I was working with these therapists and I thought, “Why are you arguing with a person’s mind? Their mind is just their reaction to their own ignorance. Why don’t you get them in their true identity?” I’d be thinking this and thinking, “Why?” And really looking back I was quite naive, but I persisted. I persisted with the training, with working, but I found the trouble was I wasn’t ambitious enough. That’s one of the things. When you work with therapists, they’re really ambitious, especially when they’re training and I wasn’t. I was very laid back and very easy. And I always felt that precision of “I am this” that I was observing, I always felt it wasn’t being communicated. I felt I was having to go into a technique to engage with someone, to reflect someone’s thinking or reflect someone’s feeling or pattern.
Rick: How did you answer those questions to yourself, of why aren’t you taking this “I am this” into account? Why are you just dealing with their mind? What kind of answers did you come up with?
Steve: Well I didn’t have the answers, that was the thing.
Rick: You probably do now though, right?
Steve: Oh I do now but I didn’t have it then. At that point, this is when I hit a wall of “this doesn’t fit in the world, this really does not fit.” Working as a therapist it’s very structured, the whole system is very structured, you see? And they had very structured ways of dealing with people, structured ways of thinking, structured ways of feeling.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: I found I couldn’t express this and I felt, then, uneasy, I felt uneasy.
Rick: What would you say now? I mean I could give you an answer to those two questions you just posed, but what would you say?
Steve: What would I do now?
Rick: Well you know you’re saying that you’re observing all these therapists who weren’t taking into account the deeper dimension and they’re just dealing on the level of the mind. I mean I would say that it’s because they don’t even, most of them realize that that deeper dimension exists, or maybe they think of it in terms of the subconscious or something, but the possibility of self-realization as an adjunct to or as a foundation for therapy is just not even on their radar, you know? It’s not in their training, it’s not in their experience, even if they accepted it they wouldn’t know how to inculcate it. And so that’s why they didn’t find it when you were studying it as a therapist.
Steve: Exactly, and that’s what confused me, was why don’t they know it? And that’s what I realized, is they’ve not had the experience, they’ve not died to their attachment to their mental emotional faculty, they’re not autonomous in their true intimacy, their state of pure consciousness, they’re simply not aware on that level. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? I mean these great therapists, trust me they were great therapists, but this is just an uncommon language, this language of self-realization and what have you.
Rick: It is because self-realization hasn’t really been common in society, it’s not something we learn about in school, it’s not something you see on TV very much. But these days, of Course, there are therapists who are realized and who are sort of non-dual therapists or enlightenment-based therapists, but I’m sure that’s still a tiny, tiny subset of therapists in general.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. So I found myself, in a way, quite bemused, but I had to continue with this job because I needed to earn the money. So I felt like a whore, I was a whore for the money, you know? [laughing]. Give me the money. And just observing and thinking, “Well how do I…” But it got me thinking, it got me thinking, that was the thing, that became the next stage in my life where I thought, “Okay, I’m really not going to do a job next time where I can’t be natural, in a natural state. If I can’t come from a natural state, in a way where that kind of honesty facilitates a way to challenge a person’s behavior,” I said, “I don’t want to do nothing constructive,” you see? So when I left there in 2006, I remember I was on holiday with the children in a caravan on the coast, in the south coast of England, and I began, that was it, I began writing. I began exploring, I began to look, I thought, “Okay, I’ve got this knowledge of therapy, and it’s great knowledge,” you know, “it’s wonderful knowledge, for what it is, it’s great.” And then – I was trained and everything – and then I found myself writing. I thought, “Well I need to learn how does one relate from Self-Realization? How does one maintain pure consciousness, the I AM? How does one then, from that position, come into the body, function, and then connect with someone else and do that?” So that became the next question. And it was then, that was in the August, and then funny enough, in the November, I was introduced to the seekers. I was introduced to people that are seeking the refined purpose of exploring what is reality, what is real, you know?
Rick: It’s funny it took you that long to run into them. So how long was it from the time you had the realization to the time you stumbled across some seekers?
Steve: Seven years.
Rick: Wow, that’s amazing.
Steve: Yeah, I’m just walking around with my head down. I remember seeing a few things in books, like Krishnamurti and stuff like that, and thinking, “Oh, he’s had the same experience,” or Eckhart Tolle’s had the same experience. But I just didn’t. I don’t know why that was. Not a clue. It’s strange, isn’t it? But one of the things that happened was, when I had the awakening, when it occurred, I used to read a lot. I used to read a lot, loads and loads of stuff, obsessively, really compulsively. And then after the awakening, I couldn’t read even for seven years. I couldn’t even pick a book up. I’d read a page and I’d have to put it down. I just couldn’t do it. It was so …
Rick: Even spiritual stuff?
Steve: No, I couldn’t read spiritual stuff. It was boring.
Rick: Interesting.
Steve: Yeah, because I knew it. But saying that, it wasn’t the right spiritual stuff, because when I met seekers, I then met a few people that did offer some good reading material. When I began to read things like the Upanishads and stuff like that, I thought, “Wow, this is really good.” So, I can read now, yeah. It’s just that I didn’t know this stuff was out there, really, to be honest with you. I was happy anyway. I had kids to look after, jobs and all of these things.
Rick: Yeah. Maybe we’ll get back to seekers in a minute, but you talked about … my voice is starting to echo back to me … why that’s happening … you used the word “imitate.” I thought that was interesting, that the mind imitating pure consciousness, and maybe you even said the heart imitating pure consciousness. It’s an interesting choice of words. Maybe you can elaborate on that for a bit.
Steve: Yeah, they’re just my words. I’ve kind of ad-hoc-ed my way through this. What it is, is there was a point upon awakening, and it kind of remained the same for a number of years, really. I was happy in the I Am, in the formless awareness, observing thought, observing reality, observing patterns, continual patterns. It wasn’t as bad, obviously, but still … but they are. But there was no integrating. There was no contact. I was observing, but not directly experiencing. And I was missing the relationship that the mind, in its function, in the heart and body … I was missing that point of how it comes into relatedness to what it’s directly observing, you see. So, when I began to explore further, I remember I woke up one day and I thought, “That’s it. I’m going to stay in the I Am now, and I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to work for people or work in places where it’s not about this.” So, I spent days, just days, just walking, sleeping, in my room with the curtains closed. I had a job just working three days a week for probation, working for the government on these drug programs. And it was easy. It just worked itself. The rest of the time, I just spent myself observing, just observing everything. I allowed myself to just observe the mind, observe the mind and its function and the heart, everything. Just observe everything. And I wanted to find, “How does one come from the self-realization aspect?” Self-realization itself is not reality. Self-realization is of reality. It’s consciousness. And consciousness knows it is of the non-location, which is Absolute. So, “How does this idea of truth, then, have the best effect upon the mind?” Because the mind is happening, right? And it took a while. Then I realized one day, I thought, “Of course, of course. Here I am, so into reality, so fine in this I Am-ness, so fine, knowing of the Absolute.” And that’s as far as I’ve got.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: The other parts of my life were playing out. I may not have been identifying with these aspects of the personal self or reflective bodies of existence. So, I was just hanging out in “Absolute Land,” in wonderment of reality and liberation as well, because that liberation of consciousness is pure. But I wasn’t really understanding the relationship between the I Am and the mind, really. That was it. So, that’s what I embarked on, I wanted to know, if I’m going to continue working or living here, it must all come now from this. It must come from the I Am.
Rick: I think it’s an important point, and we can dwell on it a bit, because people have an idealized notion of what an enlightened person should be like, how he should talk, how he should act, how he should think, how he should behave. And then a lot of times, spiritual teachers let people down because they’re not talking or acting or thinking or behaving that way. And so, people wonder why the disconnect, how come this state which should make one a walking Buddha, sort of attuned to life in a very harmonious, benign way, how come that’s not happening for everybody? These days, I think the word “embodiment” is all the rage. It’s in vogue. People who maybe 10 years ago, had some kind of awakening or spiritual realization, realize that it wasn’t embodied and that it needs to get embodied and that it needs to somehow percolate or integrate into practical daily life. So, it sounds like this was a project for you over the last decade or so. So, tell us about it. How did you go about it? To what extent do you feel like you’ve achieved it? Or is it a lifelong process?
Steve: I don’t know if it’s lifelong. I know it’s ongoing at the moment. I think it’s important to know the established position of “I am” and how that then becomes the direct experiencer. Without experiencing, do you understand? It’s like how it becomes a direct experience of what is happening within your perceptual field because what is happening does not experience itself. Now, I didn’t know that, you see?
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: So I had to learn that, I learned that on my own, just watching. I thought, “Of course, yes. There is only consciousness.” These modifications of consciousness do not experience themselves now. Which means that whatever patterns these modifications of consciousness are made up of, they come from direct observation. They come from consciousness. So, in all the years that the ego is playing out this reality of a separate self, of course, it’s still going to leave its mark, its effects. It’s not ego, but it leaves its effects in some of the patterns. You still have certain thoughts or persuasions within you that you’re observing, that you feel. The thing for me was I didn’t want to just see them and just remain arrested in that development of just seeing and just remain, “Oh, no. It’s not real. This is Absolute, and the I AM, da-da-da.”
Rick: Yeah, I mean, sometimes you find yourself saying or doing certain things and saying, “Wow, I’m really being a dick here. How come my realization isn’t changing my behavior?”
Steve: Exactly, precisely. You couldn’t have said it better. And it’s like, “Why am I sticking my fingers up at the drivers in front of me, or the guy who’s tailgating me?” And I thought, “I really want to see this,” because it interested me. I’m a therapist, and I thought, “What is the link here?” So I spent about two years just exploring that.
Rick: What did you come up with?
Steve: Well, the million-dollar question. [laughing] What I came up with is that the recognition of reality is what we call “realization,” okay? The recognition of reality. Reality itself does not need to be recognized. It does not need to awaken. It just simply is. It always has been.
Rick: Right. It doesn’t need us for anything. It’s fine, doing just fine all on its own.
Steve: Absolutely. That doesn’t need to awaken. That doesn’t need you. But it does have a thought, you see? The unmanifest is manifesting, and its manifesting in its first embodiment is what we call “pure consciousness.” It’s the “I AM,” okay? This “I AM” serves only to recognize what is real. And if it can recognize what is real, it can then live abiding to what is real. So you can become pure consciousness abiding as that. So there is no one, right? So that no one becomes the first thought of that, as Nisargadatta says, you see? And then what happens is what comes out of the pure consciousness are all the modifications of consciousness. So that’s where you then realize that there’s still experience, but there’s direct experience. So there is mind. There is the person happening. But it’s the direct experience of the person, its formless consciousness, because your observation of whatever you perceive as a person transcends the person. And what is transcendent of the person is just pure consciousness. But the person lives within that consciousness. It lives in relatedness to what is directly observing it, you know?
Rick: Um hmm.
Steve: So that’s when I became more complete. I started to mature a bit. I grew up. I realized that you can maintain this, (not maintain it, because there’s no one maintaining it), but you can abide, you know? You can become more established as self-realization and allow that pure consciousness as self-realization to live in relation to what is real, which is what Tony calls “that,” the oneness or some people don’t like “Oneness,” the “Absolute,” whatever, Unmanifest. And living in relation to that, you suddenly realize that your pure consciousness is a flow. This is what I found. This is really what had me thinking, “This is great.” It’s just the flow. It has no agenda, no orientation whatsoever. It remains undifferentiated and it’s transcendent of everything that is appearing. So everything that is appearing is a direct reflection of what is observing, what is experiencing. It then brings everything into, there’s no separation, you know? And it also brings everything into a state where there is no “I.” There’s no one doing this. It’s just happening. But then this flow of attention is realization, is “I AM.” As I say, it’s transcendent of all agenda and everything, so it just flows. So if there is something happening, you just directly experience it and it reflects what is directly experiencing. They become one, really.
Rick: Did you ever read the Bhagavad Gita?
Steve: Some of it, not all of it. It’s a really thick book.
Rick: The basic theme is that Arjuna is a warrior. It was his obligation in this circumstance to fight a battle and he was going to kill a lot of his friends and relatives and dear ones. So he had this moral dilemma and he presented it to Krishna. He said, “What should I do? I can’t do this.” Krishna said, “Transcend. Just get to the Absolute.” And then three verses later he said, “Now establish there,” establish in yoga, establish in being, “perform action.” And then the action will be in accordance with all the laws of nature, the laws of dharma or whatever, in a way that the human intellect alone could never work out.
Steve: That’s right. So I guess the question here is – and I know you talked about seekers earlier and you have a weekly meeting or something where you meet with people.
Steve: Yeah.
Rick: There are two things those people want to know that you have to somehow convey to them. One is, “Well, how do I have this sort of realization you had? How do I get to the Self or Pure Consciousness?” And then if they have that, “What do I do with it? How do I live that in my life?” Do you find that, is that true? Is that representative of the essential questions that people have?
Steve: People don’t ask me questions, hardly ever. We just sit in silence.
Rick: Oh, okay, that’s nice too. That takes care of the first part.
Steve: Yeah, I mean people do ask questions and then there’s exploration obviously within the consciousness. But I just want to go back Rick, I want to come back to this. I want to go back because when you said, “What is it?” and I said about becoming established in the Absolute. And you said that back about Gita, “Establish action” or something.
Rick: Establish, in Yogastakharu Karmani, establishing yoga, perform action.
Steve: That’s right, perform action. In Walking Awake, the book, I talk about that, the true action. The true action is actually the non-action, is the observation itself has the most profound effect on form, on thinking and stuff like that. So when people ask questions at my meetings, we connect. Simple, we connect. We merge. We connect with where that person is. I always look where that person’s attention is, because it’s the attention that is realized or unrealized. Attention is awareness, you see, and attention can get locked in many places. Because I’m a therapist, where I’ve been trained, I like to follow where people’s attention is, but speak from the point of liberated “I am” and show how you can move as the non-doer within this idea of false doing.
Rick: Yeah. I heard you say, and maybe it was your Conscious TV interview, I’m not sure, but that the people you’ve associated with, people who’ve come to your meetings, no one’s quite had the sort of degree of realization that you had, as far as you can tell. It just hasn’t happened for people as readily as it … of course, you went through a lot before it happened for you. But as you’ve been doing this for a while, living it and also serving in some capacity as a satsang guy, do you feel like a capacity or a facility is growing in you for helping to facilitate some kind of shift in people? And if so, how? Or is it just the sitting in silence and there’s some kind of attunement or entrainment or something that seems to take place?
Steve: Yeah, you know, when I talk about myself, I mean, there’s always a movement. I’ve spoken about certain movements that have allowed me to explore or allowed me to see things from the established understanding of I Am in relation to that. With people, I do understand that most people haven’t had the sort of experience I’ve had or revelation I’ve had so suddenly. It was terrifying. I don’t expect many people to go through what I went through. It was spiritual suicide, really.
Rick: So, you don’t advocate going out and drinking for 10 years? [laughing] Just kidding.
Steve: Good stuff. [ laughing]
Rick: Okay, first do that, come back to me in 10 years.
Steve: Well, that’s true. You know, if someone’s not ready to stop drinking, drink more, that’s what they say. But no, no, no. For me, it’s “Connect,” just connect. In the meetings, there’s stillness and then there’s a deeper resonance of a deeper reality. There is a deeper body of consciousness than the other states of consciousness. You know, the familiar states of consciousness such as the mind, the heart, the body, and even the intuitive body of consciousness that has you thinking and working things out and getting your little “Ah ha’s” and stuff like that. Come to the meetings, become very still, connect. Connect to the deeper body, the deeper body that is without characteristic, without attachment to any of these surface bodies for meaning. And to think that I facilitate – do I facilitate? What a great word, Rick, “facilitation.” It sounds like I’m doing something. I’ve been working some pulleys up and I’m playing books out and I don’t know, lectures or whatever. But no, no, no. It’s just sitting in silence.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: There’s a real reality. There’s a much deeper body of reality in being silent. You know this from being, what do they call it, transcendental?
Rick: Oh yeah, I used to teach that, right. And actually in that context, in that capacity, I always found, and this is my next question to you, that when you step into a role like that, something takes over. It’s like kind of all your cylinders begin to kick in and you have a kind of a, you’re kind of aligning yourself with a higher purpose or something and allowing that to use you as a conduit for something that’s beyond your ordinary capacity. A lot of people who teach in various capacities have told me that, and I’ve seen it. Joe Schmo gets up in front of a group and starts to teach and all of a sudden some light turns on and he’s ever so much more so. So, have you experienced that also, that when you put yourself in that role, there’s something profound that takes place through you?
Steve: Oh< absolutely.
Rick: It’s not like you’re doing it, but you’re allowing yourself to serve as an instrument of something profound.
Steve: I just said absolutely. I’m trying to tell myself at the moment, “Don’t say absolutely.” It’s an awful word to keep saying.
Rick: Everybody knows what the word means.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. No, no, there is. In meetings it’s profound. I go very silent. The outer bodies, the outer structure of who we are in the surface sense become very still, and then that deeper body that transcends that becomes more apparent, becomes more established, and there’s a much deeper presence. There really is. And connecting is much deeper. People relax and something does happen, yeah, something very deep.
Rick: It’s just really cool the way that works.
Steve: It’s amazing, isn’t it? Because it’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s not for you, as they say. And it’s not for me, it’s not for anyone. It’s something that simply is there, that is just deeper than what is currently playing out.
Rick: Yeah, you’re like a catalyst when that kind of thing happens.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing what realization does when it awakens. It comes away from the tension, abiding in that Absolute, and then suddenly that attention itself, the I AM, becomes an administrator of the very essence of absolute, which is a wonderful, wonderful connecting feeling. It’s nice.
Rick: I’m going to see if I can find something here really quick that’s kind of neat. Hang on a second here. I’m just going to read this. Someone posted it the other day. Ah, here it is. This is from the end of the Rig Veda. He said, “Go together, speak together, know your minds to be functioning together from a common source in the same manner as the devas, the celestial beings in the beginning. Remain together, united near the Source, integrated is the expression of knowledge. An assembly is significant in unity. United are their minds while full of desires. For you, I make use of the integrated expression of knowledge. By virtue of unitedness and by means of that which remains to be united, I perform action to generate wholeness of life. United be your purpose, harmonious be your feelings, collected be your mind, in the same way as all the various aspects of the universe exist together in wholeness.”
Steve: That’s beautiful.
Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of nice.
Steve: Yeah, very nice. Did you write that, Rick?
Rick: No, I say it’s from the end of the Rig Veda.
Steve: Yeah, sure.
Rick: I wasn’t around then.
Steve: That’s very good. Oh, okay.
Rick: As far as I know. [laughs]
Steve: Well, you were, you were.
Rick: Yeah, I was, right.
Steve: You know, present, you know. How would the world be here without you?
Rick: It’s true. There was a saint in India named Thadwalababa, and someone once said, “Do you sleep?” And he said, “What would happen to the universe if I slept?”
Steve: [laughing] Exactly, speaking from the One.
Rick: [laughing] Yeah. So, I got us off on a little tangent there, but what haven’t we covered that you would like to cover? There’s all kinds of interesting tidbits in your book. There’s all kinds of phases in your life that we’ve just glossed over, and all sorts of interesting things, I’m sure. Give me a few tidbits here that you’d like to cover that we haven’t.
Steve: Let me think…
Rick: I can ask you a question if you need help.
Steve: Yeah, I wouldn’t know what to say, to be honest with you there, Rick.
Rick: Well, one standard question is, where are you now? It’s been quite a few years since your awakening, and you’ve gone through all kinds of integration and purification and growth and whatnot. Do you have a sense of a horizon in terms of where you see this going in terms of your evolution as a human being, as a spiritual being, or whatever?
Steve: Yeah, definitely. I think where I’m at now is I’m far more abiding as the “I Am.” That’s more predominant now than ever. And there just seems to be a natural curiosity now, a natural play of I Am-ness that is curious with everything, really likes to explore, likes to really directly experience things. Because I think that’s what this is about. This is about experiencing fully as conscious beings, relating from the established “I Am” is the transcendent state that is able to live directly this life. I think it was Francis Bennett who said – is his book called “Fully Human, Fully Divine?”
Rick: I believe it is. His new book is, yeah.
Steve: Yeah, it’s very apt, because it really is about being human and also being divine. We’re not talking about divinity, we’re talking about sourcing, that part of you that is just pure consciousness and direct experience in life as it happens, but from the standpoint of the established I AM which has no characteristics. So there’s direct experience and there’s direct intimacy, there’s direct connection. This is what it’s about.
Rick: Do you tend to feel and even perceive a unity with all things? Like you’re walking down the street and it’s all kind of you.
Steve: Yeah, sometimes, no. I do. I’m not one of those people that looks out into the world and says, “Oh, this is just all me.”
Rick: Some people actually experience that.
Steve: Yeah, I’m sure they do. For me it’s more when everything just fell away. Because you got to see the world as an idea as well, your mind, your body, it’s all an idea. The world is an idea, it’s an idea of the oneness and we’re another idea inhabiting that, emerging with that. So what was the question anyway?
Rick: About your cutting edge, where you see yourself evolving. You were talking about fully human, fully divine and so on.
Steve: Oh, right, yeah. And the world in terms of creation is something that is massive, it’s a big thing. It’s here and it will go, it’s transient and all those things, but it’s incredibly profound, very profound, in a direct experience in what we’re allowed to be, here, what we’re granted to be is amazing, really.
Rick: One theme I always come back to is just that if we actually ponder or consider what we’re looking at, at any given moment, the miracle of the tiny little bit of your fingernail and what’s in that and the intelligence that’s governing it and so on, it’s mind-boggling, but we take it for granted. With me, there’s a desire to better know that divine intelligence that is orchestrating everything.
Steve: I remember when was it, in the 2000’s, I first began meeting seekers, I was introduced to a Zen master, which was a funny concept at the time. I thought, “I’m going for a meeting with a Zen master.” And it’s funny because we actually went into a pizza place where you could actually order a pizza, make you one with everything. [ laughter] So I could have used that joke and I didn’t. I learned it after. It’s bad timing.
Rick: There’s more to the joke too. I mean, you give the guy 20 and he doesn’t give you any change and you say, “Well, where’s my change?” And he says, “Well, change has to come from within.”
Steve: [laughing] Excellent, I love it. But I remember speaking to this wonderful woman, Carol Haywood, wonderful Zen teacher. We were just talking and she’s one of the first people that I spoke to who claimed to have awakened (and she was, she was a very open, very open being) the first person I ever spoke to, she said, “Truth, there is no habituation.” No habituation, which just basically means it doesn’t matter how much you source from truth, how much you say, how realized you are in truth, it’s always enough. Always, always enough. You never get bored of it. You never need more.
Rick: Oh, I see what she means, yeah.
Steve: And as soon as she said that, I thought, “Wow, that’s amazing. That’s incredible that you know that.”
Rick: Yeah. I would also say that part of the reason there’s no habituation is that it keeps blossoming more and more fully.
Steve: And that’s wonderful, isn’t it? The blossoming, the curiosity of it, the direct experience of it, the flow. It’s wonderful, you know. It’s good.
Rick: Yeah, because we are very adaptable creatures. We sort of acclimate to whatever level of happiness or suffering or whatever we’re living. And we can be quite objectively miserable, but if there’s a little bit of an uptick in our level of happiness, it seems great, but it would be quite miserable if we contrast that with where we might be 10 years hence, if it keeps upticking. So, if you were to go back to the night of your original realization, as wonderful as that may have been, you might find that it’s pretty yucky compared to the way you feel normally, ordinarily now.
Steve: Possibly. I think that night is, that’s pretty special. Yeah, that’s just changed. I remember speaking to someone about four years or five years after the awakening, and it was someone in the fellowship, and we were talking about spiritual matters, you know. And they said, “What about your ongoing relationship with God?” And I said, “Well, truthfully, God, they say God.” And I said, “Well, it’s never changed. It’s not changed since that night in ‘99. That revelation just revealed to me the unchangeable, the immutable. The reality just is. It just simply is. And I can’t add anything to it or take anything away.” And it’s good, it’s good. No habituation. It’s always good.
Rick: But just to play devil’s advocate, you can’t add to it. I mean, you can take infinity in mathematics and then you can multiply it by itself or add a thousand to it or whatever, and it’s still infinity, but there’s somehow, they talk of degrees of infinity and so on. So, it’s paradoxical.
Steve: Oh, you just played my mind right.
Rick: Did I?
Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Total.
Rick: Oh, good.
Steve: It’s amazing. (Laughter) Infinity upon infinity upon … that’s incredible.
Rick: Did I really blow your mind? Why did you say that?
Steve: I’ve never thought of that. That’s incredible. There’s nothing more infinite than … yeah, of the unmanifest and yeah, it’s interesting. I suppose this stuff, I don’t know, it always remains unchanging. It just always remains. It’s funny, isn’t it? Because it remains unchanging but pregnant with the promise of change, you know. It’s loaded with the promise of existence.
Rick: Speaking of the Upanishads, as we did earlier, there’s this beautiful verse which you may have heard, which is “Purnamadah, Purnamidam, Purnamudachyate, Purnasya.” I forget how the rest of it goes, but in any case, it says, “This is full, that is full.” Then, “Taking fullness from fullness, fullness remains.” So, it’s like the manifest world is full, the Absolute from which it supposedly has been taken or extracted or emerged is full, and nothing is depleted or diminished when this fullness emerges from that fullness.
Steve: That’s right. There’s no problem there, is there? It’s only when the ego attaches itself to the mind and lives in relation to the mind for meaning that it then becomes the quality of the mind, which is compulsion, you know? And with compulsion comes habituation. You can never have enough. There’s the illusion of lack and all of this.
Rick: How old are your daughters now?
Steve: Hannah is 16, she’s 17 in January, and Lucy is 17.
Rick: Are you married?
Steve: No.
Rick: Any relationship?
Steve: No, I’m single. And I’ve never been married, that’s the thing. We met each other, we were together for 17 years, and we were always both very laid back, and we just didn’t get married. The institution of marriage just didn’t appeal to us.
Rick: Are you in a relationship or are you just sort of on your own these days?
Steve: At the moment I’m on my own.
Rick: How has spiritual realization influenced your relationships?
Steve: Oh, terrible.
Rick: Really?
Steve: Yeah, yeah, it’s awful.
Rick: How come? Honestly?
Steve: Yeah, yeah, honestly, I’m not good. I’m not good to be with.
Rick: Why?
Steve: I’m probably too detached in many ways. I find I don’t have the same consideration that most men have, where so much has fallen away. Here, I’m blaming my awakening now. I simply don’t… I seem to be quite okay, quite self-contained in my own universe, so to speak, and quite happy to think. And I find if I do date, it can be quite difficult in that sense.
Steve: Have you ever dated anyone or wanted to date anyone who was also self-realized? [Steve laughs heartily] How would that go?
Steve: God, imagine that. Yeah, that would be nice. That would be really good, to meet someone who shared the same lack of consideration as me. [Rick laughs too] Yeah, that would be good.
Rick: Interesting.
Steve: Yeah, definitely.
Rick: Well, if you ever do that, we’ll have to have another conversation about it because that would be something that I think people would be really interested in. And there are kind of self-realized couples out there, like Rupert and Ellen or Adya and Mukti and all, and they seem to really appreciate the fact that the two of them are on that same kind of wavelength.
Steve: Yeah, it must be wonderful, it must be wonderful. I just haven’t found that yet. So, if there’s a girl out there who’s…
Rick: Yeah, send your qualifications, including a printout of your EEG reading. [laughter]
Steve: Forward them to me.
Rick: Great. Well, that might be a little bit of a strange note to end on, but…
Steve: Maybe, maybe, yeah, it was a bit strange.
Rick: Give us a synopsis or something that you would like to end on, kind of a note of inspiration to people, perhaps even people who have had a substance abuse problem and who, I think by this time, if they’ve watched this interview, can see that there is hope for them in the realm of spiritual realization.
Steve: Okay. With people that are experiencing addiction, that are experiencing maybe alcoholism or drug addiction or sex addiction or gambling addiction, just to let them know that they are on the far side spectrum of attachment, that addiction is nothing more than a symptom of what’s happening within the Western world and all over the world, you know. So, if you’re suffering from this addiction, this attachment to this separation, you’re very close to finding out what is real. If you find yourself at the breaking point and the drugs and the drink don’t work and you don’t know who you are when you take that away, you’re at a very close point of discovering who you could be, who you really are. I think addiction really boils down to, it always boils down to identity. If you think you’re a separate person, attached to a certain mind and all of this, that in itself it’s an addiction, it’s a separation.
Rick: That’s an interesting point. By that definition, everybody in the world is addicted, you know?
Steve: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of addiction. You can be very much addicted to the idea you have of yourself. It’s just attachment. It’s the extreme end of over-attachment. That’s what addiction is really. And when you’re at that point, you’re at a point where you can really look at that and maybe go through a process of, what’s the word, “review.” It’s a good time to review. So, there’s always hope for the addict. I think they’re closer to breaking than someone who is just walking the treadmill through their life. They go through life, they’ve got the car, they’ve got the house, they’ve got the comfortable stuff, and you can go through your whole life sleepwalking. But as an addict or an alcoholic, you’re at breaking point. It could be a good point. It could be the best point of change for you.
Rick: Yeah.
Steve: Definitely. It could be a blessing.
Rick: They do talk about bottoming out in 12 steps, don’t they?
Steve: Absolutely, yeah.
Rick: So, in addition to the little satsangs that you have there locally, do you do anything? Do you travel? Do you do retreats? Do you do Skype sessions with people? Any of those kind of things?
Steve: Yeah, I do Skype sessions and I do one-to-one sessions as well as I’m a therapist. I run one meeting a week in Maidenhead. I’m looking at getting a venue in London soon because I live right near London, so I should be doing one in London. And I run four retreats a year. And I’m looking at doing my first overseas one in Holland in 2016, in the spring 2016.
Rick: Great. And so people can obviously go to your website to check out all that. And your website is? Invitationtobeing.org. Okay, invitationtobeing.org. And I’ll be linking to that from your page on Batgap, of course. And I didn’t really mention your book, but you have a lovely book called “Walking Awake,” a nice book cover. Why did you choose that image of the girl with her face in the water?
Steve: Where I live, there’s a very well-known photographer actually, a very good photographer called Barry. And we were just talking one day and I said to him, I said, “What do you do?” He said, “I’m a photographer.” He said, “What do you do?” I said, “Well, I do this. And I’m just coming to the end of writing this book.” He said, “Well, look, I can do the cover for you.” And the guy who’s done that, he does stuff for Vogue, he does stuff for international magazines. That’s a quality photograph there.
Rick: Yeah, it’s nice.
Steve: It’s a work of art. And so one day he said, “Well, go to my portfolio, online portfolio, choose a picture, you can have it.” Because we got on, he said, “You can have it.” But before I could even do that, I got a phone call the following week. He said, “Have you found a picture?” I said, “No.” He said, “Look, come round, I’ll choose one with you.” And when I got round there, he said, “I’ve actually chosen one for you.” And he chose that. So when I saw it, I thought, “Yeah, that’s a great picture.” Because it’s like …
Rick: Is it a metaphor for something in the book?
Steve: I think so. To me, it’s like a baptism. It’s like going into the unknowing. It’s like she’s being baptized, going into the unknowing, being reborn. It’s a little bit like that. The tone of it fits the book, because the book is quite an exhaustive investigation in consciousness.
Rick: It is, and it’s not a thick book. I actually managed to read the whole thing, which I don’t usually do every week when people send me these big books. A lot of it was totally fascinating. There are parts where you kind of lost me, and I don’t know if that’s your fault, because you’re trying to explain really abstract stuff and deep experience, and it’s hard to put that into words. But I always find it fun to try to understand such things when I read them, to see what … to tune in to what the person is actually trying to say.
Steve: Yeah. I don’t follow a school of thought, you see. So it’s all me and using words, and it can lose you, I suppose, in some ways. What resonates with you might resonate with someone else.
Rick: Yeah. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
Steve: Yeah? Thank you.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, and I’ve enjoyed this. It’s been a good conversation. So let me just make a couple of typical wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Steve Ford, as you know, and this is one more in an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. If you happen to have stumbled upon this for the first time, go to batgap.com and check out the past interviews menu, and you’ll see all the other ones categorized and organized in various ways. You’ll also find a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you can subscribe to the channel and YouTube will notify you when a new one is posted. This exists as an audio podcast. There’s a link to that on batgap.com, so you can listen on your iPod or your phone. And what else? I know there’s the Donate button that I mentioned in the beginning. I appreciate people contributing and helping to support this. So that’s just about it. So thanks again, Steve.
Steve: Thanks, Rick. It’s been good talking to you.
Rick: Yeah, and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time.