Suzanne Foxton Interview

Summary

The conversation explores seeking, addiction, suffering, acceptance, and the tension between spiritual openness and ordinary ambition. It also examines spontaneous awakening and the possibility that freedom is found in everyday life rather than in extraordinary experiences.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual acceptance coexist with the desire to relieve pain or improve difficult circumstances?
• Can ambition and complete acceptance of life exist at the same time?
• What is a spontaneous spiritual awakening, and how can it be understood?
• Is spiritual awakening supposed to feel extraordinary, or can it be completely ordinary?
• How are addiction and spiritual seeking related?

Key takeaways

• Addiction can be understood as an intense form of seeking and resistance to things as they are.
• Acceptance does not require liking pain or becoming passive about difficult circumstances.
• Openness to life can coexist with ambition, effort, and the desire to improve things.
• Awakening may reveal that ordinary life is already what seeking was looking for.
• Suffering is not necessarily a mistake and can be part of life's unfolding.
• Spiritual freedom can be found in everyday experiences rather than extraordinary states.
• Life itself can function as each person's spiritual practice.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest this week is Suzanne Foxton. Welcome, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: First of all, somebody who is a fan of yours or something got in touch with me, and then you got in touch with me, and so we did this interview. Your fan said, whoever she was—I don’t remember—that there is something more juicy in the book you wrote than has been coming out in interviews. So maybe we will get to that.

Suzanne: I think that the book is definitely juicier than anything that has actually seemed to happen to me.

Rick: Okay. With apologies to listeners and viewers in particular, Suzanne’s video tends to freeze up from time to time, and hopefully it won’t stay frozen. But if you see a still shot of her for a while, we will just continue on because we can’t continually stop the interview just because the video freezes. So, you grew up in Indiana, as I understand.

Suzanne: I did.

Rick: And you now live in the UK, so you married a Brit for some reason.

Suzanne: Who knows why, but yes, I did.

Rick: How did you meet him?

Suzanne: We met in San Francisco by mistake. I was selling earrings at the time. I still do, actually. I’m wearing some now. I saw a bartender in a wine bar who was in her 80s, mind you. She had big earrings on, and I thought, “Oh, I can sell her earrings.” He wandered in looking for the theater next door to buy tickets, and we stopped and had a drink together. He was late for his date, and that was it. We’ve been together ever since, and that was in 1988.

Rick: Oh, cool. That’s around the time I got married—1987. Turn your video off and on briefly, and we’ll just keep talking while you do that. And you have, what, two kids?

Suzanne: I do, I do. They’re 14 and 16.

Rick: Okay. So, you make earrings, and I’m asking you some rather trivial, superficial questions, but it just gives people a sense.

Suzanne: Oh, I love the trivial and superficial. It’s just extremely meaningful, and I really like talking about it, actually.

Rick: Good. What does your husband do for a living?

Suzanne: He is an account manager for a software firm, which seems really dull, but he’s very good at it. He enjoys it.

Rick: Oh, that’s great. I forget who said it, but someone said—it might have been Steve Jobs or George Lucas or somebody—“If you love what you’re doing, you don’t work a day in your life.”

Suzanne: Yeah, that’s true. I think that he does feel he works a day in his life, but he’s still quite good at it. Yeah. Let me just tell my wife something here. I didn’t feed the birds because we’ve run out of birdseed. She said the birds are pecking at the window asking for seeds, but we’re totally out of seeds, I’m afraid. We have to get some.

You see, you’ve made them dependent upon you.

Rick: I know, a bunch of little avian junkies out here. So, speaking of junkies, I guess you had a bit of a colorful history with drugs and stuff, right? You talk about that in your book.

🛤️ Addiction as seeking

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah. I think that addiction and addictive tendencies or activities are just another kind of seeking. I always say I was never a traditional seeker, but in a way, everything that one seems to do, every activity the ego engages in, is some kind of seeking.

I suppose addiction is just a very strong example of seeking, of not being okay with however things are. They either have to be better, or they have to be less painful, or even if they’re fantastic, they have to be even better. They just have to be different. There’s no sort of—I don’t know—mindfulness-speak of being in the moment and just being completely accepting of everything that’s going on.

I don’t think that’s really what non-duality is about. I don’t think non-duality is necessarily about any one particular thing, but those kinds of concepts and pointers seem to come up a lot: people are just not content, and they are forever seeking. I think it’s probably part of the human condition, but with something like addiction, it can get very destructive.

Rick: Yeah. Well, when you think about it, the whole human race has been pretty much obsessed with changing their state of consciousness throughout recorded history, through every possible means that they can find.

Suzanne: Yes, it’s true, and that’s part of it, I’m sure. It’s part of the behavior of many seekers: to try to achieve some state of bliss, to feel really, really good. Not just kind of good, but totally good—so good that you are everything, and everything is completely wonderful.

I think that’s great, and sometimes that comes up. Sometimes it comes up from taking some kind of substance, but sometimes it can come up out of the blue, or it can come up from a meditative state or something like that.

But if that’s the only thing you want, if that’s the only thing your ego craves, then you’re sort of missing out on deeply fulfilling negative states. It’s all just pointers and concepts, but I’ve come to this set of concepts that says that life is everything. It’s set up exactly the way it’s meant to be, and you’re meant to have some not very nice feelings, and things happen, and that is just the way that it is. But that’s not a bad thing; there’s nothing wrong with that.

Life is everything.

Rick: Yeah. Turn your video off and on again while I ask this next question. It’s interesting—as you were talking, I was thinking, well, in a way you can’t blame people for wanting to change the way they see the world, because it can be fairly unfulfilling, as you were just saying, and so there’s a kind of a natural craving for it, to improve upon it.

On the other hand, in non-dual and spiritual teachings, there’s always this admonition to just “this is it,” you know? I mean, “what you see is what you get,” just kind of like “love what is,” and so on. So there’s kind of a paradox there, and a lot of people might find that advice a little bit hard to swallow, because they find what is to be quite unlovable.

Suzanne: Well, I suppose that the whole thing about making oneself feel better, and needing to have whatever it is be lovable, maybe that’s a bit more mistaken than most concepts. It’s not necessarily liking or loving apparent bad circumstances and bad feelings. It’s more like relishing them, and just seeing them as a neutral thing, and not necessarily a bad thing.

But I do remember, about three years ago, when all these things were apparently gelling, I was sitting in the back of my house, sort of at our picnic table, and it was a very still day. It was kind of gray and cloudy, like it often is here in the UK, and I’m like, “This is enough, is it? This is enough? This is really, really boring. I just can’t see how this is enough.” It was a momentary thing, and it was enough. It was enough.

The next apparent instant, I was just walking across my yard and going back into the house, and I caught sight of a robin, and yada yada—nature, nature, an old fascination. The apparent unfolding story that seems to happen in time, if you seem to be stuck in that, you wait long enough, it will change. If it’s horrible, you wait long enough, it will change into something that’s not horrible anymore.

Rick: That’s true. I mean, turn your video on and off. But there is sort of a natural human tendency, is there not, to want to improve things, to want to make things better? Like this morning, for instance, I woke up with a slight headache, and I still have it. I’d rather not have the headache, but I can live with it, you know.

However, a friend of mine recently broke his back, and he’s in excruciating agony. He says, “Fist-clenching, white-knuckle, teeth-gritting pain most of the day.” Obviously, if we had our druthers, we would choose not to be going through a thing like that. So how do you reconcile that with the notion of just accepting everything as it is?

Suzanne: Well, I don’t know that I’m really advocating this sort of conscious, willful, grasping acceptance—“I’m going to accept this” kind of thing. It’s more of an organic thing, I suppose, what I’m talking about.

But hey, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting something to be better, wanting pain to go away. The way that we seem to be manifesting—it’s all a dream, sure—but the way the dream seems to be coming out is that we are these biological creatures that need to survive. Pain is part of the whole survival packet of tools. If you feel pain, something’s wrong. If you can get rid of the pain, then it’s better again, and you have more chance of surviving. So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily preferable to sit back and just totally accept everything. For instance, one of the times I get into conflicts with my husband about all these sets of concepts is that he’s very ambitious, and he’s always very much into improvement.

A lot of the things we talk about do very much sound like you’re just going to sit back and be a couch potato, you know, and do nothing. And it’s not that, necessarily, at all. It’s much more being open to everything, and then all sorts of possibilities can happen and open up.

Potentialities can appear to unfold in the story of life that maybe, if you have too much of a set and narrow goal, you won’t see—these opportunities and these doors and windows and potentialities. So I think it’s maybe more of an openness rather than a willful, “No matter what happens, I’m going to accept it,” in a Job-like fashion. That’s probably not exactly what I’m talking about.

Rick: Yeah. I’ll tell you what, as a standard practice during this interview, every time I ask a question, turn your video on and off, unless I tell you not to do so, because it keeps freezing up, but it’s good for a little bit. So, yeah, just keep that as a reminder: every time I ask a question, go ahead and do it.

Suzanne: Okay, sure, sure. I just did it. Hopefully it’s all right now.

Rick: No, it’s working again now. So this brings up an interesting point, which I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and which I’ve kind of worked out in my own experience over the years. And that is that there can be this sort of paradoxical, simultaneous, complete acceptance and non-insistence that things happen in any particular way, with simultaneously a sort of driving ambition, if that’s how you’re wired. And the two are not counterposed. Do you agree with that?

Suzanne: Yeah, I don’t think they’re necessarily mutually exclusive at all. Whatever seems to be happening is what seems to be happening. If you seem to be wired up a certain way, that’s the way you seem to be wired up. You can go to a lot of trouble and try to recondition yourself, blah, blah, blah; that’s okay too.

But, as I’ve said before, in this interview and many others, I just don’t think there’s anything wrong, necessarily, with anything. I mean, in the character Suzanne, there are quite a few things that are wrong for me to do. But in the whole big sort of picture of everything manifesting, I don’t think there’s anything wrong, including people who are very greedy, even. People who are very driven.

I mean, I would like to see more people driven to succeed at certain tasks for their own sake, rather than to make sure they get more and more money and more than other people, and keep it from other people, that kind of thing. That would be a preference that arises.

But no, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think that often people who are on this kind of spiritual path, or whatever it is, have it happen for them in many different ways. Oftentimes, they go from being a very repressed, timid, nonconfrontational person to being quite the risk-taker. Often, that goes hand in hand with accomplishing all sorts of goals and tasks.

It’s not that people who are Buddhists, who are very intense and intent upon completing their training, aren’t extremely driven. They’re very, very motivated and incredibly ambitious, even if the ambition has to do with where that ambition is coming from, how you conceptualize the ambition, whether the ego is the thing that it happens to or not, and that kind of thing.

But no, I don’t think that being completely accepting and being quite driven are mutually exclusive at all.

The knife and the watershed moment

Rick: Good. I want to come back to this because there are some interesting things that I’ve considered when listening to your audio recordings that I want to talk to you about. But let’s go back a bit more and talk about your own sort of watershed moment. I haven’t heard too much detail about your whole drug and addiction phase, and I don’t know if we need to go into that. But then, in telling your story, you kind of skip to this point where you’re standing in a kitchen and you look at a knife, and suddenly your whole world changes. So fill us in a little bit on what happened prior to that watershed moment, leading up to it, and then that moment itself.

Suzanne: Well, the best way to describe that is, first of all, to put a big caveat in front of it, saying that it wasn’t really very important. And the reason it wasn’t really very important is that, in the way stories seem to unfold, many different things happen in many different ways.

I think for many people, it’s a very gradual kind of awakening, if you want to use that kind of term. And I wouldn’t say that I was awakened, or an awakened person, or enlightened, or whatever the label is we’re using today. I don’t know, what is it, Saturday afternoon my time? Whatever the thing it’s okay to say is right now.

But I would say that the reason it was such a big deal, and I did have a little sort of phenomenology around it, was a bit like tripping. I suppose the knife just seemed, you know, like, “Whoa, man, this is a knife. It’s such a knife.” But that was very brief and unimportant.

The reason it was such a big deal is that I realized that I had had the right state of mind the whole time. I’d been in an enlightenment, awakening—or I wasn’t using that terminology at the time. What I realized is that what I had been looking for was this life, exactly as it is. Not any different. I didn’t need to make it any different. I didn’t need to make it anything at all, and that is sort of the ego-death part, I suppose.

What I had been looking for was this life, exactly as it is.

Rick: So, that includes all your darker, addictive phases, you’re saying?

Suzanne: Oh, well, yeah.

Rick: Those are perfect as they were?

Suzanne: Absolutely. You know, people—particular teachers and seekers, and all kinds of people, actually—are very keen on relieving suffering. They’re very, very much focused on that. That is what they want to do, that is their big goal, and they’re very driven to achieve it: to relieve suffering.

However, without all the suffering that apparently came up in my life—which is only just a little memory, a spark of something or other that’s happening right now, and isn’t real—I wouldn’t have had anything to compare this to. Life is everything. Suffering came up, and I wouldn’t trade it.

If I could go back, and if I had that imaginative opportunity that many writers use to relive your life—how would you rewrite your life?—I wouldn’t rewrite it at all. There are probably a couple of specific incidents where I was very unkind to other people that I would probably wish had gone differently. Generally, I wouldn’t rewrite it, because that suffering was as it should be.

If you just look at the story of my life in quite a detached way, it makes a great deal of sense that it happened that way. And then it makes a great deal of sense that now I would be in a much better place, and much happier and content, and blah, blah, blah. Although that isn’t always the case either.

Rick: Well, if you do manage to go back, I would suggest that you play the stock market with today’s information.

Suzanne: Yes, that’s right. Absolutely.

Rick: Send me a cut.

Suzanne: I know, Back to the Future II.

Rick: Don’t forget to turn your video back on again after you turn it off.

Suzanne: Oh, okay. Sorry, sorry.

Rick: But then again, if one of your kids has the flu and is feeling horrible, you don’t just think to yourself, “Oh, this is going to be good for them because they’ll feel so good when it’s over.” You do whatever you can to ameliorate it, you know?

Suzanne: That’s right, that’s true. Though I do make them work quite hard sometimes, knowing that when that’s over, they will feel much better afterward.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Suzanne: They finish folding this astronomically high pile of clothes, or vacuuming the entire house, or whatever ridiculous task I’ve set for them.

Rick: Yeah. One thing that came to my mind: I don’t think you’ve talked about this knife incident enough, because I’m familiar with it—I listen to your videos a lot—but other people might not know exactly what you’re talking about. What you were saying was that, out of the blue, without really having much background as a spiritual seeker or anything, you had this kind of awakening or shift.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know that that’s what it was at the time. I just thought that I’d finally come to my senses. That’s probably the language I would have put it in. Right afterward, I was walking around the kitchen going, “Oh, this is so obvious, it’s so obvious, it’s so obvious.”

What was obvious was that my life is what I had been looking for. There was nothing I had to change. But because I had some phenomenology that went around it, and some sort of physical weirdness that went around it, I was just thinking, “Why am I having flashbacks to things I may have done at university? I don’t know.”

I felt like it was coming up out of the top of my head from time to time. I felt like I was seeing things from over here, maybe, like my eyes were over here. That would generally happen. I was quite tired as well. It’s probably just because—I don’t know why it was. It doesn’t really matter.

But because of that, I needed to—my mind, my brain, my little scared bit of my ego needed to have some labels put upon it. So I did a little looking around. I went to see Tony Parsons because he was quite nearby, as it seemed. And so I got some labels, and that’s what I labeled it afterward.

Rick: Well, probably the labels were appropriate. I mean, it was some sort of spiritual awakening or shift, or whatever terminology you’re good with. That seems to have been what it was, judging from the way you’ve been talking and writing ever since then, right?

Suzanne: Sure, sure.

Rick: And those do happen to people quite spontaneously, often without—not often, but sometimes without—any kind of proclivity toward that sort of thing previously.

Suzanne: It seems to be the case, and I know there are many people who are very traditional. They are very much into practice and healing the layers of the ego through meditation, and perhaps devotion to a guru or certain teachings, and feel that that’s the only way to achieve this kind of state of mind—or whatever it is, a lack of state of mind, or whatever it is. Who knows?

But I think that practice is often just life as it is presented. Everybody has their own practice, and it is just the way their life unfolds for them. That is their practice.

Rick: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I’m very traditional in the sense that I’ve been meditating for decades, but I’m not fundamentalist about it. I wouldn’t say it’s the only way. Obviously, there are people who have what you had, and many such stories. I’ve interviewed several people like that who just, out of the blue, kind of woke up and often thought they were going crazy at first, until they could somehow get a little bit of intellectual reinforcement—or just whatever word I’m searching for—an explanation for it.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah. I just needed a couple of labels, something to call it, because it just felt a bit strange.

Rick: I suspect that there are people in mental hospitals who have had genuine spiritual awakenings, and they and the people around them thought they were going crazy and locked them up.

Suzanne: Well, it’s very possible.

Rick: Put them on Thorazine or whatever, you know?

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah. It’s very possible, certainly. The weirdness, though, for me has seemed to subside, and I feel quite at home. I know lots of different teachers say this, but it’s just very ordinary, and people just don’t believe it.

Enlightenment, waking, whatever—it is ordinary life.

It’s just mundane, ordinary: the dream, the thing that we’re calling the illusion of life, the dream. That’s what it is. That’s it.

It’s your life, your perceptions, your judgments, your labeling, your thoughts, your not being able to meditate, your overmeditating, whatever it is. That’s what it is. And people don’t believe it. They just don’t believe it.

They think they have to work really hard, they have to be different, or there’s something wrong with them. They feel unworthy, and they’re not. They don’t. Oneness does not get any more “oner” while you’re meditating, and everything doesn’t become a little better at being everything because you and your little ego have managed to peel away another layer, or whatever.

Nothing special about ordinary life

Rick: Maybe the whole issue of expecting it to be flashy kind of relates back to what we were saying in the beginning about not being satisfied with your experience as it is and wanting to change it in some way. So there’s this sort of wishful anticipation that life could be so much more gloriously profound and amazing than me having to get up in the morning, go to work, and deal with the boss and whatnot. Or looking for some walking-on-water, angels-singing kind of experience.

Suzanne: Well, that kind of stuff can come up too. But getting up and having breakfast with your husband, that’s amazing. It really is, but it’s difficult if you’re in a humdrum routine. It’s just difficult to see it.

Every moment is created new; every moment is completely new. It’s never exactly the same. Everything is just what our senses bring us as reality. It’s in constant, total flux—an endless moment that is never ever the same. The foot’s never in the same place. You never put your foot down the same way twice. You never have the same breakfast with your husband. It’s all completely, totally brand new, reborn in every apparent new second. And that’s what’s amazing.

And you don’t have to have some sort of shift of perception to see that. I really don’t think it… It’s just, you know, people have the right state of mind and perception already; they just don’t believe it.

Rick: Although there is such a thing as conditioning, you know. I mean, the routine, humdrum, repetitive experiences of life can sort of—don’t forget to change your video—can sort of dull or occlude one’s perception.

And what you apparently experienced was a shift in which conditioning no longer had the same grip on you that it ordinarily has on people. In other words, it’s sort of like… In the Indian tradition, there’s this analogy: if you make a mark on stone, it really etches in there and stays. If you make a mark on sand, you see the mark, but it goes away. If you make a mark on water, it goes away really easily. If you make a mark on air, you don’t even see the mark, and nothing stays.

So that’s used to illustrate different degrees of conditioning and susceptibility to conditioning that different people have. And the enlightened person is supposed to be one who is like the lion on air. The experience is there, but nothing sticks.

Suzanne: Yeah, I think I know what you mean. That’s a really good analogy. I should read more. But… I don’t know. Conditioning comes up. I still have conditioning, I suppose, but I don’t care. It would be, you know, the water, air…

Rick: It doesn’t bind you.

Suzanne: No, it doesn’t. You know, the outcome of it, I don’t care. You know, I do. I mean, I want my children to stay healthy and well, blah, blah, blah. All that sort of stuff. All that stuff related to survival, that still comes up. Conditioning still comes up. But, you know, so what? It doesn’t… I’m not invested in it so much, I suppose, anymore.

My persona isn’t the only thing I am anymore. Whatever happens to that persona, it’s not a big deal. I can… I would probably prefer us not to lose all our money and have to move and not be able to put our children through school, blah, blah, blah. But if that kind of thing happens, then… I know that oftentimes these kinds of things happen, and the unfolding story is that you grow and learn, blah, blah, blah.

So, you know, whatever happens, I truly believe that I, being my small little self, my little persona, will be fine. It doesn’t really matter. And I think that’s the difference, you know: I’m not invested in the outcome of the story anymore.

Rick: Yeah, well, there’s plenty of references to that sort of thing in the traditional scriptures too. They talk about, you know, you don’t live for the fruits of action; you just sort of have control over the moment alone and never over the fruits of action. So you just act in such a way, spontaneously, that you’re not attached to the outcome, and that’s considered to be a healthier way of functioning.

Suzanne: Makes sense to me. There’s something I thought about a lot when I was listening to you, which has kind of been on my mind anyway recently. And actually, you didn’t need to change the video that time.

I’ll leave it alone for a while. You just tell me from now on.

Rick: I’ll tell you. Ordinarily you do every time I talk, but that was such a brief interlude that you didn’t. But in any case, it’s sort of like… I was interviewing Gangaji’s husband a couple of weeks ago. I guess I shouldn’t identify him that way because he has his own identity: Eli Jackson Baird. And he quoted something that his teacher, Papaji, had said, which is, as I recall, “Don’t land anywhere.”

Don’t land anywhere

We were discussing that in the context of not locking yourself into any particular perspective as being the absolute truth or the absolutely right one, to the exclusion of all others. And the reason I think of that in listening to you is that you’re pretty good, I think, at shifting around between different perspectives.

On the one hand, I’ve heard you articulate that ultimately nothing is happening at all, and never has. And another time you might say, “Everything is perfect just as it is.” And then another time you might say, “Well, yeah, but I’ve got this situation with my kids or whatever that I need to deal with.”

And my attitude on all that is that no one of those can be adhered to, to the exclusion of the others, paradoxically opposed as they may be. It’s kind of like the best approach is to take the whole big package and accept them all as being valid, each in their own realm.

Suzanne: Yeah, I think that, well, the mind does have a lot of trouble. The mind in general has trouble with opposing concepts happening, or appearing to happen, simultaneously or in the same sphere. And it wants to chop them and change them and categorize them and subcategorize them and make them make sense. Have them all very neat and tidy and figured out, and of course, that’s impossible.

And yeah, I like the analogy, “Don’t land anywhere.” And I find my own writing about nonduality or whatever, and it changes and morphs all the time. My mind kind of goes over here to, “There’s nothing happening.” It’s like a big, different concept, but it isn’t, you know. Even though there seems to be lots happening, it makes perfect sense to me that there is, you know, there is really nothing happening.

And I see all this around, and the eyes seeing, the ears hearing, and all that. But I also perceive somehow that it’s not there at all, that there’s no space, and really, it’s like on the head of a pin, or the point of a pin, or smaller than that, and mathematically nonexistent.

And, you know, the big cosmos is the same as the microcosm, the atom and blah, blah, blah, all those sorts of analogies. And I almost see my mind put that over here, but it doesn’t matter.

This whole thing about coming back to the marketplace, having had some sort of awakening or whatever, and then jumping back into life, diving in, and really being able to enjoy the unfolding of the story is kind of where I’m at.

Rick: Yeah, there’s those Zen pictures, you know, the ox-herding pictures. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at those, but they depict the various stages of the path. And in the final one, the guy is back in the marketplace, riding the ox and completely integrated with the world, whereas previously there was a picture where there was absolutely nothing there, you know, and various other stages.

Suzanne: Yeah, well, there’s been an unfolding, and we’ve all kind of mixed together, and maybe out of order and out of sequence a little bit. But yeah, I just feel like there seems to be less judgment about things, including my own attitude toward life or whatever.

I don’t feel like, “Oh, I must be this way, or I must not be this way, or I must only say this kind of thing, or I must never say this,” or whatever.

So with that kind of freedom, I’ve been able to just really, if there’s a problem with the kids, jump in there and analyze it, get in there and see what’s the best thing to do, and really enjoy trying to fix it. Rather than saying, “Oh my God, oh, it’s all so wrong, it’s all terrible, oh, what’s going to happen?”

Rick: Yeah, and if one of your kids runs in and says, “Johnny’s up in a tree and it looks like he’s going to fall,” you don’t just say, “Oh, there is no tree, there is no Johnny.”

Suzanne: Depending on how mad I was at Johnny, actually. “There’s no tree, Johnny’s not going to fall. You just go play over there.”

🕊️ Spiritual insight and practical life

Rick: I heard you allude to physics several times during some of your talks, and I find that to be a really helpful metaphor or structure of understanding for coming to terms with what we’re talking about right here.

The physicist will tell you that life is structured in layers, and that obviously on one layer we have paper. Go deeper, and it’s carbon molecules. Go deeper than that, and it’s atoms, which bear no resemblance to paper. Keep going down, and there are no atoms.

You go down to a point where there’s actually nothing of any substance whatsoever, and you could say that’s the ultimate reality. But the laws of that level don’t pertain to the laws of this level. You can’t light a fire on that level by striking a match.

But all these levels are like Russian dolls, containing one within the other, and each has its own realm and its own significance. And the spiritual realm is very similar to that, where you have incorporated a vast range of creation within your experience, including the level at which nothing is happening, including the level at which everything is perfect, including the level at which, damn it, this needs to be changed. It all fits into one big package.

Suzanne: Yeah, I truly believe that that’s true, that it does, but I’m not going to hold on to that belief system necessarily either.

Yeah, and I find myself less and less concerned with, “See, there isn’t anything there.” I won’t say that I’m egoless or whatever, but there isn’t anything there that needs reassurance. There isn’t anything there that feels lost. There isn’t anything there that needs to know that everything is going to be okay and that things are a certain way. There just isn’t anything there that needs that at all.

Rick: Mother is at home.

Suzanne: Yeah, something like that.

Rick: Did your family notice much of a change in you?

Suzanne: Oh, well, gosh, yeah. I mean, I’m much more there, and I’m much more… I help them much more, I suppose. I’m reliable now.

Rick: The new, improved mom.

Suzanne: Well, yeah, absolutely. And then I wrote a book, and it got published, and I’m actually earning a little bit of money. I’m talking to people, and I have coffee mornings once a month. I’ve been in touch with people because a friend of ours died recently, one of the moms in the neighborhood, and I wanted to make sure that everybody—this is one of the best things I do, frankly—is included in these coffee mornings.

They’re the primary school-level moms, and everybody’s at secondary school now, what we call high school in America. We just don’t see each other very much, and we’re just getting together. So I’m doing that kind of thing.

But, mind you, when I was not very well and definitely not only having an addiction to substances, but doing things addictively, I was a chairperson of the PTA. I was crazy busy, but I was not terribly present for it, I suppose. I was just running around like a crazy freak doing stuff.

So I’m much more involved, and I hear lots of talk flying around in the non-dual community, if there is such a thing, about how it’s okay—all this talk about enlightenment and being very spiritual—but are you doing anything about your relationships? How intimate are you with people? How risky are your relationships? How willing are you to be honest with other people? How much are you willing to invest the apparent time, effort, and energy that seems to come up into the people in your life?

I think that kind of hits the nail on the head for me just at the moment. I find that the biggest difference in my family is that I’m able to be very intimate with them, and I’m able not to fear them in any possible way. It makes life a very different kind of unfolding, one that I definitely prefer. But I’m not saying that that’s the way it should be or must be or whatever.

Rick: So you’re saying that in the non-dual community, people are coming to recognize that it’s not enough to have a non-dual realization, but there needs to be an embodiment of it, an integration of it into practical life? Is that what you’re alluding to?

Suzanne: Yeah, integration, I think, is the word that I saw flying around recently. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s good because there are a lot of people—not a lot, but some well-known voices—who seem to insist that there is no practical ramification whatsoever of spiritual awakening. It has no bearing on your relative life. But what you’ve just described, and what many people describe, is that, yeah, it’s enhanced it a lot. It’s made life a lot smoother and enriched it in various ways.

Suzanne: Well, yeah, I wouldn’t prescribe that integration must then be the next step if you’ve had some sort of awakening or whatever. But it just seems to be the case to me, and my sort of ego self, little self, whatever, resonates with that kind of reading and those kinds of concepts right at the moment.

I understand that, but I would also go along with the idea that there isn’t really a practical application. There isn’t anything that you’re supposed to do next. But that just seems to be the case.

It seems to be a microcosm of everything: the old little personal relationships in a small circle. If you are being as intimate and honest with the people closest to you in your life as you can be, then they’re less other. If you’re getting as close to people as you can within the limitations of the body and the mind and the separate, apparent package, then that’s like a microcosm for the big oneness or whatever. So that’s what seems to be happening.

Rick: Well, you know, there’s the old Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Some people say that’s not really a prescription but a description, actually. If others are appreciated as the self, then naturally there’s going to be a much deeper, more intimate relationship with them, and compassion for them, and so on.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean, it’s chicken and egg. It could be the other way around, I suppose. One way is, “I am going to treat these people as…” and the other one is that if the people really are seeming to be less other, then you just naturally do that.

Rick: Yeah, good point. I like that—that it could be both chicken and egg. It could be a laudable practice and could perhaps cultivate greater humanity, softness of heart, or whatever. It also can be descriptive of a spontaneous, natural state that one cannot help but act in accordance with.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean, if you’re going to—if the unfolding story seems to be about conditioning and training and practice—then that’s a good one to do. Why not? Why not recondition your small self in that way?

Rick: Mm-hmm.

🎵 Writing, questioning, and staying open

Yeah. Your video is still okay. Actually, no, it froze this time. So, apparently, you write reams and reams of stuff on your blog.

Suzanne: Less these days, but yeah, there’s probably about 250,000 words on there.

Rick: Yeah, I heard you say that, and it kind of discouraged me from trying to read any of it.

Suzanne: It’s just, “Pick and choose, pick and choose.” It’s all the same thing.

Rick: So what do you write? What is it all?

Suzanne: Oh, well, these days I kind of have to be sparked off by something I might see on Facebook or something somebody says to me. Then I get a concept going. I also have to have a film clip now, I’ve decided, and make a picture that I do myself. So it takes a while. I update it about once a month.

But it’s generally saying exactly what we’re saying here, over and over again, with different pointers. When I first started writing, I was like, “Oh, it all seems to be—it doesn’t seem to make much sense.” The whole thing about those mutually exclusive concepts made me feel quite adrift.

Then you can see the whole thing. You can sort of chart the journey, or the apparent journey, I’ve had through the blog and the pointers and whatnot. Now it’s much more about picking on concepts that might be a little bit limiting, that seem to be a bit limiting.

Like we mentioned earlier, you’re questioning everything. Don’t land anywhere. Never think you’ve got it. You think you’ve got it, you haven’t got it. Always question everything. Every time you think that this is it, then it probably isn’t. So that’s kind of what the blog is about: to keep questioning and keep the whole thing rolling.

Don’t land anywhere. Never think you’ve got it.

Rick: That’s nice. I like that. There’s a well-known teacher who often says we should always have the attitude of a beginner, and says that even to people you would consider to be rather advanced. I think that’s the implication: there’s always fresh ground to break, so don’t rest on your laurels. Keep questioning.

Suzanne: Gosh, I would so agree with that. That just seems to be what arises. What arises with me is that sort of, “Ooh, there are pretty birds flying around up there.”

Rick: Feed them for me.

Suzanne: Those seagulls feed themselves. Oh gosh, I was distracted by the birds.

Rick: You’re okay. You say that’s what’s arising for me. I was talking about always having the attitude of a beginner.

Suzanne: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The more I know, the less I know, seriously. The more I know, I mean, it’s all sort of a big opening and expanding in many ways.

But in many ways, it’s a bit of a narrowing and a contracting, even though that’s supposed to be an aftermath to all this. I spend quite a lot of time with a very set routine in my house, with my writing, and then my housework, and then I go pick up the children. It’s all quite da-da-da-da. I know that’s the time of my life when that’s kind of the thing.

But it’s quite a contracted life. I spend lots of time in my head, where you’re not supposed to be—not present and aware in this moment at all—but composing, editing, or writing the second book, and completely not here at all. That’s not supposed to be what you’re supposed to do, but who cares?

Rick: Who said?

Suzanne: Yeah, you hear a lot, you know.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Suzanne: So I would have thought, some time ago, “Oh, I must do that.” But now it’s like, well, that’s just what’s happening. That’s what’s arising now. I don’t know everything. There isn’t any particular way I’m supposed to be, I guess, and that’s just what’s happening now.

Rick: Yeah, you’re a bit of a rebel, so screw whatever anybody says you’re supposed to do.

Suzanne: Yeah, me, I’m a rebel!

Rick: So writing for you has not just been a kind of instructive thing, like, “Oh, I have this knowledge to impart to others.” It’s really been a self-exploration, it sounds like.

Suzanne: Yeah. The book—it’s a novella, and it’s quite short. It started out as a screenplay. It’s about that thick. It would have been a four-hour movie, and then I changed it into a musical, mostly because I wanted the exercise of songwriting. This was all during therapy; it was all therapeutic stuff.

Rick: This was the pre-awakening knife episode?

Suzanne: It’s kind of around that time. It’s all on the way to it, I suppose. I had all this material, and I enjoyed writing music. I had terrible software, and it was very difficult. I could hear everything in my head. I could separate parts, even, but actually getting it down on paper is quite tricky, especially since I know the treble clef. But that was great.

Then the thing happened, and I had all this material. I also felt like I needed—in the story of my life, it seemed to be arising, blah, blah, blah—it seemed to require some kind of punctuation, a period.

So I changed all this material into a book, and I hacked and chopped and got rid of so much material. It was great fun. That was really why that book was written. It wasn’t altruistic, really, at all. I thought, “Oh boy, I’m going to help people.” I probably won’t help people at all.

Lots of people who are addicts seem to tell me that they’re helped by it. But the whole thing—I just think that the first ambition in my conditioned life as a child was being very good at school, being very good at writing, and wanting to be a writer.

So now I’m just writing. I’m just writing a story, and those non-dual themes are probably sneaking in there, but it’s just a tale.

Rick: And you’re referring now to the book you already wrote, which is called…

Suzanne: Oh, no.

Rick: Oh, your new book.

Suzanne: The book that I’m writing now is just…

Rick: Okay.

Suzanne: Yeah, the ultimate twist was all that therapy material. It is autobiographical, but not completely. I had to change a lot of the situations and issues because I’ve got children of a sensitive age.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Suzanne: Yeah, so…

Rick: And how about the new book? What’s that about?

Suzanne: Oh, well, it’s about a washed-up child star who’s going back to Hollywood for a comeback. It’s also about a man who’s writing screenplays, dropped out of a mundane job, and moved to the South, to an old plantation, like Tara, to do so.

They stumble into one another, and they end up in Japan. They end up with this girl who’s sort of a lost soul, who is being chased by the people who used to have her captive, and blah, blah, blah. It’s just like that.

Rick: Sounds exciting. And are you trying to weave some kind of non-dual or spiritual theme into it, or is it just a story that’s kind of cool and interesting to read?

Suzanne: I’m kind of trying not to, but I think they’re sneaking in.

Rick: Okay, help yourself.

Suzanne: There’s a quote, actually. I can never remember it—my brain is not very good, really—about when you are committed, providence moves too. I think it’s attributed to Goethe, but it was paraphrased by somebody else.

Rick: Maybe Nelson Mandela or somebody?

Suzanne: I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Rick: I know what you mean. It’s like you just go for it and everything starts to happen.

Suzanne: When there is doubt, when you’re wavering, then there’s a chance to just let it all slip by. But when you’re committed, then all kinds of things come to help you that you would never have thought possible. It ends up happening in a way that you never would have dreamed of, because you’re committed.

That’s not necessarily a belief system of mine, but that is kind of behind the characters’ motivations in the book. I think that’s fascinating, that whole thing about, “I am going to do this,” and the blinkers that come with it. People do actually get a lot accomplished if that’s what they want to do and they’re like that. I’m sort of exploring that kind of energy.

Rick: And haven’t you found that yourself? I have.

Suzanne: Yeah.

Rick: You commit yourself to something and all sorts of things begin to click.

Suzanne: Indeed, but my conditioning is also along the lines of, “Well, I’m not going to completely commit myself, because I’m probably kind of rubbish and I probably couldn’t do it anyway.” So, that kind of conditioning comes up.

But the voices in the head, the thoughts that arise, the things that happen, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I pay much attention to them. I don’t know what I’d call myself. I’m just a lot more content than I used to be.

But I still get all kinds of thoughts—not so much “You are shit” kind of messages, but more like, “Oh, you’re not actually very competent in that, are you?” Those kinds of thoughts come up. It’s probably true, mind you, but all kinds of ridiculous thoughts come up. My head thinks all kinds of crazy stuff, but you know what? I don’t have to buy into it. I just kind of ignore it. It plays out, rolls away, and that’s it.

Rick: Yeah, it’s just that little devil on your left shoulder, you know? Well, that illustrates an interesting point, which is that—and your video is working okay at the moment, by the way—an awakened person, or whatever kind of terminology we want to use, doesn’t necessarily have qualitatively different kinds of thoughts than a non-awakened person. It’s just that they’re no longer gripped by them to that extent, you know?

Suzanne: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I would put it that I just ignore myself. I ignore my brain and get on with whatever I’m doing.

Rick: Yeah, but there was probably a stage in your life where thoughts like that would have been so compelling, convincing, and commanding that you would have taken them as having a lot more gravity than you do now.

Suzanne: Oh, so true. I think that, because I’m sure this comes up for other people as well as me, these sorts of thoughts—“I’m no good,” “I’m unworthy,” the whole family of “I am unworthy” thoughts—

Sorry, my husband is yelling downstairs because I guess England must have just scored a try against Wales in the rugby.

Rick: Oh, good.

Suzanne: But, oh gosh, I’ve lost that train of thought as well now.

Rick: We’re talking about thoughts of unworthiness.

Suzanne: Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, this might be a trait of an addictive personality, but I had this sort of grandiosity and very low self-esteem at the same time. All those thoughts along the lines of “I am unworthy,” “I’m terrible,” “I don’t deserve to live,” and “I have no right to be here” were generally stuffed down and repressed by the grandiose part of me that thought it was fantastic, wonderful, and amazing.

So, when I was going through therapy—and people go through therapy in all kinds of ways, often just by talking with their friends—I had to unleash all that. For a while, when I was actually getting healthier, I was just thinking, “I’m terrible. How could I have done this? Blah, blah, blah. I’m horrible. I don’t deserve to exist. I’m a bad person.”

I sort of had to let the lid off that Pandora’s box, and they all flew away and stopped having any power whatsoever. This isn’t really non-duality; it’s just what seemed to happen to me. And it seems to happen to a lot of people in various kinds of practices that have to do with stripping away layers of the ego, whatever it is, whether it’s Zen Buddhism or intensive psychotherapy.

Rick: Yeah. Well, “stripping away layers of the ego” is an important little phrase there to add on to what you just said. It seems to me that if one is solidly, concretely, and predominantly convinced in one’s experience that “I am this person and that’s all I am,” then the kind of thoughts you were just talking about would have a lot of significance: “Oh, all I am is this person, and I’m a terrible one. My life should end,” and so on.

But if one comes to appreciate, “Whoa, I’m much more than this small, little, tiny dot on the planet,” and that there’s a much vaster reality, then how much gravity, how much impact can such thoughts have? It’s almost like they’re just static left over from something that—not a bad analogy—but they’re just superficial noise that still maybe habitually rides on a much vaster, more significant level of experience. Yeah, microcosm and macrocosm, I suppose.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Suzanne: I don’t know. Yeah, I suppose whatever the thought is, even if it is, “I rock. I am so great,” I don’t really grip onto that either. I do occasionally have that kind of thought as well, probably more often than I used to. But none of it matters. None of it matters.

I don’t know—what I am, what you are, the big I and the little I, the big Self spelled with a big S and self spelled with a little s—some people are very comfortable with those kinds of pointers. I just don’t know. I tend to think of—I’m more comfortable with, or I resonate more with, the idea of this one endless moment. This is it. This is all there ever is.

Whatever it looks like, even if it seems a very small thing or if it seems a really big thing, that’s the same thing. If you seem like you’re contracted in a small self with a little s and this tiny I, or you feel like you’re everything and you have no edges on your body, and you’re out of your body, blissful, and everything, that’s what it is. It is the same thing. It is exactly the same thing. It just has a different face.

None of it matters. None of it matters.

Rick: That’s exactly what I was going to say when I heard you saying that: it’s the same thing. And, you know, when I was in high school, I was so concerned about how I looked and how long my hair was.

Suzanne: Oh, I still am!

Rick: How long my hair was, what other people thought of me, whether I was cool, this and that, and whether I was muscular. These days, it’s like I can barely remember my age or have any sense of that kind of stuff. Maybe it’s just a matter of maturation.

Suzanne: Maybe it’s a matter of gender. I don’t know. I still wonder about my looks. But that’s another thing that grips me. I enjoy making myself up. I put things under my eyes so you don’t see the bags and the wrinkles so much, and this kind of thing. But I don’t really care.

Rick: It could be a gender thing. I mean, Byron Katie and Gangaji both had plastic surgery, so what the hell?

Suzanne: Did they really? Oh, well, no, I haven’t had any of that yet. I had the veins done on my left leg, but it was mostly because they were very uncomfortable. So, I don’t know, I don’t think that’s plastic surgery. You could put me on that list if the veins count.

Rick: Okay, join the club. So, after you had your awakening moment, did you feel like therapy had become superfluous, or did you actually continue on with it for some time?

Suzanne: No, I think we just had to—the therapist and I needed to have a formula by which we came to a conclusion—and it was a bit after that, definitely. But we still texted very occasionally.

Rick: And as I recall, your therapist had a sort of appreciation of non-dual teachings or something.

Suzanne: Yeah, and the therapist in the book is exactly like my therapist. The relationship that the characters in my book had—the therapist and Lucy—is much juicier and more interesting than the very slow kind of thing that went on in my therapy.

My book is tiny and short, and the therapy went on for ages. I don’t know, 18 months, once or twice a week.

Rick: That’s not that long compared to some people.

Suzanne: Well, some people, but this was intense. It was really intense. It wasn’t just like, “Let’s have a chat.” It was all very emotional, each and every single time.

So, no, it went on for a little while, because I think that that kind of therapy has to go through to a natural conclusion, and it does take a certain amount of time.

Rick: I wonder if your therapy was somehow instrumental in bringing about the awakening you had, because you weren’t really doing spiritual practices, but that was the main thing you were doing, was that?

Suzanne: That’s it. Well, I mean, it was a spiritual practice. It turned out that it was. It was many of the same things, just with different techniques from people who are engaged in a very traditional, meditative, guru-bound teaching relationship. It’s the same sort of thing, the same sort of practices.

And often people get the same sort of practices in the kind of job that they have, or the discussions that they have with their friends, or the relationship they have with their parents, or that kind of thing. Practice unfolds in many, many different ways.

I don’t know if it was instrumental; it’s just how it seemed to happen in the story of my life.

Rick: Conducive, too.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah.

Life, suffering, and the larger picture

Rick: Yeah, well, that kind of reminds me of something you said earlier, which is that everything kind of seems to be orchestrated in our best interests, ultimately, even though it might seem undesirable at the time. From the big picture, looking back, if you will, you realize, “Oh, that was perfect. I really needed that, to go through that.”

Suzanne: That’s how it seems to me. I know there are people who have deeply unfulfilling lives from the day they’re born until the day they die, and who spend their entire time as subsistence farmers in Africa, shuffling miles every day just to get some water.

But that kind of a life can be okay, as long as you actually have your needs taken care of. There’s nothing wrong with that life, and practice can be the walk.

But I know there are some people who do not have the whole microcosm and macrocosm of their life. Many people have more of a Job-like existence, and many people are victims for the entire course of their lives.

So, perhaps—I don’t like that. I wish that, if I could change things, I would change that. But in the bigger picture of all lives, that’s where balance happens.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, it kind of comes down to whether we understand or appreciate or believe that there is some Divine Intelligence that’s orchestrating everything, and whether that Divine Intelligence ultimately has the best interests of everything in mind, and is kind of shepherding everything along toward higher and higher evolution, and things like that, which is somewhat theoretical to discuss, although some say that’s really their experience of life. They can see those mechanics happening. But it certainly helps you to kind of come to terms with the people in Africa or whoever who are going through such miserable lives, that you can sort of see some ultimate cosmic justification for it.

Suzanne: Yeah, I don’t know if I do. It probably doesn’t actually resonate with me very much—Divine Intelligence orchestrating everybody to higher consciousness. I mean, I think that this is the higher consciousness. This is it. This is as high as it gets. It might seem to get higher, and then that will be as high as it gets, but that doesn’t sort of come into the concepts that resonate with me.

But, you know, life seems to be quite ordered. This planet with life on it—I mean, there are certain rules of physics and biology that seem to happen. It seems quite ordered. So there’s certainly that I would buy into.

Rick: Yeah, there’s some organizing intelligence, apparently. That’s what I mean when I say orchestrating. I don’t sort of mean like a puppeteer who is…

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: But, you know, you look at anything on the Discovery Channel, whatever—some little story about what goes on inside a cell—and it’s jaw-dropping.

Suzanne: It is.

Rick: Yeah. And also, when you say, “This is as high as it gets,” do you go to, let’s say, a person who is psychotic in a mental hospital and say, “This is as high as it gets,” which is sort of synonymous with “This is as good as it gets,” which reminds me of an old beer ad, but I won’t go there? Or is there a possibility that that particular confused soul has some kind of brighter future, as they move along and straighten out, and whatever, either this lifetime or future lifetimes? I mean, I don’t want to get too esoteric about it, but that could very well be the mechanics of the way the universe works.

Suzanne: Well, it’s just our mind wanting it to make sense. It doesn’t make sense.

Rick: It is.

Suzanne: It isn’t. You know, there’s karma, there’s rebirth, to take care of those people who have the crap life their whole lifetime. And that’s just because the mind wants it all to make sense somehow. And I don’t know that…

Rick: It could actually be the way it works, though.

Suzanne: Sure, sure. I mean, I don’t particularly care, but it certainly could. I wouldn’t go to a mental hospital and say to a psychotic person, “This is as good as it gets. I’m not that mean.” It makes me laugh to say, “This is as good as it gets, forget about it.” No, I mean, you know how that unfolds. There’s drugs, there’s this, and people try. Some people never get better, and they can just sort of be looked after. And that’s where the karma comes in, hopefully, in the next life.

But, you know, just in the one endless moment that’s always now, in which there appear to be psychotic people from time to time, I suppose a different way that the mind could try to make sense of it is that they have a role to play. If there wasn’t a psychotic person over here, you wouldn’t understand that there’s a sane person over here. So, I mean, people sometimes in the whole story of life have very difficult roles to play.

And I just heard, oh, about six months ago, somebody I didn’t know personally but knew of died alone in the flat, in their vomit, in the feces, in a heroin overdose. And, quite surprisingly, this person had never been into that particular drug before. Also, nobody really knew that they’d been dead for some days, because he had alienated everybody, and nobody cared what happened to him anymore.

So that—whoa—that is a difficult role to play. I mean, all the people that found out about that were learning lessons and really saying, “Whoa, maybe that could be me. That could be me.” Some people have a very difficult role to play, but every role can potentially change.

But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, this is sort of a whole different train of thought than non-duality, I suppose. As one small self, one contained ego, one personality, we do so much to help others. And I tend to try to do what I can with the handy and convenient people I actually live with. They actually need lots of tending to and take up a lot of my time and energy, so…

Rick: Think globally, act locally.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: No, there’s some good points you brought out there. I mean, one is, if we’re going to have a universe, it seems that we need to have duality in it, or pairs of opposites. If we’re going to have psychologically healthy people, we’ve got to have psychotics. If we’re going to have hot, we have to have cold. And if we’re going to have fast, we have to have slow. Otherwise, everything would be one amorphous blob with no distinctions within it.

Suzanne: Well, it seems like that sometimes—an amorphous blob with no distinctions. But yeah, no, I say this a lot, and in a few talks I’ve given, it always comes up: there’s nothing wrong with duality. I mean, you wouldn’t know good if there wasn’t evil to compare it to. Now, it’s really unfortunate, but that is the case. And now, someday, it might be just the memory of evil. We can work for that; that’s fine.

But, you know, this is duality. This is one, but in order for there to be this cup, this object that I’m picking up, the atoms have to be arranged a certain way, and there has to be a subject and an object, just to sort of get through life, regardless of what the actual reality is.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a Sanskrit phrase, lesha avidya, which means “faint remains of ignorance,” and the implication is that no matter how “enlightened” one becomes, there have to be some sort of faint remains of concession with the dualistic world in order to actually function as a human being. Otherwise, you’d lie down and die.

Suzanne: You’d take care of yourself, wouldn’t you? You’d get taken out with the garbage one morning, you know?

Rick: Exactly. And that thing you said about roles is kind of interesting, too. It kind of implies that we almost sign up for roles, and some people say it that way—that before coming into this life, we choose to take on a certain destiny in order to teach lessons to ourselves or to others, and so on. Who knows? I mean, it’s kind of interesting to speculate. Go ahead, you were going to say something.

Suzanne: No, I don’t think it was. Yeah, I mean, I understand why the concept of reincarnation is believed by so many, many people, and I’m not saying that I don’t, actually. I mean, if you’re trying—the mind is trying—to make sense of things, and signing up for a role beforehand is like, “Okay, I’m going to be a martyr this time. I’m going to have a terrible life because somebody has to, and because I’m filling this bit of the energy with the terrible life, somebody over here is going to have the good life.”

And I like that idea. Maybe that is the way it works, but maybe not. I don’t know. But I like the idea. I can understand why it’s an appealing concept; it really does seem to explain a lot.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, there are some people who say, well, in fact, Tony Parsons says, “There is no reincarnation,” because that implies that there would be someone to reincarnate, and there is no one. But that’s the absolute view. On a relative level, as we were just discussing, there is someone, even though ultimately, if you boil that down to its essence, it’s nothing—the vacuum state or whatever. So reincarnation may both be… it may exist, and at the same time, it’s an illusion, and both can be true simultaneously.

Suzanne: Oh, yeah, and I truly think that resonates with me, anyway. I’m right with Tony Parsons. I mean, everything is a complete illusion, and nothing is happening, really. So I get that, or I see that, or I don’t know—whatever the right way to put that is. It doesn’t matter whether there is reincarnation or not. It doesn’t matter whether there is heaven or hell. Everything is this. This is everything.

There isn’t something in the future or the next life. You know, the future is speculation, reincarnation is speculation, the past is memory, always, and the speculation is also a thought process. And all those thought processes are always happening here, now, and that’s all there is.

So, I mean, that is—I suppose that is—I don’t want to say anything that Tony Parsons says, or that that’s what he says, but I believe that is the gist of what he says, and that deeply resonates. I mean, the story can be as interesting as you like. You can have angels talking to you, or, oh my God, you can have states of bliss, you can float and levitate. On a more mundane level, you can up sticks and move to Australia. The story can be as interesting as you like, but it’s all the same thing.

The story can be as interesting as you like, but it’s all the same thing.

Rick: Yeah, well, and again, physics would tell us that it’s all the same sort of primordial, unmanifest state, kind of giving rise to virtual appearances, but it’s all ultimately the same stuff.

Suzanne: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Rick, I’ve got a deadline coming up, actually.

Rick: Okay, well, this is a good stopping point.

Suzanne: Yeah, okay. Bye!

Rick: We’ve stopped your videos about 20 times, but good. So, thanks, this has been fun. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, and I think people will enjoy hearing this. Do you want to make any concluding remarks, or was that good, what you just said?

A compassionate conclusion

Suzanne: Oh, I think that what I always say is that this is not necessarily to do with non-duality, but I think that many people, many little small s’s, tiny i’s, whatever, are very hard on themselves. All those thoughts of unworthiness we were talking about earlier come up a lot, and people buy into them a lot, and it upsets me.

I just want to say to everybody, you’re perfect exactly as you are, and it doesn’t matter what the story of your life is; it’s perfect. You are perfect as you are. It doesn’t matter what the outcome of the things of your life is. In this moment right now, everybody is just exactly as they are. They’re perfect, gorgeous, unbelievable, miraculous, apparent creations. Everybody. And I just love to see people being a little less hard on themselves.

You’re perfect exactly as you are.

Rick: Beautiful. So, in other words, lighten up.

Suzanne: Lighten up, chill out.

Rick: Great, so let me conclude. I’ve been talking with Suzanne Foxton, who lives in the UK. Suzanne has a blog, which I’ll be linking to from my blog, Buddha at the Gas Pump, or batgap.com.

She also has some videos on YouTube, which you can watch. If you search for Suzanne Foxton, I’m sure you’ll see them. She’s written a book, and I think is working on a second book, so I’ll be linking to that. You can send me the information on your new book when it comes out, and I’ll link to that as well.

If you would like to be notified of future interviews that I do—and I do one a week—then you can either subscribe on YouTube or go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and sign up for an email newsletter there. You’ll receive an email once a week or so when a new interview is posted.

There’s also a podcast you can sign up for if you want to listen to this on your iPod while you ride your horse, or whatever you do. So, thanks, Suzanne. It’s been nice talking to you.

Suzanne: Thanks, Rick. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Rick: Yeah, take care.

Suzanne: You too.

Rick: Okay, bye-bye.

Suzanne: Bye-bye.