Ted Strauss & Hillary Davis Transcript

Ted Swartz Hillary DavisTed Strauss & Hillary Davis Interview

Summary:

  • Background: Ted Strauss and Hillary Davis are associated with the Waking Down group. They have a history of spiritual exploration, both individually and together.
  • Vision at the World’s Fair: Ted shares a story of having a vision of his future wife, Hillary, at the 1965 World’s Fair, which later turned out to be true when they met.
  • Spiritual Journeys: The interview delves into their individual spiritual journeys, their work with Waking Down, and their personal relationship.
  • Teachings and Practices: They discuss the importance of integrating consciousness with everyday life and the challenges of embodying spiritual teachings in relationships and work.

This interview provides insights into their spiritual experiences and the impact on their lives and teachings.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guests this week are Ted Strauss and Hilary Davis. Ted and Hilary are associated with the Waking Down group and I love interviewing Waking Down people for reasons that I think we’ll touch upon during this interview. There have been three other interviews of such people, the Boggs, the Gilberts and Sandra Glickman, and I thoroughly enjoyed them all. They all highly recommended Ted and Hilary so I wanted to interview them. We almost did it about a month ago but Ted and Hilary didn’t have a good camera. And we realized that as this interview would be a pivotal event in the history of human spirituality we wanted to get a good camera and do it. That’s what we’re going to do now. For the last four or five days I’ve been listening to audio of Ted and Hillary’s YouTube recordings, of which there are many, and we will link to their site, which is tedstrauss.com, from batgap.com. I recommend that anybody who enjoys this interview check out their site and click on the video link and watch those YouTube videos because I found them really fascinating and enjoyable and pretty amazing in terms of the journey that both of them have taken, individually and together. Both the highlights and high points of that journey and the more difficult periods were all fascinating and very frank and down to earth and honest and genuine. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you guys and I feel you’re friends even though we’ve never met, from having listened to about five hours of you now. It’s really been enjoyable. There are many ways we could take this conversation, your individual spiritual journeys, what you’ve done together, what you do with Waking Down and so on. And I’d to make it as autobiographical as possible rather than an opportunity. to expound a teaching, and I’m sure you’ll do that. And I thought if you feel like it, we might start with the 1965 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, because I was there, too, actually along with my friend Ralph Preston, who happens to be doing all the post-production work on these interviews. And we almost missed the bus going back to Connecticut, it was an adventure. Now I’d to pause for a second because your video has frozen, I don’t see any movement. The reason I mentioned the 1965 World’s Fair is that you said in one of your YouTube videos that you had a vision of Hillary there, and that also intrigued me because I was at that Fair along with my friend Ralph Preston who does all the post-production work on these interviews. So there’s some kind of strange confluence there that I thought make it a good place to start with this whole thing. Why don’t you take it from there.

Ted: Well yeah, okay, so what happened was I was walking around this fountain and I got some vision of my future wife. And it was very clear to me at the time, it made a pretty deep impression, and I was just walking all over the fair trying to find this wonderful lady who I was feeling.

Hillary: Who was just a girl.

Ted: Who was just a girl, but what could I say, my hormones were all kicked in and something about that made this a very magical event. And I didn’t find her, but as it turned out she was actually living in Queens. So she was close by, she was going to the Fair, and I just didn’t see her at that time. And for whatever reason, for whatever karmic reason, it took until I was 42 to finally meet her. And after meeting her, it took me just a few days to have the vision click in. But when it did, I just knew that this was my wife.

Rick: Wow, you remembered the incident at the fair?

Ted: I remembered the incident at the fair, I remembered the picture I got, and there she was. And so then I had to essentially proceed to try and convince her that she was my wife.

Rick: Did you tell her the Fair story, or just skip that?

Ted: No, not until much later. I had to work on her for a while just to get a date. I think it took me about three months to get my first date with her. Maybe not quite that long, but she was pretty resistant. In fact, she was avoiding me. She would see me and run the other way. I think she thought I was just this crazy, weird little nerd, which is true. One day her blender broke.

Hillary: Juicer

Ted: Her juicer broke, right. And she … well, I didn’t tell this whole other part of the story, which explains why I was right there when her juicer broke. I was living and working in San Francisco and commuting a lot to L.A. doing some programming work. I just got sick of the city and I got sick of the job, and I decided to move to Marin. It had to be in a particular neighborhood that gave me access to the city. So I picked a little neighborhood, decided it should be right there near Tam Junction, and then I hatched one of my crazy schemes where I was working for an employer in the East Bay and I figured I should find a woman who is a cook and a masseuse. And then I could do some crazy trade where I could get the employer to pay for her rent, make it look like a satellite office, and then I could trade for the cooking and the massage work and life would be perfect. Well as it turned out, I had had a massage from Hillary about a year earlier. And it was a great massage and I kept her card, which was unusual. I just didn’t keep cards. And I found her card and I pulled it out one day when I needed a massage and my regular person wasn’t available. And I called her up, made an appointment, drove up to her place, which turned out to be near Tam Junction, and when I walked in, there was a picture of Ramana Maharshi on the wall. And I’m like, “Oh, this is a spiritual person.” And so we had a little chit-chat about that, she gave me a massage, it was an amazing, fabulous, great massage as usual, like the first time. And I don’t know if it was that time or the time after that I got off the table and kissed her feet.

Hillary: He really did that.

Ted: Which embarrassed the crap out of her.

Rick: You’re going to have to work hard in this interview to reestablish your legitimacy.

Ted: Yeah, I’m happy to just leave it at zero, personally. Then I don’t have to live up to anything. So anyway, within a few days I recognized her as the woman I’d seen in my vision, and I just fell madly, crazily in love with her. And like I was saying, it took her quite a while to get it. I had to work on her for quite a while and she kept running away from me, and finally I got my first date with her. I made the big mistake of asking her what her favorite color was on that date, which pegged me as a very un-deep guy, which was true. So finally we started getting together and then I worked the deal with the employer and got cooking and massage. She’s actually an amazing cook and an amazing masseuse and really also a phenomenal practitioner of Chin Shin Jitsu, which is an Eastern healing form. Maybe we’ll talk about that at some point. And the relationship just sort of blossomed from there. I’m not sure where you want to go from here.

Rick: Well I’m thinking let’s have Hillary tell her side of that story and then we’ll go back to the beginnings of when you first got bit by the spiritual bug, both of you, and kind of work our way forward from there.

Hillary: Well, I had no vision at the World’s Fair.

Ted: Except that it’s a small world.

Hillary: Yes it is a small world.

Rick: You’re thinking Disneyland, that’s a Disneyland thing.

Hillary: No that was at the World’s Fair.

Rick: Oh was that there?

Hillary: Well I vaguely remember Ted when I gave him a massage at Shibuya Gardens, which is where I worked, and then when he called me back for a massage I had remembered that I had given that massage to him. And I felt immediately with Ted a feeling of friendliness, like I had known him before, it was just like a friend, but I wasn’t drawn to him in a romantic kind of way.

Ted: Some of us are slower to process. She operates at a much slower wavelength than I do.

Hillary: And he’s really fast.

[Rick and Hillary talk over each other]

Hillary: So I liked him as a friend, but like I said I wasn’t drawn to him as a partner, and so he would pursue me with his energy and I would try to avoid him, as he said. I would go to the laundromat to do my laundry and he would be there and I’d try to walk around the car so he wouldn’t see me. It happened at Whole Foods as well, I was shopping and I would see him looking up and I kind of skirted around the other way. At the time, he wasn’t my idea of who I thought I wanted to be with, and I think that’s a big mistake so many of us make personally. So what happened? Basically Ted held a space for me to come and go, like move toward him and go away, move toward him and go away, and nobody had ever held that kind of constant space for me before. And it was so moving to me. And I started to feel the love in his heart and how much unconditional love he really had and I’d never experienced anything like that either. My childhood was kind of one of those scary, unpredictable childhoods where you never knew when the shoe was going to drop next. So Ted provided that stability for me. And then he taught me about relationship, what was really possible in relationship and how to communicate, how to be there. I taught him about quiet and silence and not having to entertain me and just to be quiet.

Ted: She used to say, “Ted, come down, you don’t have to entertain me.” I wasn’t used to that at all. It took me a while to get the message and learn that I could just chill out and be me and she actually liked me a lot better. I was not trying to be entertaining.

Hillary: So there came a point when the scales just tipped and I just felt how much in love I was with Ted, because of his heart, I would say, the depth of his heart.

Ted: And my persistence.

Rick: I was listening to one of your talks that you gave in front of a group of people and you basically started the talk by crying and telling the people how beautiful they all were and how moved you were to see such a beautiful group of people sitting there. I was kind of impressed by that, firstly because I don’t cry that easily, but also because such a tenderness and sensitivity is kind of unusual, and also an unguardedness. Some guy sitting in front of 50 people or whatever and starting his talk by crying, how many people would feel comfortable doing that? After a minute or so you composed yourself and went on and gave a really nice talk and answered questions and everything, but I thought that was really sweet.

Ted: I learned that from Hillary. I mean, put it this way, I learned how not to live just up in my head from being around Hillary. And I also have to say, it wasn’t just Hillary. Hillary is kind of like a huge magnet drawing down into my body and into the earth and into the world. She’s an embodiment magnet. But her energy goes perfectly with the down part of Waking Down, which Saniel was already teaching us.

Hillary: And Saniel would often do what Ted did. His heart would just come out through his tears, through his laughter.

Rick: I’ve seen Amma do that quite a bit, although she’s a woman of course. You know Ammachi, the hugging saint, she sometimes will just start crying a lot. She’ll be sitting on her couch and just start to cry. Sometimes it’ll be some crippled child that comes up or something, but other times she’ll just cry and everybody’s wondering why. They speculate maybe she’s crying for the world or whatever, but I don’t know. There’s just that sort of spontaneity and openness and unguardedness.

Ted: I think that’s one of the things about the Waking Down teachers in general. Even senior practitioners in this work, we have learned … it’s not just about learning to open your heart, it’s very much about coming into a realization of non-separateness from other people in the world. And when you awaken into that non-separateness, you simply don’t have the buffers anymore to protect yourself from all of the feelings that you thought would wipe you out. When you find out that actually consciousness isn’t obliterated, when it’s faced with difficult or deep or strong feelings, life is extremely different. That’s another whole thing we can talk about later, but that’s just an enormous piece of what this work is about, which is the tantric challenge of coming into the world with your awakened consciousness and be fully present with all that the world has to bring us in relationships and in our work and everything.

Rick: Maybe we should just pursue this now and go into the histories later. Since this is coming up, it might be interesting to just delve into it, and at some point we’ll loop back and examine how you got here. And I’ve been thinking about this point you made just now for a few days as I’ve been listening to your things, because I can’t help but compare the way you seem to experience life and talk about that experience with other spiritual presentations and teachers. I would have to say that a great many of them do seem rather disembodied, in fact not only disembodied but dis-impersoned. There seem to be a number of teachers who would consider our whole conversation so far in this interview to be ridiculous because “there is no one, there is no person, and so what is all this fuss about relationships and feelings and all this stuff? There’s no one home”. You hear this all over and over again. I’ve actually been having friendly debates with this one guy who is the head of a website that interviews a lot of neo-Advaita people, and then this other friend of mine who keeps telling me that you have to pretty much surrender the ego or destroy the ego or whatever. And I’m trying to understand how to talk with them, because my experience so far and my understanding, which is always subject to revision, is that maybe “surrender the ego” is an OK term because it just implies having it take a back seat as opposed to totally running the show. There’s another element that comes in and tends to predominate, but I don’t see how you can be alive and not have a sense of self. How would you walk through a door? There’s always going to be some kind of preferences.

Ted: Well, I’m really glad you brought up that whole thing about self and no self and ego and no ego, because as far as I’m concerned, that whole discussion arises from a serious confusion. And there’s different levels of the confusion. One level of the confusion has to do with the overall process of human unfoldment. And the thing is that as we humans unfold as a species, we get to look back and see what’s possible. But until we unfold to the next level, it’s impossible for us to look forward and figure out what’s possible. So even just not that long ago in human history, in fact quite recently, I think there are certain levels of human unfoldment and development that just were not possible. And the reason they weren’t possible is because humanity simply hadn’t grown up enough to get to this place. We had to get to a point where we had mobilized sufficient resources that we could have enough free energy and attention, or luxurious time, time to sit and contemplate our navels, whereby we could get far enough in our recognition of who we are that then we could help each other find that. So the place we had come to, even quite recently, the best place we had come to was to be able to awaken to consciousness. And the awakening to consciousness and the way we found how to awaken consciousness, that obviously has been evolving for a couple of thousand years at least. And it’s been evolving in the context of humanity’s unfoldment so far. And most of the awakening to consciousness really got started in India, and points east. And the context in which that was happening was very different than it is today, extremely different. The point was that back then there was a sort of, I’m not sure how to describe this, but it’s almost as if there was a kind of a membrane between our recognition of consciousness and our recognition of our world and bodily selves. So that those who had the persistence, such as the Buddha, to do the work it takes to penetrate through what appeared to be this nearly impenetrable veil, when they landed on the other side of it, the experience was “holy cow! This is different, this is completely different, this is what’s real, this is the only thing that’s real, the rest of it was a big illusion.” And that was the real experience of those explorers at those times. And there was nothing wrong with that, the recognition of consciousness in that way was what we were up to at the time. But since that time, and especially I’d say since Ramana, Ramana really broke up some huge pieces in the awakening of consciousness. And something about his presence in the world made it much more easy for other people who followed him to recognize and awaken to consciousness. But the weird thing is, as these people began to awaken to consciousness, they also began to report seeming to lose it. It’s like, “I had it when I was with him and I lost it when I left.” You know, “I’d go on a retreat and I’d have a big awakening to consciousness and then I’d go home and I’d eat a steak and I’d lose it, or I’d have sex or I’d get angry.” We would be thinking, “It must be because I did something wrong.” And this is the experience most spiritual seekers have been having pretty much in the last 30-40 years.

Rick: Wouldn’t you say that’s maybe a normal stage in the unfoldment of it, simply because when it’s new, when it’s delicate, it’s not very well stabilized or integrated, and so it might be fleeting, it might come and go until it gets more established?

Ted: Yes, I think there’s a number of different dimensions of that. One is exactly what you said, it takes a while to cultivate the recognition of it. And another piece of it has to do with cultivating the recognition of consciousness embodied, which is a very different experience than the recognition of consciousness disembodied. Here, I’ll tell you a little of my experience. When I started practicing TM, within the first couple of weeks of being initiated, I was sitting in the back of my parents’ car, we were driving somewhere, it was time to meditate so I closed my eyes, and I went into nirvikalpa samadhi for, I don’t know, a couple of minutes.

Rick: Now, nirvikalpa means?

Ted: Formless ecstasy. Nothing, emptiness, and at the time I didn’t even know what was happening. It was just so empty that there was no recognition of anything, there was not even a recognition of emptiness, it was complete obliteration of self. When I came out of that, I knew what I just came out of, and I had been educated enough to get that that was some kind of consciousness experience. And then over the years, in the TM movement and being a teacher, I had many experiences of consciousness, but I never had that one again, not quite like that. And a lot of people would look at that and think, “Oh, I had it once and I’ve lost it, I’m a total failure,” but the way I look at it is, “No, I evolved. My experience of consciousness became integrated.” And what that means is that I could recognize that consciousness is part of my experience with my eyes open during the day. So as time went on, it was less about closing my eyes, practicing a technique, transcending as if to somewhere else, and having an experience of consciousness and coming back. Instead it was more like, “Oh yeah, it’s here, it’s now, it’s part of me, it doesn’t have to be separate and I don’t have to go somewhere else to get that that’s what’s going on.” And that’s part of what I help people do in their process of coming to the recognition of consciousness, is get that their doubts about consciousness oftentimes are very much based in their past experience, or in their comparison with something that they’ve read or heard a teacher talk about.

Rick: Hillary, did you want to add something there?

Hillary: No, not now.

Rick: Okay. In this whole thing that you just said, though, just the way you said it was, “I had this experience, it went, I had other experiences, and eventually I recognized that consciousness was there in the midst of activity,” and so on. But there’s always this reference to an “I,” and what these other folks are saying, what I was referring to in my question, is that there is no “I” to refer to, and that the whole notion of one is a misconception or a misperception, and that there’s nobody here, nobody home, that kind of thing. There essentially is no person, and the sense of personhood is delusion or illusion or whatever. And so all this discussion of emotions and development of experience and progressive stages of development and so on and so forth, to them sounds like complete nonsense. I was going to use another word than “nonsense,” but this may end up on television, and I meant to remind you there are certain words we probably shouldn’t use, because then we’ll have to edit them out, or this won’t get on local access TV, so let’s keep that in mind. Not that you’ve used any yet.

Ted: Keep it clean. Keep it clean. Okay. Do you want to respond to that one first, or do you want me to?

Hillary: Why don’t you respond to it first? I feel like I’m on lots of different levels.

Ted: Yeah, I feel it on lots of different levels too. I think the place I would start with that is by saying that experiences of awakening come in many different shapes and forms. Everybody has their own unique human design, I’m sure you’ve heard of that, and some human design types are prone to experience consciousness as emptiness, formlessness and selflessness. Other human design types are prone to experience consciousness as fullness and light and totality.

Rick: Yeah.

Hillary: And a movement into life in a particular way, with particular energy and gusto and zest for life, whereas others are more open.

Rick: I actually heard Maharishi say something very similar. He said that according to different types of nervous systems or different makeup, some people experience it as bliss more, and some more unboundedness, and different qualities for different people.

Ted: Exactly, exactly. And the thing is that for so long, until maybe about the 60s or 70s or 80s, most of the people who had any kind of awakening that was big enough and flashy enough to prove to them that they were awake, they’d go write a book. Usually it was a guy, because it’s the guys who have the energy to go push something into the world like that, not usually the women. So the guys who had that particular kind of experience, basically they’re thinking, “This is obviously a serious major awakening, and in my experience there’s no self. And when I look at other people and I see how oriented around themselves they are, it looks like a big joke to me,” so they spin dharma around that and they assume that that is the highest truth, because what they have realized is apparently the ultimate transcendental reality of existence. And that’s a true statement, but that doesn’t mean it’s the ultimate awakeness. To me, there’s awakening beyond the ultimate awakening in consciousness, and that is the awakening that brings consciousness here to earth and into relationship, which is another thing at some point I’d love to get into.

Rick: Yeah, we’ll talk about that. Have you ever heard of Marianna Kaplan?

Hillary: Sure.

Rick: Yeah, she’s written that book, which I’m slowly working my way through, “Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment.” And it’s a real treat to read. I don’t necessarily agree with every little thing she says, because who am I to say, but I don’t agree with everything anybody says. But there’s all sorts of quotes from different people and so on, and examples of how there is a tendency to assume that what we’ve got is the big enchilada, and then just as you said, to compare it with what other people seem to be experiencing and to relegate them to a confused status, if it differs from what we’re experiencing.

Ted: Exactly. And see, in my experience, what happens much more organically is that people go through their awakening process in waves, in oscillations. It’s like, we’ll start over here, and then we’ll have an experience, and then go two steps back, three steps forward, two steps back. And everybody’s got their own particular wave period that’s unique to their nervous system. And the people who were designed to have these big, flashy experiences, the upside of that is they don’t go through the same kind of doubts about their awakening process as other people.

Hillary: I had a lot of flashy, phenomenal experiences, and I way dropped into the doubts in the other part of it.

Ted: Right, okay. Hillary’s unique. She can have flashy experiences and doubt.

Rick: Well, is that because you lost the flashy experiences, and so you fell into doubt after you lost them, or what?

Hillary: Well, this happened after my consciousness awakening, which I experienced before I met Saniel, before I got involved in that.

Rick: Incidentally, you guys have referred to Saniel a number of times, but we’ve never said who he is, actually. Why don’t you just tell us briefly, just in a sentence, who Saniel is, and then we can go on.

Ted: Yes. Saniel Bondar is the founder of Waking Down in Mutuality, and he was a very close biographer and helper to Da-Fri Zhang for 18 years, and then found himself having to leave and find his own awakening, because he wasn’t really getting the empowerment he needed there. And he did, quite rapidly, after that, and then we were in some of the earliest groups. And Hillary actually found him before I did. So then we became highly involved with Saniel and have been so ever since.

Rick: Good. So that just explains who he is. Okay, Hillary, I’m sorry, I kind of interrupted you. You were in the middle of talking about doubts and flashy experiences. Your consciousness experience and then what happened.

Hillary: So what would you like me to talk about?

Ted: Oh, how did the doubts come in, after your consciousness awakening?

Hillary: Well, okay, so after my consciousness awakening, like I said, for quite a few months it was like my mind was gone, and there was just light and all kinds of phenomenal body experiences that were happening to me. And then, after a few months, it felt like my mind came in with a vengeance. I used to call it “Nazi mind,” because that’s how it felt. It was just very intense. And I went to my teacher at the time, who I had been sitting with, and I said, “What do I do with this?” Because it just kind of threw me for a loop. And he didn’t really seem to know what to do with me. So I ended up going to India and being with Poonjaji.

Rick: That’s Papaji, right?

Hillary: Yeah.

Rick: Were you there when Andrew Cohen and Gangaji and all those people were there?

Hillary: No, it was after they had been there. This was in ’92 for me.

Rick: Okay, and then what?

Hillary: Well, so I was pretty desperate when I was there, and I had more and more phenomenal experiences, but there was so much going on for me at the time. Everything was lit up. There was just a lot of anger and self-hatred and self-loathing, and just all of the critical negative states were really up for me. And even though I experienced more and more phenomenal places, and in a way, a very deep peace, I still felt like my relative reality was not taken seriously, because the Advaitics don’t take relative reality seriously.

Rick: You mean like Papaji, he wasn’t taking it seriously?

Hillary: Well, let me just say that’s not where he went in being. That’s not where he was led to go in being, was into the relative, and the way that I felt at the time, I wished I could have that kind of support. So what happened for me was I came back to California, I got really sick in India. I had giardia, my kidneys were in spasm, I was a mess. And I was in and out of bed for a year and a half or two, because I had back problems, and I just had this photo of Ramana Maharshi on my wall, and I would just spend all my days just lying there and just looking into his eyes and feeling like, “Just take me,” because I felt like I was done with my life. I felt like it didn’t matter if I died, I didn’t care. And I’ll tell you this experience, I would kind of crawl to the bathroom on my knees because I couldn’t get up, and that was the kind of existence I lived in. And then one day I had a telephone that was on my bed stand right beside me, and the phone rang and I was so used to just ignoring all forms of life, wanting to contact me. And then this voice, and it felt to me like Ramana’s, it was just like, “Pick up that phone, pick up the phone.” And it was a little shocking, and I did. And it was kind of like from that point on, I felt the pain in my body that I was feeling, I no longer was able to just float out and merge into what felt to me like Ramana’s heart. And I started to have to confront a lot of pain, physical, mental, emotional. And then a friend of mine suggested I go check out Saniel, so in ’94 that’s what I did.

Rick: Interesting.

Ted: I just want to tie something back in here. We were on a couple of different threads. One was about doubt, and another one was about pain, and how for most spiritual seekers, really what they’re looking for is a way out of their pain. And it’s very easy to latch onto an awakening in consciousness as a way to do that, as if we could hold onto half of being, or let’s just say a perception of half of being, and try to stay there, and try to stay exclusively identified with consciousness, and try not to be identified with this pain body in the hope that we can get out of pain. The problem that we, and I think I can speak for the whole Waking Down community here, have with that is that it doesn’t work. (Laughter)

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good question. I was wondering that myself.

Hillary: I think you have to look at, and the question you brought up before about what your Advaitic friends say about no-self, is what’s being avoided? Is something being pushed away? Because even on a subtle level, if something is being pushed away, it’s duality. So you’re still engaging in duality. It’s not just one.

Rick: Yeah, and some of them get downright fundamentalist about it, and that’s something I’ve always thought about fundamentalists, is that they’re pushing something away, and what they’re pushing away I think is doubt, really. The experience is not so solid and stable and clear for them, whatever they’ve latched onto, that it’s invincible, and therefore everything seems like a threat. Everything threatens to shake it or dislodge it. And perhaps that’s what you’re referring to as well. If you’ve somehow glommed on to a consciousness value but not integrated it, then there’s always a pressure to do that, to integrate it. And I’m just speculating a little bit here, and I’m sure you can explain it much better, but as long as you resist that pressure, there’s a tendency to reject everything and be rigid and fundamentalist about it. Does that make sense? Does that sound right?

Hillary: Yeah, and fundamentalists are really in reaction to something, and they’re not connected with themselves. They’re not in connection with who they are, because they’re in reaction to it.

Ted: I just want to quickly add that if you read any Ken Wilber or understand basic human development, we can understand that fundamentalism and duality are natural and necessary stages in the human unfolding process. So we don’t have any big judgment about that, but we need to make a distinction between the view of life as seen from duality and fundamentalism, versus the view of life from the integral or unified perspective. It’s a very different perspective.

Rick: Yeah, it’s an interesting point. In fact, I think it was Ken Wilber or Craig Hamilton or somebody who was saying that fundamentalist Christianity works really well for gang members. Not that it doesn’t work for other people as well, but it seems to be a particularly potent antidote for people who are in that mindset, to get them on to a much better stage of life.

Hillary: Right, that’s true.

Rick: We’re not picking on fundamentalists here, but I think bringing out the point that there are so many. Fundamentalism is in every strata of spiritual development. I want to loop back to something, but you might have something in mind before I do.

Ted: Yeah, I just want to say more on the same topic. I think that a lot of what I observe is that most people who think of themselves as spiritual seekers are actually pushing away discomfort. It’s not even necessarily the horrible pain, although yes, of course we prefer to be comfortable and happy. We always have that going on. But there’s a certain level of just coming to terms with the fact that being human isn’t as blissful as we might ideally want it to be. When we’re in the idealistic phases of our process, it won’t take hardly anything for us to project our idealism onto whatever person or dharma or book or cause or whatever that we think somehow embodies the picture of our idealism. It certainly is what got me into the TM movement, I have to say, because here’s Maharishi saying life is bliss, and I’m like, “If I was 17, sure, great, I’ll go for that,” because I was suffering. I bashed my head against the brick wall of the attempt to make life bliss for decades, until I finally started rotting out of that whole approach. The only way to get to the next phase is if you keep going after the bliss and the happiness and the only good and the only positive, until you start running out of energy for that.

Rick: Well, you know there’s that saying in the TM movement, “That to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life,” so it’s actually part of the doctrine, not putting your attention on negative stuff. Although there is the instruction in meditation of if you feel some discomfort or pain or something unpleasant, don’t avoid it, let your attention dwell on it and that will help to dissipate it. There’s that too.

Ted: Well, right there, I just want to say the whole point is to put your attention on it to dissipate it. That’s a completely different thing than this whole being disposition you eventually rot into, which is, “I want to feel it because I want to feel it, because I want to be here.”

Rick: Well, what if you had a headache, a tension thing, a physiological abnormality, you wouldn’t say that you’d want to just dwell on that perpetually. There is a point in healing it, right?

Hillary: It’s not dwelling on it though, and again, it depends on what phase and stage you’re at in your process, because I wouldn’t say feeling it means dwelling on it. Feeling it doesn’t mean emoting, and feeling it doesn’t mean swimming in chaos of being feminine. Feeling just means being with your body. And that’s really important because I think most of us don’t know what to do when people say, “Just be with it,” or “Don’t dwell on it.” Which is why we avoid feeling the discomfort. It’s like nobody’s been with us at that place where we want to cope on top of the feeling of discomfort, and they go, “No, sweetie, you can be here. You can be right here, and I’ll be here with you. And if we just be here together, this energy and attention that’s been going into avoiding and wanting to run and jump is going to free up, and more consciousness is going to be the result of that”.

Rick: Right, well yeah, so that kind of corroborates what I think I was getting at, which is that the attention seems to have a healing influence, or rather than diverting the attention and trying not to feel the thing, just be with it and feel it. Not because you’re a masochist and you want to feel something unpleasant perpetually, but because actually by feeling it, the way you put it was the consciousness streams in or something, and it does end up eventually resolving or dissipating or whatever. It clears up and then you’re more liberated. Ted, earlier you made a point about the historic, you traced the history of enlightenment back to the ancients, and you referred to Buddha as breaking through a membrane, so to speak, and breaking into self-realization through a membrane that may have been very thick 2000 years ago by comparison to the way it is today. And I was wondering now, and we haven’t fully elaborated or discussed your whole concept of embodiment and all that, which we will get into more, but when you look back at some of those famous ancient spiritual teachers like Buddha or Shankara or these people, do you get the feeling that they had gone beyond that initial break through the membrane and that they had progressed on to greater embodiment? For instance, you were in the TM movement… Let me save that question because it throws in two different whole concepts and I don’t want to mix up your answer, so go ahead and respond to what I just said if you would.

Ted: Well, I’m not much of a scholar of those ancient teachings, but I can tell you that I have heard that Buddha’s teaching evolved after he had his first awakening, and he tried to get some of his earlier students to understand what he came to later in life, but they didn’t get it. They didn’t want to hear it, because his earlier teachings sounded more juicy to them, which I think is kind of a natural and pretty typical thing to happen. So I don’t know how embodied anybody in particular got later on in their process. I wasn’t around to find out. I can usually feel these things when I read teachings. If you could find some of those later teachings and put them in front of me, I could give you a feeling about it, because you can usually feel through somebody’s language and the way they’re expressing where they’re coming from. I don’t know, the problem is that humanity is still extremely young, and there are still very few people who are even awake to consciousness. It’s just that now we’ve got enough who are awake to consciousness that that membrane that was separating our worldly attention from our spiritual attention is way thinner. People these days are having awakening experiences left and right, and even Oprah is into it.

Hillary: I just saw today Jim Carrey had a consciousness awakening.

Rick: Yeah, I saw that on YouTube.

Ted: So as far as I’m concerned, the way we break through into these different stages individually is highly related to what stage of development we’re at as a whole human being. Right now, humanity has evolved to the point where enough of us has awakened to consciousness, but we’re still at this place where very few have awakened to the depth of embodiment that we’re talking about. So even the consciousness people have a hard time hearing us or understanding what we’re talking about. They think we’re talking about something that in their worldview is backwards. If we’re getting into the drama and the history and the story of our lives, they think we’re going backwards.

Rick: Yeah, it’s an interesting point. There’s this whole movement of evolutionary enlightenment, Craig Hamilton and Barbara Marx Hubbard and Andrew Cohen and all these people, and they talk about this stuff a lot, how the very nature of spirituality itself is evolving as a species and even what individuals among us might be experiencing compared to what they might have been able to experience in ancient past. We’re kind of like breaking new ground as we go along. And you can imagine that there were ground-breakers a thousand years ago that broke ground that some of us have not yet broken even, because there’s always outliers, there are always people way up on the end of the bell curve. But as the mass of the bell curve seems to be shifting along.

Ted: That’s right, and the thing is you’ve got so many people who have this belief that the wisdom that’s been around for thousands of years must be the most advanced wisdom. Whereas if you look in any other field of human endeavor, it’s exactly the opposite.

Rick: Yeah, very good point. Interesting.

Ted: So somehow our ideas of spirituality have been pretty much stuck in the Bronze Age for a long time and needs to be updated, and that’s part of what we find ourselves having to do. But the truth is it’s not like we’re out there proselytizing or anything of the sort. The only way this can work is if people get to the point where they start what we call “rotting” out of their idealism and their belief that following a formulized spiritual practice is going to bring them freedom from suffering. Until they get to that point, there’s really nothing we can say.

Hillary: We often do these workshops called “Myths of Enlightenment,” just really letting people get out what are all their myths about what enlightenment is. And boy, people go away very different after that.

Ted: Yeah.

Rick: Well, I guess by rot you mean disillusionment, or getting fed up basically with what you’re doing, kind of hitting bottom with it and thinking, “Okay, this isn’t going to take me any further, now what?” Is that correct?

Ted: Yes, if it’s really that. See, people go through different kinds of disillusionment and despair. If they go into a stage of disillusionment and despair and hopelessness that’s really about taking a few breaths and getting it together and finding the next great journey to the top of the mountain, then that’s not the rot. What we mean by the rot is when you get to the place in your process where you’ve fallen back into the valley for the last time and you don’t care about climbing up onto that mountain again. It isn’t about getting up to some high experience anymore. It’s not about the perfection or the ultimate or the final liberation from limits and the difficulties of being human. When you’re at that place it can show up very differently. It shows up like, “Okay, how do I learn how to be here?”

Hillary: If you come to the place where you can’t keep coping anymore on top of a conditioning that you see isn’t even real anymore, it’s kind of also the end of coping on top of something. It’s just the surrender into this, what is.

Ted: Reality and what reality is isn’t just consciousness. Well I’ll qualify that statement for those who are going, “Yeah, everything is consciousness and yeah, everything is one thing.” I wouldn’t even call it consciousness, I’d call it being. So we define being as consciousness plus phenomenon or absolute plus relative equals being. So when you get that being is one thing and everything is being that, well the way I would put it is, I can hardly talk about consciousness anymore. I talk about it to people who need to talk about it that way because they’re seeing it that way. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t see consciousness as a thing to get to or something to realize. I see it as, let’s say, a dimension of being that can be awakened into, just as there are other dimensions of being that can be awakened into. So when you’re rotting, you’re falling into reality. You’re falling into, “I guess I can’t escape the fact that I’m human. I guess I can’t escape the fact that being human means sometimes there’s pain and sometimes there’s pleasure.” And for some people it’s not even about pain or pleasure, it’s about the fact that it’s constantly alternating and they can’t control it. That’s true, you can’t control it. So for some people the rot is the rot out of the illusion of control. For other people it’s the rot out of the illusion of separation or the rot out of the illusion of perfection, the way they were thinking about it. Yes, everything is perfect, but it ain’t perfect the way we’re thinking about it, because if that’s a thought, that’s not the whole reality. It’s just a thought.

Rick: I want to play devil’s advocate to something you said a minute ago. I’m no longer officially part of the TM movement, haven’t been for many years. I still meditate in a TM kind of way, although with some slight variations. But I just want to say that it’s not fair to characterize an entire movement, TM or any other, in any particular way. Because I know people who are very much still involved in that, and whose permanent level of experience and development would blow you away. Some very profound stuff is going on. There’s one guy who’s a good friend of mine who’s been married for 40 years, he’s got a couple of grown kids, will probably have grandchildren soon, he runs a fairly large business, he likes to ski, he’s very artistic, he’s got all kinds of real life stuff going on. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe enlightenment with such clarity and genuine authority as this guy. And he’s really never done anything other than TM, so if he heard this talk about rot and so on, he would just think, “I can’t relate to it.” He can certainly relate to having gone through many, many, many stages of unfoldment and shifts and developments and so on, that’s very real for him. And there’s always actually something new when you talk to him, because he’s always writing reams of stuff and very keen on exploring this whole thing as thoroughly and deeply as possible. But it’s more like his vision has been more on the road ahead as opposed to, “This isn’t working and this isn’t working,” and so on. Does that make sense? Does that jibe?

Ted: Sure, that totally makes sense. And I’m sorry if I gave the impression that we were characterizing a whole movement as being somehow inadequate or something like that, because I really don’t feel that way. In fact, I did TM for 25 years and it helped me, it really helped me. It was one of the more important things in my spiritual process, and I think that it’s very natural that when somebody gets one way or another some help to awaken the consciousness, it’s pretty inevitable that then they’re going to move on from there and they’re going to evolve to other and deeper levels of their own development. They could say it’s because of this or because of that, but I think it’s just because we humans naturally want to grow and evolve and awaken to all of who we are, which is, in my opinion, all of here. That’s who we are.

Rick: Yeah, and I find that some people, it works for them to just really stick with one thing and just milk it for all it’s worth, and other people, they have a more potpourri kind of approach to it, try all kinds of things and energy work and whatever, all the things. And that seems to work for them. So to each his own.

Ted: It’s true. I think that there are some people for sure, like you just said, for whom a formulaic approach will work very well, but I suspect that even for them, they’re going to have to break the formula somewhere because they in fact are awakening into being an absolutely unique person. So sooner or later you get to an edge of your own process that no one else has been to before, including you, because they weren’t you.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a very interesting point because what I observe here in Fairfield, Iowa, which is the home of Maharishi University of Management, where there are several thousand TM practitioners, is that quite frequently people kind of pop out of there and it seems to either be caused by or be coincidental with a blossoming of their individuality. It’s like this happened to me, I just started to get independent in my thinking and I started to do things without worrying about what the right thing to do was or what the movement would think or anything else, just innocently doing stuff. In fact I ended up getting booted out for being that way. But it sort of happened at the right time. The chick had pecked through the shell and was ready to get out of the incubator and any more time in the incubator would have been bad for the chick and interfered with the other eggs.

Ted: Yeah, that’s a great analogy. I think it’s absolutely true. I think any time you get any sort of a group that has some kind of a group mind around it that is especially reinforcing that the inside is good and the outside is bad, that creates a thick membrane and then it takes more energy to peck your way through that. Hey, you know what, a lot of people even need that. I needed it, you needed it, we all needed it.

Rick: The chick needs the shell, otherwise it’s not going to live.

Ted: That’s right.

Rick: I’m sorry Hillary, go ahead. Any time Hillary actually wants to speak we should let her.

Hillary: It’s really the genius of being is guiding the shell. So wherever people end up it’s perfect and if there’s something more they will be drawn to that too and if not they don’t need it.

Rick: I agree. There’s this song by Rascal Flats, it’s called something like “God Bless the Broken Road that Led me Here to You” and it’s a love song, but it could be applied to this because the road can be apparently very devious and circuitous and so on, but it’s really heading straight to where we need to go by our own unique route, I think.

Ted: Absolutely, absolutely.

Hillary: I just want to add that what you were talking about before about the more Advaita types and that there’s no one home and no person, I know that about myself. I often fall into all these different places where absolutely there’s no person here, there’s no one here, there’s just this flow. I’m more open, whereas somebody like Ted has a very different experience there, he’s more in the world. His experience of being is very different from mine in many ways and that’s one beautiful thing about the work we do, and about the Waking Down work, because there’s so many of us teachers and there’s so many different kinds of people. I had a very dark life in many ways. I dealt with some very deep dark stuff, difficult material and so I can be there for people who went through that and never thought they could awaken. Ted can be who he is. So it’s the beauty of what we’re offering here is that everybody’s different and unique and you don’t have to fit into any process. It’s not a cookie cutter process. Your own individuality is honored and held and so that’s how we find that people just drop really fast because they’re being held and met right where they are.

Rick: That’s one thing I’ve observed about Waking Down as an outside observer is that it doesn’t have a static dogma, it’s honest and open and willing to be vulnerable enough to continually re-examine itself. I’m using the word “it” but I’m talking about people, of course, because that’s what it is, a bunch of people. But there’s this sort of culture within the group that is continually self-assessing and willing to redefine things as need be, according to what arises, according to however the whole thing progresses and I find that to be really refreshing and healthy and admirable.

Ted: Yeah, well it took us a while to get there. We had our own various forms of shells and incubators going on in the earlier days of this work, where we took what Saniel had realized and written and was offering to us and we tried it on, and as it turned out it worked really well for a lot of us. So as we moved from the early 90s into the late 90s we started to realize that the ideas that Saniel had formulated and that we had all continued to formulate with him were missing some big pieces, and we went into all other forms of growth and learning about group dynamics and mutuality and how to do relationships. It’s very interesting because in the early days there was just a bunch of heady guys sitting around talking karma. In the next phase of it there came men and women and women wouldn’t stand for this kind of behavior.

Hillary: Maybe we were a little more vocal then.

Ted: Yeah, they became much more empowered and wouldn’t let the guys just be in their heads. And then over time you could see how the men and the women were getting together, first Saniel and Linda and me and Hillary and then some other couples and now we just came out of a teacher retreat and we’re looking around the room and just about everybody in the room was in a couple. It’s like we had evolved to the point over these years of learning how not just to be embodied but to come into the world and come into relationship and bring our vulnerable hearts and bring our awakened beingness and really be there and learn how to do this skillfully.

Hillary: And use relationship as a path of much deeper awakening. Because that’s when the wounded parts come up, is in relationship.

Rick: So, is everyone coupled up because couples are attracted to Waking Down or because people who were single kind of paired up within the group?

Hillary: First of all, they’re not all coupled up. Most people came into this work uncoupled. But what happens as you deepen in this awakening is your needs come up and they’re not taboo. It’s like your needs are your desires, and they’re valid, they’re worthy because it’s about fulfillment on all levels. And so what ends up happening is these people find partners kind of out of necessity to share, necessity to share with someone.

Rick: They find partners within the Waking Down group or anywhere?

Ted: Some do, some don’t. Sometimes they find it outside.

Rick: Does Waking Down work very well for people whose partner may not really be into it?

Ted: Well, we could look at two ends of the spectrum of what happens there. On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got somebody who’s really into Waking Down and the partner isn’t and they’re kind of hoping they’ll get into it and that whole thing. And then if they don’t, their growth trajectories, the arcs of their growth trajectories go in different directions. And then it doesn’t work.

Hillary: But there are many people in our work, many people in our work whose partners are not in the work. And as long as the partner has an openness to being, an openness to a kind of awakeness and honesty, it works fine.

Rick: Yeah, as long as they’re tolerant or accepting.

Hillary: Well, as long as they can have a depth. Because when you awaken, you drop into more depth and more of yourself, so you want to share more.

Ted: Yeah, you need somebody there to share with. And there’s a couple of things I want to say about that. Sometimes what will happen is you’ve got a Waking Down person who’s like, “Oh my God, I just have to find a Waking Down person.” Maybe they even do find a Waking Down person. And then after a while they’re like, “I don’t care about Waking Down, I’m just being me.” And then their partner is like, “Oh, but I need you to be a Waking Down person.” And maybe that won’t work, or maybe it will. It’s like every possible permutation comes up. And I think that is actually one of the happy outcomes that goes on here. Waking Down is in many ways a kind of passageway. It’s a kind of a vortex. And you go through it and you come out the other end and you graduate. And some people graduate into a completely different life that has nothing to do with Waking Down at all. They’re like, “Thank you very much, I realize that I’m an archaeologist and I’m going to go do that.” Other people might come out of that going, “The depth of my being says I don’t want permanent relationship, so I’m just going to go have these serial monogamies” and if that’s perfect for them, great. That’s great. And then there are the few people who go through that passageway and come out the other end going, “I want to be a Waking Down teacher and help other people go through this thing.” But it’s not like we expect everybody to have any sort of reaction like that. It’s fine if they come here, get whatever they can and go wherever they’re going.

Rick: Now we’re making it sound like Waking Down is basically some kind of a relationship group thing, but obviously there’s this enlightenment component or consciousness component which is a very important part of it, is it not?

Hillary: Yeah, I wouldn’t call it a relationship thing, that’s a misunderstanding.

Rick: We’ve talked so much about that that we haven’t mentioned much about the word “Waking”!

Ted: That’s it, you get it. It’s like “Waking Down in Mutuality” is the whole title of the work. And waking refers to consciousness, down is embodiment, and mutuality is relationship. And that doesn’t just mean interpersonal relationship, it means relationship with the world. Although you could also esoterically look at that as the relationship between absolute and relative, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as you’re seeing that that’s a relationship, you’re not getting that they’re the same thing.

Rick: Right. So would it be fair to say that the three things are like the three legs of a stool, and if there’s a leg missing, the stool’s not going to stand. You have to have the waking, you have to have the embodiment, and you have to be able to integrate that into relationships, is that correct?

Ted: Exactly, in relationship with the world, exactly. And that’s exactly why I think a lot of the various attempts at personal growth and spiritual development have been less than satisfactory, simply because they haven’t been integrated, they haven’t been whole. And funnily enough, if you just go after the realization of consciousness on its own, it’s really kind of hard to get to it. But if you let yourself be a body in relationship to the world while you’re doing that, it’s pretty easy.

Rick: Now would you say that the three components, waking, down, mutuality, develop sequentially, usually in the same order, or is it a complete mix-up where they could happen in any order? For instance, is the down and the mutuality facilitated by the waking? In other words, they’ll happen more readily if the waking is there as the foundation.

Ted: Yes, I think the thing is that the stage of humanity right now is a lot of people are – how would I even put this? A lot of the people who were attracted to the work in the early days were wanting the consciousness piece, and that’s what they were focusing on. And so they needed to be helped into understanding that the down and mutuality were necessary parts of the whole process. But these days people show up from any of those directions. There’s a lot of people who are sort of like lifetime workshop junkies, either focused on relationship or focused on personal growth. And so we help them to find the other one or two legs of the stool.

Rick: Maybe what I’m suggesting is that maybe the relationship/personal growth thing doesn’t work so well without the infusion of awakening.

Ted: That’s true.

Hillary: It won’t.

Rick: You can carry on with that for decades, but if you don’t know who you are, then you’ve got a problem.

Hillary: That’s the thing.

Ted: Well, I think many of us have had that very experience. I certainly was involved in a work for a while that was very much about down, down, down, down, down. It was like getting down to the darkest material you can get into and then go even deeper and take that to the mat. And looking back on that, I call that “treading dirt.” Because until you’ve got awake consciousness present there and a willingness to actually feel and process your stuff with other human beings, there’s only so far down you can go. It doesn’t work well.

Rick: I used to use the analogy when teaching that it’s a lot easier to dissolve a shovel full of mud in an ocean than in just a bucket of water. There’s no place for it to go if you’ve only got a small bucket.

Ted: Exactly, and when your consciousness is awake, well then yes, any other material you’re bringing your attention to, you’re going to have way more resources available to deal with that thing, if you’re disposed to actually go into down and mutuality. But if you have been for decades surrounded with a dharma that has suggested to you that that’s the wrong direction, you can end up in a cul-de-sac for a while.

Rick: Yeah, although, again, it’s like we’re not allowed the liberty of continuing to box ourselves in forever. Something starts breaking down the doors sooner or later. It might be a disease, it might be a divorce, it might be anything that throws the reality in your face and you have to deal with it.

Ted: That’s right, absolutely true. This is just a point of order, this should be edited out. We might want to consider limiting the length of this one and then just making another date if we want to go any further.

Rick: Well, we can’t go on all night anyway, but I say to a lot of my guests, actually, let’s have another one in six months or whatever. It doesn’t have to be six months, it can be a couple of weeks if we feel like we’ve got a whole major chunk of stuff to talk about that we haven’t covered, but sometimes it’s good to let it settle in and then we can do that. One thing I was thinking of doing is going back to what I was going to do in the beginning, which is have you talk about your initial awakening experience, which I thought was kind of interesting. You were doing some kind of breathing exercise and then you started crying a lot and then you just had this breakthrough, which I think people might find interesting. You’ve already mentioned in this interview that you meditated for a couple of decades before that and so on, so people have a sense of how you might have been primed for a breakthrough like that, but the actual breakthrough I think is worth recounting.

Ted: Right, okay, so I think part of the history for me was that I really hadn’t learned to discriminate consciousness from mind very well. The mind has many different levels, subtle layers and levels of it. There are levels that are just about obvious, gross thoughts and then there are layers that are into vision and layers that are into understanding and meaning. All these different layers of mind have the capacity to assume that they are being consciousness until you get the kind of help you need to witness the mind. That’s the sort of work that Saniel was into with me after he got where I was in my process. In fact, I remember fairly early in my time with him, I went to him at some point and I said something like, “Well, after all the meditation and work that I’ve done in my process, I think I’m pretty awake in consciousness, what do you think?” And he said, “I think you’re pretty identified with your higher mind.” And so I went away from that thinking, “That guy just doesn’t get me. I don’t know if he’s as awake as he thinks he is.” So anyway, needless to say, not too long after that, after some more help from him to get the distinction, to understand what it means to be witnessing even the higher mind and to be watching the mind try to claim itself as consciousness and stuff like that, then that’s a very different kind of perspective to have. That moment, that day, I had been going through my own kind of oscillations around clarity of knowing myself as the witness and other times maybe knowing that consciousness was there but not certain that that was me, and other times feeling like all is lost and I need to be doing another two lifetimes of practice. And then this thing happened this day. I was doing this breathing exercise with Hillary and I don’t know, something just took over. Next thing I knew I was just crying and crying and crying and something had completely snapped and let go. And when all that crying was done I sat up and I just felt what was going on. It’s as if my mind had gone onto the screen. It’s like prior to that moment I was identified with my mind and I didn’t know it. So I was looking at everything through that lens. But from that moment on until my second birth, it’s like my mind became like my body. It was another object of my experience. It was something I could be aware of as an objective part of myself. And I make that distinction, that’s part of self, but it’s the objective part. And the consciousness then was the subjective part. And I remember taking a walk in Tennessee Valley with Hillary, just kind of shocked and stunned that I had this, that after decades of work I actually had the breakthrough that I was looking for all that time. And I was in the sort of glory of that for several weeks, with a lot of electric energy. It was hard to sleep. I felt enlightened and at the time didn’t have any problem letting other people know how enlightened I was, which didn’t go over too well.

Rick: So that wasn’t your second birth?

Ted: No, I thought it was because I felt like I had been reborn. I felt like I had landed back in my baby body, but now I was witnessing it. It was very strange and after a few weeks of this I went back to Saniel and I said, “Saniel, is this what you mean by the second birth?” And he’s like, “No, I don’t think so. Here are some things I want you to start exploring.” And then a couple of months later, that’s when I fell into my second birth. As it turns out, I was sitting around with Hillary and some other friends at a party we had gathering. People were having a wonderful time and chit-chatting and smiling and laughing. At some point I realized, “I actually don’t feel like that. I’m not in a party mood. I feel kind of glum. I feel kind of down and uncomfortable.” I just sat down and started feeling myself. A student who had been a practitioner in the work, who was a senior practitioner at the time, came and sat down next to me, a woman, and she was just talking with me and listening to me. We just sort of fell spontaneously into a gaze. As I was gazing with her …

Rick: Gazing being something that’s done in the Waking Down group, you gaze? Okay, got it.

Ted: Yeah, but here it wasn’t a formal practice. We were talking and we fell into a gaze. As I was gazing with her, I could see that she was being the ocean and she was being the waves, and they were the same thing. I realized, “Oh my God, I have been avoiding the down parts of the waves my whole life, and I’m sick of it. I want to be here.” I just sort of fell. It’s funny because Hillary used to tell me how much up in my head I was. I used to say, “What are you talking about? I’m here.” Right after that moment when I fell down into my body, that’s when I knew how much I had been up in my head. I had been not only in my head, but identified in consciousness up here. It’s as if the center of my identity fell from here into here plus my whole body. The average was lower. I just kind of fell into this whole earthly embodiment, all of a sudden, really in a split second. I knew right after it happened, “Oh, that’s what he means by the second birth.” It was completely different. It’s not like the consciousness awakening at all. It’s awakening to life. For me, I’m one of these very bodic kind of people whose process is high frequency and rapid high contrast shifts. That was the second awakening for me. Then, about two or three years later, the third awakening for me happened in this relationship with Hillary. It was an awakening into mutuality for us, because that wasn’t just my awakening, it was a thing that happened together, it was sort of an awakening out of the illusion that all we are is Ted and Hillary, into the awakening that there is Ted and Hillary and us. It’s like another shift in identity that got me further out of a fixation in the localized aspect of self. From that point on, I started to understand and see how other entities exist in the world, in relationship entities, and how these entities can actually awaken to themselves.

Rick: That’s TED Darwin, probably for another day to talk about. TED Talks. Adyashanti says that awakening moves from the head to the heart to the gut. It kind of sounds like what you were saying there.

Ted: Aziz talks about these three centers.

Rick: He’s a Sufi, Aziz?

Ted: I think so, yeah. Some people actually awaken in the gut first, and these tend to be the people who have more of this emptiness and no-self kind of awakening. Some people awaken in the heart right away, and for them the awakening appears to be all about love and connection. And other people awaken in the head and it appears to be about consciousness, and maybe emptiness, or separateness, or pristine consciousness, untouchable, or something like that.

Rick: And do you think that however people awaken, then they have to actually fill in the other ones?

Ted: Exactly.

Hillary: To the degree that they need to. Not everybody is balanced in all three areas. It’s very uncommon for people to be that balanced.

Ted: It’s like Ayurveda. You’ve got a natural balance of the three doshas, but everybody’s got some of all of them. If you’re exclusively in one department, then yeah, you’ve got more work to do in another department.

Rick: Interesting. So we’ve been going on for quite a while. Poor Hillary has hardly gotten a chance to say anything. If we do another interview we’ll have to gag you and then let Hillary talk. Let’s kind of wrap this one up. Is there anything in particular that you feel like we really haven’t covered that we ought to cover in this one in order to make it complete, keeping in mind that we’ll do another one and before that other one we can each give some thought to points we’d like to cover that we haven’t done justice to or that need elaboration?

Ted: Nothing’s coming to me.

Rick: How about you Hillary, are you good?

Hillary: Yes.

Ted: But if you have another question, that’s the thing, we didn’t come here with an agenda. Whatever comes up in the conversation we’re happy to respond to.

Rick: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I don’t actually write down questions or anything before I do these. They come to mind and I could probably sit here for the next couple of hours thinking of more questions, but it reaches a certain point at which you feel like, “All right, we’ve pretty much covered it for now. This is a good dose and people aren’t going to want to sit and watch this for three hours.” So why don’t we conclude and let’s both think.

Hillary: Everybody is so unique and different and different things work for different people. I just want to say, especially for people who just feel like they’ll never get it, it’s just not true. You don’t have to fit yourself into anybody’s map anymore.

Rick: That’s a very good point, yeah.

Hillary: And there’s more, and more to come on that.

Rick: You want to say more now?

Hillary: No, I don’t want to say anything now.

Rick: I mean, it’s a clear point. You’re both from the East Coast, you probably saw Sly and the Family Stone, or was he from the West Coast? But different strokes for different folks. And I think it’s a good point to end on, because it’s a very important point. It’s a point that so many teachers and teachings and religions and everything in this world don’t get. And they all end up feeling that everybody should do what they’re doing and that their thing is the best. And if it’s not the best, why am I doing it? Therefore it must be the best, otherwise I should be doing something else. But I’m not doing something else, so this must be the best. And therefore everybody else should do it and be like me. But God is not a Nazi, it’s not a one-size-fits-all universe. Look around, look at nature, look at animals, look at plants. He loves variety, huge variety. And so why shouldn’t variety show up in the spiritual realm as much as it does in the natural world? Not that the two are really separate.

Ted: Exactly, they’re not separate. And I would say God is a Nazi plus everything else.

Rick: Right, exactly.

Hillary: Good way to end. I couldn’t hold you back.

Rick: Okay, so our concluding point in this interview is God is a Nazi!

Hillary: And everything else. He’s also a Jew and a Christian and an atheist and an agnostic.

Ted: It depends how you define that, but I’d say God is everything.

Rick: Exactly. Maharishi used to say, “Brahman is the eater of everything.” And to my mind that means that all the paradoxes you can think of, and for everything you can think of there’s a paradoxical opposite, it’s all contained in the greater wholeness. And we are that wholeness, and the sooner we can learn to function that way, the smoother life will be.

Ted: Amen, that sounds like a good place to conclude.

Rick: All righty, so thank you so much. We will do this again sometime soon. My name is Rick Archer and I’ve been talking with Ted Strauss and Hilary Davis, who are senior teachers in the Waking Down in Mutuality group. And probably I’ll be talking to some more of the folks too. Max Goeller is an old friend of mine, and June Konopka, and many others, so we’ll get them on the line one of these days. But I try not to make this the Waking Down show, I want to intersperse all kinds of people. And for those of you who happen to be just listening to this, there are various ways of doing so. It can be viewed on YouTube, it can be viewed on www.batgap.com. There are about 20 some odd other ones prior to this that I’ve recorded that can be seen there. There will be many more in the future. You can subscribe to it as a podcast. So there are many ways of participating. There are chat groups where people are talking about this stuff. In fact, people might start asking questions when I put up your particular page, and I’ll let you know when they do and you can respond to them. But it’s a multifaceted sort of thing that keeps me entertained. And so anyway, I just wanted to let you know that. In the closing titles you’ll see, again, www.batgap.com and the names of some of the people who are responsible for making this happen. So thank you very much and until next time, this has been Rick Archer talking with Ted Strauss and Hilary Davis on Buddha at the Gas Pump.

Ted: Thank you so much.

Hillary: Thanks Rick.

Rick: Thank you.