This is a rough draft generated by Otter.ai. If you would like to proofread it please contact me.
Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people I’ve done, it’s coming on 500 of them now it’s still around 470 something. And if you if this is new to you, because first one you’ve seen, you might want to go back and listen to previous ones. And if so, go to batgap.com, the ATG AP, and look under the past interviews menu. There you will find a past interview that I did with Thomas hirable, and that was about five years ago. And someone Thomas’s assistant or somebody emailed me and said, Thomas is going to be at sands, and he’d like to have lunch with you. And we didn’t get around to doing that. But I said, Great. I said, maybe we can do an interview too. And we figured out when the best time would be, here we are on a Saturday night, it’s nine o’clock. I don’t know what time zone, you’re still in 11 months later. But I love doing interviews in person when possible. And usually it’s not practical, you know, flying all over the world. But the sand conference is a good opportunity to get together with some people in person, often meeting them for the first time in person. So I listened to Thomas was just telling me that he remembers our interview from five years ago. And he really enjoyed it. And he thought we covered a lot of ground. I listened to it last week. And I would agree. I’m not flattering myself, I just think it was a nice chemistry. And we covered a lot of information. And so if you like this one, you might want to go back and listen to that when you can even listen to that one first and then listen to this one. But in any case, here we are. And Thomas, I think we should just start for the sake of those who are unfamiliar with you, with just having you give a bio of who you are, it doesn’t have to wear off to go through the whole thing of you know, we covered like, at least an hour of biographical information in the first interview. So we’re not going to do that. But just give us a sketch, you know, of who you are, how you got to be doing, what you’re doing and what you’re doing.
Thomas Hubl: So, I started off as a medical student, when I was 26, I left my studies and I went on a four year meditation retreat. And then actually what actually was almost five years and then a kind of a spiritual teacher came to town. And, and somebody took me to his lecture. And he said things about me and people started to invite me for workshops. And, and that’s how my work actually started. So from being very quiet and retreated. I started my life when totally 180 degrees the other way, and we and I started with one suitcase and the computer bag traveling the whole world not having an apartment, I was just traveling, and working with people intensively giving a lots of workshops, lots of workshops. And so and then I got married and lived in Berlin for five years. And now I moved to Israel.
Rick Archer: married to an Israeli Yes, artists, artists.
Thomas Hubl: Yeah. And, and so I think we did so many things in this last 17 years. We, you know, we have lots of training programs, we worked with 10s of 1000s of people all around the world. And but I think one thing that I came to understand is, on the one hand, that spiritual practice for us, like living in culture, needs to be a is a complex practice, because we need to heal ourselves to be more embodied and able to function in the world and not run away from our problems into kind of a spiritual world, but to take the spiritual transcendence and all the kinds of amazing capacities that come with it into as a kind of a resource into our world so that it makes us stronger and more resilient in dealing with what happens in the world. And I think that often we often spirituality can be used to bypass those difficulties and to kind of run away from them. And so, yeah, that’s
Rick Archer: just beginning I’ve sometimes wondered why there are so many spiritual teachers from the East who come to the west and start out okay, but then they ended up getting into trouble of some kind or another usually involve And women or money or, you know, power is issues. And you know, perhaps something you just said, gave me the idea that perhaps it’s because in the cloistered environment in which they were raised in the East ashram situation or whatever, they didn’t have to confront certain shadow issues or things that might have needed healing, they could get along just fine and actually rise to a high level of spirituality. But then when they came out into western society, a lot of those things began to be triggered and things that they didn’t even know that issue that even though they had began to cause trouble for
Thomas Hubl: them, that’s right. And I think that’s what we see in all of us that simply, all the trauma points or the strong conditioning and the unconscious parts of who we are, they don’t disappear. Usually, for some people there is like, for some people, there is such a strong breakthrough, that it kind of transforms at least a lot of their kind of unconscious past. But from for many of us, our spiritual practice is a path and we are waking up gradually, maybe in champs but it’s, it’s something that we need to put where we need to put a lot of energy in into our practice. And I think what we see often is that if shadow elements are not taking care of the bigger a community becomes so the bigger spiritual community becomes the shadow of the teacher, kind of it casts a stronger shadow, kind of onto the community. And that’s why it’s, it’s not not only to be see sometimes in isolation of teachers, because if somebody says, I’m completely done and ready, then they they actually prevent that the universe can channel information to them about what they don’t see, right, because they put themselves in a kind of an unreachable place. Yeah, so nobody can give them feedback. And I think that’s why I find it very reliable than everyone. It doesn’t matter on which level of consciousness that works with people has some kind of supervision process, that if I know that there, if I even don’t know, but I know there is somebody in my life that will tell me, even if I don’t ask. And, and I think that’s a very important kind of element. And we see this that simply when also in the different cultures. So when when somebody comes into a different cultural field, and is much more involved with people, so then all these shadows are important, and they don’t disappear just like this.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it almost seems hard to believe that anyone would have the audacity to say, I’m completely done and ready, but believe it or not, people do. So it’s all too common.
Thomas Hubl: That’s fine. Yeah.
Rick Archer: And the bigger they are, the harder they fall, unfortunately. It’s funny, because I’ve, in the past year gotten involved in the formation of this Association of Professional spiritual computers. And we have been comparing all the codes of ethics drawn up by different other spiritual organizations and everything in trying to craft something that could be a common denominator for the larger spiritual community of which we’re a part of. And we gave a presentation on it today at sand that the point you just made came up with most of our presentation was audience interaction, play just came up, made just came up about the shadow of the teacher kind of casting, polluting, really the whole collective consciousness of the group around him and taking on his, his shadow, and how crazy the scene can be. A friend of mine was just saying today about the town in which I live, and which is a spiritual community and how the younger generation has had so many problems with drugs and suicide and all this stuff. It’s I know, you talk a lot about trauma being handed down generationally to this, unfortunately. I mean, there are obviously exceptions to it and some beautiful, bright people. But there’s, to a certain extent, that’s the seems to have been a case in point.
Thomas Hubl: First of all, I think the more teachers and communities will embrace the fact that we have kind of a higher development, State Development, and we have a process development. And for people that live in a cultural context and not in a cave in the Himalayan Mountains, we have to have a process awareness to find those two terms. So state awareness is when I meditate and I attain higher, let’s say, higher subtle states or causal states or non dual state. So these are states and through certain practices, we can induce those states, some at the beginning, maybe moments, and then our consciousness kind of gets stabilized on a higher level. So suddenly, I have access. I live in the physical world, but I have more and more access to the subtle world. And so then I live in the field is equal and in a subtle world and something happens in my meditation, because many people make space consciousness, like a kind of as a silent expansion. With awakening, a silent expansion is one state of stillness, contemplation, and then we drop into a deeper state that goes beyond the subtle world. And then I live in the physical world, in the subtle world and in the causal world. So simultaneously so myself is the myself is not anymore, just my physical, emotional, mental self. It’s also not just my soul and my subtle self, it expands. So the, the center of identification gets larger, and it contains more so include Ken Wilber put it as include and transcend, or transcend, and include it means what today is me tomorrow is in me, it doesn’t mean that my emotions don’t exist anymore. But they don’t they don’t run the show fully, because I have more capacity to witness and, and this is a constant process. And I think so there’s state development. And then there is also live interaction, there’s a lot of information flowing between us when we relate. And when we really pay attention, because meditation and contemplation are also a way to increase the resolution. It’s like you see a film. And suddenly you see every photo and a frame, every frame. And so there is you see, oh, you see, there is a person that I didn’t see, well, when I saw the film moving, but I see it when it’s still when it’s a and I look at it, clearly. And and I think that’s what we do in relational contemplation, that relation, there’s so much information that we might miss when we relate to each other superficially. But if we really learn to attune to use our whole body as if it had eyes all over, if we if we pay attention to the subtleties, the subtle movements in relation, so then we increase our process awareness, because awareness means that I’m more aware of more of life. And this also means that I’m more aware, every time I support an unconscious dynamic, I invest my life energy into the confirmation of an unconscious process. For example, there’s like one example that I often use, but it illustrates illustrated. Let’s say you came to me and you said, Hey, St. Thomas, I have a strong contraction in my back, I have a back pain. So if I’m a nice guy, I say, Oh, I have a great massage therapist, and I give you his number, or her number. But actually, in the moment, I say that I’m already participating in your unconscious dynamic. Why? Because you present your contraction in the back as if it’s an eight. You don’t say I’m suppressing my fear so strongly that I get that that tension over time, hurts my spine.
Rick Archer: Could be that could be that you you lifted the dog in the wrong way and hurt your back. Yeah, yeah, something I’ve done.
Thomas Hubl: That’s true. And Ill at the same time, there is already most probably like a weaker part of the back that if this is just an example. But we don’t say we don’t say that the tightness in my muscles is actually an active process that I I learned maybe as a child to control my fear in tensing up,
Rick Archer: it gets repressed and stored in certain parts of the body,
Thomas Hubl: right? And so if that tension stays for a long time in the body over time, it’s going to be painful, it hurts the physical body like developed. Yeah. But it’s not so much about the back pain. It’s more about it. That’s a simple example. How if I’m not aware, so I confirm your language. And with it, I confirm your unconscious process. And then I’m already a an investor in that unconscious company. But if I say, Okay, I have a massage therapist, and at the same time help you to point out okay, maybe there is a lot of emotional stress right now in your life, and that charges that area. So we can also look at that. And this is only one of 1000s of examples how shadow language is crystallized shadow. And we agree on many elements of shadow language. These are words that are already part of our regular way of talking. For example, another one is that a stranger is in our cultural convention, a person that we don’t know. But a stranger, in fact, is a process in me, according to a person that I don’t know. But we accepted that it’s something too To be the person that I need to get to know, which is not true is the distance that we sometimes feel when we check somebody out. And we don’t know the person has nothing to do with the person. Except, let’s say there’s a serial killer coming into my house. But then, then I feel that there is a danger. Yeah, but I don’t need to suspect the danger. Most of the friends that I have today, and serial killers, so maybe, why was I afraid they never hurt me. And maybe at the beginning, I looked at them as Oh, who are you? So that’s a that’s part of our trauma history. I believe that that initial distance, so we are overcoming a lot of fears that we know because we kill each other. And we torture each other as humanity quite often over 1000s of years. And I think, today, we are sitting in a consequence of it. And that has something to do with the passing on of trauma, as you said,
Rick Archer: Yeah, but I could ask you about 20 questions based on everything you just said. One is that you were talking about as consciousness rises, if you want to phrase it that way, then we may end up becoming much more acutely aware of things like the individual frames of a movie. Are you suggesting that that might happen automatically? Are you suggesting one might need to do something, in order to be so much more aware, we have to do something. So you can’t just meditate and expect that to happen automatically. There must be something else you need to do? Yeah,
Thomas Hubl: we need to practice relational precision, like that, then we relate to each other that we learn to relate. My whole body is like an antenna. Yeah, there’s a lot of my body knows your body. My emotions, know your emotion. So your emotion, communicate your emotions communicate with mine. So this means in the moment, I ask somebody, how do you feel? Actually, I’m already part of emotional fragmentation. Because my emotional field should know what you feel. Because it’s been communicated viewers attuned enough to be right. But why are we not attuned enough? Yeah, that’s already that because we are living in a very traumatized world, so and so what we can learn is to heal our own trauma, and then come back to a state that we are naturally more and more attune. So I can practice relational attunement. And I can, of course, practice meditation to be more present, and then a heal my own past because then I’m more and more open and available for life and human interaction. And then we could say that basically, our deepest humanity is also our highest possibility. Because when I’m open and vulnerable, and, and, and available in the world, that’s where most of spirit can come through me.
Rick Archer: Some people have said to me that they’ve, you know, had openings which rent and make it very difficult for them to go out in public, you know, they can’t walk through a Walmart without reading the thoughts of everybody and feeling the feelings of everybody is like that too much information. They don’t want all that. So to what extent do we is being shut down to all these potential perceptions and advantage rather than a handicap?
Thomas Hubl: You know? So if somebody said that to me, I would ask, I would have a look why they don’t have the capacity to regulate this. So because there’s a difference between free regulation, shutdown and overexposure. So it’s, it’s there’s a, there’s a lot of new research about hypersensitivity or highly sensitive people, or high sensitivity. So they’re where we say the nervous system of some people is, is more receptive or perceptive than other people? And I think there’s a truth to that, that some people are simply naturally more sensitive, I’m afraid checked out. Yeah. Yeah. But if somebody has been born with the nervous system, that nervous system is a gift, that person for their incarnation, they need the sensitivity. So when they are suffering, then it’s not a matter of the sensitivity, then it’s a matter of the grounding. You know, when a tree has good roots, the tree is stable. When the tree doesn’t have good roots, the wind is dangerous. So when a lot of information comes in, this means that my nervous system is to open Of course, people suffer. Yeah. But that’s not what we mean with a professional achievement. So I can, I can go and see people deeply and at the same time, I can be in a supermarket and I don’t need to look at everybody deeply. Yeah, so and that’s a regulation. So then I think we there’s something that we maybe somebody had a big opening, but then we need to learn how to regulate that that’s not a burden, but a gift. but you can use this as a gift for the world. I think maybe
Rick Archer: the ideally, I think it would developed in a way that the regulation would be sort of an automatic function, that you wouldn’t have to be manipulating it. But when it was handed like Superman, you know, sometimes he wants to use his X ray vision. And other times other times it wouldn’t be practical.
Thomas Hubl: So Superman can also do it. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you can. That’s good. Okay, so we’ve covered so far, well, covered a bunch of things. You’ve alluded to trauma, or something of that nature being inherited or handed down. And a lot of traditions talk about this, I think Native American traditions do I know that the Bible says something like the sins of the father visited upon that sons or something. In the Vedic tradition, they say things like that. And they also say, conversely, in several traditions, that if you can resolve those traumas, and perhaps attain Enlightenment, or whatever, you know, that it’s going to, there’s going to be a ripple effect, some say, even in both directions, forward and backward, to other generations. And I know that, from what I know, of your work, and you know, I’m not as familiar with it as I would like to be. That’s been a big focus of yours is healing trauma. For instance, I think just today, I heard you say that people in America, don’t know what it would be like to be born in a society, which not that long ago, had slavery. And people in Germany don’t know what it would be like to be born in a society, which not that long ago had the Holocaust. And these atrocities have left a deep impression in the collective consciousness, which influences us all, whether we like it or not, and that it’s in our own best interests, individually and collectively, to somehow dissolve or heal or resolve that residue that’s been
Thomas Hubl: left. That’s right. And I think that’s a fundamental thing that has too little attention, I believe, because it’s so important we see. And, for example, there’s trauma healing in somebody. So there’s a there’s a frozen zone. And there is developmental energy caught up usually, especially when it’s something that happened early in our life. So trauma is is a very intelligent function that protects the rest of the organism to be able to continue its development and it shuts down a part of the nervous system. And it’s kind of a hyper activation and the numbness. So when we heal it, what happens, there is a deeper relaxation and grounding. So one impulses you set goes back down, and not just in the body, it actually goes back into the past into the family system, and maybe into former generations. And that’s the principle of grace of God inserted into creation after some time, Grace, what is grace, grace means that the future has the power to rewrite the past. The future has the power to rewrite the past. I am the future of the traumatization of my parents, my grandparents, people who who live now in the US, or the future of the people that were affected, or were part of prosecution and slavery. So through our consciousness work, we have the power to literally rewrite history. Because when we talk about the past, usually we like in the mystical understanding the past is only the energy that is unresolved. That affects my moment. Because if there is no unresolved energy, I’m present with unresolved energy and present, plus, there are all kinds of fears or thoughts or body sensation, overshadowing my present moment, that’s when people meditate. It’s not that usually the beginner in meditation sits down and is in place. Usually, the beginner of meditation sits down and thinks a lot. Why? Because the better is so charged that there is no presence at the beginning, there is a lot of energy that needs to discharge itself. That’s why I think meditation is first of all, a kind of psychological hygiene process. And then when we discharge all the information that we couldn’t process, we come into deeper states, and then slowly it becomes more quiet and more expanded. And I think so that the, the when we have a big fight now, and then we both leave and you’re you think about our interaction and I think about our interaction, we both have a little karma. Maybe it lasts for half an hour. So you’re not fully present with the people that you talk to and I’m not fully present because they still think about you while I talk to her. So that’s a little karma Like when there’s a holocaust, yeah, then that karma keeps life busy over generations, because it takes a long time until we detox, so much pain and so much atrocities. And I think many cultures around the world have some sort of kind of big impact that we need to process. And the second thing is also, I think, in the understanding of collective trauma that let’s say one person gets traumatized. Two or three within a stable society. So this society is a resource for the trauma process. But let’s say there is a war or there’s a big something going on. And then many people are traumatized around me while I’m traumatized. That’s a whole different thing. Because then this society has a social trauma regulation, and every individual has an internal trauma regulation. So the individual trauma is entangled with the collective trauma. And that’s much more severe. And also in the treatment. I think it’s more severe. Yeah.
Rick Archer: I just want to interject that I, you and I were talking before we started, the taping, I was asking you about the motivation of people who get involved with you, I said are some of them like primarily interested in spiritual Enlightenment? Or is are most of them primarily interested in just sort of trauma healing, and I think you said, basically, just both, and sometimes one or the other, there could be some horrors didn’t both and others are on this end of the spectrum and others on that end. But I think it’d be fair to say, see, if you agree that? Well, it’s like, you put one leg of a table and all the other legs come along. If you’re interested in Enlightenment, and you pursue it, it’s going to somehow, at some point, entail healing trauma. If you’re interested in healing trauma, and you do so successfully, it’s going to be conducive to your becoming more awakened. And maybe maybe even if you’re weren’t initially interested in spiritual awakening, you’ll get interested because you began to have a taste of it.
Thomas Hubl: That’s exactly how it is, in the, in the in the kind of traditions, it’s described, as many people get onto the path through the fire, a fire means that there is a pressure in my life, whatever difficulties in my relations or the difficulty, in my work, I don’t know what to do in the world, or like something is a kind of a pressure problem. And then I go to look for answers. But then when we do enough, and the good inner work, so our energy becomes more free, be loosened up certain stagnations. And we become more relational. So then our life starts to flow more, and we are able to connect our intelligence to the world and receive feedback from the world and become a fluid process. And then usually, life gets lighter and more beautiful, because things start to flow and they become more successful. And then, and then the next challenge is that when the original motivation to be on a path drops away, then it’s interesting, who really has an inner calling, because some people I see, they heal, and then they stop their path. And then there are some people there to heal. And actually, they are very committed to their path. So not everybody is going to be interested in deep Enlightenment or mystical practice. For some people, that’s a way to use the wisdom to heal themselves. And then we will see who are the people that are really interested in the deeper mystical exploration,
Rick Archer: I think that that pertains to the value of knowledge. Because if you don’t know that such and such as possible, then you’re not going to be interested in it. And conversely, you might think that you are finished or that whatever level, like you were saying earlier, people think they’re finished sometimes, or that whatever level of development or attainment you have reached is adequate. But if you could compare that with what might potentially be possible, if you could suddenly snap to what, you know, some of the really great sages of this world have we’re experiencing, you would be thunderstruck. awestruck by what you are now experiencing, and you’d be just like, if it were taken away from you, again, your every breath would be like, I gotta get that back. I got this. And so it’s sort of like ignorance is bliss. But that phrase doesn’t really mean that it is bliss, it means that, you know, you’re you’re kind of settling for something less and you
Thomas Hubl: don’t know it, that’s fine. That’s fine. And often we read books, even if you read a lot of books, we don’t know yet. You know, this is intellectual knowledge, but the knowledge become wisdom is when knowledge really walks itself, and what I say and what is inside the state of consciousness and how I talk about it. is the same, you’re walking your talk, right? And only then it’s real. And it’s good that we are informed, but only the practice or cosmic lottery. But that’s not so common, really makes it real. And I think that’s for all of us. And it’s true. Not everybody is, even if people know about higher states of consciousness, sometimes life. So this is gonna be
Rick Archer: very distracting. Yeah, yeah.
Thomas Hubl: That’s why I say often, like, we will see like, who, who is kind of being pushed by the fire. And who is this and kind of hears the echo of the original creation, you know, who hears the echo inside, because a calling is that we hear already the voice that calls us back into the source.
Rick Archer: There’s an interesting story and one of the Vedic literature’s it’s actually forget the name of the master and the disciple, but that the master was sort of like supposed to be avatar or incarnation of God or something, the disciple was a very high being. And the disciple says, teach me about my I want to understand my, the master says, Sure, I will. But first, I’m thirsty, would you get me some water to drink. And so he runs off to the local village to get some water. And then he meets this beautiful girl by the well. And he falls in love with her and proposes marriage, they get married, they have kids, he starts farming, he gets involved in this whole thing. And then this great big flood comes and his family is washed away, and he’s about to drown himself. And suddenly he remembers the master says, Master Master saved me. And then all of a sudden, the whole thing disappears. And he’s standing there with his master the Masters Well, where’s my water? Is that to illustrate how completely absorbing the the world can be and how Deepak was talking last night about how what we’re actually perceiving is really a far cry from the reality of life.
Thomas Hubl: That’s right, that’s right.
Rick Archer: Let me when I used to teach meditation, we had this mechanics that we explained of how the mind and body are interrelated. And when the mind settles down in meditation, because they’re interrelated, the body settles down. And when the body settles down, that means deep rest, and in deep rest, healing can take place. And when the healing takes place, that means some physiological changes is occurring, and that physiological change is activity. And because, again, they’re interrelated, that uptick of physical activity creates a corresponding uptick in mental activity, and you begin having thoughts. And the thoughts there in meditation are therefore not a bad thing. They’re indicative of some sort of beneficial change taking place. This this, and then when you realize that they that you’ve been off on thoughts, it means that physiological change has subsided somewhat, and you can take another dive, does that kind of concur with your experience and understanding and how you teach?
Thomas Hubl: Yeah, but definitely happens is what you said, that’s beautiful. And that’s, I think, a very important thing for our time. Because that when we go into deeper meditation, we go into a yin state go into a feminine state. So we, we dive into the deep state, and that actually activates our self healing capacity. But that’s something especially in a world that is speeding up like crazy because of the speed of data, I think, for many people a prerequisite to have. So meditation nowadays is not just a spiritual practice, it’s actually a balancing that we can digest the experience that we have every day. And that’s because it’s like, it’s like, our brain has this kind of short term memory where we stick it push all kinds of data packages into and but if once that’s full, we call it very stressed. Yeah. And so when we sit in meditation afterwards, so it goes without saying, we go in, and then it goes plop, and one part of it comes out. Yeah. And then we digested and we sink in, in a loop, and another data package comes back and another data. So that’s maybe also a bit correlated to what you said the same thing. Yeah. And then after some time, when we learn to really digest life as it’s happening, so because we are living in a culture, we say, okay, you do your work for a few months, and then you go on holiday, but do you go on holiday with a red battery? Yeah, you know, the battery is empty. But actually, a healthy spiritual practice means that I have the peace within the movement. I have the regeneration within my life. So when I go on holiday, I enjoy my holiday, my family, my traveling, whatever, I do my meditation retreat, but I don’t commit the last 5% of my bedroom to the meditation retreat, and then I need three days to charge my battery. So But that’s so that’s why we are saying it Like karma means to postpone energy. So karma means I cannot experience the experience right now. So I postpone it. And this can be a small interaction. But this can be a huge atrocity, it’s the same. So, through meditation and spiritual practice, we, we kind of bring the karmic delay back into presence. And that means that we learn more and more to live a life that is sustainable in every moment. So that every moment will be digested. But if I’m pre traumatized, the digestion goes only up to a certain depth, and then it cannot heal. Yeah, that’s why we need to clear our trauma so that then the new x, the current experience, can really run through. And so for people that live in culture, our spiritual practices, we see that if the less we postpone, the clearer we get, the less we postpone, the clearer we are really in every present moment, and that becomes a state. That’s not just happening a few times a day, this happened more and more and more often, that because when we work, we’re not supposed to be tired. Yes, I mean, we are supposed to be biologically tired. But many people when they say they are tired, they get tired in team meetings, they get tired in therapy sessions, they get tired in many moments where tiredness isn’t, is a reflection of the unconsciousness. So then it looks like, oh, I need a coffee because I sat in the board meeting and three people were tired in the board meeting, because we didn’t really say what really was going on. And then when we suppress life, life energy drops. And yeah,
Rick Archer: I think one thing I did that that triggers in me is the notion of naturalness. And nature’s principle of least action. Nature operates that way, I think I might have used this metaphor in our last interview, because I remember hearing it recently, somebody but if you throw a ball, there are an infinite number of paths that ball can take, but it will actually take the path of least action according to the laws of gravity and other other laws. So if a human being it’s, I think it’s possible for human beings to be in tune with nature, or not. And if they’re not, then their action is very inefficient, even the way that the nervous system functions is extremely inefficient, and takes a whole lot of energy to do a certain thing and a lot of energy is consumed that could otherwise be used for something useful, and so on. But and this is probably evident in athletics, a really great athlete moves in such a perfect way as to not expend energy needlessly, and, and perform performs in a in a way, which is actually beautiful, and very effective in terms of what they’re trying to do. And it carries over into every field of life, not just athletics. I mean, you could be a businessman or academician or something. And you your mind and body can function inefficiently, and with a lot of gear grinding and wasted energy, or just smoothly and efficiently. And the people who are incredibly productive in this world or have very often mastered that ability,
Thomas Hubl: that’s fine. Yeah, that’s fine. I totally agree. And the Dao De Jing calls this Wu Wei Wu, not, like I said, you make the water and the river flow as you push it, or you don’t resist it, right? You as fast as the river flow with it, you flow with with the flow of life energy through your system, right. And that’s, that’s beautiful. That’s in tune with nature, because we are nature, right?
Rick Archer: And it’s interesting that if there’s a rock in the river that’s impeding the flow of water, that rock gets pushed and pushed and pushed by the water until eventually wears. That’s the nature of trauma. Yeah, so traumas are like the rocks in the river, and
Thomas Hubl: many interactions may trigger my trauma, my internal process. So my trauma gets hit again and again and again, until I really take care of it. And it comes up again and again. Because life says, the self healing mechanisms is there is something that is there. We call it problem. When we say I have a problem, life tells me yeah, look at that rock, look at the drug. It’s kind of the nervous system wants to detox, the pain of the past.
Rick Archer: Necessity is a term detox. And from what you said, just a second ago, I’m reminded of the terrible problem of opioid epidemic in the United States, where I don’t know how many 10s of 1000s of people are dying every month from overdoses. And you know, I often think of these people and there’s often stories on the news and I’m thinking, you know, why don’t they get it, that it’s such a short term and hopeless fix, to try to just blot out whatever it is they’re feeling? Couldn’t they somehow, you know, be helped to feel or whatever it’s going to take to resolve the stuff that they’re trying to block out and thereby learn to live happy lives and not die. You Were Have you ever talked to such people? Or what would you say? If you did?
Thomas Hubl: I’d say that every process in life, once it exists, it’s needed for something. And so, and that leads me before answer the question, it leads me to something else. Because we live in a, in a culture where it’s, at least in certain parts of the population is it’s, we call, this part of me is a strength. And this part of me is a weakness. And so, naturally, we want to get rid of the weakness and we want to hang out where is the strength? So we constantly split the world into in a good world and into a bad world. And then, and then that split perpetuates itself. In many situations, when I have opinions, usually I have, I liked the world, I dislike the world, in the spiritual practice, we need to get through a practice when it’s successful, we somehow kind of transcended level of likes and dislikes because I start to examine Okay, actually, why do I not like that person? Instead of taking this as a fact, I take it as a process question. And if I do this, and the same is with my weaknesses, weaknesses, or childhood heroes, so if if I say this is my weakness, the weakness is a symptom of an intelligent process that I needed, most probably as a child. So there was something overwhelming in my childhood, I established a certain function. But now that function doesn’t serve me as a grown up person. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a weakness, it was an intelligent process. So when we stop framing life like that, I think that’s a very helpful thing to do, that we don’t split the world into these two. And now, when we look at people that that have drug abuse, we see more and more that the amount of the addiction rate goes significantly up with the more adverse childhood experiences one has significantly is the rise of addictions.
Rick Archer: So do you think that somehow or other people are, there was a rash of of childhood abuse? or something of that note, now those people are coming of age and becoming drug addicts? Or is it more something in the collective consciousness now? I mean, a lot of these people end up being veterans who have come back from war, and they have post traumatic stress disorder. But not all of them. There’s just a lot of people these days getting addicted to opioids. Why this epidemic?
Thomas Hubl: Because I think, yeah, that you know, that massive social trauma impacts get detoxed over generations. So every generation after will show certain symptoms, they might change, but they’re basically still bound to the original dramatization. So for example, after the Second World War, we saw a lot of domestic violence later in Germany. So when people experience wars, it’s not that when they come back, it’s over. No, they just kind of keep reproducing that violence, because they are so traumatized when their kid needs something or freaks out, and it’s too often then the parent cannot handle this. So then they punish the child, which is a trauma for the child, and then and then it kind of keeps on perpetuating itself it just pass it on. And I think we simply are not aware yet, like there are more and more studies on adverse childhood experiences, how epidemic is domestic violence, and it’s not only domestic violence, it’s just simply painful attachment processes that are also very traumatizing for people. And I think if we see a high level of addiction rates, I think we need to think, Okay, what’s the underlying cause? What, what is underneath that the person is not regulated, because addiction is a dysregulation, and trauma always causes this regulation. And so when, when I’m not regulated, I know how much I can eat, what I can eat, how I relate, and what Where are my boundaries, and where is my freedom and intimacy, kind of pendulum, these are all regulated function of a grown up being. And when somebody is in an addiction, usually there is a dysregulation before and then there is a substance abuse and the substance addiction. But the substance addiction is mostly not the problem. The problem is that it’s the boat underneath. That’s the sail, but the boat underneath is a dysregulated nervous system, that when the people stop, they simply start to feel a lot of pain. And in order not to feel that pain, there’s something on top of it.
Rick Archer: I wonder if there’s, you know, you always hear that the pace of life is increasing. And, you know, you drive around California here and the traffic is so horrendous and people are so stressed out and everyone, people, friends have been telling me how everyone’s so materialistic and $10 million isn’t enough for them anymore. You know, stuff like that. And then obviously, so many people have very little and are living go up to Oakland and all the bridges are occupied by tents. And people are sleeping in the parks in a sleeping bag with no other shelter. I don’t know, it seems like there’s sort of a crisis situation that’s becoming more and more critical, at least in the United States, and United States is heavily compared to Syria, or, you know, Somalia or some of these terrible situations. So it almost seems like there is a greater degree of trauma. I mean, we’re not in the middle of World War Two, we’re not bombing firebombing Dresden or dropping H bombs on Japan. And then we’re not in the middle of a civil war, like we had and Steven Pinker and some people like that outline all kinds of indicators of how things are actually a whole lot better than they used to be. But it almost seems like things are maybe if thinker is right. It almost seems like yeah, he’s right. But at the same time, other things are much worse than they used to be as if the polarities are increasing, right.
Thomas Hubl: And there are two things, I think you mentioned something very important. You said, on the one hand is speed of data channels, more data through our nervous system. So we need to deal with more data. More data also means, for example, more global news. There’s, through the internet, we have an amazing collective learning process. And we have an amazing collective trauma trigger. You hear what happens in Syria here, 10 minutes after it happened five minutes. And so like you, we are embedded in a lot of impulses that that kind of come to our nervous system. And trauma is always a reduced movement. So when there is more data flow, and they reduce movement, they’re reduced movement gets triggered much more. Yeah. So that’s one thing. And the other thing is that, that I believe there’s one function, and I’m not sure that collectively we’re aware of this, that when when somebody is traumatized, what is trauma trauma says that this is overwhelming, and I shut down part of my nervous system to contain the overwhelm so that the rest of the person or the being can continue and survive. But so this is now in my nervous system, somewhere. It’s in my body. And this Yeah. So this stays there, stays there and stays there. And this is what I’m saying is also true, I believe over generations. So if something happened, like a war, this is such a massive trauma, like they tried to do therapy with Holocaust survivors. And in Israel, they stopped after some time, because they they had a too high suicidal rate. So when you open the trauma, it’s so overwhelming that somebody cannot handle it. So the best is to keep it that way, sometimes, so but then, but then and stabilize the person around this, but not open this Pandora’s box. But then after generation when, when the nervous system feel safe, for example, if we have a good trauma therapist, that gives us the safety, then that information releases. So sometimes we see after two or three generation, only the release of the trauma and the massive rising of siblings, but now we are in a good time. Why are your drug addicted here because now the nervous system starts to detox information that it couldn’t detox before because it didn’t have the right preconditions. And that’s also important that, that I see there’s a delay in the detox until this information can be let go, because it’s safe enough today, to detox that part. So we have two things, we have an enormous speed of data that creates a pressure and we have also maybe because it’s a good time. Now there’s more of it out there. And then if the good time continues, and we work on this, maybe then in two or three generations, we have a really good time without the diction and without the side effects. Because and this is where people say, oh, when people are feel too good, then they have a higher suicide rate. It’s not because they feel too good, but because deeper stuff is allowed to come up.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s interesting. So your the way you’re phrasing it, it’s almost like karma or trauma or whichever term we want to use is like financial debt, and it it has to be paid off sooner. And if it’s not paid off by this father that his son inherited, he’s gonna have to pay it off and if he doesn’t, then his sooner or later it’s gonna have to pay it off. I don’t know if it’s accruing interest and getting getting bigger But it kind of rings true what you’re saying it there’s, there’s a sense that, you know, once something, and it might be interesting to ponder for a minute how it’s stored, because I don’t think is just stored in our neurophysiology. That’s the grossest level, perhaps, and perhaps is a neurophysiological representation of it in terms of, I don’t know, certain impressions in the nervous system, which possibly physiologists could understand. But I think you would agree, I think I’ve heard you say that there’s a subtler field, which is all pervading, more or less, and that we’re all sort of living in that field, and influenced by it, and we influence it. And that’s where the stuff is stored, kind of like the national debt, you know, we all have to pay taxes to help to pay it off. But it’s not the soul burden of any one of us. And so what we need to do is figure out ways of paying off that national debt of karma that of healing the collective field, and really, like, Yeah, well, I think I’ve made the point you can elaborate. So
Thomas Hubl: that’s, that’s beautiful what you said. So when we say, the debt, the debt is often suppressed, unconscious information that is not in our awareness, because once it’s we are consciously aware of it, it’s already starting to resolve. So what we are saying is that when we when we come into life as a soul, we actually when the light of our soul gets connected to the conception, it needs to go through collective layers of information, more family, until it meets the DNA of that conception. So when we come down, we collect subtle information that has already tendencies. And that tendencies fit to the certain situation where we get born into. And that means that the death is always like an unconscious field that is charged with information. Now, when you look at this, the Enzo the scent circle, what does it say? It says, Once energy has been born, it needs to fulfill its cycle, like when you throw the ball, it will fly forever. And the energy is discharged, it rests like when, when energy is being born, it needs to fulfill its cycle until it returns into nothing. That like in the Dow the Ching, everything is used from it, everything returns to it. So and what when some when energy returns, we have peace. And so that means that that once pain is created, even if it’s not a physical, if the person that experienced the Second World War, it does is not alive anymore, that energy is still around because it hasn’t been fulfilled. And that’s why it’s being passed on. And recently, last year, last year in the festival, we invited a professor from Zurich for epigenetics. And she spoke about her mice experiments. And she can show that sperm cells transmit trauma through epigenetic changes. So it’s literally also in our cells in our bodies, their tendency, so they can show that mice they get traumatized have offspring like five, six generations that express the same symptoms without the trauma. Yeah. And it’s pretty amazing because that confirms what was written in the Bible already longtime implies
Rick Archer: that the trauma is stored in the DNA, because that’s the only thing that in a sperm cell is going to be transmitted or to
Thomas Hubl: epigenetics. Yeah. Right. What is epigenetics was kind of what what what acted the machine that activates the genetic code, when genes get expressed there is a kind of another layer of whatever like a computer that activates the
Rick Archer: whether it’s in DNA or something on that level, very, very fine, microscopic, fundamental right. And is there anything because you just gave them that kind of explanation, but you also just gave a rather esoteric one about a soul coming in you know, between life stage or So do you believe in reincarnation? Have an interesting theory, at least maybe course.
Thomas Hubl: I mean. So, when we talk about reincarnation, I mean, of course, we’re in QAnon days reincarnation, but there are different models to interpret reincarnation. And so many people interpret reincarnation from a very personal standpoint and say, Oh, I was this. I was, I was that person. Yeah. And I don’t think that that’s true, because this kind of human life form is unique. And this human life form was not that before. So my personal experience was not that before so many people look at the reincarnation in a kind of a personal frame. And that’s not true. But that, that there is an information field that gets charged with many with a lot of information. And that there is a continuation of that information field, that’s for sure true. But it’s not that personal, I think is many people like to talk about it or talk about it in some of the reincarnation therapy work that has been done.
Rick Archer: But there are a lot of stories where like, some little kid will remember his name, he’ll remember in his previous life, he’ll remember what kind of fighter jet he was flying. And he’ll have all kinds of what he lived in, and their stories where kids go to the town. And they they know, some people there and they know what no all kinds of information. So are you thinking that just these kids are just picking up a handful of information from the, from the collective field and arbiter randomly and it’s not necessarily who they were?
Thomas Hubl: Yeah, who they were. That’s what I mean, that person was not that person. But that there is a connection between these two lives. Yes, that I think we interpret this we like to think like, a person, because that’s usually what we know. But I think reincarnation from a higher level of seen from a higher level of consciousness is not that personal. But that, that a person is a composition, moment to moment have different levels of information that compose one reality right now. And so we are connected, nobody is ever separate or alone. So this means that we are all inter interconnected field, and we are continuously every generation is a new potential update. And so we are there is a connection, but I’m a bit I think we need to be careful in how we frame it. But that there is an interconnectedness. That’s for sure. True. There’s a transgenerational data flow. And there is there are many things that are true. Yeah. My attitude
Rick Archer: toward it, and toward a lot of questions like that is that it’s an interesting hypothesis. And I don’t think you were I can’t necessarily prove, you know, adamantly, whether it’s this or that, but it’s interesting to contemplate how it might work and might consider the mechanics. But if we really want to be scientific about it, then it’s a hypothesis. And you know, it’s subject to revision and is subject to more learning and information, everything. That’s probably true of just about everything we’re saying here, wouldn’t you say? I mean, 10 years from now, you might have revised or in, are deepened or clarified a lot of the things you’re saying now maybe even change some hope for Maryland?
Thomas Hubl: Hopefully. Yeah, because I see that, like, if if the way we look at the world kind of stays stagnant. We are not anymore fully participating in the movement, like when you swim in a river, you know, you swim in a river. And there the landscape is constantly changing, because the water is moving. And our life is like that. So I think a creative life is a life that keeps on updating itself. And then you find out new things, you do things differently. I think that’s a good sign. I think it’s also a good sign of a successful spiritual practice, whatever that means, is that when when you speak, and you surprise yourself more often by what you say, Yeah, that’s a good thing. Because that’s a sign that we have become more open that more information can flow through that we not that we didn’t premeditate that we spontaneously allowed to come through. That’s a good thing.
Rick Archer: It is. Knowing what you know, and thinking about this kind of stuff all the time as you do. Do you pay much attention to current events? And do you do you find that the familiarity with the concepts that you teach gives you an interesting angle on current events, you find it gives you a way of interpreting things that are not that it’s not commonly being used by other interpreters?
Thomas Hubl: No, of course, I pay attention to what happens in the world. And I and I, yeah, and I think also that that spiritual practice means that we constantly increase the resolution of how we experience life. And so we deepen and the more we deepen our awareness into life, of course, the deeper we go, the more connections appear, you know, the more the interconnectedness of everything kind of arises moment to moment. And I think that’s helpful in looking at stuff. And I think also what I said before process awareness also means that, that I’m less and less hypnotized by symptoms, because often what we describe in the sufferer as symptoms, yeah. And so and did my My awareness goes more and more to the offense say, there is not much help if we have together in the in the smoke, you breathing smoke, I breathe, and they’re both coughing. So it’s at least one of us or some of us should find the fire in and take care of the fire so that there is no smoke. And then I think that’s simply what what process awareness is that we more and more listen to the essential aspect. And mostly to that which is not being spoken about. So when a client comes and tells me about his or her issues, I’m much more interested in what you don’t tell me then emote? You tell me? Because what you tell me you anyway already aware of. But I am the one that needs to be aware of what’s not being communicated. And I think that’s also true for the social process. So there’s a lot of dealing, for example, in the political landscape, we deal a lot with the symptoms. But what are the root cause? What is actually the root cause that needs those symptoms to be there or needs that process to be there? Yeah, that’s much more interesting, because there is the change possible, the change is never possible in the symptoms, but the change is possible in the, in the creation of this, what creates that symptom? I think that’s true for an individual. But it’s also true with for example, if you coach a company, or that’s also true when you look at, like whole countries. Yeah,
Rick Archer: let’s take a case in point. For instance, in the United States, there’s a high degree of polarization now, between left and right, between Democrats and Republicans. Yeah, political polarization that Congress can’t get anything done because they can’t talk to each other. And in Europe, there’s a lot of, you know, right wing backlash against, you know, the policies that have allowed huge immigration influx and stuff like that. So when you when you look at things like that, which are symptomatic of something, what, ultimately, do you think they’re symptomatic, though? What is it on a real deep level that is causing this greater polarization?
Thomas Hubl: Yeah. So let me speak a little bit about Europe. So what we see, I mean, let’s say Europe, is, for sure, a part of the world that is very affluent, like the US. So a few million people coming to Europe, into a functional collaboration of many kinds of wealthy countries, per se, shouldn’t be a problem. I think, if Europe had worked together, and collaborated, and everybody would participate, then Europe could easily deal with the stream of refugees. But what happened is that only a few countries participated, and many countries didn’t, so they got overloaded. And then they had to carry the whole burden. And that created already like an imbalance. So that’s number one. But I think the more interesting thing is that, okay, so why
Rick Archer: does that that’s like a political analysis. But, you know, what, what deep in the collective unconscious?
Thomas Hubl: Yeah, that’s what I, that’s what I want to come to. So then, let’s say there’s Europe, Europe is maybe two generations or three generations after a major catastrophe. So there is a war trauma that is kind of cold. It’s resting in the collective subconscious. And now there are people coming from a worse situation coming into that country. So what was lying dormant in many people get activated by people coming with word trauma. So there’s an unconscious element, and every time something is unconscious, it runs me. Which means many people get afraid many people get so many people started to project their inner discomfort onto the refugees. So suddenly, they are the bad ones. And maybe there are also some people that are you know, they’re doing criminal things, and they’re like, like, everywhere, but isn’t that all the refugees are like that. But they kind of think there’s a strong reactivity now. Because because we are, we are actually not dealing with the trauma, we are dealing with the polarization. And I think there is a similar thing that there that really the racial question in the US, the whole slavery topic that hasn’t been properly dealt with, and that creates continuously a strong polarization. Because I think if we were really to open that up, a lot of social structures in the US would change. And that that’s not I think that’s not allowed yet, like psychologically many people are subconsciously don’t allow this even if we are very liberal. It’s still not fully allowed. And I think that’s a that’s a strong process and is long as that information cannot move, it’s in its unconscious, it will create polarization. And at the moment, we see this very strongly. But that’s always when the legacy starts to run the show. I often say unconscious energy is destiny. conscious energy allows for a new possibility. Yeah. And I think if and often like with ourselves, when we get very afraid, we projected often onto other people, because it’s easier to think you are the cause of my discomfort, and I need to take it back. Because if I can get you out, I feel better. But this doesn’t mean that I dealt with my discomfort, then another person like you comes in, I feel again, fear. So I need to deal with my fear first, and, and then relate to the world.
Rick Archer: A lot of people, both ancient traditions, and you know, these days, sort of spiritual people, new agey types, and all feel that, you know, some kind of Age of Enlightenment is coming, we’re going to shift, perhaps even abruptly into a much more enlightened world. And if we do that, then I guess a lot of things that exist in our current world really won’t fit anymore. So if that’s actually going to happen, then somehow rather they’re going to have to cease to exist. I mean, do you ascribe to that notion, that kind of notion that we could be on the on the brink of some radical shift into a better time? And if so, you know, do you feel like these prophecies of tremendous turbulence taking place as we make the transition, then perhaps you in light of the kinds of things you say, with that turbulence be symptomatic of a kind of a stirring up of the mud and a rapid resolution of a lot of long held traumas late and traumas?
Thomas Hubl: I think we are already in the middle of it. Yeah. Because like, there are two elements that kind of support it. One is that, like, we see many people around the world to do some kind of consciousness work at the moment, many increasing all the time, I think, yeah. So certainly something is calling those people to do it. So there’s, there’s one thing, the other thing is that we created a global brain, like the internet and the whole communication technology. Now AI, so we are, we are creating a new thing that hasn’t existed before it never, we never had something like that. So this creates kind of a much higher synchronisation around the world. And I believe that the consciousness awakening the collective consciousness awakening is connected to, to the development of technology on the one hand, so they’re, they’re interconnected. And then, but what the new perspective does, because we speed up energy, there’s more pressure onto this dark lakes of collective trauma information. So this starts to come up more and more. And we see this, when it comes up unconsciously, it will create a lot of terminal, if, if enough people start to understand how to work with this, we can, in a way release the brakes of awakening, because this also kind of is like like karma, it’s kind of it’s a weight, and it doesn’t allow certain processes to happen. And then the last thing is, I believe that a consequence of the trauma decision is that we are to a certain sometimes to a higher degree, disembodied, we are not any more connected to the fact that we are the planet, my buddy is water and carbon and whatever that is the planet. And so because we are separate, we don’t care enough. And because we don’t care enough, we start to produce a catastrophe. And, and if that continues, then you have really a turmoil, because suddenly you have people that lose massive, massive amounts of people will lose their jobs or technology, there will be a massive amount of climate refugees, because in certain parts of the world, it will be harder and harder to live.
Rick Archer: And If sea level rise is temporary, there’s going to be hundreds of millions of people evacuating the cities,
Thomas Hubl: and scientists keep updating their predictions. So it comes down to like the plagues in Egypt, you know, in the plagues in the Bible, and Egypt means that at the beginning change was a whisper it was out there, and then it comes closer and closer like in our lives often we don’t change our lives until we really have a problem. And and we have to or we suffer in our body And so we see that all the pollution that we put out there since like 2030 years ago, we put it somewhere out there. But now we suddenly discover in this whole global brain that out there is in us. Yeah, you know, there is no out there anymore. It doesn’t matter where I dump my waste and all this toxic stuff. And all the pesticides, this slowly come back into my body sure is the same.
Rick Archer: I mean, the oceans are full of plastic, and the fishery and the plastic, they’re saying that within 50 years, we won’t have any fish or negligible amount. So there’ll be a loss of a whole food resource. And that’s term on the droughts and everything else could could decimate the land food resources, and then then we’re really gonna have refugee crises. But what are we getting pessimistic here.
Thomas Hubl: But that’s, that’s a possibility, the beautiful thing in the mystical understanding of realities that because I am not on the planet, but I am the planet. Because of that, I understand that I am part of the game board, and not a player on the game board. If that’s true, then all the inner work that we do is part of the change of reality. And that means that the world is not a fixed entity, the world is being fixed by our collective state of consciousness. Yes. So it’s not that we will end up having no resources, in that possibility of reality, we want maybe have resources. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only possibility. If many of us grow and progress, or we learn to unleash more, or like integrate more and more of the collective stuff, maybe there’s a whole other planet with a whole different intelligence of collaboration, contribution, support care for each other, that the whole system becomes much more intelligent. And then, like, we see this when we work with clients, if they if there is a certain inner condition, the person goes that way. But how often and how many therapists see that when you heal something, the person suddenly goes that way? Yeah. So there’s a course correction in life for that person. And I think that’s also true for us, the planet can end up in a catastrophe, but the planet can also end up in a whole new level of realization, and it will never get there.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you know, thinking last few days, I’m sure others have thought this too. But it’s just become more clear to me that this is we’re living in a time. I mean, ever since the invention of atomic weapons, the thin the possibility of wiping out life on earth, for the first time and hundreds of 1000s of years, that has been possible. But we managed to keep that at bay. But now we’ve found other ways of doing it. And, and, you know, we’re looking at the very real possibility of that happening through climate change and other such things. And it’s almost as though the the nerve, the Earth has an immune system. And we are agents in that immune system as if white blood cells or something, and that the way that that immune system is kicking in, the way we can see that it’s kicking in, is that there’s this spiritual upwelling taking place, you know, this epidemic of interest in, in spirituality and actual genuine awakenings. So it’s almost like that’s the way the the Earth’s immune system is rising to meet the challenge of the possibility of mass extermination and the suffering that that would entail. And so that gives me optimism.
Thomas Hubl: That’s right. And, and I think what we need to maybe add is that more and more people that use the spiritual practice, to bypass the difficulties of the world, start to become interested and resourceful to meet the difficulties of the world, that the world is not an illusion, but the world is part of our repair. So our repair is in the engagement with the difficulty and the more we embody ourselves, this here holds this body is not whatever, 47 years old, this body is millions of years old. That’s the difference. So the whole achievements of life from the very first cell up through the plants and the animals and everything, everything is here. Yeah. And that means that our awakening goes back through here. And so when we look at, at the realization of Christ, and then we look at, at what has been said in the Bible, so the on the Judgment Day, the dead will rise, right? What does it mean? That
Rick Archer: zombie apocalypse
Thomas Hubl: I, Hollywood’s full of it. What what it means is that in here, there are 1000s of lifetimes of life that led up to this moment to this conversation, so many lifetimes developed, that we can have this conversation that sit in us. So if our awakening, kind of, like Grace, ripples back in time, ripples back through this body, and we really embody our Enlightenment, then we actually ignite all those souls that were part of, of the process that led up to here, being unified. So they are alive in that realization, because all of it leads up to this moment and to that realization. And I think that’s the possibility of a collective revelation that we that enough people practice and embodied spiritual practice where we download the light of spirit into ourselves. And that’s actually igniting a massive awakening because then then it’s like a wildfire, then it’s not one person after one person after one person, that it’s your buddy transmits a lot of light into every cell in the room. That’s a different, that’s a game changer. Yeah. And I think if you don’t escape anymore, say, Oh, I cannot hear this, I need to be in peace, I need to be with my green smoothie somewhere. If it doesn’t matter where I am, because where I am, that’s where life wants me to be. And then it doesn’t matter if life brings me to the green smoothie, perfect. And if life brings me into a warzone, also perfect. And then because I say often to people, because sometimes in our groups, we talk about causal, meditative states. And then maybe one hour later, we need to deal with stuff that comes up from the Holocaust. But actually, it doesn’t matter. Because all of this is life. And if the more fluid I become, the more I’m not fixed into one thing, one state one part of myself, whatever life brings, there’s a fluidity to be with anything. That’s beautiful.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Essentially, you know, a lot of times I think people who are trying to come up with practical solutions to the problems regard spiritual people as being a little impractical, because you know, Oh, fine, you meditate, you get into some nice high level of consciousness and you feel groovy. But what’s that going to do about the, you know, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or the melting of the methane in the Arctic, or the the mass die, dying after the BS and whatnot, which could decimate our whole agricultural system. But what I think is that, you know, obviously, meditation and spirituality and spiritual awakening is not just some groovy subjective thing where it’s all nice and enjoyable, but it has, it has tremendous influence on the way one interacts with the world and one’s creativity, and so on, if it’s if it’s genuine, you know, and we saw a presentation at the same conference today by this guy who’s figured out a way of restoring the bee population. And he gave this whole thing about the interconnectedness. And this whole chain of events that takes place between trees and bears and animals of various kinds and bees. And he’s actually got this contraption that has some little, you put a bunch of honey water or sugar water, and then few drops of this stuff that’s derived from mushrooms, and the bees love it, and it cures the stuff that’s killing them. And the Norwegian government just bought 40,000 of these things. And oh, wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, it’s kind of like it could be really ticked up. So it could be that these these dire problems that seem insoluble, and you know, and there are actually, environmentalists and people say that we’ve got about 10 years left to live, and it’s too late, nothing can be done. I think there could be 11th hour solutions that come about, which, as in most cases are unforeseen. We never see the technologically brilliant breakthroughs that end up taking place. And that the the engine behind those impetus behind those will be this upwelling of creativity that results from the upwelling of collective consciousness. That’s right.
Thomas Hubl: And then in the, in the mystical understanding, you say, there’s always the light that potentially has the power to turn around the difficulty. But often, it’s a fish that’s swimming around our legs or legs, but we don’t see it. So often, the information of the solution is already somehow here, but we are currently not able to see it until we uncover it through some kind of process. And I think that’s that’s the same for I think all the people that have the answer to solve climate change. already around, it’s like a puzzle piece all the people that are interested in feel called to work on it. We just need to see how this forms an answer in the world. And so I think would you say it’s very true that often some revelatory kind of inventions or insights change a lot of the game. And but I think the combination, we call it a combination of inner and outer science, doing enough inner work, to be able to do the outer work that’s needed the scientific breakthroughs to technological solutions or breakthroughs, to help us to deal with the current situation.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And some might say, Great, yeah. Technological breakthroughs. Look at how much good those those have done us. That’s what’s gotten us to the brink of destruction. But
Thomas Hubl: no, we have brought ourselves to bring up not technology
Rick Archer: know how the tools we’ve created, have have had very, are they how we use them, how we use them, which is where spirituality comes in? Because it hopefully gives us the intelligence and not the intelligence, the wisdom to use them intelligently.
Thomas Hubl: That’s right. That’s right. And the good thing is that AI became like, is the welcomed alien. Suddenly, humanity has another you know, before it was always the aliens, we thought, Oh, the aliens will come and kill all of us. And now, we don’t have that. But we have certain AI, it’s kind of a kind of alien that did landed here. And suddenly we think, Oh, my God, this will kill us. This will torture us this winter. So suddenly, we see on the face of that alien, our own evilness because we also contribute a lot to the extinction. And so how we treat animals is torture, at least in some in some food production. That’s torture. And it is and and now we look at AI and we see our own past on the face of a potential future. And I think if we are wise enough, then we do what every good psychologist would do, we learn to deal with our protection. So we really look at the way of the ethical behavior, how we live. And then maybe we also come with a pure motivation to develop technology in a way that will not be harmful. Yeah. But it’s, I think that there is something very interesting right now going on, when you read a lot of writings, I think that that’s a perfect protection on to another. And I think that’s a very healthy process. If we, if we are wise enough as humanity, then we used that moment to really self reflect as a as a species. And I think that would be a very, very powerful process.
Rick Archer: Yeah. We’ll probably wrap it up pretty soon, because it’s getting late. But one thing you just said about you use the word ethical, I mentioned earlier that, you know, I’ve been involved in formation of this thing to hopefully increase awareness in the spiritual community about the value of ethical standards, in addition to merely developing consciousness and so on. It’s been a bit of the wild, wild west in terms of all these spiritual teachers doing whatever the heck they pleased. And so many people have been hurt and confused, and disillusion, and so on. But I mean, I’ve kind of made it sound, that spirituality is going to be this great Savior, that’s going to save humanity from from disaster at the last moment, but some would take a look at what spirituality has been like so far, and say, this is the thing that’s going to save humanity. Because, you know, there have been so many crazy situations. In so many spiritual communities, and among so many teachers and gurus and everything else, it doesn’t seem like they could save their own community, much less of the world. So, I don’t know, maybe you would say this, too, is? Well, I will go ahead and comment on that. I don’t think I need to say anything more, leave a comment on it.
Thomas Hubl: Yeah, I think, like, what we see is that there is a lot of spiritual trauma in the world. And it didn’t start now. Like I think we, we went into human history through many, many very traumatizing events connected to spirituality or religion. And, and I think it’s our job to start. Like looking at them to say, yes, you know, you just read here, something happened in the church, he has something happened. They’re here like this, fundamentalists doing this and that, and when you look back in history, so many things actually kind of are connected to the spiritual world or the religious world. And I believe what you say is true. We are here. We can stop the recreation because trauma of and has a recreative cycle. So it takes some time and then it shows up again. And, and I believe our calling maybe is that we say okay, yes, there are many things going on and we are hurt, but we will take a break and and really look at that hurt. Look at that spiritual trauma decision doesn’t matter if you call it this happened in religious communities, but there is definitely a yearning in humanity for something higher. And I think that’s because we are kind of spiritual beings also. And, but we need to look at the hurt that happened in order to restore the healthy, ethical life that you were talking about. And everywhere where is trauma, there’s numbness and numbness, create side effects. And so I don’t feel it’s like trauma is like imagine is you’re swimming in a river, and you’re in the water. Life is swimming in the water, every one of us wins in the intelligence of our souls path. Like there’s intelligence, well, this intelligence is life in movement. And so we’re in the river, and then suddenly, there is ice. So you need to get out of the water, you need to walk maybe a few 100 meters. And then you can go back into the water, hopefully with a wetsuit. Yeah. But what I’m saying is, once you are on the on the ice, you’re not getting wet. Right? Right. So you’re not connected to life. So when I when I’m not connected to life, or when somebody is a parent, for example, and is now connected, that’s the zone where we beat our children, where we hurt our children, where we hurt other people, we don’t hurt other people, because we are connected, we hurt them. And we are disconnected. Because everybody who is in the water respectful to everybody who is healthily connected to the body will eat and do things in a way that are in alignment with the body. If I don’t feel my body, I do stuff that will hurt it. And I think that’s the same with this with spirituality, that there’s a lot of hurt, that is connected somehow to it. And that’s what we did in the past, but we are the ones that can restore it. Yeah. And I think for your process, I think with the ethical rules, I think that’s going to be an important part two, take some time out and look at what is the spiritual trauma in the world?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think that it’s sort of an effort to encourage greater self scrutiny, both individually, you know, and within communities, to have them sort of take a look at how what they’re doing and how things are happening there. And whether that’s really kosher, you know, kosher, you know, because a lot of things are taken, a lot of things happen. And then people assume that the teacher must know better than I do, because he seems so enlightened. And therefore I’ll just sort of abdicate my judgment and discrimination. And then things get really far.
Thomas Hubl: And I think what many teachers I mean, there are some that do this anyway. But I think there is a, there’s a higher degree, where we, I often say spiritual teaching is we start in kindergarten. And we go up through school through high school to university, which means everybody who works with people needs to know that some people hear me as a grown up, some people hear me as a three year old and some people hear me as a 12 year old and I need to be aware that I am that I see exactly where you come from, especially when when your trauma or your early attachment wounds are active. And that’s why that’s a very complex process because even if you talk about mystical spiritual teachings, I need to be aware who who listens to me Yeah. And and many people you know there for example sexual admiration of spiritual teachers. Many people take this as real whereas it’s it’s it’s it’s a it’s a process that is not
Rick Archer: only meant to take me teachers to get us some tea featured by the athletic
Thomas Hubl: this and take advantage of it or they think that sexual, whatever attraction is intimate. Yeah, as legitimate and true, or it’s being even sold as okay, my sexuality will help you to get enlightened I can give you my Shakti Yeah, right. And I think that’s really dangerous. That’s really dangerous. And because we don’t see where this where these impulses or sexual impulses come from, and that’s why to have certain rules that make it kosher, in a way is important. And also a sophistication that we can see what kind of protections we get. And that we are that we have enough awareness not to get in tangled in those protections. And, and so I think that work is very sophisticated because it includes the developmental process of a human being plus the transpersonal process. And so I think the more people include basic psychological and trauma and developmental knowledge, I think that’s going to be good for a process that can unfold well, where people can heal and transcend themselves.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s interesting, when I was listening to you earlier today, over at the conference, I was kind of thinking, putting myself in the shoes of some of the kind of Neo Advaita types, you know, who like to boil everything down to, you know, you are that and, and you don’t exist as an individual and the world is an illusion, and, you know, give me 20 bucks, and we got it all figured out. And they listen to someone like you or many other teachers who are talking about all these psychological things and cultural things and collective unconscious, they think, oh, man, the guy’s just overcomplicating it really all that stuff is illusory, and we shouldn’t even think about it. But I think, personally, that, you know, what you’re doing is very valuable, and that this stuff can’t just be dismissed as is illusory, it actually a deep understanding of it is essential, for, you know, really making progress individually and collectively. Spirituality is a nuanced thing, you know, it’s not, I mean, in a sense, it’s very simple. But it’s not simplistic. It’s, it’s nuanced. And there can there’s great richness and complexity, if you really want to understand it thoroughly.
Thomas Hubl: And, and, and us You said it beautifully. I think that there is simplicity and complexity. Yeah. And, like, in the Bible, on Mount Sinai, even the voice of God appeared for the whole group. There was kind of a mass awakening. And, and it says, and then the voice spoke, everybody felt, it spoke personally to me. But what is the meaning of this? These are just metaphors. But the meaning is that, that the most universal is expressed through the most individual, so that your individuality and the beauty of your crystallization is part of the non dual reality, that’s different than your this is an illusion, this is a no, this is beautiful, this is beautiful this, and all of it creates all of it. So energy and emptiness is not two means that the energy that runs through me, and all these stagnations, they are part of my repair and my Enlightenment. So the personal karma that I took on is part of my repair. And I think, because that’s very complex, that’s not so easy, really accessible. Yeah. Because then it becomes also very sophisticated. It’s very simple. And it’s very sophisticated. And I think, and we have been living in a more and more complex reality. And the reality I think, I think, actually, it’s dangerous when people say the world is an illusion. Yeah, I think that’s a dangerous ethically, it’s a very dangerous thing, even if, when they have very high level of development, of course, we are looking through the world. We transcend. But it doesn’t mean that it’s an illusion. But transcend the illusion is the separate perception of the world, that I perceive myself as a separate particle in the world. That’s an illusion. But, but the world, the movement and the stillness and not to that’s non duality, not this stillness. hiding out in stillness is not non duality. There’s stillness within the moment of every moment of life unfolding. And, and I think that means that we need to be deeply embodied and transcendent. And that that’s, I think, multi dimensional multi dimension, which doesn’t mean that what what the teachings of Advaita they are very beautiful and Ramana Maharshi. But my Ramana Maharshi had a practice. He said, inquire, the root of the thought of i, which is every meditation does the same thing. You inquire the current moment until you come back and get absorbed in the source. But I believe for us living in culture. That means also that we do this while we live our life while we are parents while we have a job while we otherwise we need to go to the cave, like he did Ramana Maharshi is set in a cave and it’s very important to see this most of us are not sitting in a cave or not.
Rick Archer: We’re not constituted that way. Yeah, yeah.
Thomas Hubl: And but that’s very important. We can take this as a role model. But we are not living that way. And so if you’re not living that way, that’s only partly our role model. But the state that Ramana Maharshi was in, of course, was amazing. And I think there’s a lot of truth to them.
Rick Archer: Yeah. There’s a saying in the Gita that you know, once one’s own Dharma, but lesser and merit is better than the dharma of another. So you know, perhaps Ramana Maharshi, was living the highest Dharma, but that would, that it goes on to say better as death in one’s own Dharma, the dharma of another brings danger. So if everybody tried to live life as Ramana Maharshi, it would, it would return the revolution, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t necessarily accelerate it. And for those of us who are suited and constituted to be active in the world, the world can be a very evolutionary place, full of all kinds of lessons that we wouldn’t otherwise learn.
Thomas Hubl: And, and I believe that there is an importance in practicing our stillness, meditation into deep, deep states of stillness. I mean, that’s inherently important.
Rick Archer: Do you have a daily routine like that? Yeah. No, I kind of meditative routine on a daily basis.
Thomas Hubl: Yeah, it changed over time. And like, I meditated over almost 30 years, and I and I was on a four year meditation retreat in a way. And, and so yes, I have a practice. But my practice became more and more like, part of my work with people, and my own my groups, and also became more and more like a kind of a healing work for people
Rick Archer: say, don’t just get up in the morning, meditate for a while, then start your day.
Thomas Hubl: And if I’m meditating, then that’s also often including someone or some Yeah. Well,
Rick Archer: there’s a lot, I’m sure that what I know about you, and your work is much less than what there is to know. And you know, so this has just been a little snapshot that we’ve been able to do in the time allotted. But is there anything that’s important that I haven’t even thought to ask you or that you haven’t? So far had a chance to say,
Thomas Hubl: first of all, to thank you for the work you do, because you bring together lots of great people, and lots of different, maybe different perspective on to, like the essence of life. And I think that’s important for everybody to hear, and then see what deeply resonates and learn to follow resonances. I think that’s why you’re doing a great job. And I always enjoy our time, there’s a deep thoughtful exploration that you induce, and it’s lovely.
Rick Archer: And you induce that in man, it’s very enlivening to talk to you get my mind working in ways that wouldn’t ordinarily works. I appreciate that. In fact, everyone I interviewed does that in their own way. But each one is different. So it’s cool because it sort of gets different cylinders firing.
Thomas Hubl: And I believe that, that maybe one last thing is that all of us did do enough inner work to become like grounded and present enough in the world. And have the maybe the capacity to expand that awareness into the cultural process and partake in the cultural process, but also also help to that we together walk into the jungle of collective legacy. I think that would speed up our evolutionary process. And I believe that’s also partly the reason why our response to climate change is so slow. And because trauma has a hard time changing, trauma is frozen, and frozen parts usually don’t change so fast. So trauma is often afraid of change, because trauma in itself is already unsafe. And and so when we when we want to change as a culture and adapt to different circumstances right now, I think we need the energy that is stored there. And and I believe that’s something that we can do on day together, because it’s a collective legacy. And we need to take care of our life base together like an orchestra.
Rick Archer: Yeah, we’re all in the same boat. Yeah, that’s right. If it sinks, hopefully who in the front of the boat aren’t going to be better off? No as well, thank you tamas. I really enjoyed this. Yeah. I’m sure you have. I know you have a website. I’ll be linking to it. And I guess people can go there and find out what you’re doing. But you want to just sort of say a few sentences, the kinds of things that people could get involved with if they wanted to. So
Thomas Hubl: we’re involved. So many things we do Of course, lots of online classes. I am mostly I don’t do much on like open retreat, many open retreats and just to two year committed programs, because I love to work with committed
Rick Archer: people. The people have to quit their jobs and
Thomas Hubl: somehow right commit me to a cave career and how do you do it till you’re like they have weeks, multiple weeks in a year, but it’s a committed program online in between those. Yeah, right. Right, right. But it’s more committed programs. And then and then we, of course, we do like a big annual conference like celebrate life festival. And we brought into life, my wife and I like a nonprofit, a global nonprofit organization to deal with collective trauma around the world. And so everybody who feels called to it and wants to contribute to that kind of nonprofit in one way or the other there, there is enough trauma in the world that we can take care of. And it needs a lot of people. So that’s something definitely that is a more socially oriented activity.
Rick Archer: That’s great. Well, I’m sure that’s all described in detail and your website and everything. That’s where people can just go there and read about it. Get involved if they feel so inclined. Thank you, Rick. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, it’s a joy. So thank you for hosting to those who have been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one.
