Thomas Razzeto Interview

Summary

Thomas Razzeto presents nondual wisdom as a practical way to understand awareness, emotion, and the world without trying to solve life’s ultimate mystery. The discussion also explores how spiritual realization can coexist with compassion, social responsibility, and respect for human suffering.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is nondual wisdom, and how can it help with everyday life?
• What is the difference between intellectual understanding and spiritual realization?
• How can awareness help us relate to painful emotions?
• How can nondual insight support compassion and social responsibility?

Key takeaways

• Life’s deepest mystery may remain unexplained while spiritual wisdom can still be practical.
• Conceptual understanding and direct realization deepen and support each other.
• Emotions can be witnessed and released into the awareness from which they arise.
• Mystical insight is recognizing what is already present, not acquiring something new.
• Nonduality includes both spiritual unity and compassion for people who suffer.
• No one is spiritually more valuable than anyone else, despite differences in personality or experience.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 340 of them now, and if this is new to you, or if you’re new to this, you might want to go to www.BATGAP.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look at the past interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones categorized and organized in various ways.

There’s also an audio podcast for this, and the whole production is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button there, and much thanks to those who have been supporting it.

My guest today is Thomas Razzeto. Thomas is—reading his own bio here—“One of the newest and freshest voices among the teachers of our balanced ancient non-dual wisdom. Thomas easily digs deeply into the core of this wisdom to reveal both its essential truth and the heartfelt compassion that all true sages embody when they are genuinely engaged in the world without being entangled by it.

“The first time Thomas heard this non-dual wisdom was in 2005, when he attended one of Timothy Conway’s satsangs. And he has continually attended these weekly meetings since they provide the foundation for all his work.”

And I might add that I interviewed Timothy in the first year that I was doing BatGap, and you might enjoy watching that interview. By the way, Timothy Conway was guest number 28 on Buddha at the Gas Pump in July of 2010.

“Timothy woke up when he was only 16 and later was fortunate enough to meet several enlightened masters, such as Sri Nisargadatta, Annamalai Swami, and others among Sri Ramana Maharshi’s immediate followers. Thomas teaches in plain English, yet much of what he says would be recognized by people familiar with Advaita, Buddhism, or Hinduism.

“Thomas has taught a class based on his book, Living the Paradox of Enlightenment, for the Center for Lifelong Learning, which is part of Santa Barbara City College, the highest-ranked community college in the U.S. In September 2012, Thomas spoke for the prestigious lecture series ‘Mind and Supermind,’ which is run by Santa Barbara City College.”

Thomas is speaking to us from Santa Barbara. I just want to add that I have read about 95% of Thomas’ book. It was either finish the book this morning or take a bike ride, and I took a bike ride. But I’ve really enjoyed it.

It’s an interesting mix, Thomas, of Advaita explained in ways that I find uniquely clear in some respects. You’ve sort of devised some of your own analogies and metaphors and clarified my understanding of some things, and yet you easily segue from quoting Shankara and discussing Advaita to quoting Seth and Bashar and getting into a little bit of politics and social justice and compassionate action.

Thomas: Ah, thank you so much. That’s so nice to hear.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. Well… yeah, go ahead.

Thomas: So, you touched on some really important things, and one of them is that we’re not here to explain this mystery of life, God, and creation. I mean, I want to encourage people to stand in awe of this mystery, and yet at the same time we can gain a practical understanding of it.

I want to make a distinction between explaining it and describing it. Explaining it would try to go in real deeply, whereas describing it is just staying a little bit on the practical level. So I think that’s really important because this non-dual wisdom is very practical. It can lead to a deeper peace, greater joy, and more love. And what could be more practical than that?

Describing the mystery

Rick: When I hear “explaining versus describing,” the connotation of one is almost academic, whereas the other is more experiential. Are you implying that?

Thomas: Yeah. For example, scientists take the same approach. If you hold a ball in your hand and let it go, it falls to the ground, and they can describe how fast it’s going at every moment of its fall with a mathematical equation. But they know full well that time, space, energy, and matter are all complete mysteries which they are not going to try to explain. They can describe what they see, so they’re staying on this practical level.

We, as sages, can do the same thing. We can step this non-dual wisdom into a practical level without really worrying about these deep questions. In fact, one of the questions that I first had for Timothy when I started to attend satsang, almost 11 years ago, was, “Timothy, is there an outside world out there?”

That was a burning question for me, and Timothy simply answered with one simple statement. He said, “This question does not lead to liberation.” And with that I went, “Ah, I don’t have to answer all these questions. I can just look for something that’s helpful.” He was speaking about liberation from these selfish or self-centered tendencies.

Rick: I heard a story about the Buddha one time. It’s just an example he used: If you’re shot with an arrow, you don’t start asking questions like, “Hmm, I wonder what kind of wood this is made of, and what kind of bird these feathers came from?” You want to get the arrow out. So there’s sort of an immediacy about that, and you wouldn’t get caught up in trivial questions like that. I think that kind of illustrates the point you’re making.

Thomas: Yes, it does. That’s very good. I like that.

Rick: Yeah. So, when did you first kind of get interested in spirituality? When you were a young kid or something?

Thomas: Oh yeah. I mean, I was raised Catholic by very loving parents in a big family, and I always felt connected to some kind of spiritual dimension. I was very Catholic, so when I was in grade school I was thinking I was going to be a priest. And I am a priest in a way, but by the time I was about 20, some of those principles of the Catholic faith just didn’t seem to hold up.

I read a book by Alan Watts called

The Book: The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are . It was a very thin book. You probably have seen it, right?

Rick: I never read it.

Thomas: Yeah, I read it and went, “Wow, there’s a really different way of looking at all of this.” For a while I just didn’t have any guidance, but I still felt quite strongly that there is a God and that I had a soul.

About 1980, I started to read some of the Seth books. Now there are quite a few Seth books, so I only read a couple of them. They’re very deep, and they got me thinking. The Seth phrase that’s so popular is, “You create your own reality.” That really is something to ponder, especially when you realize that Buddha says something very similar: “With your thoughts you create the world.”

With that, I was open-minded to channeling. I would say that about the middle of the 1980s, I started to go to live channeling sessions and was actually asked to be the audio guy involved in one of these groups. So I saw quite a bit of channeling, and the experience of it—the guided meditations and things like that—was quite profound.

I wasn’t as interested in normal human teachers, shall we say. I was really reading more channeled books and just meditating, walking in nature, hiking, going to the beach, and stuff like that.

Again, about 11 years ago I showed up at Timothy Conway’s satsang. I had just bumped into a friend downtown. She said something like, “Well, I’m going up to Timothy Conway’s for a meeting.” I said, “Well, who is he? What does he do?” She said, “Oh, he’s a spiritual teacher.” She practically had to drag me up. We were right in the neighborhood, too.

The thing that really impressed me about Timothy was that he’s so relaxed and so comfortable. He just matter-of-factly explains the non-dual wisdom. He doesn’t use any fireworks or spotlights or drum rolls. He’s completely comfortable.

It took a while for me to realize the breadth of his knowledge. He’s quite scholarly in Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other non-dual traditions.

Rick: He’s got a PhD in what? Comparative World Religions or something?

Thomas: Something like that.

Rick: It’s more about what is enlightenment or something.

Thomas: His PhD thesis was actually written on the aspects of enlightenment. It’s surprising to me that the thesis is 550 pages long. When I heard that, I realized that Timothy likes to talk, and I do, too, so I wasn’t too surprised. At the same time, he told me just a couple of weeks ago, “Tom”—he also calls me Thomas—“Hey, my original draft was a thousand pages long.”

Anyway, we’ll talk a little bit about what enlightenment is. What I did want to point out was one of the things that he did for me immediately that went, “Ah!” People had been telling me for 25 years that I was divine: “You are divine. You are divine.” Timothy was the first one to say how I was divine.

You are divine in your awareness. It is here you find your source nature, your divine nature, your infinite nature.

And then I went, “Oh, this could be what I’m looking for.” It didn’t really make sense immediately in a deep, intuitive way, but it gave me something to work with and to ponder.

Rick: When did it begin to make sense in a more intuitive way?

Thomas: Oh, it probably took a couple of months. Again, I would attend every week, and he would basically go through some of these fundamental points of non-dual wisdom. I would just go for a walk, be out in nature, and sit on a rock. You don’t need to sit out in nature; you can sit wherever you are. Don’t do this while you’re driving.

I would just think, “What does it mean to be pure awareness? What is that?” So it started to have a bit more of a feel to it, an intuitive wisdom.

A lot of people think that this non-dual wisdom actually is beyond the mind. Certainly, this intuitive component is beyond the mind, but there’s a cognitive component also, where we have true ideas. As this deep intuition grows, these true ideas become clearer and clearer, and the words become clearer. This helps open you up to the intuitive understanding, and so that becomes deeper.

They each help the other. They’re like two hands, one washing the other. Together you come to a clear understanding in words and a deeper understanding in wisdom. So it’s very beautiful and very important.

Experience and understanding

Rick: Yeah. Would it be a simple way of saying, and an accurate way to say, that enlightenment or higher consciousness, or whatever we want to call it, has two legs to it: experience and understanding?

Thomas: Yeah, I think that’s a good point.

Rick: And you can’t walk without both legs, really.

Thomas: Yes. And there are actually some aspects that we can go even deeper into. When it comes to experience, of course, we’re always talking about phenomena, the world, or some aspect of the world. An experience is, of course, the experiencer, the active experiencing, and the object that is experienced. This understanding is phenomena. It’s a collection of beliefs and ideas that are integrated into your soul, into your personal consciousness. So yes, that’s growing, but it’s all sourced in this thing that is not a thing.

But you can know this pure awareness because this is what you are. Everything else we know through experience, but this is something we can’t experience. You are not an object of any kind. There’s no aspect that you can see or perceive.

Rick: Yeah.

Thomas: You see what I mean?

Rick: I do. And obviously, the word “experience,” as you say, ordinarily applies to every experience that we ever have, which has that threefold structure: the experience, the mechanics of experience, and the objects of experience. And maybe we can find a better word, but I kind of use the word just to emphasize that what we’re talking about here is not merely conceptual.

There are a lot of people who immerse themselves in the concept and mistake that concept for actual realization. In fact, there’s an old Tibetan saying: “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.”

Thomas: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah. So somehow or other, maybe we can find a better word. The kind of experience we’re talking about here is not a threefold structure the way ordinary experience is, but we do want to emphasize that we’re referring to something experiential that’s sort of lived in a deep way, and that would be a radically different way of being in the world than if that experience had not dawned in one’s awareness. I keep coming back to the word “experience.”

Thomas: Yeah, but I see what you’re saying. It’s personal. It’s really intimately personal.

Rick: Yeah, very much so.

Thomas: Timothy sometimes uses the phrase, “This wisdom comes alive within you.”

Rick: Yeah. If you could magically step into Ramana Maharshi’s shoes, so to speak, although he didn’t wear them, and see the world through his eyes, you wouldn’t say to yourself, “Wow, now I really understand things.” It would be more like this profound experiential shift. That would be the main emphasis.

Thomas: Yeah, and for me, I did have an experience that I write about in the book.

Rick: Tookie Williams?

Thomas: Yes, about the passing of Tookie Williams.

Rick: Why don’t you talk about that? That would be a nice segue right now.

The passing of Tookie Williams

Thomas: I had been listening to Timothy for about five or six months at this time, and I became aware of this person named Tookie Williams. He was scheduled to be put to death, and he was at San Quentin. He had been put in solitary confinement numerous times.

I didn’t know anything about him. It just came up in the news on one of the stations that broadcast out of Los Angeles. They were talking about the attempt to stop this execution. The reason they wanted to stop it was because it seemed like he had become a transformed man.

He had started off when he was only about 12 years old, I believe, in South Central Los Angeles. The people he hung out with later became the core of a very famous gang called the Crips. As he got older, he was in quite a powerful position in this gang.

I’m sure that lifestyle was very violent, and there were many things that we would say mean you can’t be in society and have to be in prison. So they put him in prison. I heard him speak personally a couple of times on the radio, and these were not just quick little sound bites. So I got a feeling for the guy.

I knew that he had written children’s books, several of them, maybe 12. He always co-wrote them, as far as I understood. These were books about peace. They were books about the false promise of being in a gang. He was getting a lot of feedback from people who read his books. They would say things like, “Your book helped me stay out of a gang.” Or someone would say, “Your book helped my children stay out of a gang.”

So here he had a positive effect on the world, and I just couldn’t imagine taking someone who was contributing to our society in this very important way from his perspective, a perspective that I could never have. I mean, he could talk about what it was like to be in a gang because he had been in one since he was 12. He was Black, from South Central. I was born in Oklahoma. I’m white. How can I take this perspective?

I realized that his voice was so important. I had also been working on a children’s book, but it wasn’t getting any traction. Here he was making this difference.

And so the day came when they were going to put him to death. I usually get pretty emotional when I talk about this. They usually do these things at midnight, and I had never heard of anything like this being stopped at the last minute. So I really wasn’t that hopeful. But I wasn’t that strongly connected to this man, or so I thought.

I went to bed at around 11, and I knew he was scheduled to be put to death in just one hour. About 1:00 a.m., I woke up. It was just a couple of minutes before 1:00. I looked at my clock radio and said, “If I push that button and turn it on, the news is going to come on. It’s been the lead story, so they’ll probably tell me what happened.”

I reached over and pushed that button. A man said, without any emotion, that they had put Tookie Williams to death. I was not ready for how strongly this hit me. I just started crying so much. I didn’t know anyone could cry that hard.

As I was crying, I was still in this place of being quite comfortable, witnessing this crying, witnessing this sadness, witnessing the beauty of this moment. I thought to myself, “I’m going to find out what this sadness really is.” I pulled this sadness closer and closer, and as I pulled it into me, it just dissolved into nothing.

I realized that it was dissolving into my awareness because that is where it was born out of. I realized that all my emotions were like that. They came out of my awareness, were witnessed by my awareness, and were dissolved by my awareness.

They came out of my awareness, were witnessed by my awareness, and were dissolved by my awareness.

In this, I realized that everything was born out of my awareness, that this awareness is source awareness. This, of course, is what Timothy was talking about. It helped underline what he was saying through a very personal and deep experience.

I want to say something about mystical experiences. Some people might ask, “How come I haven’t had one?” Or some people might have one and try to put themselves up on a pedestal: “I had it, you didn’t. I’m the teacher, you’re not,” all this kind of ridiculous stuff.

When you really understand this wisdom, you know that all these people are this divine essence. The person itself is this unique expression that comes from this. So in substance, they are this, and there’s nothing wrong with them. No one is better or worse than anyone else.

Now, on a practical level, it’s important to evaluate people and deal with the reality of personalities and things. But I think you understand what I’m saying.

Let me go just a little bit further with that. When you really understand what a mystical experience is, you understand that all experiences are mystical experiences. This is the witnessing of God in form; it’s just not recognized as that.

Recognizing what is already present

So I have another little chapter about recognizing something that you’ve been seeing all the time. I talk about seeing the 3D dinosaur. I don’t know if you read that chapter.

Rick: I did, I did. Yeah, that’s cool. In that chapter, you refer to those puzzle books that have this whole computer-generated jumble of patterns and colors and all that. They don’t look like anything, but if you stare at them long enough in the right way, an image pops out. In the example you used, it’s a 3D dinosaur.

You’re kind of saying that the world is like that. We’re actually staring God in the face, so to speak, or He’s staring us in the face. It’s like we’re looking at the Divine here, but we don’t see it for reasons we can discuss.

Thomas: Yeah, exactly. I like the way you put that, and I even like the way that you said, “We don’t see it.” To be a little bit more precise, we do see it; we just don’t recognize it.

Rick: Yeah, we misinterpret it or something.

Thomas: Yeah, exactly. That’s probably even a better way to say it. I also like that word you used, “pop.” When you’re looking at those images and all of a sudden they just pop right in front of you, it’s like, “Whoa! Look at this! How could that have been there all along?”

Then you put the book aside and come back, and you don’t see it. It’s like, “But you know it’s there. You know it’s there; you can’t deny it.” If more than one person is seeing it, they can all agree: “Oh, I see it’s standing this way, it’s looking to the left, it’s got little arms or a big body,” or whatever it is.

Then if somebody doesn’t see it and tries to protect it by saying it’s got a little hat on, everybody looks at him like, “No, it doesn’t have a hat on.” You know what I’m saying?

Anyway, what I’m saying here is, be comfortable with who you are and where you are, and everything will unfold with you, for you, at the precise moment. If you want to have an experience different from the one you’re having, that might be a little bit of a resistance. But don’t worry. Just let it flow, and we’ll see what happens.

Rick: Yeah. And just to wrap up that previous point, the famous Vedantic example is the snake and the string. The light is dim, there’s a rope on the road or something, and you’re walking along and jump in fear because it looks like a snake. So you’re misinterpreting it.

Then, with a little bit more light, maybe a little bit more knowledge, you realize, “Oh, it’s only a rope. Nothing to be afraid of.” That example is obviously always used to illustrate that we’re looking at God, but we don’t recognize what we’re looking at. We misinterpret it, under-evaluate it, and underappreciate it.

Of course, there’s a flaw in the grammar I’m using here because who is it that’s under-evaluating it? We can get to that.

Thomas: Yeah, and I like that example. I like the fact that when you realize what it is, you realize it’s not dangerous. When you realize what the world is and who you really are, you realize that you are this unchangeable thing that is not a thing, and that the world is not really dangerous.

It seems dangerous, and we will respect that from the experiential point of view because if you’re driving your car or riding your bike, you don’t want to engage in dangerous activities that might be harmful to the person, to the body. But who you really are is untouchable, and we also want to have compassion for people who are suffering. You know what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah. What was that? What was it, the Diamond Sutra or something in Buddhism? I just read it in your book last night. I have it here, actually. It’s the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

Thomas: Exactly.

Rick: The Vajracchedika Diamond Cutter Sutra – “One must save all sentient beings and there are no sentient beings.”

Thomas: And this is really an important thing: one statement is from one perspective and the other statement is from a different perspective, and both perspectives are valid. This is the key thing. For example, maybe we can actually open up this question of why we use the phrase “non-dual wisdom.” I actually have a little essay that’s up on my website, and it’s part of the first chapter of the book. It’s about these two perspectives.

So, why do we call it non-dual wisdom? Well, God and creation are one reality, not two. This is the “not two” that the word non-dual is pointing to. Yet why would we think that God and creation are one reality? Where does this come from?

Of course, we use the analogy of the actor coming forth as the character. In this case, let’s think about a real actor in Hollywood. We clearly see that the actor is the source of the character; it’s not the other way around. The character cannot go on the stage without the actor. But when the actor comes forward as the character, they are one.

When you look into the eyes of the character, you’re looking directly into the eyes of the actor. You don’t need to dig into a deeper level to find the actor. Every quality or aspect that the character has is really a quality or aspect that’s being exhibited by the actor. The actor is fully permeating the character in a way that makes them one.

And yet we also know that it makes perfect sense to respect this difference because one is the transcendent source of the other, which is dependent. So, it’s paradoxical, but we can take both approaches and recognize them both.

Of course, we see that the analogy I’m using is meant to point to God and creation. God is this invisible actor that’s coming forth as not only all persons, but also all worlds and all props, all sentient beings. In doing so, God permeates all of creation in a way that makes them one.

The character can’t push back against the actor; it has no will or power of its own. And so, creation is this instrument of God that comes forward, and yet one is the transcendent source of the other.

Rick: Nice. Just a little plug for something here. I gave a talk at the S.A.N.D. conference last October that emphasized this point quite a bit: what we see around us must display the qualities of its source. I ticked off a whole bunch of points about various qualities of the world, as evidenced by scientific understanding, that correlate with qualities of the Absolute, or pure consciousness, or Brahman as understood by Eastern philosophies and religions.

Anyway, if anybody feels like checking that out, it’s on Batgap. But do you want to play off that before we continue?

Thomas: Yeah, it’s really interesting. As the process of enlightening unfolds within the person, the person becomes more transparent, more open for the instrument and the power of God to work through. So it’s this openness that the person becomes, but who you are is this open-source awareness.

Rick: Yeah, and I really like the way you dealt with that in your book. There’s all kinds of things here. Here’s something that I quoted from your book:

The main paradox of enlightenment is that the true self, the Divine Self, does not become enlightened. Enlightenment is a set of conditions exhibited by the functional self, but that is not really you. Your true self is the unborn eternal divine awareness, which never changes since it has no form that ever could change. It is free from all conditions and as such it could never be or become enlightened, yet it is what enlightens all souls.

Thomas: Yeah, I’m glad you read that. Timothy likes to say that who you are is the clear light that enlightens all souls. And notice he doesn’t use the word “white light,” because you would see white light.

Rick: It has a quality to it.

Thomas: Exactly, it can be perceived. But you can’t see clear light, so who you are is aliveness itself; who you are is awareness itself. And it magically—we’re only describing, we’re not explaining—through the mystery of creation, this formless reality, capital R, that exists and always exists, magically comes forward as all form.

And in this, there can be the polishing up of the person so that it moves down the road of spiritual unfoldment to the point where it becomes enlightenment. And then the main paradox is you’re cruising down the path thinking—and most people are not too egotistical about this, they’re just kind of curious—“Well, maybe one day I’ll become enlightened.”

And then when you wake up, you realize, “Oh, the person is not who I am fundamentally. I am this open-source awareness, which cannot become enlightened.” But the person became enlightened. How interesting. There was an awakening, but that is not really me.

Except in the way that you are all persons. Timothy likes to use this phrase, “the supra-personal,” because God is not a super-person, a big human with the qualities of being the good guy or the good gal or whatever. It’s supra-personal, meaning it gives birth to all persons, permeates all persons, animates all persons, and yet transcends all persons.

Rick: So, you would agree that, as contrasted with what some teachers say, you are a person, you’re just not only a person. Would you agree with that?

Thomas: Oh, absolutely. And the important thing about that is—well, quickly, with the analogy, the invisible actor comes forward as the character. There’s no doubt: if you walk up to someone playing a role and you look at them and say, “I know who you are. You’re really”—and then you name the actor—of course it’s true, but they are, at that time, playing that role. That is who they are there and then.

So, you are both, yet there is this transcendent nature, which is truly the self. There is only one self. It gives birth to apparent selves, which are apparent in the sense that they are not really autonomous. They are not the source of their own will. If they appear to be the source, they appear to have their own will and power, but the will and power that’s expressed is truly that of this invisible actor, this one source.

Rick: Yeah. Well, let’s play with this a little bit. We know that Rain Man, Ratso Rizzo, and Tootsie never really existed. They were just roles, fictitious characters played by Dustin Hoffman. We know Dustin Hoffman exists, but those things were just things we saw on a movie screen.

So, some people argue that there really is no person. I mean, it seems like there is, but there is no substance to it. When you get right down to it, you do not exist. And yet, we talk about reincarnation. You’re comfortable with that—that there is something that accumulates experience and merit and demerit and whatever as it goes from life to life and evolves.

So, it would almost seem that there is a subtle essence of something or other that keeps on moving along. And we hear about ascended masters, for instance, even Jesus, interceding in human affairs. As highly enlightened as they were when they were on Earth, they don’t seem to have dissolved into nothingness like a drop going into the ocean. They seem to exist in some discrete, autonomous form still and are playing some kind of functional role.

Thomas: Well, I like the analogy of the movie. And especially, let’s use Hollywood. Imagine you were down in Hollywood. It exists. We’re going to use that as our framework, our main framework: Hollywood.

And within this framework of Hollywood, there’s a stage, and on the stage, we fabricate, we create a story. Now, people often say that the movie is not real. But the more correct and precise way to say this is the movie exists as a movie. The movie exists as a fabrication. The movie exists as a fictional construct. This is how the movie is real. If the movie wasn’t real, you couldn’t go to the movies, you see.

I like to say that the movie is one level down. It’s not real in the same way that Hollywood is real, but the movie is still in existence as a movie. Let’s suppose the story, the movie, has a murderer. The real police are not going to show up and arrest the actor who plays the role of the murderer because he was only pretending. There wasn’t really a murderer, but there still is a construction.

So, the world exists experientially, but who you are exists absolutely. Who you are exists before space, before time. Who you are, this pure, open awareness, exists in the here that gives birth to all apparent here and there. Who you are exists now, in the eternal now, that gives birth to all these fleeting moments we call “now.”

And so, there’s a reality to this movie, to this dream, to this construct. It is real experientially. It is vivid. You know this is real in some way. And yet, it’s not real in an absolute way because all of it is changing and it can all disappear.

Now, I hear people—and Timothy’s one of them—talk about how it disappears many, many times a second, and I don’t have any way to know that. But Timothy speaks so casually, and he never boasts about where he is and who he is and all that kind of stuff. In my opinion, he probably goes into samadhi.

I myself am not one who has experienced that. But when you exist as pure awareness and all worlds have disappeared, you become so sure that this fundamental source awareness is indeed the source of universal consciousness, the construction of all worlds, and all sentient beings.

And so, they are constructed and they’re real experientially, but I think it’s a mistranslation to say that they are not real or that they don’t exist. And I jokingly say something like, “The pink elephant in your pocket—that’s what doesn’t exist.”

So, there are three terms I think we should use: non-existence, reality as experienced, and reality in this absolute way. And I think Shankara says something about this: reality with form, reality without form, or reality with qualities and reality without qualities.

One is this absolute, transcendent source awareness, which you are, and the other is this emanation that comes forth as a dream, or a constructed story, or a constructed fiction.

Rick: I think that’s Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman or something like that.

Thomas: Yes, you’ve got it, and I often don’t know which one is which.

Rick: Well, Nir would be without, so Nirguna would be without qualities.

Thomas: Okay, there you go. I just want to make a little statement about language. Timothy is a scholar; he has a strong aptitude for language. But I myself—that’s not my strength. When it comes to language, I’m a little bit dyslexic. I don’t spell very well at all. I have to look up all kinds of words. You’d be surprised.

Rick: I caught some typos in your book. I’m going to send it to you.

Thomas: Yeah, and I’ll appreciate that. And I’m okay with it. I mean, this is who I am; this is how it is. My aptitudes lie elsewhere. It’s not like I’m completely inept with language because I like to speak, but when it comes to those kinds of things, I don’t do well with that language.

And what really helped me with Timothy’s satsang is that whenever he used a Sanskrit word, he would immediately explain it in plain English. He would take words that—well, I had tried to pay attention to Buddhism in the past, and I went to some Buddhist classes and stuff, but I just couldn’t get a handle on all the language, and so I just didn’t go there.

But anyway, it was very easy for me to deal with Timothy.

Rick: Well, that’s one thing I find refreshing about your book: it’s written in very clear, plain language, and you use some really nice, clear examples, some of which I guess are original with you because I haven’t seen them before, but they help to illustrate things very nicely. Like the example of the house and looking out through the windows of the house, and so on. Maybe we’ll get into that.

I just want to throw one thing out here, because we were talking about whether the world is real and so on, and I think you used the word “dependent.” There is actually a Sanskrit example for that, which is the word mithya, which means “dependent reality.” They always use the example of a pot, where it’s obviously there—you can put water in it or beans in it or something—and yet if you look more closely, it’s only clay. So there is no pot; there’s only clay. But for all practical purposes, there’s a pot, and it’s absurd to sort of ignore that level of reality and not use the pot, or deny its existence or something, just because you happen to know it’s only clay.

Thomas: Yeah, that would be silly. I have a chapter about illusions, and one of the things I point out about illusions is that even when you understand the truth of the illusion—in other words, all illusions point to a false idea—once you realize that false idea is false, you let go of the idea.

But still, quite frequently, your experience will show you that the false idea still appears to be true. One example I use, of course, is the sun traveling across the sky. And right there I said it, and everyone went, “Yeah, okay.” But in fact, the sun isn’t what’s moving; it’s the Earth that’s spinning on its axis.

It’s perfectly okay to be comfortable with the language and structure the language from the inside of the illusion as if the false idea is true. So we have words like sunset and sunrise, and I’m not going to jump up and down and insist, “You can’t use that word because it’s not true.” It’s like we all know what it means.

And so I think it’s equally valid when it comes to understanding this illusion of the world that it’s perfectly fine to speak from the framework of the illusion and say, “Hey, Rick, how was your bike ride today?” You don’t have to go, “I am the unborn awareness; I can go nowhere.” I mean, that’s a dysfunctional response.

Rick: Sure.

Thomas: You know, that’s not what I’m asking, and most of the time we can tell the difference between the you of the normal, ordinary world—the personal self—and the you, this absolutely amazing source of awareness, who you truly are.

✨ Awakening and samadhi

Rick: There is a term in Sanskrit, in Advaita, that sort of helps, which is “leśāvidyā,” which means “faint remains of ignorance.” And it’s said that you have to have that in order to function as a human being.

Thomas: Exactly. And that’s what I mean when you function in the world and you’re in this illusion. If you were to talk about the sun traveling across the sky, it’s perfectly fine to talk about that, even though it’s not the truth. We know it’s not the truth.

So the one thing I would like to say is that if a person feels comfortable having that as a goal, to have this dissolve completely, I’m okay with that. I feel like that’s their path, but that was not my goal. I didn’t have that understanding that I should have that as a goal. I was just pondering.

I used the three-step method that Timothy gave us, which is an ancient method—he certainly didn’t create it. The idea is hearing the truth, pondering the truth, and meditating on the truth.

So I spent a lot of time listening to Timothy, pondering—that’s what we’re doing, lots of different ideas: What about this? Does it look like this from that angle? There’s a lot of thoughts; there’s a lot going on.

And then the meditating, where there aren’t so many thoughts, maybe just one: What does it mean to be pure awareness? Who am I as pure awareness? Meditating on that. So that’s the ancient three-step method.

And, of course, you don’t just complete it one, two, three, and you’re done. You do each step as many times as it comes up. So my focus was much more on just stepping back into this open awareness rather than thinking of dissolving something that’s a part of who I would normally identify as me. You see what I mean? It’s stepping back.

Rick: Yeah, and it almost seems funny, contradictory, to say, “Well, I have this goal. I want this.” Because who are we to say exactly how it’s supposed to turn out? I think perhaps a healthier attitude would be, “Okay, God, make of me what you will. Develop my experience as it is meant to be experienced, ultimately. Who am I to say exactly how it’s supposed to look 20 years from now? You know best. Go ahead and work me over.”

Thomas: I hear you loud and clear, and that’s acceptance, of course. When I use the word “goal,” I like to put it on the table as just a guiding thought, not some kind of absolute top of the mountain.

Rick: Not so specific, perhaps.

Thomas: Exactly. And it may have, as it gets closer and closer into time—I had a goal of coming here today and talking to you, and I had a desire, a wholesome desire, that the technology would work and that we would have a nice conversation. And so it’s just a guiding thought, and then it will be let go because that time will pass, and then there will be another wholesome inspiration to pursue something else.

Rick: Yeah, I interviewed Suzanne Giesemann a few weeks ago, and she quoted somebody as saying, “Convert your demands into preferences.”

Thomas: Oh, yeah.

Rick: I like that.

Thomas: The first time I heard that—oh, go ahead.

Rick: Yeah, well, basically, it says it right there.

Thomas: Yeah, I heard that—I read a book called The Handbook to Higher Consciousness. Did you happen to read that book?

Rick: Who’s that by?

Thomas: Kees or Keesie?

Rick: That might be the person she was quoting, actually.

Thomas: Something like that.

Rick: I think that was the person she was quoting when she said that, yeah.

Thomas: And that book was a bit of a hit, and I read it. In there was the distinction between being unhappy when you don’t get something you want and just making an adjustment when you don’t get something you prefer.

Rick: Yeah. And that actually segues us into something you talked about quite a lot in your book: the whole thing of The Secret and wanting to fulfill your desires and all that. Perhaps we should talk about that a little bit.

Thomas: Yeah, it really surprised me that I wrote so much about that. The two biggest chapters in the book are the chapter about this and what I call the Satsang chapter, which we’ve been talking about—this understanding of who you are.

So I started reading the Seth books in 1980: You create your own reality. What does that really mean, you know? And, of course,

Buddha: With your thoughts, you create the world. Is there something to this, you know? And I think there is.

Now, let me quickly say that the world’s simplest philosophy—which I don’t adhere to—seems to be, “I will be happy when I get what I want, and here’s how to get what I want.” So if that philosophy is being strengthened by using some kind of secret, it won’t really liberate you. It’ll simply entrench you.

I heard a teacher many years ago saying something like, “The only prayer is the prayer for liberation. To pray for anything else will only bind you further.”

So, is there something to this? Is there something to The Secret? And I think they put something on the table very clearly: “Ask, believe, and receive.” And it’s very outer-oriented, very thing-oriented.

Now, some of this is not presented this way, which is one reason why I put Bashar in the book, because he talks about getting what you need, not getting what you want. And it’s not about you going out and getting it; it’s just being open for it so that it comes.

Rick: Mick Jagger talks about that too, as you may recall from the song: “You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.”

Thomas: Exactly, yes. This is really a nice posture, because you have this comfort of, “Ah, I’m being taken care of by God,” and yet you’re alert to your wholesome inspirations. “Ah, I think I should engage in this. Ah, I think I should not engage in anything right now, be more passive.” So you have this flow that you go with, or as I like to say, you glow with the flow.

You glow with this love and peace and joy that comes from just flowing along and not pushing back or pulling.

You glow with this love and peace and joy that comes from just flowing along and not pushing back or pulling—“I want this,” or “I don’t want that.” There’s just this flow. Now, as far as that phrase, “glowing with the flow,” that came from someone else I heard in the ’80s at a channeling thing. So some of these phrases are actually mine, but it doesn’t matter. The core truth is this ancient truth. Nothing that I put on the table of substance is my own: “Oh, we’re going to do it the Thomas Razzeto way.” No, it’s not that at all. I mean, you are this reality, you’ve always been this reality, and this is the reality that does the teaching.

Rick: So with regard to this thing of desiring and getting things, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi often used to say, “First deserve, then desire.” Make your priority be increasing your deserving ability, and then the thing, desiring, kind of comes second. It will be taken care of if deserving is there.

There’s actually a story that comes to mind in the Vedas where Brahma, the creator, wanted to create creation. He tried, but he couldn’t do it, and nothing was happening. Then a voice came which said, “Nivartatvam,” which meant “retire” or “transcend.” So he retired; he went inward for, I don’t know, eons or something. Then, having done that sufficiently, creation was able to just come out effortlessly.

Thomas: Yeah, spontaneous. I mean, is the tree efforting, growing? Does a baby growing in the womb—does the mother or the baby have to do something like, “Oh, today I’ve got to work on the liver”? But there are things that are a little different than that. People often talk about growing your hair, the energy to digest your food. But it does seem like we get in our car and we go places and we do things. Just see it all as flowing along with the flow that God brings us.

But I did want to say something real quick about this—the secret. I mean, something about the universe, in my opinion, is that it is not a catalog that you order things from. But there is a dynamic interaction between personal consciousness—and I’m using this phrase “personal consciousness” and equating that with soul: soul, personal consciousness, the Sanskrit word jiva, and also perhaps viewpoint or window. We can talk about that window analogy of being in the room later.

This soul has a certain collection of beliefs that are integrated into it, and this creates a certain vibratory state which can attract things. So if someone is always in a grumbling mood, then the things that come along are going to kind of reflect that. In fact, everything that shows up is a reflection of that and can actually reflect a positive or a negative experience.

If someone gets into a situation that they may be surprised at—suppose they lose their job—you can open up and give positive energy: “I wonder what’s going to happen. I wonder what’s going to come next,” rather than, “Oh, no, I’m not going to be able to pay my bills.” There’s a reflecting in the moment, and you could use an affirmation: “I always see the good in everything that arises for me.” You can spin that just a little bit: “I always see God in everything that arises for me.”

So this reduces the desire to push back or pull. It also opens you up to the mystery of what’s going to happen, the surprises. If you always were this so-called deliberate creator, there would never be any surprises, and what would be the joy in that?

But Timothy does talk about how, on the astral plane, there are some beings that are very skilled at creating what they want. He says that they don’t find liberation because they don’t really know the truth of who they are. They don’t really understand the gifts of letting go and just allowing that which comes.

Acting in the world without entanglement

Rick: I kind of do. In fact, I’m reminded of

Hamlet: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. I think I butchered that a little bit.

But in my own life, I kind of went through a balancing act for years between assertiveness and passivity, because there was a shifting sense that I was moving into the experience of God doing everything, nature running the show, and yet there was still plenty of individuality there which had its own drives and motivations.

So there’s this kind of balancing act between how much I want to be assertive here and try to change things, or how much I should just let go and let God, to quote the bumper sticker. I feel like I’ve made a fair degree of transition in that regard, and there’s much more of the latter taking place, although there’s still individual assertiveness and stubbornness and things like that sometimes.

But it’s an interesting metamorphosis people go through between feeling like, “This is me and I’m in charge, damn it.”

Thomas: “And we’re doing it my way.”

Rick: Yeah. And then just really being kind of like an instrument of the Divine. It’s not like you wake up one morning and you’ve made the transition. There can be years and years and years of transitional phases.

Thomas: Yes, and I think in every specific instance it can be helpful to tune into your own intuition, to ask yourself, “How actively should I engage right now?”

Even if you engage in something—say there’s someone who’s doing something inappropriate or harmful to others—you can perhaps engage in preventing them from doing any further harm, while still having love in your heart for this person. That person may even have to go to jail, but not to be punished—just to help them learn who they are and how they can come to a greater understanding of who they are as a kind person.

For example, if somebody is walking down the street at night by themselves, and somebody jumps out of the bushes and grabs them and is going to do bad things, and it just happens to be that there’s a police officer driving by, who jumps out and runs up, should he say, “We are all one. Everything is God,” or should he grab that guy and get him off that person?

Rick: Yeah. Ultimately, it’s God grabbing God and getting him off of God, and all are playing their appropriate roles. So if the police officer had that perspective, it shouldn’t diminish the enthusiasm or the zeal with which he intervenes and tries to change the situation.

We’re all—I mean, the Gita comes to mind. There was a point at which Arjuna was saying, “I’m just going to sit down here in the chariot, and I can’t fight this fight. It’s better to live on alms in this world than to engage in this battle.” Lord Krishna says, “Hey, I’m doing it all anyway, so just play your role, and it’s already done, basically. So take a very assertive role in this situation; don’t just be passive.”

And yet he said, “But first get yourself established in union, established in yoga, then perform action. Then you’ll sort of do it in tune with Divine Intelligence, not out of individual ego or anger or any such limiting thing.”

Thomas: That’s very well put, because you will see this person as a unique expression of the Divine. In substance, they are this one source awareness.

Three levels of reality

Rick: I quoted you; I’ve got a quote from your book here: “On a practical level, engage in your life as best you can while holding the intuitive wisdom that the Divine is doing everything.” That’s what we were just saying.

Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Along these lines, I’d actually like to point to the Serenity Prayer. Of course, everyone has heard this, but I’d still like to put it on the table: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the wisdom…” Did I say that wrong?

Rick:

No: “To accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can,” right? “And then the wisdom to know the difference.”

Thomas: Thank you. Some people might be surprised, going, “My gosh, a non-dual teacher is teaching a prayer that’s based in duality.” Again, this goes back to what I was saying: it’s perfectly fine to use a language that’s structured in the framework of our illusion.

In other words, I know that it is God who is speaking through the person saying this prayer. This person is asking for God to come and help and polish this personal self up. So I think it’s perfectly fine to ask it.

Timothy also sometimes says something like, “Prayers allow God to lift us up.” It’s God opening up the people who are praying and lifting them up. So you don’t see yourself as the one doing this.

Rick: I think if you’re praying in the right spirit, it’s not, “Hey, God, give me this.” It’s more like, “Let Thy will be done,” with a more submissive or surrendered kind of attitude.

Thomas: Yeah, and I have another affirmation that goes something like, “I always resonate with well-being on every level.” So it’s along these lines, going along with this flow.

Rick: Yeah. Well, if non-dual teachers—let’s say the most famous and significant ones, Shankara, Nisargadatta, Ramana, and many others, Annamalai Swami—if they all just dismissed the world as either illusion, or said it’s all one and why bother doing anything, then why would they have gone to so much effort to teach people? I mean, what people? There’s nobody to teach.

Shankara marched all over India, setting up these different centers of learning, training disciples, writing books, commenting on scriptures, and so on. They all—some teachers, like Amma, for instance—do something almost superhuman on a daily basis to uplift people. She’s not saying there are no people, and yet she has that non-dual vision.

In fact, there’s some story—I think I’ve told this before—where she has all these projects going on: hospitals, schools, orphanages, and all this kind of stuff. One of her swamis came to her and said, “What more can we do to help the world?” And she said, “What world?”

So she’s got the “what world?” part clear. But in the very same breath, people like that spend every ounce of their energy consoling, helping, and uplifting people and trying to remove suffering from a world which they know ultimately is unreal. They’re comfortable with the sort of multileveled reality of things and can operate on all levels simultaneously.

Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: In fact, they run through that three-point thing that Timothy does—there are three levels. That’s kind of cool.

Thomas: Yeah, on the practical level, the ordinary reality that we seem to experience, with a guy over here and a guy over there, and me doing this and me doing that, we have a functional understanding. In here, we see justice and injustice, and we work for justice. We see all kinds of atrocities, and we work for those to be removed, eliminated. We see people who have broken hearts, who need to be loved and held. And so we engage in this from the framework and the morality that most of us would understand as quite common sense.

And this is what he calls Level 3. And this is respected by the non-dual sage because it’s experientially true; it’s experientially real. And so we engage in it, and we also know that everything that’s there is, in substance, God. To say that this is all an illusion and therefore doesn’t matter is to say that God doesn’t matter. Because this illusion is structured out of God, permeated with God. How could God not matter?

Now, on the next higher level, which ruffles some people’s feathers, we see everything that’s going on as the perfect reflection of God’s love, and there’s nothing wrong with it. And, similar to saying, “What world?” we say, “The world is not broken. You don’t need to go anywhere and fix anything. God is taking care of everything.”

Rick: And that ruffles feathers because of all the horrible atrocities that have taken place.

Thomas: Exactly.

Rick: How can you say that God is doing that, or that that’s God?

Thomas: How could you be so cold and heartless? We need to fix this, and you can sit on your little chair and meditate all day, but that’s not helping that guy over there who has…

Rick: Yeah, but of course, then you can take him back to Level 3, which is, “Yeah, we do need to fix this. We didn’t say you didn’t need to fix this. We’re just saying that this, in its essence, is the Divine playing all of its various roles.”

Thomas: Yeah, and these are all the dynamic interactions between the souls, the karmas, the souls that have all these beliefs integrated into them. And these beliefs are dynamic because you can look at your beliefs, and you can change them and integrate new ones in there. And then your soul will be resonating with different souls, and different people will get together and interact in new ways.

So, while there may be trouble afar, the real question is, what’s happening where the rubber meets the road, where you are? Is there something you can do right here, right now, to help the world be a better place?

And sometimes it’s simply loving yourself and bringing your own personal experience into a higher vibration, one of, “Oh, I don’t have to complain about my life all the time. I don’t have to worry. I’m going to stop worrying as much as I can,” and you can make progress. And this increases your enjoyment of life.

✨ Personal consciousness and awareness

Thomas: Maybe you have another segue, but one point that I’d like to put on the table is the distinction between personal consciousness and awareness.

Rick: Yeah, I’d like you to talk about that.

Thomas: This was quite enlightening to me when Timothy started to use this phrase—well, he’s been using it forever—when I first heard it. And he makes a distinction between awareness, which is the only thing that is not a thing, and it’s the only thing that is sentient, and personal consciousness.

Personal consciousness is more like a window through which the one awareness looks. And because they work together, they’re often identified as the same thing by science and researchers and spiritual seekers.

But when you open them up into the one awareness—and we use this word “one” not because there is one and we counted it, but because it’s always whole. It doesn’t branch out like a tree might branch out. And it doesn’t break into pieces, either connected or disconnected pieces.

This one awareness that’s looking out of your eyes right now is this—what I’m talking about—this open-source awareness. This is the only thing that experiences. And yet, from this has flowed many personal consciousnesses. Each person has their own personal consciousness.

This is why, when you take a bite of food, you taste it, but I will not. You can see your thoughts, but I cannot. You can remember your memories, but I cannot.

And so, if we use this analogy of the room, imagine you are this one awareness, and you’re in a big room with a bunch of windows that look out into the world. When you look through the first window, you see what they see, hear what they hear, think what they think, and have all the experiences of that person.

And yet, when you look through the other window, the next window, you have all the experiences of that person, and so forth for all the windows. If there was just one big, giant window, all these sensations would just flood on top of each other, and it would be just a big, giant mess.

So, in this way, it can be described, but not explained, how the one comes forth as what appears to be the many. There are many personal consciousnesses, but they are not really selves; they’re not autonomous.

And what does a window see? A window doesn’t see anything. A window can never learn to see anything. A window merely presents to the person viewing the objects that are in the scope of that window.

So, your personal consciousness, your soul, your jiva, is permeating your body right now, because you’re awake in the world right now; you’re not asleep. That’s why you have this sensation of touch that goes throughout your entire body, because your personal consciousness—the doors of perception, it’s been said, right?—is not just the five physical senses, but all senses: the ability to see a thought, the ability to perceive your intuition, to feel a feeling.

So, your personal consciousness is permeating your body, which is like another window into the world. When these two windows line up, the experience of being in the world as a person, with the sensation of being a separate person, is presented to this one awareness.

And at night, when the body goes to sleep, this personal consciousness can permeate the dream body and experience things in the dream world. At night, the personal consciousness can completely disappear, dissolve. That’s the same as samadhi, but samadhi is a conscious experience of that, rather than a process when the body is asleep.

Rick: Yeah, and a couple of things there. One is that when we have sufficiently woken up to our true identity as pure—what do you call it? Pure source awareness?

Thomas: I like to call it—yes, I like to use those two words together: source, because that shows us the creative aspect of it, and awareness, because that shows its capacity. You are this open capacity for experience, this open-source awareness.

Rick: And so, when one is sufficiently woken up to one’s essential nature as that, then even when the personal consciousness goes into deep sleep, that source awareness remains awake.

Thomas: Oh, absolutely.

Rick: That’s what they call witnessing sleep. I have a file on my computer with dozens and dozens of quotes from various sages about maintaining pure awareness during sleep.

And another thing I just wanted to throw in here is that you’re talking about the window analogy. When the physical body dies, that particular window is shut, but there’s still the subtler body, which still has its window into a subtler realm. It’s just that the physical body is no longer providing access to the gross realm, but the subtle body still has access to that realm. Still, it’s the source awareness that is the seer.

Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: I guess one question I always wonder is, just as the physical bodies die and are reborn, does the subtle body ever cease to exist? When full enlightenment arises, for instance, does it just go kaput and never again, or does it still kind of continue to move to subtler and subtler realms and still function in some capacity, like I was alluding to earlier? So many people I’ve talked to have had experiences of Ramana Maharshi or Neem Karoli Baba or Jesus Christ, or all these great beings who still seem to be doing something on some level.

Thomas: Well, I would say this. First of all, I’m no expert, but the personal consciousness dissolves every night when you fall asleep and then is reconstructed when you wake up. That’s why you’re getting in your body.

Rick: But it’s kind of still there in seed form. It’s just sort of gone into, like, a flower folding its petals in at night and then coming out again when the sun shines.

Thomas: I think that’s a good way to put it, and also in formless trance state, samadhi. And then when the body passes, of course the soul is in the soul realm, and it can go through sudden shifts immediately, or it can be polished, or whatever. But it also can be available, perhaps reconstructed. It’s not like it’s always hanging out going, “God, I wonder when someone’s going to call me.” But it can be constructed in such a way that someone will have an experience of these great souls that you mentioned.

And you also know from your work that there are mediums that can get in touch with people who have passed away. So this is a great area where I think science could be more honest, because I really think that science can be used to study past lives, communication with spirits that have passed away, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences.

I don’t think science, in the mainstream, has done an honest job with that, but there have been some scientists who have written many good books about it, and some of them even give practical guidance on how to have your own out-of-body experience.

Then you would be someone who has had a conscious experience and knows from that experience that you are not just this body. And that can be really important. I haven’t had one of those.

Rick: Well, it conflicts with their paradigm. That’s why science doesn’t want to deal with it, because it’s a materialistic paradigm.

Thomas: I hear you. Yeah.

Compassion and social justice

Rick: A question came in for you from Dan in London. This gets back to your personal story. He wondered, “You mentioned you had a very loving upbringing. I think this shines through in your very gentle demeanor. Did you have any spiritual experiences in childhood, and do you think having a loving upbringing sets the scene for a spiritual awakening later in life?”

Thomas: Well, I think that that’s true, that it did do so for me, and I can’t speak for anyone else. And if I were to say, yes, it’s important to have a loving upbringing, then people that didn’t have that might go, “Oh, well, that door’s closed for me.” So I think it’s really important to look back on your past and ask the question, could this actually be perfect for me to unfold? What’s happened to me? Could that really be something that will allow me to see God in everything?

So I definitely appreciate my family. I still appreciate my family, and I also want to dedicate this to my mom, too. But what I want to say about that is I sometimes use the analogy, “Oh, we can all be like a nice big family,” and in my mind, I’m thinking of this happy family that gets along, and other people must hear that and go, “Boy, you haven’t been to my family. We don’t get along.”

So I really appreciate the fact that I have had such a caring and supportive family. They’re very Catholic. I’m a bit of a problem in that sense. It’s like, “Tom doesn’t go to church anymore. What are we going to do about that?”

Rick: He didn’t become a priest.

Thomas: Yeah, and we’ll pray for him. But my mother prays for me dearly, and she does embody the love of God, so that’s good.

Rick: So here’s a question that came from France, from somebody named A.C. in France, asking, “If life is just a play, maya, lila, in which there are good stories and bad stories, so as to make it more interesting, then why would we bother to make things better, such as protect the environment, be compassionate, etc.?” Good question.

Thomas: That’s hard to answer, but if it happens to arise for you as a wholesome inspiration to make things better, and of course that’s measured on level three of the ordinary world, it’s better to have peace than it is to have people fighting.

Better in what sense? Who says? Well, from an absolute perspective, it isn’t better. But from our perspective of the world, it’s more comfortable. I mean, I make a funny little joke in the book about going to a restaurant and ordering breakfast. You order some oatmeal, and the waiter brings it, and it’s not oatmeal, it’s sawdust. And you look up at the waiter and go, “Where’s my oatmeal?” And he says, “Everything is God. We’re all one. Sawdust is oatmeal.”

No, they’re different, and this is what the non-dual sage respects, the difference in experience. Hot and cold, good and evil, these are experiences. They’re real as an experience, and they’re different. And you can have a preference toward one or the other.

And there are other types of dualistic expressions in the world. It isn’t just this continuum between two polarities, because there’s gender, and there are also coins that come forward with their head and tail. And the world is also filled with many examples of things that are not dualistic. Multiplicity—who you are is unique. There is not a dualistic representation opposite of who you are. You and him and her and us—multiplicity. The world is filled with these multiplistic and dualistic expressions. How are we doing on time, Rick?

Rick: We’re doing okay. We’ll wrap it up in a couple of minutes. I just wanted to add that if all the world is a stage, and all the men and women are merely players, then what sort of role do you want to play? If you feel like you’re going to gain maximum satisfaction out of being a murderer or something, then I guess that’s what you’re going to be attracted to.

But if you feel like you have a choice—and I think most people would prefer, if they had a choice, to play a role that is actually going to be gratifying in some meaningful, beneficial way, to bring some good into the world. Obviously, not everybody makes that choice, and I guess whether or not we have choice is a whole other question.

But addressing A.C.’s question here, personally, it would make me more gratified to work toward some environmental solution than to be a polluter.

Thomas: Yeah, it seems to arise organically in your soul what you’re called to do, and if there is a calling to come forth as a helping hand, it can come forth selfishly: “I’m going to be the great helping hand and help little tiny you,” or “I’m here to help you.”

And when you see it all as God, when you see everything is perfect, it isn’t, “Oh, okay, I can stop now because everything is perfect.” There’s still a calling within you to come forward and engage—engage without being entangled.

Rick: Yeah, and there is blowback. I mean, things do have their consequences, and it seems to me that it’s more blessed to give than to receive, etc. And if you are working for something that has a positive quality to it, in whatever way—helping stray animals or doing some kind of service—that it cultures your own life in such a way that’s very gratifying and brings you greater happiness, even though obviously, if you’re doing it merely to gain greater happiness, that’s kind of a selfish perspective. But it’s sort of an outcome or a consequence of working that way.

Thomas: Let’s touch on that.

Rick: Yeah.

Thomas: Being happy is not necessarily a selfish thing. It can be self-love, and it’s important to make a distinction between being selfish, which is, “I get it, you don’t. Get away,” and there’s an attitude of disrespect for others.

But if you go get a massage, it can be a very loving thing to give yourself. So it’s important to be open to self-love, and a happy person most of the time is much more of a loving person, right? It’s much easier to open your heart up to others, and so I think that’s really important.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s a whole interesting section in your book about social issues and social justice and economic equity, and things like that, which we don’t really have time to go into at great length. But it seems to me that those who promote such things—

(Dog barks.)

We’ve got dog issues today here.

Thomas: That’s all right.

Rick: Those who work for social justice, the Martin Luther Kings and the Gandhis and so on of this world—that arises from, or springs from, an impulse of higher consciousness than those who are saying, “Me, me, me, what more can I get, and to heck with all of you.”

Thomas: Because it’s oriented toward cooperation rather than competition. That’s the core difference.

Closing thoughts

Rick: Yeah. All righty. Well, that might be it. There’s no ideal endpoint for this conversation?

Thomas: Oh, I’ve got a good endpoint.

Rick: Good endpoint. Okay, go for it.

Thomas: I love that expression, “We are all one,” and it speaks from two perspectives, so I’d like to open it up a little bit. I’d like to say, “In form, we are many. In essence, we are one.”

In form, we are many. In essence, we are one.

Rick: That’s great. Let’s leave it at that.

Thomas: Thank you so much for having me on, Rick. It’s been a real pleasure.

Rick: Yeah, Thomas, it’s really been a joy, and I think people will enjoy this conversation. I’ll be linking to your website, of course, as I always do, and linking to your book on Amazon, so people can get it. Is there a physical book or just a Kindle book?

Thomas: There’s a paperback and a Kindle, so it’s Amazon. Paperback and e-book.

Rick: Link to that place on the site.

Thomas: By the way, if anybody wants to get a book but they can’t afford it, the e-book, just send me an email and I’ll send you a copy.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s only like $4 or something, isn’t it, for the e-book on Amazon?

Thomas: I think the Kindle is $7, and the paperback is $14, and it has a beautiful cover. I meant to bring it, but anybody that’s interested can look on the website. I happened to shoot that cover when I was walking on the beach nearby. So I don’t want to put up any kind of financial barriers. I very much would like to speak in public as much as I can, and so we’ll see what happens.

Rick: Yeah, so if people want to invite you to come and speak someplace or something, you’re up for that?

Thomas: Yeah, I will definitely consider it.

Rick: Great. Okay, so let me just make a couple of wrap-up points.

Specific to this interview, as I just mentioned, there will be a page on batgap.com which has all the necessary links and information. In general, if you go to batgap.com and explore the menus, you’ll find all kinds of things which will be pretty self-evident. So, rather than run through them all, I’d encourage you to just go there.

There aren’t that many things, but just drop down the different menus and see what we have to offer, because there’s lots of interesting stuff. There is, I will mention, an audio podcast of this, and also a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new one is posted, which is generally once a week.

And the “Donate” button I mentioned in the beginning. We rely on the support of appreciative listeners and viewers to keep this thing going, and it’s totally voluntary. And otherwise, we, like you, like to make it free for all those who would like to watch it. So, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one.

(Music.)