Timothy Conway 2^nd Interview

Summary

The discussion explores enlightenment as a shared theme across the world's mystical traditions and examines what genuine realization includes. It also considers how unchanging awareness relates to the changing body, mind, conditioning, and conduct of an individual.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What do the world's spiritual traditions have in common in their understanding of enlightenment?
• Can enlightenment be lost, obscured, or affected by changes in the body and mind?
• How is nondual realization expressed through a person's behavior and relationships?
• What is the relationship between absolute awareness and individual consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Enlightenment is not personal property; it is universal awareness expressing through an individual.
• Genuine realization should appear in emotions, motives, and behavior, not only in spiritual ideas.
• Bodies and personal minds remain vulnerable to fatigue, illness, and conditioning.
• Unchanging awareness can witness every changing state without being altered by it.
• Humility, equality, and selfless care are important signs of mature realization.

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. I’ve been doing it for over six years now, and if this is new to you, if you go to batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—you’ll see all the previous ones archived and organized in various ways under the Past Interviews menu. Check them out.

This also exists as an audio podcast for those who like to listen to audio podcasts, and the whole thing is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. So if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it to any degree, there’s a PayPal button on the site. If you don’t like PayPal, there’s a page that explains other ways that you can donate, if you wish.

My guest today is my old friend Timothy Conway. I laugh because we’ve never met in person, but we’ve been friends for about six years now. I interviewed Timothy about six years ago, shortly after I started this show, and I recently listened to that interview. I think those who find this one interesting will enjoy that one.

In that one, we went into a lot of biographical stuff—Tim’s history and everything. We’re not going to do that this time, so if you want to fill yourself in on that information, you should listen to the first one.

I’ll read a little bio here that Timothy sent me, especially for the sake of the audio podcast listeners who may not have read the bio on the BatGap page.

“Surely by Divine Grace, Timothy woke up to non-dual reality, the Divine Reality or Self that is doing everything and being everybody. He has gratefully served ever since then as a simple spiritual friend, kalyanamitra, and, since the 1980s, as a satsang teacher, counselor, healer, and author of over 100 essays, as well as the book Women of Power and Grace , and forthcoming books, The Liberating Zen Sourcebook , the enormous two-volume India’s Sages , and other works. “His website, enlightened-spirituality.org, is a major resource on spiritual awakening, non-dual wisdom and non-dual devotion, engaged spirituality, illustrious sages and world religions, spiritual humor, and much more. “The ‘much more’ actually also includes rather insightful critiques of some teachers who might have enticed a lot of people into following them but may have gone a bit off the rails. “Timothy and his wife, Laura, are residing in Vistancia, Arizona, for at least a year to be close to her family. Timothy continues to hold free satsangs and classes on a variety of spiritual topics and also sees clients for psychological counseling services. “His basic message: ‘Your unborn true identity is already complete, whole, and full as absolute awareness-aliveness, and by the graceful power of this suprapersonal reality, the personal consciousness instrument can be suffused with all sorts of beautiful divine virtues.’”

Another thing that Timothy doesn’t mention in that bio is that he did his PhD dissertation on enlightenment. I guess I’m trying to get his arms around what it actually is. I believe it was something like 600 pages long or something, wasn’t it, Timothy?

Timothy: Yeah.

Rick: I think I even heard it was a thousand, and you managed to edit it down to 600 or something.

Timothy: Yeah.

Rick: That must have been tough on a manual typewriter back in those days if you didn’t have computers to work with.

Timothy: That’s right.

Rick: And actually, that’s the main thing I’d like to talk to you about today. We’ll talk about whatever comes up and whatever people want to ask among those who are watching live, but I would like to talk about what enlightenment is, because all of us watching this podcast, and thousands of people out there, are keenly interested in it. Yet, if you think about it, do we really all understand exactly what we mean by the word, and do we all agree on what we mean by the word?

There are a couple of reasons why I think it’s really important to understand what it is. First of all, it is not a thing that a “you” gets. We can make that clear, but the language being such as it is, it’s convenient to just talk normally.

I think one good reason for understanding what it is is that it can be an incentive, a motivation. There are many people who feel that life is meaningless, empty, and depressing, and hundreds of people a day end their lives intentionally because they don’t want them to continue.

To me, it’s like we’re all, metaphorically speaking, multimillionaires who are living as paupers, not having been told that we have this tremendous bank account that we could tap into if we only knew it existed and had a means to tap into it.

So maybe you could even just speak to that first point before we go on. As a culture, understanding that there actually is such a thing, that it’s right under our noses, and that we all have the potential for the tremendous value of living it would transform us culturally and individually.

One reality doing everything

Timothy: Yes.

Rick: You’re going to have to say more than that.

Timothy: Well, let’s get clear on some basic concepts, perhaps. That long dissertation was all about trying to find out what the common areas of agreement are among all the great sacred traditions and the sublineages within each tradition—say, Chan, Zen, and some Buddhism within Buddhism, along with the Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist schools of practice and thought.

There are Christian mysticism and Northern European Christian mysticism, Southern Christian mysticism, like in Southern European countries from Italy and so forth, going over to Eastern Orthodox spirituality, Kabbalah and the Hasidic traditions within Judaism, and different tariqa, or lineages, of Muslim Sufism and Muslim mysticism.

What are the shared features as, in each of these traditions, the members, the teachers, and the practitioners all aspire toward the acme, the summit, of realization? What are the qualities, the virtues, the knowings, and the realizations?

I’ve been devouring the literature of these traditions since I was young. There are also awakenings that happen without any reading or any preformation by concepts. I was just a dumb jock, totally addicted to sports, and I suddenly woke up. I had nothing to do with it, which is why I can’t claim it as my enlightenment and start going around trying to subtly imply that others are not enlightened, and then presume to charge people money.

The one power—shapeless, colorless, formless, and partless—that is being everyone and doing everything is not mine.

I find this one of the oldest rackets, and it’s corrupt to the core. I don’t even know how to heal the different scratches I get.

The food you might have put in your mouth for breakfast, or dinner last night—are you personally supervising digestion? No. It just happens by virtue of the great power.

So this great power is somehow using personal consciousnesses as viewpoints on reality, as places, so to say. Think of the word locus: a place, a site for experience. There is vivid experience of bodily processes, mental and emotional processes, psychic processes, and rich phenomena by the countless gazillions of beings.

One reality is doing all this, powering and animating all of this, and sustaining this amazing dream. It is a dream because it’s vanishing moment by moment by moment.

Enlightenment is really a set of phenomena for the personal consciousness, and it’s all powered by and dreamed up by this one clear-light source of all enlightenments, this one power that is powering the powerful realizations by different beings. Again, as I always say: one reality doing everything, being everyone.

I wanted to get clear that this personal consciousness instrument—this Timothy fellow—was given some kind of assignment to start researching early on what all the greatest saints and sages in all of the traditions were saying about this process of enlightenment, awakening, realization, sanctification, or salvation. Different terms have different semantics for it, and more generically, in the dissertation, I just refer to it as spiritual realization: realizing everything there is about spirit and spiritual capacity.

In a project like that, I had to do a literature review. It was massive. I also did a whole set of interviews—dozens and dozens of interviews—with different figures more or less representative of different sacred traditions.

Some criteria did emerge: different factors that definitely characterized, in common, so much of our shared sacred traditions—East and West, North and South, male and female, ancient and contemporary.

At my website, I have very short synopses and lists of these qualities, like a tremendous sense of non-duality on a whole lot of different levels: cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational.

That’s important, because if we have a very clear understanding and can give a good talk about non-dual spirituality, we know that there are fundamentally no real differences or any gulf between personal consciousnesses, or between personal consciousnesses and the one universal creative consciousness, or between form and formlessness.

But if there’s a clear understanding of this non-duality and it’s not also leading to affective, motivational, and behavioral non-duality, then something’s amiss. Something is out of balance.

I’ve always been intrigued by how spirituality—that is, the realization of our formless, open-awareness nature, pure spirit, pristine, unborn, changeless, the changeless host for this whole play of changes for the worlds and the personal consciousnesses—is realized by beings.

It’s not realized through their own power. The absolute wakes people up and then can put them right back to sleep, which is why Dogen Zenji founded the Soto Zen tradition in Japan in the first half of the thirteenth century. He said that anyone who’s boasting of some enlightenment as if it were a done deal, a completed state of affairs for the personal consciousness, should think again.

If enlightenment isn’t renewing in an ongoing moment-by-vanishing-moment, then it’s just a concept. It’s something that people are probably identifying with in a not-so-wholesome way and maybe using as a position to one-up other people.

Rick: Well, I have one trick question.

Timothy: True sages don’t operate from that kind of conceit.

Rick: Yeah, so speaking of true sages, if we put Buddha and Christ and Krishna and Zoroaster and Muhammad and Moses and whoever else in a room together and…

Timothy: Well, some of those I would call prophets, not sages. Some of them don’t seem to be as clear about non-dual truth, really all the way through, really seeing that phenomena are ultimately not other than formlessness, pure noumenon.

Rick: Okay, so if we took a collection of sages who would fit your criterion of what enlightenment is and put them in a room together from various cultures, various times in history, contemporary and ancient, do you feel they would pretty much agree with one another?

Timothy: More than that, I think they’d just be enjoying one another, enjoying the differences of how this one can somehow appear as many, how the one formlessness can show up as Rick, as each person watching this. How miraculous. Surely the openness that is your true nature, that the personal consciousness functions out of, is empowered by, animated by—surely that formless, open awareness, aliveness, is not other than what’s powering this personhood.

Rick: And so you said a minute ago that you’d have to always be on your toes because you can lose enlightenment. Do you feel that there is such a thing as enlightenment which couldn’t be lost under any circumstances, for any reason—just, sort of, you’re home free and that’s it? Or do you feel that no matter how exalted or deeply realized one is, there’s always a possibility of losing it?

Timothy: Always the possibility that the one Divine that’s coming over all phenomena could emanate an unenlightened phenomenal state for a personal consciousness, because no personal consciousness is the absolute.

When we speak of enlightenment, it is paradoxical, because the clear-light awareness that we are—the true Brahman, or reality; the true Atman, or true self; the unborn, changeless self-nature; the open being, awareness-bliss, Sat-Chit-Ananda supreme—is the light by which all lesser lights are seen and known.

All of these lights, including a very luminous deity or a luminous saintly sage literally exuding light, are phenomena. But it’s this clear-light, absolute awareness, prior to all phenomena, prior to all experiences, which is hosting this whole cosmic light show and many lights, including the light of a sage apparently enlightened. But that’s still merely a phenomenon.

So when an apparent sage comes along boasting of their enlightenment, I have to chuckle and almost shed a tear, because something’s gone wrong there. I can’t escape the fact that phenomenal enlightenment is just a speck of happenstance within the absolute nature that we are.

So enlightenment is for the personal consciousness; it’s getting cleared up. You could speak of spiritual realization. The different traditions have different names and terms for it. Usually it’s put in a cognitive sense, like that jnana, that ancient Sanskrit root. It’s in the words jnana and vijnana, and the Buddhist Sanskrit prajna. It’s the root that was borrowed by the Western mystical tradition down in Greece and Asia Minor, known as gnosis.

That all has a very cognitive semantics to it, but true realization will open you up so much that affectively—that is, emotionally and behaviorally—it’s a sheer non-duality reigning.

So someone like the hugging mother, Amma, whom you and Irene, your wife, certainly have experienced so much over the years, sometimes doesn’t articulate on the cognitive level of understanding perhaps the clearest non-dual Dharma. Sometimes it will sound rather dualistic, and yet in her actual behavior, in terms of the hugging marathon sessions and certain other aspects of her life, there is a remarkable non-duality: a lack of preference for her own comfort, a willingness to just be there hour after hour, day after day, decade after decade, for all these beings, some of whom don’t have good personal hygiene. She’ll still take them right into her arms. Lepers, even.

Rick: Oh, of course. I heard that story reported in that book chapter in the Women of Power and Grace book about Dutton. She took him to her, as one of her disciples said, as if he was her long-lost lover, and she licked his open wounds and sucked the pus out of them.

Timothy: I mean, that’s behavioral non-duality in a way that the five-star-hotel-staying, jet-setting, so-called sages I’ve heard about—charging money, and very dualistic in their preferences and biases, it seems. But somehow, Amma, in her hugging mode, she’s off the charts in terms of a capacity that most beings can’t even dream of.

Rick: Yeah, so the question, though—I want to come back to the question—is, setting aside people who may be half-baked and who may have questionable motives or whatever else, but taking the Buddha, Christ, Amma, whoever we consider to be the king of the hill in terms of human spiritual development, do you feel that even with them there’s a possibility of losing that state?

And let me just add one more thing. The Gita says the self realizes the self by the self, but it seems to do so through the instrumentality of a human nervous system. Enlightenment is a living reality by definition. Human nervous systems are frail; they’re subject to disease and dementia, or whatever may happen to a human nervous system—Alzheimer’s or whatever.

Timothy: If I could interject, Rick, it’s important to note that it’s not just human nervous systems, but the very personal consciousness itself as an instrument. Just as the moon does not shine with its own light—the borrowed light of the sun—all personal consciousnesses have their existence in this absolute awareness.

Through the creative universal consciousness power, the Shakti of Shiva—that formless divine absolute self—through its Shakti, its creative universal consciousness and life power, it conjures up all these personal consciousnesses.

So, just on the level of these souls, these persons, these jivas, there is frailty. There are the vicissitudes of the samskaras, the wholesome and unwholesome personal-consciousness tendencies that would have been called the non-binding and binding likes and dislikes.

There are innocent preferences and wholesome skills and talents. Those color or characterize a personal consciousness stream of phenomenal states, moment by moment, through the lifetimes, subtle-plane lifetimes, and earthly existences.

But there are also these unwholesome tendencies, and these are the ones that are pulling and pushing people around. So that creates a frailty just on the level of the soul, not just the physical human organism.

Rick: Right, but if enlightenment has been attained, so to speak, does that imply that one has eliminated all unwholesome tendencies, or can there actually still be a residue of those even in someone like Ramana Maharshi, for instance?

Timothy: The only kind of samskara I could find about Ramana, closely reading not just the official biographical literature but all the reminiscence literature, is that he was absolutely stubborn when anyone tried to single him out as special or tried to give him anything special, like certain medications toward the end of his physical life, when the cancer was devouring the body.

When people would bring prasadam—usually fruit or sweets, flowers, the edible kind of prasadam people would bring—and they wanted Ramana to sample it first and then give it back, he would make sure that everyone present got a bite of it before he himself partook. So he was absolutely stubborn if people tried to contravene him on that one.

Rick: Yeah, so we wouldn’t call that a flaw.

Timothy: No, no. It was the least kind of flaw you could possibly imagine for a being, but he’d actually get irate over it. But could you call it a binding dislike, in the sense of a samskara, an unwholesome samskara that would necessitate future births? I don’t think you could say that at all about Sri Bhagavan.

Rick: So would it be fair to say of enlightenment that it’s possible to have attained it to such a degree that regardless of the vicissitudes that the individual mind or body goes through, on the inside, so to speak, nothing fluctuates?

For instance, earlier this summer I was sitting maybe a few feet away from Amma, and she was giving a talk. She started talking about some disturbing, scary things that might happen to the world in coming years, and some of the stuff was getting a little strange and people were getting a little disturbed. At a certain point she just stopped and said, “I’m tired. I should stop talking.”

So a person could—an enlightened person, so to speak—could be tired, and maybe they would say something that they wouldn’t say if they were fresh, or it might not come out as clearly and coherently as it might if they were fresh.

Timothy: Oh, there’s probably a lot of witnessing of the state of fatigue. You can watch yourself fall asleep, and if you’re ever having to deal with tremendous lethargy, the capacity is simply to notice fatigue, to notice alertness, all those different states—waking, dream, dreamless sleep—and, within the waking state, greater states of energy, lesser states of energy, states of good health or ill health for body or mind. All of that can get witnessed. But the clear-light principle is always clear, always self-luminous, always self-bright, the very openness and host for whatever happens.

So that’s why one old Chan master spoke about the power here: I eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired. So much of it is just happening; it’s not me doing it or suffering it. But sometimes states of personal consciousness, suffering, or pain will arise.

Amma comes from a crazy fisherpeople’s village background. Her father had a real anger problem and beat his own daughter severely. The eldest daughter had to be like the little mother because her mother was very infirm. But then she became this full-blown mystic. She’d already had all these mystical tendencies as a youth.

Gail Tredwell, one of her longtime earliest disciples from the West, wrote that Amma would sometimes explode in ways that seemed like some raging Kali Ma, just inscrutable, and sometimes seeming more like something quite human, quite petty, and apparently quite unenlightened.

So where would those come from? How can profound personal-consciousness enlightenment—the clearing of a whole bunch of samskaras for a personal consciousness—occur in one way, and yet there might be unhealed stuff from her clearly abusive childhood?

Rick: It could also conceivably have been a teaching strategy, possibly. Although, always evoking that alibi can excuse all sorts of egregious behavior in teachers. You were mentioning a Zen teacher who beat the crap out of one of his disciples, threw him off a balcony, and did all kinds of wild stuff.

Timothy: Hakuin’s Japanese Zen master.

Rick: The disciple had a fair amount of spiritual ego—he thought he was pretty hot stuff—and so this guy pretty much pounded it out of him, literally. Eventually, the man became enlightened. So that could be a teaching strategy in certain circumstances, though I think we should use that excuse very cautiously.

Timothy: Oh, very, very, very cautiously. Just like people who have invoked the idea of those Tibetan mahasiddhas and their crazy behavior, like Marpa beating Milarepa and so forth. All of those stories were invented centuries later. The really tough stories of Tilopa beating Naropa, demanding that he jump off a cliff and then coming down to heal his broken body—all of those stories were invented about five or six hundred years later by some crazy Tibetan monk.

So the idea of taking those literally and then using them as a license or rationale for punishing one’s own disciples—that’s just such arrogance and conceit, a beggar’s description.

🛤️ Recognizing the path and avoiding spiritual traps

Rick: Don’t try this at home, as they say.

All right, so my initial question was: What is enlightenment? It’s a good idea to have an idea of what it is because it can be an incentive to “attain it,” and most people in the world don’t even know such a thing exists.

There are some series of verses in the Gita where it kind of breaks it down by powers of ten. Out of so many thousands, only one even knows that there is such a thing; then, out of so many thousands of those, only one actually strives for it; and, out of so many thousands of those, only one actually attains it. So it seems like a kind of exclusive club.

But I feel that, as we evolve as a culture into a more enlightened age—which hopefully we’re doing—it will become a better-known thing that human beings can attain to, sort of like Abraham Maslow’s self-actualization as we rise up the hierarchy of needs.

You could envision a society in which schoolchildren are taught to meditate and taught about enlightenment, and it just is as normal as learning about history or sociology or something.

Timothy: I think there’s some hyperbole in that Hindu metaphor of the exclusive club: one out of a thousand, and then of that subset only one out of a thousand. The Buddha had spoken very similarly: What are the odds of a blind turtle sticking its little head and neck through a little tiny hoop on an ocean of such enormous size? The odds are basically impossibly against it.

Rick: So, not very encouraging.

Timothy: So all of that is motivational hyperbole. It’s kind of the way Newt Rockne would tell the Notre Dame football guys, “Win one for the Gipper.” It’s a big boot-camp pep talk.

But in other ways, because the clear-light awareness, our absolute truth nature, is true, it’s simply relaxing back into what is always here—closer than close, closer than your eyeballs, nearer than thought, prior to the arising of any thought about “Will I become enlightened? Who is enlightened? How do I become enlightened?” Prior to each of those thoughts, what are you?

You are this openness right now. Right now, you are vast, open, changeless, utterly silent and still: isness, awareness, aliveness.

This is playing at personifying as a personal consciousness, and operationally that’s just a series of personal-consciousness moments. It’s a flux, a streaming of phenomena.

So I part company from those who are always trying to shame you for being a personal consciousness, shame you for your so-called “ego mind.” That’s a cheap trick that certain people in the spiritual and religious field use to make people ashamed of personhood and then feel like you have to somehow leave all that behind for the impersonal.

Our real nature is suprapersonal, and it’s the host for all the impersonal phenomena. But these personal consciousnesses—their destiny is not to be destroyed or suppressed or utterly abandoned for the sake of some impersonal reality.

Our suprapersonal reality is suprapersonal prior to the personal, beyond the personal, transcending the personal. And yet it includes consciousness states and their interaction with fellow persons and impersonal things.

So, realizing all this, there’s a clarity here, and anyone can realize this same clarity. Each one, at any moment, can simply, through this radical intuitive knowingness and knowing by being, clearly know what we always absolutely are.

This knowing by Being is available to anyone, anyone at any time, any moment. So we can’t be exclusive; there’s no exclusive club about this.

That’s why I say many spiritual teachers out there whom I find abusing or exploiting followers in numerous ways, I often find very unenlightened compared to many of their followers, who are serving selflessly and have largely abandoned all unwholesome tendencies.

Rick: That actually gets me into a second fundamental question, or fundamental reason, why I think it’s a good idea for people to have an understanding of what enlightenment is, and that is that I think it safeguards the path.

We’ve seen so many weird things come down in terms that could be loosely thrown into the basket of enlightenment or higher consciousness, everything from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate and Scientology, and any number of other things.

If someone really had a clear understanding of the goal, so to speak, and understood what the potential of human awakening or realization was, then perhaps they wouldn’t get waylaid by things like that. There’s a real value, as I see it, to infusing a clear understanding of the path and the goal into our collective awareness.

Timothy: That’s why the topic for the doctoral dissertation arose. Later on, Bill Moyers said the attempt to define what spirituality really is is the great problem of our era, because most people had abandoned traditional authoritarian forms of religion for a more generic kind of spirituality.

When we’re savvy about all the different qualities and virtues and wholesome aspects of real spirituality—living from spirit, finding spirit in everyone we meet, flowing, letting go, and not selfishly clinging or self-aggrandizing with pride and greed, defensiveness, and all that—when there’s authentic spiritual living, we’re not capable of being duped by profiteers, hucksters, and scoundrels who may have some degree of profound spiritual awakening but then manifest it in twisted, distorted ways.

It’s very easy for people to get caught up in what I’ve always called the grace chase. Then they lose the sense of the absolute, and they’re chasing phenomena. They’re addicted to the phenomena happening around a particular spiritual teacher, place, or group of people.

But when we’re clear about our absolute clear-light host nature, which is prior to all phenomena and not interested in any particular phenomenon as the method for God-realization, then there’s real freedom.

When we’re clear about our absolute clear-light host nature, you can’t be duped; you can’t be seduced.

📚 Should spiritual teachers charge money?

Rick: You’ve made a few references to teachers who charge money, and I just want to address that for a minute. Obviously, you don’t. Nisargadatta didn’t. Ramana didn’t, although the ashram received donations that supported it.

Some teachers these days are making a killing. I also happen to know some who are living very modestly but who don’t have another means of support. If they had to work an eight-hour day, they wouldn’t really be able to serve in any capacity as spiritual teachers. They charge reasonably for their time.

It would always be good, even when modest sums are being charged, to have it be on a sliding scale. Some people can drop a hundred bucks here, five hundred dollars there, or ten thousand dollars over there. It’s nothing to them. Whereas to some elderly woman who needs to be on certain medications, whose rent is going up each year, an extra ten dollars is the difference between hearing that great so-called enlightened teacher give his evening talk and having enough for her medication or food.

Timothy: Okay, but let’s get clear about something here, Rick, in a friendly discussion of this. Why is one person presuming to be enlightened and sharing teachings for a fee? That suggests, in all the trappings of the situation, that the very shape of the room, the flowers in front of the teacher, and the teacher sitting on a fancy chair usually, all of that setup reeks of what someone like Ramana Maharshi fundamentally rejected: the idea that one person is enlightened and the other is not.

When Ramana looked at people, he saw only the Self. He didn’t see a client or someone who needs to hear a message about enlightenment because you’re not enlightened and I am. He had nothing to do with that. Neither did Sri Nisargadatta, Anasuya Devi, Anandamayi Ma, the Buddha, or any number of truly realized beings.

My comment has to do more fundamentally with a power grab. It’s a seduction, because if you make your ability to earn a livelihood dependent on being a spiritual teacher, then you need spiritual disciples, listeners, and students—people willing to pay for what you have to share. I fundamentally reject that as a valid model for authentic spiritual sharing.

Rick: Well, I hear you. I can think of teachers who explicitly articulate exactly what you’re saying. They’re striving for a more egalitarian arrangement. They’re still serving as spiritual teachers, but they’re trying to empower others and make it a kind of learning circle, rather than just a hierarchical arrangement with them up on a couch.

If one makes one’s living as a psychologist or psychotherapist, one depends upon clients paying a certain fee for one’s time. Would you put that in a completely different category?

Timothy: Yes. In psychotherapy, someone comes in with a presenting problem, and soon enough, through brief therapy, you can very quickly bring people home to nondual awareness, and then their problem is obviated.

In spirituality, from the get-go, the message is one of completeness and wholeness as you are right now: closer than close. Your true nature, spirit, has no problems, no lack, no warping or trauma, no disfigurement or distortion. In spirituality, this should be the upfront message.

When money is brought in and people adduce the psychotherapy model as a rationalization, what we have here is still the model that something is wrong with people; they’re not yet enlightened. I fundamentally disagree with that entire message and approach. It’s not the message of the great sagely nondual tradition.

Rick: True, but to take an extreme example, you walk into a room of psychotics at a mental hospital or something like that and say, “Who you truly are is the pure, unchanging universal.”

Timothy: They’re not ready to hear that in most cases. Shankara made it very clear that the pure Advaita teaching is only to be shared with those who have already grown on the personal-consciousness level, such that the personal consciousness won’t be full of trauma and mental, emotional disorder and pain that will hijack, ignore, or distort the nondual message about who we are.

So there are states of readiness. I don’t deny this. There are stages of brightness.

Rick: And there are many things.

Timothy: That’s why, for many, it’s a kind of healing thing—a kind of reparenting—to have devotional practice. But the sooner devotion can be realized as nondual devotion, the better. What is the power by which I sing the praises of or bow down to the great living God? Surely that power is God.

So when the true devotee realizes that only God’s power is here, that I have no power of my own even to be devoted, then devotion is nondual devotion and is far less problematic.

Rick: I’ve interviewed a great number of people in a very sincere, honest, down-to-earth, humble way. Some of them really seem to have their head in the right place, their heart in the right place, and to be genuinely benefiting from the process. So I’m just a little bit more forgiving and supportive than you are, I think.

Timothy: I’m very supportive of wherever truth is shared in a heartfelt, sincere way.

Rick: There’s some really good eggs out there, and some of them actually are charging a fee for their retreats and whatnot.

Timothy: A good day job for many so-called teachers would be very good for humility and for generating more of that engaged-spirituality empathy for how so many workers of the world are faring.

Rick: One other thing along those lines is the readiness of a person to become a spiritual teacher. I’m told that in Zen tradition you’re supposed to wait at least ten years after awakening to take on the role of a teacher.

What I’ve observed is that in many people there’s a lot of inner Velcro still. They’ve had some awakening, they feel marvelous, they start teaching, and suddenly, without their even knowing it, the praise, the adulation, and the attention start sticking to that inner Velcro. The ego begins to get more and more aggrandized, and then they begin to get in trouble.

Timothy: Can one not be a teacher if one obviously has a vocation as a teacher? I remember sitting with Annamalai Swami, a very beautiful spiritual son of Sri Ramana Maharshi. He manifested simplicity and clarity among all the people I’d met who had personally known and sat a lot with Sri Ramana Maharshi.

I was a graduate student and broke. It would have been easy to let it all go and stay there and live on bhiksha, on donations of food and rice from the villagers. But Annamalai Swami looked at my palm and said, “You have to go back. It’s just in your prarabdha karma, your destiny karma, what’s prescribed, ordained by the universe. It just has to happen.”

I said, “But I’m so mental already, you know—a graduate student, everything. Shouldn’t I just be a farmer? Wouldn’t that be a far less problematic way, with the least chance of the ego coming in?”

He looked at my palm again and said, “You don’t have any choice about it.”

So there are going to be people who have no choice but to somehow be in some kind of teacher role or sharer-presenter role. I would simply encourage them to really check out the motivation. Would you be just as happy working in some store like Trader Joe’s? Or could you be a farmer? Could you live simply? Could you be just a housewife or house husband? Could you live without the glamour?

Rick: We try to interview people like that, actually. It’s hard to find them sometimes; they don’t have a public profile. But we do try to mix in some people who are living lives like that, who don’t want to be teachers.

Sometimes they aren’t as articulate as people who are practiced teachers, because teachers are used to teaching. But there’s a sort of innocence and simplicity, and it’s one of the original motivations of this show: to demonstrate that awakening is not for special people, it’s for everyone, and that there are all kinds of people who are driving trucks.

I interviewed a truck driver. He’s still a truck driver, and that’s what he likes to do. He doesn’t want to be a teacher, but he had this beautiful awakening. So they’re out there.

Timothy: Absolutely. This is exactly what needs to happen: the realization that this one clear light, absolute awareness, open isness, is always here, and everyone we meet can be living this.

There are many beings living from this beautiful simplicity and openness and real freedom. It’s infused with beautiful divine qualities, and that’s why I harp over and over on how enlightenment is not just some cognitive understanding.

In many circles they make a fetish out of this understanding, and then as soon as you learn the concepts and the language and can do the rap, you can sound very impressive on a conceptual level. But the quality of relationships and the presence of the divine virtues may simply not be there.

Rick: So one person might be genuinely realized and not be very clear in being able to express it; another might be able to express it beautifully but not be actually realized.

Timothy: Exactly. Inwardly they’re thinking, “Now, how can I turn you into a paying client? I want that extra mansion.”

🕊️ Mystical spirituality and engaged spirituality

Rick: Spirituality and practical realities such as economics and social justice are inextricably interconnected, and spirituality has something to offer these more practical realities and perhaps bring about some real change, with a lot less pain and bloodshed than changes have required in the past.

Why don’t you explain your three-level model? I think it would help explain why you were able to make this segue into talking about economic justice.

Timothy: I distinguished between mystical spirituality and engaged spirituality. Most of what I’ve been talking about today thus far, and much of my teaching, sharing, and writing, is about mystical spirituality. But we cannot leave aside this engaged spirituality.

The threefold model is an elaboration of the old Dvaya Satya, the Sanskrit phrase meaning “the twofold truth.” It is basically Paramarthika Satya, the absolute truth level of understanding and discourse, and the relative, phenomenal, conventional, or pragmatic level of discourse.

The absolute-level language is all about negations and superlatives: “None of this really exists right now. This is all just a dream. Only awareness is. Formlessness is always transcending, and it’s the only reality. Nothing has ever happened. You don’t exist. Nothing exists. Only the great No-thing is real.”

Rick: You could be sitting at dinner with a Neo-Advaita person and say, “Please pass the salt,” and he could say, “There is no salt. There is no passing.”

Timothy: “No table, no people, no time, no space.”

Rick: You say, “Would you cut the crap and pass the damn salt?”

Timothy: The Chan and Zen masters had a field day with anyone who presumed to be enlightened because they had a realization of the absolute. They immediately saw all that as a power play, an attempt to elevate oneself above everyone else’s level of conventional relating.

Nagarjuna himself said that Sunyata is a medicine for those who are sick with worldliness and thingness. But for those who get sick from this medicine of Sunyata, what medicine can we give them? The Chan masters had medicine. It was like, “Go scrub the floor,” or “Go read the sutras,” or “Go work with the nonmonastic laborers out in the garden or in the farm fields.”

So this threefold model posits an intermediary level between the absolute and the realm of phenomena. Level one is the absolute. Level three is the realm of phenomena: light and dark, positive and negative charge, good and evil, justice and injustice, male and female, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Sufi—all the differences and all the phenomena of all the sciences.

Level two still acknowledges multiplicity, but in the absolute perfection of how the absolute knows all phenomena and beings. Timelessly we are all living Buddhas. All—including the bad boys of history—are still intrinsically and innately pure, innocent personhood, personal consciousnesses, emanations of the one absolute.

On level three, when you’re in a hellish situation, there needs to be an intervention. Let’s bring in social workers in the case of an abusive family situation. In the case of death camps and death marches, let the soldiers come in and liberate those who were abused, tormented, and slaughtered.

Level three is all about justice and injustice, right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, skillful and unskillful. How does compassion get manifested? Skillfully, maybe not so skillfully. Let’s always be aiming for a more skillful manifestation of compassion.

But on level two, you could say that whatever is happening is somehow perfect. The souls playing the roles of perpetrators have extraordinary lessons and tests and challenges facing them. On the side of those being persecuted, it’s like, “How selfless and courageous are they in sharing their little morsels with people who couldn’t even get out of bed that day?”

So level two is all about souls, the intrinsic perfection and innocence and blissfulness of souls, their imperturbability, and their incapacity to be touched by the phenomena of the worlds of pain and denser illusion.

Rick: It’s also all about God. Is God making mistakes? Is He screwing up? Is He not omniscient? I like to think that we can actually see all these three levels, in a sense. The most manifest level is obvious: the need for social justice and all that, the laws of nature and all the things that science studies, and what we deal with as a society. At level two, the subtle level, we see divine perfection in every molecule, every atom, every biological entity.

Timothy: There are so many books by scientists who appreciate the stupendous miraculousness of these consummately fine-tuned balances. If the force of matter were just a little bit stronger or a little bit weaker than antimatter, you don’t get a physical cosmos.

And so, on that level, it makes all the difference in terms of how engaged spirituality in the form of activism gets carried out on level three, the level of pragmatic relativism.

Gandhiji, Mahatma Gandhi, was really the father of the modern-era engaged spirituality movement. He trained people in total love and respect for the essential goodness of whomever the perpetrator might be, and he forbade people from using sarcasm or dualistic mocking sloganeering.

He always wanted his satyagrahis to see that even the worst perpetrators are fundamentally innocent souls underneath all that complicated conditioning. They are, on level two, absolutely innocent, pure emanations out of this one single reality doing everything and being everyone.

So if we live all three levels spontaneously, there’s a balance. If you get too into just one level, it’s very imbalanced and undermines engaged spirituality: actually talking about certain problems, their apparent causes, and what might work to help solve them.

✨ Seeking, patience, and ongoing awakening

Rick: The first question is from Bobby in Griffin, Georgia. Bobby asks:

Timothy, can you speak to the topic of patience on the path? I have been meditating for six or seven years and have felt many changes and beautiful experiences, yet many habits in my life remain fixed. Seeking has fallen away a good bit, and I’m much happier in general, but I can’t help but want the big shift. I know that desire can be a hindrance and yet also propels us forward. It feels like a bit of a balancing act, like avoiding sweets yet really, at the core, desiring a big piece of cake.

Timothy: It’s a fun question, Bobby. Thanks for your sincerity in posing it. You’ve said a lot of the seeking has fallen off, and in fact all of it could fall off, because right now what you are is intrinsically closer than close—not at all like a human being, but nameless, formless, pure spirit. It is whole, has no parts, nothing lacking, seamless, full, openness. So there need not be any seeking.

As soon as we make who we truly are into an it or a that, many teachers continue to use pronouns that suggest a fundamental dualism between who I am and what I’m seeking. The great reality is the reality. It’s your withinness and withoutness, inside and outside, your up and down, your in and out, everything and formless.

Right now there can be completeness in your open, formless nature, and spontaneously and paradoxically, your formlessness is host for this whole play of forms. Your suprapersonal nature is hosting, witnessing, and animating.

Rick: Timothy, your last sentence broke up. Just repeat that last sentence.

Timothy: Your suprapersonal nature of body is hosting, manifesting, and powering this whole play of personhood, Bobby.

Now, for the Bobby personal consciousness, there can be not seeking but a divinely infused aspiration. Let it manifest through the personal consciousness in a full aspiration, a beautiful, lively aspiration to allow all the divine qualities, virtues, and capacities to express through the Bobby personality.

With this, it’s not a matter of patience or impatience. You are so wonder-struck, moment by vanishing moment, that anything can arise at all: a world of experience, a Bobby personal consciousness, which is just a speck upon a speck of who you truly are.

There’ll be such wonder, curiosity, openness, and sincerity that you won’t have the phenomenon of time to be impatient. You won’t be measuring this moment against some imagined future moment when you are truly God-realized.

Rick: On this seeking note, let me read you the last few sentences of an abstract I wrote up from my talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference this year:

If we see spiritual development as never-ending, will we be forever chasing the dangling carrot, or can we rest in our true nature, the seeking energy having dropped off, and yet acknowledge that, compared with what might be possible, we are relative beginners? Many spiritual teachers make statements such as, “This is it. You’re that which you are seeking. Realize this and you are finished.” Is such advice helpful, or does it shortchange spiritual aspirants?

Timothy: In the Chan, Seon, and Zen traditions, the paradox is stated fully. Beings, personal consciousnesses, are always in the process of evolution. Even the highest bodhisattvas and perfect Buddhas are always finding new powers, new capacities, and new ways of being virtuous.

Let the enlightening and the infusing of divine virtue, the learning of new capacities for helping, and more intelligent, powerful ways of being compassionate and effective continue. But fundamentally, what we are is this intrinsic, pristine openness: imperfectible, with nothing wrong, not a matter of becoming or developing.

So Sri Nisargadatta said:

What you are, you can only be. What you are not, that you can become.

In our absolute nature, it’s perfection and fullness unbounded, incomparable. But on the level of the personal consciousness, there will be all sorts of growing and developing. There can be tremendous tests and challenges. There might be post-traumatic stress disorder, wars, rapes, and terrors that the personal consciousness kind of signs up for.

When a being is suffering intense physical or emotional pain, who is experiencing it? Only God. God is the one sentience, the supreme Self, or Shiva, or the Buddha nature. The Absolute is the only sentient one here. It’s experiencing life from the Rick viewpoint, the Irene viewpoint, the birds and the bees, and the celestial beings.

So anything that any being is experiencing, it’s not their experience separate from God. Shiva is Shakti and is playing as each being, experiencing each experience. So Shiva has compassion, infinite compassion. Our Buddha nature has infinite compassion—not just wisdom, but compassion and empathy and loving-kindness and sympathetic joy for all that each being is going through.

Rick: I like to think of the metaphor of light bulbs in the electrical field. Let’s say you are the electrical field, the ubiquitous, omnipresent field which powers all light bulbs, and then individually you’re also a light bulb. As an individual light bulb, you can upgrade from a watt to something brighter, but you’re still, from the very beginning, that same ubiquitous electrical field in your absolute nature.

Timothy: On the relative level, that metaphor works beautifully to suggest that light bulbs get smashed. If the Timothy utterly vanished, it wouldn’t make a difference to the cosmos as far as who I am is concerned. And yet, for some reason, the Timothy personal consciousness is allowed to continue, as is every personal consciousness. I think our divine nature finds each of these personal consciousnesses quite adorable.

There’s an interesting, paradoxical flip that happens devotionally in spiritual life with nonduality. Instead of trying to seek out a separate, above-everyone deity to worship, you realize you are the Absolute, and you find all persons adorable. No one can be a stranger to you, no one can be lesser, and everyone is equally important.

Rick: Some say that the individual is snuffed out like a drop going into the ocean when enlightenment happens and no longer exists in any way, shape, or form. Others refer to Buddhas and bodhisattvas who continue to exist. Is your sense that there’s some sort of integrity to what we are that continues on eternally and continues to evolve, or do we just merge into the ocean?

Timothy: The ancient texts speak of the Maha-Pralaya, the great absorption of all phenomena that transcendently dreams them, moment by vanishing moment. Ultimately, all phenomena, including personal consciousnesses, are expendable. But all sorts of beautiful beings, sagely and saintly beings, avatars, become almost like beautiful archetypes, and the divine continues to animate them as it did in the first place.

Rick: I’ve interviewed at least half a dozen people who say that Ramana came to them, in some cases before they even knew he existed. He showed up in very tangible form, and later they saw a book with his picture on it.

Timothy: I’ve had these subtle-plane manifestations of Sri Ramana and numerous other beings. It’s like the one actor playing all these characters, all these personae. The old Greek word persona means literally “the mask.” That’s what “person” means: it’s the mask of the absolute infinite by which it can differentiate into different loci, different places of experience.

Rick’s experiences are not Irene’s experiences, are not Timothy’s experiences, are not that bird’s experiences. There’s all this differentiation for gazillions of beings—human, animal, celestial—and yet one being, one sentience, one awareness playing as all of these consciousnesses through the universal consciousness play, Shakti.

Rick: Is samadhi something that is required to become fully awake to the correct identification of the self as pure, open-source awareness? If someone has had this experience, even if only once, does that mean that they are fully enlightened?

Timothy: There are different kinds of samadhis recognized in yogic literature. Samadhi basically means sameness or oneness of the highest intelligence, the highest cognitive principle. It means the absorption of the mind in a trance state.

They differentiate between samadhis based on or centered on some form and Nirvikalpa Samadhi, samadhi without seed or form. The others oriented to form are called Savikalpa Samadhi. The devotional traditions have different bhava samadhis, where you’re absorbed in the essence of Krishna or Shiva.

So there are all these different kinds of samadhi. They are just experiences; they come and go. As Ramana Maharshi always invited: What are you prior to all the comings and goings of states and phenomena, visions and samadhis? What are you, changelessly, prior to the arising of all these? What are you after all of these leave? And all of them leave.

Deep, dreamless sleep is Nirvikalpa Samadhi if you were clear. Most people are not clear during deep, dreamless sleep, so it doesn’t have the glow and clarity of conscious Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

Ramana spent a lot of time in those early years at Arunachala in states of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Then one day he had a kind of death experience, a second death, years after the one that initially woke him up. Later, the second death felt like the total end of the need for any kind of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. After that, he only spoke of Sahaja Samadhi, the natural oneness, which didn’t matter whether there was a world or not, whether forms were happening or not, or whether he was talking or not.

People should also disabuse themselves of the notion that Ramana only sat around, quiescent and silent. He spent many hours talking with people, editing texts, reading the newspaper, and working in the kitchen.

Rick: I heard an interesting thing when I was listening to some recordings by David Godman. He was saying that Ramana said that in samadhi, with the senses withdrawn from their objects, he could dissolve the impurities that he tended to absorb from his devotees. At a certain stage he stopped doing that, and people around him said he noticeably aged much more quickly after that.

At one point, when he was suffering from cancer, someone said, “Why don’t you just apportion your suffering among all of us?” And he said, “Where do you think I got it from in the first place?” So it would seem that physiologically, even nirvikalpa samadhi could be an opportunity for the physiology to restore itself.

Timothy: Deep dreamless sleep is what restores or helps regenerate the physical body, whereas dreaming sleep helps restore the psyche. When you deprive an organism of REM sleep, you’ll start causing psychological disintegration. If you deprive an organism of deep dreamless sleep, they know that with certain organisms, they killed those organisms. They had to stop doing it with humans.

That’s why, on the personal consciousness level, one reads that one of the greatest health things is eight hours of sleep. Maybe twice a year I might get as much as seven hours of sleep, but for most of my adult life it’s been about five or four hours of sleep.

Rick: As I was listening to your recordings, there were several points at which you seemed to be speaking somewhat disparagingly of meditation, yoga practices, and things like that. The first couple of verses of the Yoga Sutras are, “Yoga is the cessation of fluctuations of the mind; then the seer is established in himself.” Krishna advocated being without the three gunas to Arjuna, and then said, “Established in yoga, perform action.”

I think there’s something to be said for meditative periods where the mind and body become silent. Obviously, you’re not going to remain in that state, but it produces physiological change, and it also infuses the mind with being, with pure awareness, in a way that, over time, accumulates and becomes stable under all circumstances.

Timothy: There are definitely good habits for the psyche, like eating wholesome, healthy plant food and maintaining the sattvic elements identified in the Bhagavad Gita. What my remarks refer to specifically is something I’ve noticed over and over from aspirants as they present their state in satsang.

Too often, what’s happened is that they have a huge dichotomy, a split or fragmentation in their life—a fragmentation between when they feel peaceful and meditative and all those other times.

I’m aware that so much of this also has to do with one’s home life and vocation. The CEO of an organization has to accomplish a hundred tasks before lunch and be answerable to dozens, if not hundreds, of people. It’s not going to be easy for them to live the kind of yogic serenity and bliss streaming pure consciousness states.

Emergency workers go into a crisis area. What kind of yogic calm will they have? If they’ve spent a lot of time in meditation, they have that as a baseline, but sometimes there needs to be a real adrenaline rush.

So are those people not spiritual when they’re rescuing people from the rubble after a horrifying earthquake? Someone comes to a satsang and says, “All day today, or for the last year, I’ve just felt not as peaceful as I used to when I used to be able to do retreats.” It’s at that point I realize people have confused their spirituality with states.

So much of the yogic orientation is about perfecting and maintaining states. That’s why many yogis have to become recluses and leave society, go off and live in solitude, and get a routine existence where they can dwell in some kind of samadhi or near-samadhi.

But if a bunch of children moved into a little hamlet and suddenly that yogi’s meditations were being interrupted by children playing, laughing, crying, and screaming, what would the yogi do? That yogi, having made himself a slave to a state of phenomenal peace, does not awaken to their supraphenomenal nature, which would find all the cries and laughter of the children to be other aspects of the one Om vibration.

So the sagely way is to awaken to our true, absolute Host nature, which is host for all vibrations, all worlds, all kinds of experiences, all kinds of vocations, and all states and demands of compassion.

Rick: I know plenty of people we could call yogis—householders, businessmen—who live active lives, yet who, through a lifetime of practice, have integrated the silence into dynamic activity. They could be an emergency-room doctor, someone raising a family, or whatever, and yet the serenity and clarity that might once have just been a moment has become a permanent feature of their awareness.

How does that freedom best arise? Through years and years of yogic retreat experience, or can it happen through sudden awakening? This is where the Chan and Zen tradition made a huge contribution. They speak strongly of the need for sudden awakening, dun wu, and then zengo, gradual cultivation.

There’s this sudden awakening right now. It takes no time. Timelessly, you are this changeless openness, this fullness of the Absolute, pure, pristine spirit.

Timothy: It’s in the context of that sudden awakening that the rest of the cultivation—and it can be unending for eons—can occur: the spontaneous practicing of spiritual practices, the manifestation of virtues, and the learning of different skills.

It all happens not out of the problematic sense of “I’m an unenlightened me, and I need to do these practices in order to realize the great state of freedom.” No, that whole illusion is wiped clean. From essential freedom, one freely practices this and that virtue, this and that strength.

The sudden awakening is the realization of your innate Buddha nature, your unborn, timeless, boundless Buddha nature. But gradual cultivation is what it actually means for the personal consciousness to start manifesting Buddha-like virtues, qualities, and capacities over time, over the eons. And that’s the whole process of becoming.

The Chan masters were clear: let there be tremendous energy, dedication, and effort exerted for cleaning the monastery, growing food, being a villager, being a monastic. Let there be a tremendous effusion of qualities and wholesome behaviors, yet it all happens from the context that there’s not an ego in here trying to do all that, trying to become better.

The Sankara interpretation of Advaita, the way most people have interpreted it, suggests this quality of awakening to the absolute Self, and you’re finished. It leads to people saying they have realized this Self and then trying to market themselves with the finality of that, and that strikes me as silly.

Rick: As my friend Francis Bennett puts it, “How do you know you’re done? Did someone stick a fork in you?”

Closing thoughts

So, on that note, I think we better wrap it up. There are more questions from Thomas, but I’m sure he’s asked those of you before, and we’ll end.

Timothy: Thank you, Thomas. Thomas has put in tremendous generosity and spirit. Not only has he recorded and figured out the sound levels of many digital recordings of the satsangs that I presented over the years, but he’s put them up on the internet, and all of it is available for free.

Rick: They’re nice. I encourage people to listen to them.

Timothy: Satsangs Santa Barbara.

Rick: It’s sweet because you can hear, as the evening progresses, the frogs start croaking. First there are birds in the background, then evening starts to come on, and then there are these beautiful frogs singing. It gives you a real feeling for being there.

Timothy: Sometimes there wouldn’t be any frogs, just crickets. Or some nights it was the owls—two owls that would sing to each other. We lived in houses right up on the northern edge of the city of Santa Barbara, so the whole back was wilderness.

Rick: And that’s at enlightened-spirituality.org, right? People can find those recordings, as well as hundreds of pages of things you’ve written. I especially encourage people to read that “Three Levels” article. It’s a handy teaching tool and a way of understanding and reconciling the paradoxes that we sometimes encounter in spiritual practice or spiritual pursuit.

Timothy: But you’ll find all of this right in yourself, anyone who, without even reading. I never read anything when there was a major awakening and life-changing boom in the [unclear] year, or whenever it was. Anyone can open to this, and then you’ll be creating your own websites or something, freely sharing. It’ll all be realized to be the activity of the One streaming us all.

Rick: Apologies to those whose questions I didn’t get to. If you have questions, you can freely email Timothy at d.conway@cox.net.

Timothy: Do you want me to post that on your BatGap page?

Rick: Sure.

Timothy: Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll post your email address, and people can email you if they didn’t get a chance to ask their question online.

Rick: So let me just make a couple of wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Timothy Conway. It’s my second interview with him; check out the first one if you like. You’ll find them both, and many, many others, on batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P.

I encourage you to explore the menus and see what else is on there. There’s an audio podcast, as I mentioned. The previous interviews are categorized in several ways. A number of them have been transcribed if you’d like to read them.

And there are some other things. Look under the Resources menu; you’ll find useful resources and tools, and this is a work in progress. There will be many more.

I think we’re going to take a little vacation for a couple of weeks now. When I come back, that weekend I’ll be interviewing Radhanath Swami, who is a leader of the ISKCON, or Hare Krishna, movement, and Rick Weinman, who is the founder of something called Vortex Healing. Then, a week after that, Sri M. I believe I’ll be going off to the Science of Non-Duality Conference and having conversations with Adyashanti, Susanna Marie, and other people.

So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you, Timothy.

Timothy: Thank you, Rick, for the chance to be with all dear souls here. Best wishes in all the work that you, Irene, and everyone involved with BatGap are doing. It’s a great service, bringing forth greater wisdom and compassion.

Rick: It’s great fun. Namaste.

Timothy: Namaste, dear Rick G. [Music][Music][Music][Music]