Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Timothy Conway. Do you prefer to be called Timothy or Tim, or doesn’t it matter?
Timothy: I like Timothy.
Rick: Timothy, okay, we’ll stick with Timothy. And Timothy and I somehow connected, I don’t know, a few years ago. I think maybe I saw something you were posting in an Amma chat group or something and I contacted you about something and then we kind of ended up on each other’s humor and political lists, which is actually not the only spiritual person I’ve interviewed who’s ended up on my political lists. There’s another guy I did a week or so ago who’s in the same predicament. And so I’ve kind of known him from that angle, but it was actually only until recently that I read things he had written or things about him in greater detail, specifically an interview in Non-Duality Magazine, to which I’ll link from batgap.com and also a very interesting page if you do a search for “neo-Advaita” in google, this page comes up in the number one position. It’s about a 44 page thing that Tim wrote and assembled about neo-Advaita or pseudo-Advaita or whatever you want to call it versus real Advaita or non-duality. And maybe we’ll touch on that topic a little bit as we go along. But in any case thank you for arranging to do this Timothy. I’ll have to get used to that. And I’ve really been looking forward to it.
Timothy: Me too. It’s been this fun cyberspace solidarity going on between the two of us, as with so many dear souls. What powerful technology that somehow some universal mind or minds is congealing where we can again have great resonance on spiritual topics and realizations and aesthetic beauty and all the gorgeous photos people are sharing on the net and the cute animal photos, you can get tired of that, seeing the suchness of each being, each manifestation of the One Supreme Self in these beautiful animals. And then again the humor which keeps us all light. Some may know I have this huge spiritual humor collection at our enlightenedspirituality.org website. And then of course the political, social justice, racial justice, economic justice issues, who can be a mystic and not feel everyone’s pain is my pain and everyone’s struggling is my struggling, this solidarity with all life. So Rick is an incredible source. Thank you Rick for just all that you do. I kind of wonder, do you have a parallel life where you’re generating and passing along all this stuff because I have no one on my list who is sharing as much as thyself. So boundless gratitude. Not that mind you I have the time to read all of it or even see all those cute animal photos but I actually save probably two-thirds of the stuff you send along for some parallel life for me where I’ll get a chance to fully enjoy all of it not just some of it.
Rick: If you ever get sick or something, you can just sit there and look at animal photos for a week or two.
Timothy: Right, that would be healing.
Rick: Let’s see, what was I going to say? Let’s just start about your story. It took a little bit of arm-twisting for me to get Tim to want to talk about his personal story because he really identifies quite strongly with the impersonal, universal quality or aspect of reality. But he does have a very fascinating story on a personal level. And as I’m sure we’ll allude to a number of times during this discussion, Tim shares my perspective that the personal is not to be dismissed or ignored as insignificant as some people seem to tend to do when they initially identify with the impersonal, they kind of brush off the other half of life. So let’s consider how you arrived at that perspective, Tim. The first thing that struck me in your Non-Duality Magazine interview was an experience you had when you were about 16 years old or something like that?
Timothy: Yeah, what to say? I went into great depth there. John LeKay, the interviewer, really got me to share more about this than I’d ever done. So all the details are there. He wanted to know what I felt, what I saw and specifically what happened, what led to it. So I’ve gone into all of that. Basically, I’ll give the gist here because there are a lot of delightful topics to talk about. I’m really interested in the personal. It’s not my personal, I’m interested in fellow beings. And by the way I always like to distinguish for satsangs and classes and dear friends who gather at guest lectures and stuff that I’m invited to share that the realization of the absolute is not impersonal. Hydrogen gas and rocks and minerals are impersonal. We persons are so much more than, again, like hydrogen gas clouds or something because we have expressivity, sensitivity, creativity and so forth, the capacity for interrelational empathy. Maybe the hydrogen clouds have that too but we can’t detect it. So I distinguish between the impersonal and then the personal, which is so much more, it seems anyway, to us, than the impersonal. But then beyond that, whatever we wish to call the great supreme spiritual reality that’s our source, that’s dreaming all of us moment by miraculous passing moment, this absolute reality must surely be supra-personal or trans-personal as Abraham Aslow, the new transpersonal psychology crowd has been calling it since 1969. So somehow this supra-personal reality which dreams all of us beautiful, poignant, sometimes kind of pathetic, ridiculous persons, I was such a one. I was a kid, a jock. My religion growing up was Catholicism but it was just nominal. I have to say bye to someone who’s caring for our plants. Thank you, Janneke. Bye-bye. And sports was my real religion as a kid growing up. So at about age 14 a series of knee injuries, playing football, basketball, so forth just started wiping out any possibility of an athletic career and that always been my dream as a boy when adults would ask me, “What are you going to do, Sonny, when you grow up?” I always thought I would somehow be involved in sports, a career in it as a performer and then maybe a sportscaster, sportswriter, or something. So that’s all I was reading as a kid was sports illustrated and books about athletes, fictional and non-fictional works. And I suddenly realized all of this is just being taken away with these knee injuries. So I was in a depression, a situational depression, quite clear. I look back and my dreams were very dark, filled with strange entities, strange happenings. It was hard to just get up in the morning. I just felt like, “Is there a way I can just pull a switch and make all of this disappear?” So more and more I was getting more morose, more down, more devitalized. I wound up coming down with strep throat and that strep throat had me sidelined for about a good two weeks. I remember being on antibiotics and seeing the doctors a lot. And they said, “You’re just going to have to take a long time off of school and wait it out because you also don’t want to infect others.” So I sat at home, and those two weeks or so at home were just like some kind of hell. And interestingly our Jesuit priests and novices and the lay teachers at my high school – I went to a Jesuit prep school high school in Los Angeles – they had us reading the French existentialist. So that’s not a good combination for teenage kids.
Rick: It’s like rubbing salt in your wounds.
Timothy: Yeah. I mean, young people, it’s hard enough growing up just with the hormones in our Western culture. I won’t go into a long thing about that but it’s very easy for teens in our culture and older folks to be in real identity crisis. Who are we really? What are we here for? It’s our spadharma, as they would call it in India, our vocation, as the Catholic tradition calls it. So I hadn’t awakened to any of that. I felt completely lost. I felt like I was disintegrating and just, again, getting so devitalized and depressed. And all of that French existential literature with the emphasis on the absurd and the meaningless was maybe the final straw. So I began to definitely start in my mind wondering, “What would be the cleanest way that would leave the smallest mess to exit this life?” In other words, I was becoming suicidal. And then finally I was well enough from the strep throat not to have any more excuses not to go to school. So I started going back to school, but it came even worse at that point because now interacting with fellow human beings and seeing people at the market or in the cars next to me on the freeway, it seemed like everyone was stuck in this sense of hopelessness and emptiness of life. And I actually began to ask people, “Are you happy?” I couldn’t find anyone who didn’t have some kind of qualification or excuse for not being happy. One day in the afternoon I realized my body had gotten very devitalized. I needed some exercise and get my energy going again. I had been so active as a kid. I was trying to play sports my entire life, basically, whatever chance I could get to be outside throwing a ball or shooting hoops or whatever. So I went out in the backyard. My parents at that point lived up near Mulholland Drive looking out over the San Fernando Valley to the north. And I was out there doing some calisthenics. After about ten minutes, I felt the urge to just stand there, and I was suddenly just riveted. And whatever was going on I hadn’t prepared for this in any way, hadn’t read any spiritual books or anything. The only thing and I forgot to mention this in the Non-Duality Magazine article, the interview with myself, was I had been contemplating, “What is this void of pure God before God creates a cosmos, before there’s a universe? What is there?” But that wasn’t in the foreground of my consciousness that afternoon when I was doing the calisthenics, but it must have been somewhere in the background. It allowed a kind of an openness and suddenly everything just dropped away. There was this profound opening. It was as if you took Timothy, this depressed, confused, spiritually stunted kid and you just replaced him with nothing but love and joy and gratitude and this sense of vitality. I felt like in a kind of subtle, subtle vision, I’m not a visionary but some things have been seen over this life, very interesting and anomalous, but in that moment there was a subtle vision and it was of all our loved ones on high, so to say, all the spirit guides, angels, saints, benevolent ancestors and I felt some of my Catholic conditioning coming in, Jesus, Mother Mary, the Catholic saints and God, him, her, I am that himself, suddenly were just showering me with grace. I felt so lucky, so grateful, and everything after that was entirely different. My life had changed from all wrong, suicidal, utterly depressed, to absolutely all right. I was totally made of solid bliss of God.
Rick: I just want to say, it’s interesting that you should have had that vision because I often get the feeling when I hear experiences like this that there has been some kind of blessing or some kind of grace through some conscious entity of a higher nature, that it’s not just some physiological shift or something that took place but that you had a calling, a destiny, or whatever, and you were given that blessing at that time in order to step into it. It may have been something that was prearranged before you came into this life, who knows, but I often get that feeling. It just seems like a real possibility from my way of thinking and you’ve done well with that. I mean, you’ve made good use of it which we’ll continue to talk about as we go along here.
Timothy: I would just underscore that, Rick. I mean, you’re right spot on with that because this was sheer grace. I had nothing to do with this. There was nothing about deserving and it wasn’t just a physiological thing. I triggered endorphin chemistry and serotonin chemistry by being outdoors much of my life and all the sports activity and so forth. Every morning, up until all the injuries and the depression, I couldn’t wait to get up and get out and be active and part of life. It wasn’t like suddenly for the first time in Timothy’s life some decent serotonin is flowing or some endorphins. I’d been running that chemistry since I was a little child. This was very different.
Rick: And it might very well be that the knee injuries and the depression were part of the scheme. “All right, we’re going to injure this kid.”
Timothy: “We’ve got to get stripped.”
Rick: “Yeah, we’re going to knock this kid down a bit because otherwise he’s not going to want to have this breakthrough.”
Timothy: There has to be a real emptying out, and however that occurs, I don’t think one can deliberately empty oneself because then you’re full of yourself, trying to empty yourself. But if we just trust, if there’s a faith that somehow the source of all of this miraculous, wondrous appearance is divine, call it what you will, the Tao, the Buddha nature of life, some incredible super intelligence, super power is responsible for all this. And if you just kind of trust this power that’s putting you to sleep every night and refreshing you, dreaming your dreams, dreaming your big waking daydream of life, growing your hair, digesting your food, running your millions of enzymes per second, if you trust this power, sooner or later I think there’s no choice about this. This power will take over your life, transform you, and everything that was all wrong becomes perfectly all right.
Rick: Now I kind of interrupted you because I wanted to interject that thing.
Timothy: Oh, interrupt as much as you want.
Rick: Okay, but now I want to get you back on track. So I interjected that bit about the blessing, I want to emphasize that a little bit more, that it seems like there was some sort of divine intervention which facilitated this but you were about to say that everything was different after that and I’ll let you continue from there.
Timothy: Well, so many parameters, if you will, did change. Again I wrote all of that after John LeKay’s Nonduality Magazine. For you and your viewers here I don’t want to make it too lengthy and I have a reason not just wasting time about someone’s personal story, when again, the real reality here is the super-personal divine, our true nature, what we look from, feel from, the unseen seer of seeing, the unheard hearer of hearing, and so forth, is our most ancient wisdom text, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad set about 3,000 years ago. The main reason I don’t want to talk too much about it is I don’t want anyone to feel like my life doesn’t measure up the way his does. I haven’t experienced what he does and then these subtle comparisons. The way I feel that everyone is just absolutely the fullness of God as they are, this particular life, no matter be it full of physical pain, emotional pain, relationship trouble, vocational job issues and challenges, I feel that each life is the absolutely superb manifestation for the moment in an incredible divine drama of such incredible beauty it will just make you weep. And so, people started to get too fascinated by, for instance, I started feeling all this sense of wonder moment by moment, everything and everyone became precious that later what I learned, the old Sanskrit word, “tathata,” the Buddhist term we translate as “suchness.” The Zen friends speak quite a lot about the suchness of each being, each life, each manifestation, be it animate or inanimate, nature made or man made, this preciousness of every phenomenon, a profound sense of wonder and gratitude, that was one specific quality that came in. Later I would learn in the Franciscan tradition, it’s funny, just about four blocks down are Steve Hill here in Santa Barbara, right up against wilderness and looking out to the ocean, about four blocks down there’s a street called St. Francis Way, I think it’s so perfect every time I drive by that going downhill because St. Francis of Assisi, his way was not loving nature but loving this tree and this bird and this little bug and this human, his love of humanity, and it wasn’t a generalized abstraction for him, it was this human being whom he got to meet, this human being whom he got to meet, be it a leper or one of his fellow friars or one of the institutional church people or a peasant farmer. So this suchness quality in this Franciscan way which I hadn’t read about at that point, later on I would read about it, this became very profound for me. I would often just spend hours just gazing at a shrub, the lighting on the leaves, feeling the life power that was in that shrub, what was it like to be a shrub? We may not consider it a person but I didn’t consider it inanimate, it was somehow lit up with the personal energy of the super personal God. So this quality of ongoing wonder and tremendous appreciation for each being in the suchness and that’s what, if you will, antidoted me to when I later began to read a lot of this very powerful Advaita literature from age 18 onward, that’s another part of the story, you know so much of that is neti neti, not this, not this. That line itself also comes from the ancient Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, our most ancient wisdom text on the planet. All that deconstructive, disidentifying, negating, what in Christian mysticism is called apophatic, via negativa, negating way mysticism, all of that happened for me in a context that was already so full of the via positiva, the positive way of not negation but affirmation, not affirmation of me, I felt like no thing, just open up for a God. What was so spectacular was the affirmation of everyone and everything. So a certain kind of narcissism that all kids basically have until they learn some amount of empathy, what it’s like to really fully feel into a fellow human being or any kind of sentient being, that narcissism that’s suddenly given way, I won’t say perfectly or completely mind you, don’t anyone put me on any kind of pedestal because there’s been some narcissistic behavior since then or just basic selfishness, a lack of perfect empathy in certain situations that’s for sure. The human act is a case of perfection perfecting itself perfectly as an old Taoist friend said because let’s face it the human being is full of imperfect conditioning, conditioning that’s not virtuous or wholesome but full of all sorts of forms of selfishness and greed, again, lack of empathy, lack of love, kindness, generosity. But I have to say that suddenly the orientation has shifted from all about me to all about who is this, what’s it like to be you, what’s it like to be a fellow human being, this shrub, this little bird singing on the branch or the little bug that came from the screen, appeared on my desk in my study. I told John, “Hey, I actually bought a little magnifying glass I could keep in my desk drawer so that when certain little bugs sometimes came to visit, especially in spring and summer and fall nights I could kind of gaze at them eye to eye, sometimes my two eyes to their four eyes or however many they had and just contemplate what’s it like to be this fellow being?”
Rick: So you’re saying that this happened at the age of 16, all of a sudden you kind of had this 180 degree turnaround and you had that orientation, looking lovingly at every little thing large and small. Did people notice a change in you, your friends and family? What happened to Timothy?
Timothy: Oh yeah, that was rather interesting. I mean in the home life it became a source of disturbance because my mother – and I relayed a story for John LeKay in that magazine – my mother and my sister secretly thought I was on drugs. One night in particular I remember this would have been a number of days into it and mind you about four days into the total change or whatever you wish to call it, the opening, my mother said “You know Timothy, you seem so happy all the time.” I said, “Yeah Mom, something just happened the other day. Everything’s completely different. I just feel like God is inside us and all around us and everything’s precious and sacred.” She said, “Well, you know, you’ve probably had some kind of a religious experience. You might want to read the Bible.” So I actually sat down one night, probably a week into this transformation and just began to read the Gospels. I didn’t read any of the other stuff, the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, I didn’t read the Epistles or thank God I spared reading the Book of Revelation, the worst thing that ever happened in that Bible, all that apocalyptic obsession and dualism and paranoia. No I just started reading the Gospels and it was clear to me Jesus was this God-abiding, God-permeated mystic and he was sharing what it’s like to live God and invite everyone into this same divine party of non-dual bliss. “May we be one with the Father as I am one with the Father,” as he prays in that Last Supper discourse in John. So I began to read the Gospels. Catholic kids aren’t encouraged to read the Bible like Protestant children are. So it was kind of a revelation for me because we’d always just get little dribs and drabs from the pulpit in church on Sundays. I had been an altar boy and I’d heard the little passages from the Gospels during the homilies and so forth and the readings but I’d never really gone through it. So that was to me confirmation that we could live this completely God-filled life, emptied out of self for God. This line really struck me powerfully early on where Jesus enjoins or invites people to lose your life for the everlasting life, the divine life. So I began to read the Gospels and then it got even deeper and more profound. So one night, for instance, my dad was off while working. He had his own literary agency in Hollywood working with writers and directors. He’d given up working on actors and actresses years before, a little too much trouble. But he was getting jobs and breakthroughs for all sorts of Hollywood writers and directors and this sort of thing. So he would sometimes not come home until about 6.30 or 7. And my mom sometimes liked to feed us kids early so we could, kids, my sister was 15, I was 16, so that we’d get our homework done, maybe, you know, whatever, get out and play. So one night I remember in particular my mom is saying something like “So Timothy, how was school today?” I said, “Mom, that was back then.” That’s a memory right now can you feel just how vivid and how powerful it is? Can you feel just God vibrating all of us? And I noticed she shot a glance over at my sister but I was still focused on my mom and I’m wanting to talk more in this mode. And after a while my mom kind of made some kind of signal to my sister and she excused herself from the table. My sister began to converse with me, asking questions, what it was like in the state I was in. And about 20 minutes later my dad comes storming through the door. My mom had gone off and called him on the phone. And he came storming through the door using expletives I won’t repeat here, you know, what the frigging hell is going on? And are you on drugs? And suddenly I just did this complete change and slipped back into a very non-mystical, conventional kind of self or persona, social role. And I reassured them I just had a heart-to-heart discussion. Mom, dad, sister, Kathy, I don’t know what’s happened but it just all feels holy. It was actually from that time onward we actually began to discuss the possibility of maybe becoming a priest or something. That was the only context I knew for living this. We didn’t have, it was actually the year the Yes movement got born, but the Human Potential Movement was really nothing, there was really nothing you would read about in the papers. My parents were lovely people, very kind, generous, life-loving, fun-loving, but they weren’t mystics really. There was nothing on our bookshelves at home about any of this. So what is curious, my sister, when I was young with her, I was about eight or nine and she was about seven or eight, for whatever reason at one point we began to spontaneously share spontaneous haiku, kind of poetic sayings. Somehow we’d heard something about Zen and we began to just speak spontaneous haiku to each other. So it’s like already in our way we were starting to get maybe a little taste of the suchness of life but it was just at that point just kind of an innocent childhood thing. But the bottom line was I did realize that when one opens this profoundly, several things can happen. You can start, the energy just becomes so bright, you become so here and now, so present. A lot of folks’ energy level will not be comfortable with that. They’re used to a more conventional way of being. And so I realized I can in various ways invite them into the same energetic mode I’m enjoying but I don’t want to be presumptuous, I want to honor their truth. And so I realized I really need to learn the language of mystical expression so I can find meaningful ways to communicate this so it doesn’t just blow people away.
Rick: Were you maintaining awareness during sleep at that stage?
Timothy: Dreams for instance became lucid quite often. The deep dreamless, here and there it was spontaneous, I would come to clarity in the middle of the night. It was so clear, all of this was one big arbitrary dream, the waking state, the night dream state. I wasn’t yet a Samadhi adept, not that that’s been my focus for the remaining four decades since then. Later on I did practice consciously falling asleep, just letting go, getting subtler and subtler. The brain of course as we know is moving into stage 1, 2, 3, 4 sleep and these slower brainwaves from beta to alpha, delta to theta. But I was happy to just go off to sleep. I wasn’t really a yogi back then, so much of this was spontaneous. I hadn’t done anything to make it happen, I wasn’t reading yoga texts or anything to try and keep the experience around. It was always available thereafter, this bedrock sense of joy, it was like my default state, whereas the mind, the emotions might get a little agitated about this or that. It was so easy to just come back to this, if you will, to use a different metaphor. It was like a buoy, it just always comes back up.
Rick: I was just curious because some people report that when they have an awakening, pure awareness is just maintained 24/7 and if they don’t understand that sometimes they think, “What’s the matter with me? Do I have insomnia now?” Because I never seem to lose consciousness, even though my wife said I was snoring or whatever. It didn’t seem to me like I was sleeping, so I just wondered if that happened to you, but it’s just a side point.
Timothy: Again, Nirvikalpa Samadhis have come, but that’s not the focus. And it’s so clear to me that what we are is already the open “no” thing. I have to be frank, I’ve always been somewhat critical, at least for myself. Others may be quite wonderful that they get lots of time in Nirvikalpa, pure formless Samadhi states, but for this one, it was always so clear that we look from the “no” thing. Why try to make the mind “no” thing? The mind is this incredible instrument as is the body, for sharing, communicating, creating, empathizing. So I was curious, because I was very introverted as a kid, but if anything, these openings – they opened up that introversion all the way to the “no” thing-like source and the sense of the pure void but it was so clear that the void was every one and every thing as well. Formlessness was forming. The non-personal, if you will, was personning. And so it all became of one piece. We know that so many great mystics like Sri Ramana Maharshi, Saint Francis of Assisi, wasn’t just a “nature mystic.” He was spending 8, 12, 16 hours a day in formless, or maybe Savikalpa, near formless, subtle subtle seed of love or divine contemplation in these long trance states. Timothy was never really a trance mystic. I never seemed to have time for it but I had all these involvements and opportunities. One time I have allowed for these kind of states of non-involvement have been all the long trips to India and Burma where I could just sit around. There was nothing to do. There was no people in particular to see, no manuscripts to work on, school projects, service projects, anything.
Rick: So you’ve taken us about a few weeks into this realization and you learned how to modulate it so you didn’t blow your family away. They began to realize you weren’t crazy or on drugs. And at this point I get the picture that you must have begun to want to understand this more and to seek out things to read or people to talk to who could understand it and who could talk to you about it. So is that correct? Did you begin to read Eastern philosophy or more Christian?
Timothy: That happened a bit later. My senior year, this awakening happened in the early spring or actually late winter, it was February of 1971. I was born in the Gemini, June 5, 1954. Virgo rising and Leo moon and a lot of planets in cancer for all you astrology buffs. Incidentally astrologers would be fascinated that it was in that sixteenth year that my sun, what’s the word, progressed or transited into Cancer, which is a water sign. So it really opened up the heart. Gemini’s tend to be airheads basically, more engaging say than the Aquarius air sign. My dad, late dad was an Aquarian. Anyhow, well, you know, mainly what I want to do is just share. It made me something of an extrovert. So many people socially, like high school and neighborhood and so forth, we all just suddenly were hanging out a lot and people wanted to know what had happened because they knew that I’d never touched drugs, but they all thought I was on drugs and then found out I wasn’t on drugs and they want to know how do we realize that. So I was basically inviting people just to relax. I would sometimes sit with folks one-on-one and just invite them to change viewpoints. Imagine you’re Timothy and I’ll imagine or intuit deeply then bow.
Rick: And did that work for people?
Timothy: Some people who’d actually done quite a lot of LSD and Psilocybin, all sorts of creative openings, some of them were blown away. It was too much like spiritual vertigo when I would invite them just into this pure open being, awareness, openness. And they wanted something to fixate on, be it a vision or a practice. My sister, some months after this opening, she and my aunt went off and got initiated in TM but it never held any appeal for me. I felt like the whole universe was vibrating as mantra sounds. Sometimes I’d just listen to the sounds of traffic or the wind in the trees or some, like the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen or something. And it was just revelatory to me. So I didn’t feel the need to seek out methods. What did happen and I shared this for John, I’ve shared this a few times because it’s a fun story, a delightful math teacher we had in high school, Father Colosimo, he was probably fresh off the boat about 30 years earlier, this Jesuit math teacher down at my high school Loyola. He said something one day in math class, I believe it would have been algebra class, and it kind of piqued my interest. I thought, well, maybe this is someone I could speak to in more depth about this because no one in my social circle and in the adults I knew seemed to be open to any of this sort of thing. Or if they did, they were sympathetic but not knowledgeable. So Father Colosimo said something one day, and I thought, I bet he knows something. So I asked to see him after school that day and so he said, “Sure.” So I met him on the steps of the rectory right next to the big classroom building in downtown LA. After a few words he invited me up into the hallway and then after a few more words, he invited me over into this big kind of parlor room, living room, whatever you want to call it because I could sense he wanted to talk about stuff that maybe would be dangerous if it was heard by other priests or novices or students. So we began to talk and just very quickly I was saying to him, “Father, you know, it says in our catechism and what we hear in the pulpit and the sermons on Sunday that God is not on earth. God is the creator of earth. God is up there. We’re down here. God is separate from us. But is this really true? Sometimes it feels like God is inside us, all around us, and we’re not separate.” And Father Colosimo’s eyes just lit up and he looked both ways to make sure no one was listening and then he looked at me and his eyes were just beaming light, radiantly, almost twinkle and zest and he said, “Yes Timothy, in the mind of man there is separation between man and God. In the mind of God,” and then he looked around again left and right and he says, “Timothy, in the mind of God, it’s all God.” And in that moment he was so lit up and it was such a beautiful, blessed confirmation for me that one could just allow God to be all in all.
Rick: Well, God is supposed to be omnipresent, right? I mean, so if he’s omnipresent how could he just be up there?
Timothy: And that’s what I really tuned into like with those gazing exercises I would invite people into. It wasn’t really an exercise it was just an experience, an invitation to feel each other. Because whereas it was so clear about the power of now, this was before Ram Dass wrote his book or Eckhart Tolle wrote his book and I hadn’t yet read it in the ancient Christian mystics as I would start to delve into it. Just as it’s so obvious ‘now’ is the only moment, and whereas this ‘now’ is momentary, the Buddhists were so savvy, Lord Buddha himself pointed out in trillions of events per second, it’s all fleeting. It’s the fleeing “now” – the nunc fluens, but the nunc stans, as an ancient Roman philosopher distinguished, the now that stays, that stands, the eternal now, this is the now we’re always part of in which all the passing, changing, transitory moments occur. So there’s a lot of emphasis in mystical texts and certainly in the modern mysticism we’re having in America the last 30, 40 years, a lot of attention and focus on the now but there’s almost no focus on this radical, omnipresent here. In other words when I look at you, I can think, wow, this is a webcam, so I say, you know, you’re a foot and a half away but really you’re in Iowa, which is what, about 1,500 miles away from California so if I think of you as an it, out there, or over there, I’ve depersonalized you in a way, I’ve made you an object, I’ve cut you out of my here, but you know yourself, Rick, you know you are right here and if you were deluded, if you were deluded, you would think, oh, there’s that Timothy bloke out there in California, out there in it, out there, but you’re not deluded you know that I look from the same here that you look and feel and perceive and function from. So this became quite clear early on that there is, as you say, this omnipresent here, this is our true nature, so no one is distant from us. Lord Buddha, Lord Jesus, God, him, her, I am, self, is right here where we are. I often would ask my mom when she was trying to figure out what had happened to me or dear friends, I even kind of challenged a couple of teachers at high school about this, and they would speak of God, and there was kind of a reference to the guy up there. I said really now, where is God? And if we were to go as souls, quote unquote, with the dropping of the body to heaven and God was what, seated on a throne, surrounded by angels, what would we see? Would it be God as an it over there? Is this God’s experience of God’s self and God’s experience of the divine within us? So I began to really challenge a lot of the received wisdom, the non-mystical kind of religiosity that would make God an ‘it’ or the Buddha nature an ‘it’ up there. And that’s why so many of the neo-Advaita or pseudo-Advaita texts today, they’re always referring to the self as ‘it’ and that strikes me as just an abstraction. Just talk about this, here, what we are, what you are, what I am. And this makes it real, this owns it so it’s not just an abstraction to the mind.
Rick: So when you began to challenge it, did you begin to challenge it openly like in your classes at school?
Timothy: Oh sure.
Rick: Did you start getting flack for that?
Timothy: Not really, maybe a little. One of the things that occurred with this opening was fearlessness and I knew what we are. I knew what this truth of who we are is. And it’s not something I can own or aggrandize myself with. But I won’t say it was as fully brave and heroic as Socrates in ancient Greece but definitely I was inviting people to question received wisdom, the CW, the conventional wisdom which turns out to be a lot of illusions and conditioning. God bless everyone.
Rick: So had it dawned to you at that point, or occurred to you that what you were experiencing was what all the great mystics had been referring to or hadn’t that quite clicked yet?
Timothy: I began to read the mystics, but at first it was just Catholic mystics and books I could find in our high school library. It wasn’t a big collection. At some point I found Meister Eckhart, the real Eckhart, the one 700 years ago who shared all about the God, the un-God and God is simple, man is complex, God is at home, man is abroad, out in the mind, all in the wanderings. In my senior year we did get a basic, heavily Christian biased little primer for our high school on world religions. I remember being dazzled by some of the stuff revealed therein but I didn’t have the wherewithal or the knowledge of resources to be able to find that myself. Basically what happened was after graduating high school I wound up going to the University of California at their Santa Cruz campus. I’d been attending UCLA down in Los Angeles, advanced placement courses. They let us high schoolers do that so we could get a taste of college before we actually went off for the collegiate experience. So I went off to UC Santa Cruz and double majored in religious studies and psychology. I felt they needed each other, they go together. I learned about transpersonal psychology within a year or two. But that very first quarter up there in Santa Cruz, there in the wonderful redwoods with the moisture, the rainfall nightly almost, the beautiful sunny days, the oceans, the hills and forests, the rock quarries. I met a very interesting chap named Dan McClure. Dan, wherever you are, we haven’t kept touch for so many years. Wow, so much gratitude here for thee because he gave a guest lecture in Professor Noel King, the beatific, venerable old Noel King, the chair of religious studies at the UC. He’d been a missionary in Pakistan, growing up there with missionary parents. He taught a basic religious studies 101 course and Dan McClure was invited in week two or three to give a guest lecture. He was a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Department at Santa Cruz.
Rick: They had a whole department for the history of consciousness?
Timothy: Yeah, they did. It involved anthropological studies and cross-cultural psychology and so forth. They didn’t really have consciousness studies the way we know it now say from the Journal of Consciousness Studies. There were David Chalmers and so forth, Arthur Deichmann and these lovely people who made it clear to science that, “Hey, what do you do about this fundamental challenge? What is consciousness? Without consciousness you don’t have your theorems or fieldwork or computer screen readouts. Consciousness is primordial. You’ve got to solve what this is before you can figure out what is energy, matter, space, time and so forth. Anyway, Dan had had bouts of polio as a youth, so he limped through his adult life. He dressed kind of old-fashioned with tweeds, a little tweed tam or a cap, smoked a pipe. He was only about 28 but he was like a throwback to some older soul from ancient Europe. He basically gave his guest lecture on Esoteric Christianity, the occult arcana tradition in the West. I ran into Dan about two days after that lecture and I introduced myself, “Hi, Dan. I’m Timothy. I heard your lecture the other day in the big Religious Studies class.” He goes, “Oh, yeah.” He was looking at me really funny. He had these very beautiful, pale, electric blue, piercing eyes. He was looking at me kind of funny. I must have made just a little more small talk appreciative of his lecture. He suddenly interrupted and he said, “You’ve never done drugs, have you?” I said, “No, but how do you know these things?” He says, “Well, I see things.” Turned out, I found out later from some of his students that the police department would hire him from time to time to find missing persons, to clear out haunted houses and this sort of thing when they needed a psychic. They turned to Dan. Turns out his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, they’d all been 33-degree Scottish Rite Masons. He was one but he was teaching a little tutorial on Esoteric Christianity, the holy arcane tradition of white magic, invoking archangels, doing white magic for the healing of the planet, the healing of certain beings, spiritual elevation of all beings. Beautiful, beautiful guy. So he invites me to this tutorial that was happening a few days later. He had this little weekly afternoon tutorial with just a handful of students and he invited me to come join. They’d been students of his I guess, for a few years so I was the newbie. So I walk into this largely empty classroom with just Dan standing there, close to the table with a few chairs and a few of his students, maybe just three of them. And I sit down and what’s the first thing that happens? Dan looks at me very intensely, and he says, “Who are you?” And I looked at him and at first I thought maybe he hadn’t remembered the interaction of a couple of days ago, so I said, “Well, Dan, I’m Timothy. You know we met a couple of days ago and you invited me.” He goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that. I know your name. Who are you?” And I looked at him and I said, “Dan, I’m a human being. No more, no less.” He looked at me deeper and he said, “Who are you?” I said, “Some old conditioning came up from Baltimore Catechism. I felt like something. I didn’t know about the Zen tradition and Mondo and Koans and stuff so I thought Dan was still looking maybe for some verbal response. So something welled up, the old conditioning from age six. I’m a child of God for the love of God.” He goes, “I know these things. I know you know them.” And he says, “The lips are flapping. The mind is generating beautiful concepts. Who are you beyond concepts, beyond self-labels?” And we just enjoyed the silence, the mutual solidarity of just awareness beholding itself somehow in these two personal forms. And then at some point, Dan said, “Drop the personality. It’s not what you are. It’s an instrument. It’s an expression. It’s not who you are.” Within a few moments he said something like, “You don’t need to come to these tutorials. This is more for the way of the white magician, the way of working with the mind through affirmation, visualization, intention, invoking archangels and so forth for the healing of the world.” He said, “There’s another path for the healing of the world. That’s the way of the mystic.” He said, “Timothy, you’re a mystic. Read everything you can about Sri Ramana Maharshi of India and the Advaita Vedanta tradition of India and find everything you can to read on Zen.” You know, China and Japanese traditions of Zen. He said, “You won’t need to come here. We’ll keep in touch. We’ll meet from time to time. If you ever have questions, give a holler.” Turned out we would spontaneously run into each other here and there. And I think once I did call him up and we went and met over in his home for a while. But dear Dan McClure, that lovely gentleman ignored by society as, you know, someone who limped around, dressed old-fashioned, didn’t seem impressive or charismatic, not one of the beautiful people of Santa Cruz on the outside. This man was all gold on the inside and very knowledgeable already as like a 28-year-old about the great mystical traditions. As I shared with John LeKay in the non duality magazine, Dan just sat me right in the lap of the great Mahatmas. And from that point on I lived and breathed and drunk and imbibed Sri Ramana and Shankara and Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna and Anandamayi Ma and the great Chan and Zen masters. I also found Conrad Heyer’s book Zen and the Karmic Spirit and disturbed a lot of people in the library that day when I was laughing and laughing out loud. So what more to say.
Rick: That’s a nice story. I wonder have you ever tried to find that guy Dan?
Timothy: He’s on the internet. You know, I should use things like Skype and Linkedin, Facebook and so forth. I’m not a social networker much.
Rick: Yeah, you could track him down, you know, get in touch with him, have a Skype call with him.
Timothy: You know there’s kind of a sense of completion to, where we know what we are and that we permeate each other, we intermingle each other. He’s not that body, I’m not this body. But man, what gratitude I’ve always had for him. He was, if you will, in addition to whatever intelligence, first, the resonance opened me up in that backyard looking out over the view in Southern California when I was 16. Then Dan early in my 18th year, it would have been around September of 1972, he was really my next guru if you could say. And he turned me on to Sri Ramana and the inner guru.
Rick: So you started reading Ramana and Anandamayi Ma and all these great teachers. Did you feel like practicing anything or was it sufficient just to read and have that resonate with you?
Timothy: Yeah, this way of understanding that goes so deep. I mean, there is the ancient triple method, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad identifies it as to a few later Upanishads as to Shankara in the Buddhist tradition, especially Nagarjuna goes into this. It’s the triple method of hearing the non-dual absolute level truth about who we are, the deep pondering or reflecting or contemplating this. And Sri Nisargadatta whom I got to spend a lot of wonderful quality time with in January you are basically the Lord Atma of this universe,” Sri Nisargadatta, he was known as Maruti back then, he came away from the meeting transfixed and he felt, “That’s a very respectable man. He’s a guru, a sage to many. He wouldn’t just give me some high-flown concept, how is it that these words are really true of this consciousness, this source? How is it true that the divine is right here, that’s who I am?” So that intention then, what Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj always called the earnestness, Shankara calls it, “mumukshatva,” the great longing or intensity for having truth be true of you, let it take over your life, that pondering is the second stage after the hearing of the truth or reading of it in scriptures or specially aphorisms like the I Am That collection of Sri Nisargadatta that I found in 1979. That then leads on to Nidijasana, Shravana Manana, Shravana is hearing, Manana is the mental pondering, contemplating, Nidijasana, deep meditating as truth, or if you will, truth is meditating you, God is meditating you. So the way was very much Suma Iru as Sri Ramana and Swami Jnanananda, a great, great sage who lived a little bit south of Sri Ramana down in Chittor Koirala, few people know about him, a tremendous Jnani. They, these guys would always share with ripe aspirants, “Suma Iru, be still,” as the old Sai Baba assured it, the old Sai Baba said, “Just be still and I will do the rest.” So you let God take over your life, and again I was never much of a yogi, I learned Hatha Yoga early on, I learned the Sanskrit and a bunch of postures, I learned yogic forms of concentrative meditation, you know, Ekagrata, just getting very one-pointed on a visual focus or an auditory focus like mantra or whatever you can one-pointedly focus on. But for me, Shankara’s definition of Ekagrata was always the one that was so obvious, self-evident, which is feeling and perceiving and intuiting whatever phenomenon or being arises for you as the Oneness. So meditation for me was more this open rather than narrowed down, concentrated kind of Ekagrata, one-pointed focus.
Rick: Did you do it as an actual practice where you would set aside time to sit and meditate? Yeah, there were periods where there would definitely be a regime and I remember when I was about 20 and my sister had gone out to Hawaii but right before she did I came down and spent a few months with her and my parents. I took a year off from Santa Cruz and basically I have to tell you, in between one of the passions where I was spending a lot of the time wasn’t even reading mystics or just being, just gazing, just appreciating, it was learning to play the guitar. My sister stuck a guitar in my hands when I was about 18 saying, “You can’t just meditate all the time and contemplate nature and God. Why don’t you learn to play music if you don’t have a sports career? This will be fun.” So she taught me a few chords and I took it from there, learning folk and jazz and rock and …
Rick: Have you kept up with it?
Timothy: I’ve been immediately up on classical. Oh, I let so much of that go. At a certain point you just let all attachments go but it’s still there.
Rick: Recently the bass player of the Mahavishnu Orchestra got in touch with me and wants to do an interview. His name is Rick Laird and I’ll be doing that but he’s good buddies with John McLaughlin and all.
Timothy: Sure, I was listening to all that stuff back in the early mid-70s, great material. These guys talk about musicianship and skilled level of attainment in music. These guys are like special Gandharva celestial musician beings. So I was actually spending a few hours each day, at least, sometimes seven, eight hours a day just playing guitar and having fun, singing songs with friends. Later all of that would become in use when I was invited to play the harmonium in a spiritual center up in San Francisco. I learned to sing hundreds and hundreds, probably at this point a thousand or more bhajan songs. I never felt the need to make a spiritual career out of it and charge money for me. It was always just singing for the love of God with however many I wanted to gather. So all of that started going on from around 1979.
Rick: So how old were you when you first went to India or are we getting ahead of the story for me to ask that?
Timothy: Oh, again, it’s a long, boring story. As I told John LeKay, it was a funny, funny thing that happened once, a dinner party with dear friends in about 1985 I attended and someone brought as their potluck item a bag of Chinese misfortune cookies. I remember one person got the fortune, “Your spouse will become famous as an advocate for celibacy.” The fortune this guy got here, Timothy, was, “Yours is a very long and uninteresting story.” So again it has a certain fascination but it’s not that fascinating. What was it Amma the hugging mother, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi says, “cease to be fascinated by anything except God.” So, oh yeah, the India trip came together. I’d gone off to college back up to Santa Cruz for my junior and senior year. My sister had passed on. What a dear spiritual light she was. She had people out in Maui, Hawaii calling her their guru when she was 19, and they were of all ages. I met people on the island after her passing who said things like, “Your sister turned me on to God.” What had happened was when I went off to college as a freshman she ditched out of her senior year at Catholic Girls High School. They were giving the girls a chance to finish early but she left even earlier to pursue a music career back in Nashville with some guy who was smitten by her and wanted to introduce her to the Nashville music scene. She left that, thought it was all very worldly, wound up with the Rainbow people in Wyoming or Montana, wherever it was being held that year, the big summer festival. She was doing a lot of mushrooms, smoking a lot of grass, dropped some acid and found God. I wound up coming back, making amends with my parents. There had been parental daughter stuff about not wearing a bra and not shaving under the armpits. It was the flower child movement. My sister was a wonderful flower child. She really healed that relationship with them. Then she went off to live out on the islands, wound up on the east coast of Maui, the Boonies, very undeveloped, largely caring for a blind man there and traveling around. She welcomed me. I blew all my money on Oahu on a visit out there and went over to Maui. She and her friends were all on food stamps and they turned me on to vegetarianism and just the lightness and clarity of eating that way. I had just been loading myself up at Big Macs right up until the end when I flew over to Maui. That also makes a difference, is purifying and cleaning out your diet. While we were there, spending about a month traveling all over, she was showing me all the incredible places on Maui, many of which had been developed like the southern beach areas. There was no development back then. We took a hike through Haleakala Crater. There’s a real high side, about 11,000 feet up. Then you hike down into the crater and down at that lower slope it gets increasingly more and more lush. Previously it was like a moonscape in the depths of that crater and then it becomes very lush. Then it drops down to this gorgeous long coastal promontory terrain and a set of waterfalls and pools leading down to the ocean, the so-called Seven Sacred Pools, the Ohe’O Gulch area. One night she went out with some friends. She had not been doing any hallucinogens for some months. She was meditating most of each day, as was I. That night she met some friends. They wanted to do LSD with her. I kind of looked at her like, “I thought all that was behind you. You didn’t need or want that anymore.” She decided to go off. There had been triple rainbows that day. We were going to be flying home to California. I was going to Santa Cruz. She was going to pursue a parapsychology major at Sonoma State. She had a boyfriend on the mainland she wanted to rejoin. She went off and did that acid trip I guess as one final way of just being completely one with that beautiful nature of that paradise of southeastern coast of Maui. She never came back. She apparently went swimming out into the ocean. No one swims in the ocean there. She was a very great swimmer. My dad was actually an Olympic caliber swimmer. He was one of the two alternates that they had beyond the four main swimmers who did all the events. They would have two alternates. My dad was one of them in 1948. My sister was an even better swimmer than I was. I had been on the swim team in high school. Anyway, she had a better breaststroke and butterfly stroke. Anyway she went out swimming in the ocean on a rip. Must had caught her and she was never seen again. I had all these amazing dreams of her thereafter. Not that night of the day she passed on but the next night and the night after where she was just all lit up with radiant light. It was all very interdimensional and sparkly and glowy. She was saying, “Please, Timothy, tell everyone not to worry, not to be full of sorrow or grief. This is absolutely wonderful. What we’re made of, God’s love for us, God’s welcoming us all back home into the light. It’s beyond words. Please tell everyone not to worry, not to grieve. We’re all together in spirit.” So that was a tremendous inner strength and consolation. I still miss her on the outer level. Tears were shed. I felt nostalgic with it all the times we shared. We’ve been very close as a brother and sister. So I went back up to Santa Cruz in the junior year and then senior year and finished that double major in psychology and religious studies. A few years later went to the California Institute of Asian Studies now known as the Institute of Integral Studies. I wound up going, after finishing my master’s in one year in East-West psychology, I went out to Burma with a dear ten-precepts nun, Rina Sircar, who’s a professor of Buddhist studies there and got to ordain as a monk way up in the boonies of northern Burma with a couple of buddies under a tremendous spiritual master Taungpulu Sayadaw. That man had the most beautiful voice of any human being I’ve ever heard. It was like a voice from Nirvana. And then I got the chance to go over to India. Rina Sircar’s brother and sisters had all moved there when the country, Burma, had become nationalized. They donate a lot of land and wealth to the Buddhist Sangha. So that’s why we got to have such high quality, very, very special privileged time up there in northern Burma. And they extended the visa specifically for us. But then I wanted to get to India because I wanted to see Sri Nisargadatta before he dropped the body. I knew he had throat cancer and wasn’t long for this world. So we came into Pondicherry, where Rina Sircar’s brother and sisters lived. And then I straightaway hightailed it over to Sri Ramana Maharshi’s, Ramana’s ashram at the old Arunachala Shraddha Temple and the holy Mount Arunachala there in December of And I didn’t want to spend too much time there although it felt like home. And Annamalai Swami, a beautiful beautiful spiritual son of Sri Ramana, he invited me to stay there indefinitely and just live. Rick
Rick:I think I was in India at the same time. I was up in New Delhi at that point.
Timothy: Oh wonderful. And up in Rishikesh.
Rick: I didn’t get up there. I was over on a course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for about four months in New Delhi at that point.
Timothy: Oh, that’s a small world.
Rick: I wish I had headed south actually and found Amma at that point but I didn’t know about her. But anyway, continue your story.
Timothy: I wound up meeting Sri Mani Swami up at Virupaksha Cave and that’s where the whole revelation really came totally clear. We are Shiva, formlessness, and our play as Shakti is not separate from what we are. Forms are formlessness. Formlessness is forming. In that little hot cave there in Virupaksha where Sri Ramana had spent quite a lot of time as a youth when he first came after being down at the temple and the mango orchard he went up on to Arunachala and that cave and the Skandasramam cave is where he spent most of his time. And that place was just still buzzing with this truth revelation of Shiva, Shakti and not to somehow apparently distinct, source, awareness, open, infinite, birthless, deathless, yet also creating, dreaming forth, emanating these gorgeous worlds and it’s somehow not to. Shakti is Shiva. Shiva is Shakti. That all came quite clear in that cave. And then I met people like wonderful Yogi Ramsuratkumar, Ramji, what a God-drenched beautiful mystic is Yogi Ramji. He dropped the body some years ago but I had some wonderful one-on-one time with him, long hours in a night and a day. But I was feeling the urge to get out west up to Mumbai, Bombay as we knew it then to see Sri Maharaj. I went out west. I stopped at Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s ashram, lovely energy, much spiritual experience there. Only much later did I find out and I wrote a long web page on my concerns about Sri Sathya Sai Baba which made me the object of the internet stalker, terrorist hitman, as he’s been called, the guy who’s created about 12 negative pages about me which flood the Google returns when you try to search.
Rick: Is that Joe Moreno?
Timothy: Yes, dear, dear Joe.
Rick: I just ran across him today actually, because I have this chat group called Fairfield Life and someone on there Connie Larson, I know Connie and somehow this whole connection came around and somebody made some comments about Sai Baba or something on Fairfield Life and this guy came zooming in and started making comments. I just became aware of the guy’s existence today. But I remember years ago reading your bit about Sai Baba. And anyway, that’s a diversion.
Timothy: But my experience with Sathya Sai Baba had always been wonderful and it was later when I found out tragically what was happening, not just to young adults, but then finally I heard about legal minors, boys 15, 16, 17, and that’s when I and a number of others felt we have to speak out. And so I left the movement. I had actually been one of the bhajan leaders and so forth in San Francisco and they made me president up there when I returned from India. It was a spiritual household. An old buddy of mine, a grad school mate invited me there and I spent some happy years in the 80s finishing grad school, learning all these gorgeous bhajans and being involved in service projects, wonderful people. So the Sathya Sai Baba ashram was just a little interim state. Ramana Maharshi was my first guru, sadhguru if you will, and I needed that connection, but I wanted to press on. So I went out west and basked in the wonderful vibes of Swami Ramdas, not the American Ram Das, but Swami or Papa Ramdas, the great Keralan saint of Southwest India who met Sri Ramana and always chanted Sri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram. A beautiful mandala kind of ashram arose around him and his successor Mother Krishnabai whom I had some wonderful, wonderful time with. A marvelous Mahatma, Mother Krishnabai, a true Parabhakta, Supreme Bhakta or devotee, nondual, Abheda Bhakti and a pure Jnani, pure wisdom sage. And someone there at the library gave me a little rare, not many copies in print, little biography of Sri Nisargadatta that I got to read on the 26-hour bus ride up to Mumbai where I met Sri Nisargadatta in January of 1981. It was at Maharaj’s that if there was anything of the search, most of that had been ended in that Virupaksha cave at Ramana Maharshi’s ashram, Maharaj’s one big canine teeth of the Bengal tiger living in Mumbai, that was Maharaj one aspect of him anyway. He pounced and finished off the Timothy character in terms of having any more questions basically. I must say there’s another side of Sri Maharaj which I would really like to just take a minute to share. This side is simply not presented by all those who consider themselves part of the Navnath Sampradaya, so-called lineage from Sri Maharaj and his guru Sri Siddharameshwar. Frankly I think all this lineage mongering stuff is baloney. And recently John Lekay was insisting I get my name somehow put up there on a list that our dear friend Dennis Waite has written several books on, Advaita. And finally, I’m glad he did, he wrote a kind of a correction book to kind of really distinguish out neo or pseudo-Advaita and real Advaita. Anyway I think that book’s called Advaita, Pathway Through the Jungle or something like that. But his earlier books there’s a little indiscriminate mixing. One of the things is in the neo-Advaita it’s all this cutting via negativa, this is all just a dream. I wrote an award-winning essay back in grad school in 1983 affirming in all sorts of ways and documenting it from the sacred traditions how this is all a dream, that’s the title of the essay. But it’s quite clear to the sages that in our wisdom cutting mode, the negating via negativa, we detach, disidentify, we destroy with a sort of Manjushri, to use the Buddhist metaphor Bodhisattva Manjushri, we take that wisdom sword and just cut through all illusions and realize everything is, as the Buddha said, the marks of existence, anicca, anatta, dukkha, impermanent, therefore insubstantial, therefore not worth clinging to. So that’s what wisdom does for you, it divests you of the illusions, the identifications, the needless attachment and compassion or love, the Shakti, bliss, solidarity, love of persons great and small, all creatures great and small, that makes you one with everyone. And Sri Nisargadatta he had this slashing wisdom style that just left you nothing, it stripped you, diced you, pulverized you, evaporated you and guess what? He had not only this total disidentifying mode, he had this complete identifying mode. And so I’ll say that Nisargadatta’s way was kind of a little two-step, even though we never go anywhere, don’t need to attain, step anywhere. I’ll just say that for the jiva, the one who gets enlightened through the clarification and the purification of the buddhi, the highest aspect of the knowing faculty, the higher mind, the jiva has a two-step of disidentifying and then there’s this spontaneous re-identifying with everyone and everything. And Sri Maharaj, this beautiful Nisargadatta, literally means “without artifice,” without any artificialness. I’ll use the old Zen saying, “No need to add legs to a snake, Maharaj.” This pure Shiva snake you know and he just zapped you with wisdom. But he was also a great abheda bhaktan, this no-difference oriented devotee. You should have seen him during the bhajans. The first night I came to the bhajans I noticed, “Where are all the Westerners?” There were like two pious European ladies who were there and no other Westerners. A number of the Indians came and Maharaj saw and he gave approval. He nodded and he said something in Marathi and a translator translated it for me. Nisargadatta said to me, he nodded his head and he said, “Those who think they understand only come to the talks. Those who really understand come to the bhajans.” And it was during those bhajans that Maharaj would light up and oh, it was just ecstatic. And they had this big duffel bag and they’d pull out right before the bhajans all these big symbols that they use in the Indian percussive way for the bhajan songs. Maharaj’s symbols, they were about this big and man it was deafening. Some guy had a big brass gong, he’d just be beating the heaven out of. It was a complete din in there. And Marathi bhajans are not particularly musical. They have kind of a sing-song, rather monotonous kind of chant. But they’re all like the old hymns of Sri Gyaneshwara, the great non-dual Abhidha Bhakta and Purugani from the 13th century and other hymns of Eknath and Sukaram and Sri Nisargadatta. Some of his songs were in the official collection of the Navnath Sampradaya. And all of these people that say they’re Navnath Sampradaya from Nisargadatta and they’re doing this lineage mongering and trying to make money off Sri Nisargadatta’s name with books and tapes and CDs and everything, they have completely neglected this side of the Maharaj. Which is why in my big, almost booklet-length free offering on Sri Maharaj up at our enlightenedspirituality.org website, I’ve talked about this other side of Maharaj, the very devotional side. And there’s a lot of energy. I remember one day he just came over and grabbed me by the shoulders and he was looking at me and he kind of moved me over about four inches and kind of looked at me. He was hitting those big cymbals and he kind of put them down and grabbed my shoulder and moved me over a little bit. I mean this guy was working with energies and forces. He was a wonderful guy. And there’s so much more, so much warmth and love, a kind of a jocular, a vuncular closeness, infinitely one-on-one with a translator. I’d be pulled in and we’d talk at little times when no one else was around. And he would share a tremendous warmth and with that a tremendous strength. His whole way was not to have you become a devotee in some personality cult. And a man would never charge a dime. He wanted nothing from you. He only wanted this fellow mutual celebration of what we are. And the full formlessness of this and then the full solidarity and love and gladness of sharing this with each other. The final message Sri Nisargadatta would give to anyone who thoroughly “understood” on the intuitive level about this was, “Now, no need to run around and monger after this or that. Forget attainments and so forth. Go home. Be a good friend to your friends. Love your loved ones. If it spontaneously comes up, be of service in some way and that will come. It will all happen spontaneously. It’s like growing hair,” said the Maharaj. He was a great Daoist Zen mystic in a Hindu cultural body. He was the complete teacher. And my concern, if you heard me being a little feisty there a few minutes ago, the critical of some of what’s being done in his name today is because I think a very stunted or truncated side of Maharaj is being presented at the expense of, to the exclusion of, all these wonderful other facets of the man. He was a very full, multifaceted guy.
Rick: Well I’m glad you did come back to that because it’s been a recurring theme for me in these interviews. I don’t mean to pick on these guys because I really enjoyed listening to the great ones.
Timothy:I mean, they’re talking about one part of the truth, often tremendous brilliance or cleverness.
Rick: Absolutely. Some of them are so articulate and so clear and so well spoken, like this Urban Guru Cafe website if you’ve ever heard of it where they’re all disciples of Sailor Bob Adamson who actually was with Nisargadatta.
Timothy: Nisargadatta, yeah. A very basic teaching about the is-ness. The way is, people send me stuff on various people, once you’ve actually met Sri Nisargadatta and Annamalai Swami and people like this, you don’t need to search out other teachers or something or try and check up on what everyone’s doing. People send me links and I did take the time to hear what Sailor Bob is sharing. It’s a very lovely, simple, no-nonsense, very easy and accessible for most people. Whereas the Timothy brain may have gotten a little over-educated with grad school and the old joke about PhD piled higher and deeper. And I like to use the terms of our great sacred traditions. Why try to reinvent the wheel or pretend that you are the great source of this knowledge, when again they’ve been talking about this in India for 3,000 years. Why not give credit where credit is due? So I like to quote a lot of our sources, a lot of our friends, our older brothers and sisters who bequeathed this great legacy, which can be the basis for this old jnana-marga, wisdom way path of shravana, manana, nididhyasana, hearing, contemplating and meditating on the truth. But Sailor Bob’s way is, it was Nisargadatta, one part of his teaching, “Any true jnani,” you can’t doubt that you are. There’s a basic is-ness here that’s indubitable. This is Shankara’s great critique of Buddhism and what helped restore Advaita Vedanta to the fore among the intelligentsia of India 1,300 years ago. When you wake up from dreamless sleep in the morning there’s no doubt about a deep, deep continuity that’s here. It’s not the mind, it’s not memory, it’s not self-identifications, all of those come and go. They’re not there in deep dreamless sleep. When you’re basically dead to everything, there’s no you, no world, no agenda. We don’t doubt this basic is-ness. No one doubts this. So Sri Maharaj would say, “Receive back as that, stay as that.” And I would also say too, there’s another point about neo-Advaita, pseudo-Advaita, specifically in the works of Wei Wu Wei and my dear old friend Sri Ramesh Balasekar, the late Sri Ramesh, who spent time as one of the four or five translators around Sri Nisargadatta. I actually drove him around a little bit in LA and San Francisco and Tiburon and helped set some things up for him. But I needed to pull away because that pseudo-Advaita, because it’s not the complete teaching, it really comes down strongly. There’s no efforts to be made. And yet the paradox of instruction that you find with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sankara, Sri Nisargadatta, all the great, great dear ones who are helping us home in this journey from here to here, they’re using the paradox of instruction that what you are, you cannot become, live for. As Sankara and Nisargadatta and others said. You can only be this. So as Sri Nisargadatta said, “Just be.” And don’t get restless about trying to just be, just be. Nevertheless, you should have heard the many times he used the imperative verb form and you know those eyes would bulge and he’d look so hyperthyroid in such moments or again like that Bengal tiger in Bombay just about to jump out and grab you by the jugular. He’d say, “You must meditate. You must drop this involvement. What are you before you’re born? Where were you a billion years ago?” He used questions a lot to role model what it’s like to be passionately, earnestly involved in real self-inquiry to really shatter the illusions so that all the conditioning and mediocrity and the tendencies for ourselves to exploit others, to be less than empathetic with other persons, to not be all that we can be on the personal level as an instrument for the expression by the super-personal. Maharaj really wanted all that clear. He really wanted all the virtues there in full bounty. So he used the paradox that you are already the Absolute and yet the jiva, by the grace of God does have the power it seems to have choice, the power it seems to form intentions, the power it seems to engage in practices. And he wanted that power used to the max. And I would also distinguish here, most people only know Nisargadatta’s meditation on the “I am” sense. Realize I am not this, I’m not the speaker, I’m not the listener, I’m not the body, I’m not the mind, I’m not male, I’m not female, I’m not this, not that, I am. Just meditate on this “I am-ness” or “being-ness” or “consciousness” as he called it. He said that through that method, one’s personal consciousness would start relaxing, receding back unto its Source, the universal manifesting consciousness. He had a word for it, which I don’t know, but we could also call it “Shakti,” the Source of the many, the “Om.” And then by divine grace, one awakens as the Absolute and one realizes one was worldless, personless, mindless, relationless, and that the whole play of the worlds and beings and so forth, that was all a marvelous Shakti play. Now that’s the meditation that most people are breaking their brains, breaking their minds over, is, you know, “What is this ‘I am’? What is this ‘being-ness’?” People aren’t usually aware that Sri Nisargadatta gave another way back home, so to say. In this paradox of instruction where, you know, you must meditate, you must make efforts in this. His other meditation was a wonderful one for householders and I think it’s been the experience of so many folks in satsang I’ve shared this with over the years. Meditate on the vital power. There’s a dear chap, a naturopath up in Sebastopol, Northern California, Peter, I’m forgetting Peter’s name, how could I do that? He went over to see Sri Nisargadatta in the summer of 1981, I believe it was, July, maybe because he was a doctor, a healing professional. He drew out of Maharaj a more in-depth presentation of this meditation on the vital power than I’ve read in any of the books and conversations available on Sri Nisargadatta’s sharing. And Sri Nisargadatta said, “Look, there’s this meditation on the I am-ness, it’s more of a cognitive form of contemplation but why not inquire, what is this vitality, this power, this force by which you can even lift a finger or blink an eye or feel a feeling, or think a thought or launch an intention like I should meditate on the I am-ness? What’s the power?” If you notice, with intuition, you’ll notice this power is shapeless, it’s formless, it’s not structured, it’s not an object for the mind, for perception, there’s a deep intuitive feeling that you are this vitality and this, said Sri Nisargadatta, is de facto the God of your world. Without this vitality, nothing happens, you wouldn’t get out of bed, you wouldn’t have the power to be conscious of anything during the day. So he said, “Allow this vitality, this light force, let this be the God of your world, meditate on this, be this.” And I tell you, it’s very easy to meditate on this while, say, washing dishes, driving the car, being in conversation with a loved one, a so-called stranger, no one’s a stranger when you come home to this, we’re all the same one, love thy neighbor as thyself. This meditation from Sri Nisargadatta is a tremendous gift and it allows a certain focus for “effort,” intentionality, that earnestness. People would ask Maharaj, because he uses this word “earnestness” quite a lot, “What are we to be earnest about?” And he would say, “Be earnest about who you are.” And again, there were two ways of realizing that using this pure “I am” meditation to extricate oneself, to pull back from these illusory identifications with “I am this, I am that, I am Timothy, I am Rick, I am so-and-so” and then come back home to open awareness. But this meditation on the vitality, the life force, he said this is equally good and for very busy householders will actually probably be preferable because you won’t have the time and space to just sit around contemplating the “I am,” where you can kind of feel the vitality in motion when maybe the brain, mind, has to be somewhat busy working at a computer or setting an agenda for a work day, dealing with children’s health issues or whatever it might be, or getting educated on political justice issues.
Rick: That’s good. So I haven’t felt the need to ask you too many questions because basically I just think the questions and then you answer them. It seems to be going that way.
Timothy: So many people inside saying, “Oh, I’ve been sitting here with all these questions.” It’s all just a flowing.
Rick: So you would sort of summarize the whole Neo-Advaita issue as being that many of the spokesmen for it these days are legitimate up to a point, are speaking truth up to a point but they’ve kind of left out the rest of the story to quote Paul Harvey. There’s a further development that can be appreciated. I’m just summarizing, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. This whole emphasis which sometimes comes out about it’s not necessary to meditate, there are no degrees of progress, all teachers who say they are are bogus, all you really need to do is realize that you’re that and you’re done. Forget this whole evolutionary process business. I get the sense that you would dispute that and that it may be true up to a point but that’s not the rest of the story.
Timothy: Yeah, to answer your question, I mean, God loves these dear souls sharing in all the heartfelt ways. My concern is a lot of it is just excessively clever, it’s a one-upsmanship strategy. If you look at relations between and among human beings, like it or not, there’s power issues. It’s so easy to use Advaita teachings to subtly or not so subtly one-up other people and get the edge. I mean, if we were introduced at a party and you made a conventional kind of extension of cordial good wishes and introducing yourself and I pulled one of these one-upsmanship stunts like “Who had that history?” What’s the source of that thought?
Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of a conversation stopper.
Timothy: Yeah and roleplay the guru and kind of force you into being a disciple. I find this stinks. It’s a violation of what we are. It’s a presumption that I’m the enlightened sage and you’re not. And I have to tell you honestly when you wake up to this authentically, everyone you see is the divine. Everyone is a sage. And if temporarily in the ego-gy play of me, it seems like the being is suffering and not so enlightened, timelessly you know that they don’t come from ignorance and suffering and limitation and that’s not their destiny in psychic time and the great finale, the grand comedic climax where all souls are being awakened unto God and all the gross nonsense is being left behind. So we all know that we’re Buddhas deep down. Why play the game of presuming I know and you don’t know and become the terse talker? All these people that now feel like, “I’ve mastered silence, I rarely speak. If you’re lucky you’ll get one of my pearls of aphorisms.”
Rick: Well there’s also a cop-out thing too, in a way, because if you convince yourself that you’re done and that there’s no need for spiritual practice and that you’ve realized what the great realizers have realized, then that kind of lets you off the hook.
Timothy: It sure does. It sure does, we’re not on the hook and there’s not any of us here, but it’s part of the great lila divine play, the great divine game, that jivas need to undergo some deconditioning. They can drop the non-essential, they can drop the unwholesome qualities and have the virtuous qualities being spontaneously growing and sometimes cultivated.
Rick: Which is another important point, because if you feel like you’re done then you may be totally neglecting a huge area which is in need of improvement, which is in need of purification and culturing of virtue and so on and so forth. And we’ve seen all kinds of horror stories where people have neglected to do that and have assumed teaching roles and sometimes very famous ones and then have really stumbled and fell.
Timothy: Yeah, when there’s deep, aching loneliness for a fellow human connection but you’ve allowed yourself to get put up on a pedestal, sometimes through your own doing, playing one-upsmanship power games and then everyone gives you power, defers to you, especially people who are trying to replicate in some way a dysfunctional family system they might have come out of, they’ll make you play that dysfunctional father figure above and give their power to you. And then you lose out on the kind of solidarity and deep interconnectedness and the feeling like we’re really made of each other, we’re one. And so you start lording it over others but then you’ve got these deep pangs of loneliness and you need, you know, if you’re a man you might need the touch of a woman’s body or something and then people get very irresponsible with this, exploiting their students’ bodies for their own sexual needs, seeing women as objects. Women “gurus” have done this to male disciples as well, it doesn’t just go the one way, although unfortunately it is largely the case that it’s men that have abused this more than women. That’s why I started that huge project of Women in Spirit and came up with that book in the mid-90s Women of Power and Grace, the last chapter of which, as you may know, is all about our dear Amma.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve seen that book. In fact, I saw that book years ago and didn’t connect it with you until just the other day when you mentioned you had written it.
Timothy: That was the first chance introduced to the official American book trade, the story of Amma. Neil Rosner’s book had come out a couple of years earlier but it wasn’t in mainstream distribution, nor were the two books that had come out of India. It’s fun to hear the reactions from some religion editors, some newspapers and magazines, I won’t mention names, but they were full of criticism, “What is this? This woman is some kind of divine incarnation, all this Christian bias basically” and thinking the whole thing was some cult. Now, those people have been forced to eat their words when the UN and so many interfaith agencies and so forth, the World Parliament of Religions have just fallen over each other, giving Amma all these awards for all her incredible ministry of love and humanitarian projects.
Rick: Perhaps we could talk about Amma in just a second, but I just wanted to wrap up our previous point, which is, lest we be guilty of lording it over others, I just wanted to say that there are so many different things that people do and it seems that everything they do in the name of spiritual development is appropriate for them at that time. For instance fundamentalist Christianity. Personally I have a problem with some of the way they behave in terms of my own interaction with them, if it occurs, but for them it’s saved many people’s lives and transformed many people’s lives profoundly. Not that this is the case exclusively but I heard someone say recently that fundamentalist Christianity happens to be very effective in helping gang members get out of that lifestyle and into a more wholesome one. Perhaps there’s still the pack mentality and so on but it’s turned into a more benign form.
Timothy: Although I do have to interject there and say that it was actually in the same graduating class of Loyola High School, Father Greg Boyle, he went on to become a Catholic priest, he’s internationally famous for his homeboy ministry project down in the barrios of L.A. because this progressive, Catholic, not evangelical fundamental right-wing guy by any stretch of the imagination, warm-hearted guy, he’s done the yeoman work to help bring gang members out of that milieu and bring them into a much lovelier life.
Rick: Yeah, there you go. And also all the different neo-Advaita teachers that are so popular these days. I have a lot of friends who really got into Gangaji and really got into this and that and the other thing and a lot of them aren’t doing that particular thing now, they’ve gone on to something else, but they speak very highly of the benefit they derive from that and now they’re experiencing something new and deriving benefit from that, which they may or may not stay with. But we just kind of keep rolling along and all these teachers are contributing what they have to contribute and many of them, their contribution evolves. There are teachers who speak a certain way, teach a certain way and then as their realization deepens they think, “Well, wait a minute, there’s actually more to this and I was sort of shortchanging you guys now here’s something a little bit more complete.”
Timothy: Yeah, it’s funny to watch some of these movements grow. They wouldn’t even have the big followings had they, early on, given all this for free and not created big organizations, not played some of the one-upsmanship games that are on all these needy, subservient, dear souls. So suddenly they’ve got these huge organizations and things are starting to get a little strange, maybe dysfunctional and then suddenly they realize the teaching is imbalanced, this isn’t working. It’s a fun thing, it’s like a bunch of people out on a lake on a boat without paddles and they have to improvise but everyone finds their way home. The God Self isn’t going to leave anyone out in the cold. There’s a beautiful old Christian teaching. I found out actually it was from a rather conservative evangelical website that this was actually mainstream. For many years I thought it was just the teaching of early church fathers like Clement of Alexandria Origin of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, later John Scotus Origen in the 9th century, the greatest Christian non-dual theologian I think in Christian history, this 9th century theologian. They all taught this beautiful doctrine of apokatastasis, that’s an old Greek word that means universal salvation or liberation or redemption. The teaching is basically God is God in all and God’s love is so all-loving, all-embracing, all-forgiving, all-powerful that no soul is going to be able to exile itself into strange states of megalomania and fear and hatred and self-loathing, other-loathing, forever. In other words the hells are self-created if you will but finally God’s going to find a way to awaken you to God within the hell and then it turns into heaven and then it just turns into God. This is a powerful teaching. When you’re really living from the heart of this that everyone is in God, of God, God is everyone, no one but the one and everyone, then so much fundamental sense of there’s a problem here, all these neo-Advaitins and stuff, well that just falls off. Also too the tragedies in history like Hitler and six million dead in the Holocaust, Jews, Gypsies, gays and so forth, that’s just horrifying. And yet, we know that when souls drop the body they are immediately pain-free, not subject to cold, anger, fear and they’re debriefed in the light by all the light beings and then depending on their capacity for opening up all the way to the clear light, beyond the visible white or golden or blue light, the Christian or Jewish heavens, they are no longer suffering. So six million dead, yeah, what I’ve come to call level three, the conventional world, the world of whether it’s justice and injustice and it behooves us to be on the side of justice, not one of the perpetrators or their accomplices, there needs to be morality, ethics, cultivating the virtues, trying to remedy the wrongs with rights, healing, that’s level three. And there’s a lot of pain on this level and not to acknowledge it is blindness and it’s a kind of closed and hard-heartedness you can’t feel the pain of fellow beings that are experiencing physical or emotional pain the intensity of whatever situation they’re in, either because it’s “their karma,” you know, they hurt someone in another life, now they get pain but it may not just be that, you know, people are often taking on the karma of others in their own intense situation, sometimes it’s just the atma testing itself to see how strong, how loving, how patient can you be when this is happening, how about when this is happening, so there’s any number of reasons why people are undergoing certain intense, intense, painful situations. To close off one’s heart to that, to say, “Oh, it’s all just a dream,” to say, “That’s not who you are,” wake up from a certain callousness or cruelty and this is where neo-Advaita can lead to a kind of thing of sociopath. I mean Charles Manson had a certain Advaita teaching, if you read the historical record, he thought everyone was God, so if you killed someone or tortured and murdered them it’s all God anyway. So that’s a complete forgetting of what the Buddha, Shankara, and Nagarjuna talk about as the conventional level, the vyavaharika or samvritti-varta level of pragmatic experiential living, the beings and worlds and relationships. And then on level two as I’ve kind of inserted a level in between the old two levels, the two-truth teaching of the great ancient masters, level two is this deep sense of the apokatassa sense that we’re all being liberated timelessly, we are all Buddhas, we are already realized beings. There’s this pretense or play of being the soul associated with this earthly body and these earthly situations but really we are right now perfectly in bliss, as bliss in our real nature as souls. So that’s level two, a psychic level truth, if you will, a heavenly level truth. It’s still part of the relative the many gazillions of souls. What’s level one? Level one is there’s only one being there, one awareness. Nothing has ever happened, nothing is happening. Whatever seems to be happening is just an ephemeral dream that’s gone the next moment as soon as you try and sink your teeth into it, it’s already just a memory trace. So there’s really only reality here, non-dual, worldless and yet it’s somehow magically dreamlike playing as these worlds and these beautiful beings we share these worlds with on the soul level. So let all three levels be honored and one’s spirituality is complete and there’s no imbalance.
Rick: Yeah, I agree with you. There’s that old saying, “Knowledge is different in different states of consciousness,” and although it might be argued that ultimately there is a state or a level which is fundamentally real and that other things are partial reflections or not as essentially real, nonetheless they do have their own intrinsic, every level has its own intrinsic level of value and significance and has to be honored at its own level. And another key point is that you can’t mix levels, you can’t apply the understanding of one level of consciousness to the understanding of another. You can’t kill the tiger of the dream state with the gun of the waking state.
Timothy: Well said, well said, Rick.
Rick: I didn’t make it up.
Timothy: Oh, okay, nice borrowing then. Oh, wisdom, it’s coming from all directions, all paths.
Rick: Well, speaking of different levels of reality, here in Iowa there’s the reality of dogs needing a walk at this point.
Timothy:Hey, wonderful. Who’s walking who, Rick? Who’s walking who?
Rick: Yeah, good question. Oh, actually even on the evident level it’s them walking us. But it’s really delightful to talk to you Tim and we’ll have to do this again because I’m sure we could easily fill up another two hours like this.
Timothy: Certainly. Any time, Rick, any time. And if anyone who viewed this program has questions or anything for a subsequent kind of program or I hate to say you write email, I already get flooded with email from aspirants all over the world. But I’m happy, you know, really burning questions not just frivolous questions or ones off the top of the head. Let the questioning or inquiry process go real deep and then whatever kind of real earnest questions one has if they still haven’t been resolved by the light of one’s own wisdom, true, one’s own divinity, feel free to email me. My email address is at my website, the enlightened-spirituality.org website.
Rick: And I’ll be linking to that website from batgap.com. And you know, you could actually, if you wanted to, you could set up a video satsang or an audio satsang like this that went all over the world that you could actually do once a week and people could ask questions and you could talk to them and all. I can kind of refer you to some people who would help you figure out how to do that technically if it’s something you wanted to do.
Timothy: Sure. No, actually I’ve had satsang members here in Santa Barbara wanting to do that. I had such a nice time just with the dear friends here and the thought of, you know, you don’t need to see this old mug, it’s getting older, but your own truth is what’s most important. And I put up so much stuff at the website. If someone were to go through even just a fourth of that and not awaken to their own truth I’d be surprised. Because our own truth is so magnificent, so available. What we are is the divine. Open awareness playing beautifully as this poignant human being. And on that note, Rick, I wish you namaste.
Rick: Namaste to you.
Timothy: Jai Bhava, Jai Guru, Jai Ma. Be well.
Rick: Thanks Tim. This was a great talk.
Timothy: Thank you. Everyone viewing, just love to all. We are each other and finally there’s just one of us playing as everyone. So everyone you meet, it’s not “Hey you,” it’s “Hi I.” It’s one of us here. Enjoy thyself.
Rick: Very good. Thanks, Tim.
Timothy: Sure.