Tom Kurzka Transcript: Fear, Trauma, and the Unfolding of Awakening

Tom Kurzka Interview

Summary

Tom describes early experiences of unity, spacious awareness, and deep sensitivity that were gradually covered over by childhood conditioning. He also recounts how an LSD experience exposed the loss of a separate self and became frightening without anyone to help him understand it.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Do young children naturally experience unity or nonseparation?
• How can childhood experiences condition us to shut down sensitivity and openness?
• What can happen when a spiritual or psychedelic experience dissolves one’s sense of self?
• How can guidance and acceptance help someone move through a frightening awakening experience?

Key takeaways

• Early childhood may include direct experiences of spaciousness, unity, and deep sensitivity.
• Conditioning can teach children to suppress intense feeling and lose touch with openness.
• Spacious awareness is different from fully feeling the body’s pain and emotional experience.
• A sudden loss of the familiar self can be terrifying when its meaning is misunderstood.
• Fear of unusual experiences can reinforce itself and make surrender more difficult.
• Compassionate guidance can help people stay with felt experience instead of reacting mentally.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews. Not interviews—conversations. We’ve changed it because that’s what they are—with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 500 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to BatGap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them organized in several different ways.

If you appreciate this show and feel like supporting it, we appreciate that. That’s what makes it possible for us to do this. There’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and also a page that explains other ways of supporting it besides PayPal.

So my guest today is Tom Kurzka. That’s the right pronunciation, isn’t it, Tom?

Tom: Yeah, you’ve got it right, Kurzka.

Rick: Kurzka, good. Tom lives out in Eugene, Oregon, and has an interesting story, which we’ll be getting into. I’ll just read a little bit of his bio that he sent me.

“Over his lifetime, Tom has dived deeply into inner work while simultaneously living a householder life. Through an ongoing revelation of living in the moment, he integrates the insights of the most sophisticated Western-developed psychologies with the ongoing intuitive consciousness with which he has been blessed since childhood to guide those dedicated and willing to go courageously inward, often finding and releasing blocks to spiritual awakening which originated in earliest, often preverbal, childhood. After being asked to teach—”

Who asked you to teach, Tom?

Tom: Several. Joel Morwood in 2000. And then a subsequent—oh, some people here cornered me one day and had me teach after I had left the center. And then another teacher I worked with on the childhood issues, David Waldman, suggested I teach. So they keep cornering me, Rick. I can’t help myself. I’ve never myself gone after it. It just comes to me.

Rick: They say, “We have ways of making you teach.”

Tom: Yeah, that’s it.

Rick: So anyway, Joel Morwood has been on BatGap. People can look him up. Probably Tom will be talking about him during the interview. But after having been asked to teach, “Tom has been sharing this work for over 19 years. His sessions give attendees a taste of what he exudes: a patient, tender love that is our true, interconnected nature. His focus on connection to the immediacy of felt sensation enables potent transformations to readily manifest. His work and presence is an acknowledgement that our beautiful, imperfect human condition is completely embraced by the wide openness of life itself, even when the most uncomfortable aspects of ourselves appear.”

Do you do any teaching remotely, like over Skype or webinars or anything? Is it all just local in the Eugene area?

Tom: No, I go over Skype. I have a group in Charlottesville, Virginia. I go out there twice a year, but monthly we meet over Skype. And then I also go on Open Circle on occasion out of Berkeley. By the way, I want to plug Open Circle a little bit. They’re a great outfit. They have a lot of teachers who go online. They’ve been very, very supportive of this work.

Rick: Yeah, I’m friends with the people who are sort of like Kent Walsh and others in different areas of Open Circle around the Bay Area.

Tom: Yeah, they’re good people, so check them out.

Rick: Yeah, so they’re giving online things now as well as local programs in the Bay Area?

Tom: Yeah, there’s always an online thing. Again, basically it’s a format with a lot of conversation and interaction.

Rick: It’s like a Zoom call or something.

Tom: Like a Zoom, yeah. They use Zoom. Usually the sessions go two hours, and Pamela Wilson and Jeannie Zandi are on there.

Rick: Okay, good. So just to finish up your bio here: “Throughout your life, you’ve worked in numerous jobs in multiple disciplines, from basic minimum wage to corporate executive, from grade school teacher to construction contractor, from graphic designer to writer. You’ve been married to your wife, Dawn, for almost 40 years, and you have a daughter.”

Okay, so as I recall, having read a more detailed bio on your website, you began to have inklings that there was something more to life from quite an early age. So maybe let’s start there and then see how it unfolds.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Okay, well, I’ll start with three things. The first one, as a little kid—maybe three or four, it’s hard to say—I can recall sitting in my grandma’s sort of enclosed back porch. The windows were behind me, and I would look into this blue-tinted mirror, which would reflect the trees and the sky behind me that were coming through the window, right?

As a kid, I would just stare—a three-year-old just staring like that, not getting busy, busy, busy.

Rick: So you’re actually looking at the window but seeing the reflection of the trees and stuff that were behind you.

Tom: Yeah, yeah. I’m looking at the mirror and seeing a reflection of the trees behind me in the mirror, and it has that blue tint. I would sit there, just entranced by the trees waving in the space of the sky.

It wasn’t until 2000, when all of a sudden I had this shift in perspective, that I realized what that little boy was looking at. As a child, we don’t have the cognitive ability to go, “Oh, I am feeling myself as the space, as the trees, as they wave through the space.” That isn’t there. You’re just it, right? And so we forget that.

When that came back in 2000, I went, “Oh my gosh,” because I was having the same experience then. It was like, “My gosh, I look at the trees and the clouds, and I can feel myself as those. I feel myself as part of those. It’s like the separation has ended.” And yet I can still be separate and be that separate one as it waves through the sky or whatever.

When that came back in 2000, I went, “Oh my gosh,” because I was having the same experience then. It was like, “My gosh, I look at the trees and the clouds, and I can feel myself as those. I feel myself as part of those. It’s like the separation has ended.” And yet I can still be separate and be that separate one as it waves through the sky or whatever.

So there was that. Then, maybe at age seven or so, I would look in a mirror. I was always looking at mirrors, right? I would look in this mirror in the bathroom and just start looking at it, and basically I wouldn’t know who I was anymore. It was like the thought came, “I don’t exist.” For a minute, everything sort of shifted. My whole life wasn’t my life. It was like I was just here.

And the third one that I remember—so that’s sort of feeling the spacious presence, the spacious quality—was one time when I was a pretty good kid. I didn’t really raise a lot of fuss, but for some reason, this day my grandmother—my grandparents lived two doors down from my parents in Chicago. We lived in these two-story flats.

My parents had us when they were pretty young, so they would shove us off on the grandparents so they could go party or something. So we’re at Grandma’s house, and all I remember was that I was being a brat. I’m sitting in a chair, and she’s putting on my shoes to put me outside.

Every time she touched my leg to put my shoe on, it would hurt. Grandma, at the time, had some pain in her arms or in her body. Every time she touched me, it would hurt me. The response was that I would kick because it hurt so badly.

In other words, I was feeling her pain as my pain and in my body, right? I was completely enmeshed in that. And then, of course, she threw me outside. My father came into the backyard and picked me up and took me home. It wasn’t like he was being mean, but I was being a bad kid. I wasn’t being nice to Grandma.

I just remember hanging over his shoulders on his back, watching the ground. The point was that I was reprimanded for really, really feeling everything at this visceral level, and so that shut down.

We come in able to do that, but because of what parents and the environment do, we start to shut down.

That’s a point we come in able to do that, but because of what parents and the environment do, we start to shut down. It was like, no, it’s not okay to do that. What does a little kid do when they’re feeling the immense pain all around them? At some point, you learn to shut down.

Rick: I think they do, and maybe even all of them at some point, but I think it gets overshadowed to varying degrees at varying points in their early lives. For some, probably very quickly and heavily. For others, maybe it takes a little longer and isn’t so heavy.

The people I talk to on this show—many of them have memories of early childhood unity consciousness and celestial perception, where they’re seeing angels or something, or all kinds of things. But then, almost universally, it begins to be lost as they approach the age of eight or nine or ten or something. They may or may not go through a wild teenage phase, and then usually in the late teens or so, they start to have this yearning to regain that, and they start working at it consciously.

Tom: Yeah. I think that’s the common human experience. We come in. We’re this wide-open vessel, and then we forget, and then we have to remember again. See, we really never lost it. We just got covered over.

Rick: So in your case, as you’re saying, a lot of this stuff shut down as you were growing up. At what point did you have the inclination to start seeking or reawaken it?

Tom: Well, I think the looking in the bathroom mirror with that “You don’t exist”—that one, unlike looking at the clouds in the mirror or the experience with Grandma, stayed with me. All along, I still played the game of life. I would do what a kid does, get in trouble, do good things, do well in school, whatever. That was always there. I never forgot that one.

It was like there was something in there that said, “Oh, there’s more to this. There’s something that I’m missing.” And I think it was around age 14 that I found some academic books on Buddhism. I don’t know how I came across them, but I started reading some of them and went, “Oh.”

I was brought up a Lutheran, and God was like the Big Daddy in the sky, and there was Jesus. But Jesus was like the Big Daddy in the sky. There were all the Bible stories and everything, and I couldn’t relate this experience—this experience that, when we’re talking about religion and God, it’s like, “Well, this feels like this is God.”

I couldn’t make the leap to go, “Well, what are these Christians talking about here?” It just wasn’t computing with this immediate experience I was having.

So I ran across this book on Buddhism, and it was like, what they’re talking about—there’s no self, it’s nirvana, there’s just this now or whatever. And I thought, “Oh, well, this kind of relates to my experience, right?” So it got me interested in the Eastern religions.

Rick: That’s cool, around the age of 12-ish.

Tom: Yeah.

Rick: That’s kind of impressive at that age.

Tom: Well, I was a bookish kind of guy, introverted.

Fear, psychedelics, and losing one’s bearings

Rick: So then, as I recall your story, one of the next most significant milestones was when you took LSD as a kid. Or was there something before that that we should cover?

Tom: Well, there was one more piece I want to go over from when I was maybe in first grade, which I think is relevant. I always like to differentiate between feeling yourself as the space and feeling yourself as the whole human experience.

How I see it, it’s sort of like you’re driving down a road and it’s foggy, but the fog is only up to the top of the hood of your car, so you can see over the fog. There are two ways we can experience it. We can be more in the space, and we can sort of override this visceral physical pain. I was very good at that as a kid.

The example I’m giving is from when I was in first grade. Again, I got in trouble. There was an outside drinking fountain during our lunch break, and I loaded my mouth up with water and spit it on this other kid, Jimmy. I don’t know why I did it. I thought it was funny. I wasn’t that kind of kid. Every so often, this mischievousness would get in me, and so I forgot about it.

I came back in after lunch, and Mrs. Sauve, the first-grade teacher, said, “You come with me,” because the kid’s mother had called her up and said, “Tom Kurska did this to my kid.” She took me to the janitor’s closet, and she had the yardstick. She started beating my butt, first kind of gently.

My experience was that it was almost like I was up in the ceiling—not exactly, but I was up in the ceiling. It was like I was just watching this, and all the brunt force was hitting me. There was the physical pain and the emotional pain of her reprimanding me, but I was just calm up there, like, “Yeah, whatever.”

So she started hitting me harder and harder. She wanted to get me to cry, right? I didn’t know that at the time, but then she gave up because she couldn’t get me to cry. Here’s this six-year-old getting beaten by a yardstick, and the kid’s just sort of sitting there, taking it. Not denying that it’s there, but it’s sort of like he’s overriding it.

She stopped hitting me because she realized she couldn’t make me cry. She said, “Well, when you go back into that classroom, I want to make sure that you come back in there, cover your face and your eyes like this, and go down on the desk like you’re crying.”

Rick: It’s funny. She didn’t want the other kids to think that she wasn’t tough enough.

Tom: She wanted to make sure I was really punished, or whatever. I just wish, as a kid, I would have—today, a kid would probably go in there, do this, sit down at the desk, and start laughing or something.

Rick: These days, the teacher would be fired for doing that.

Tom: Yeah, that’s true. But anyway, I just wish I would have, because why is she thinking—? As a kid, you don’t understand these things. It’s like she wanted me to do that, but you listen.

Rick: Interesting.

Tom: So the point being, where I was going, is that I always like to differentiate between someone who can be spaciously present but isn’t totally here as a human. They’re not totally feeling the whole thing.

Just like with the grandma thing: I’m feeling her pain as my pain, felt-sense-wise, not just spaciously. So the next experience was the LSD experience.

We’ve already talked about how I still had this thing—“I don’t exist,” right? That’s in the background. I’m interested in Eastern religion, and I think it was the summer of my sophomore year in high school. I think I was 16. I started hanging around these guys who were doing drugs.

Some of these people in high school—I don’t know how they did it. There would be guys who were tripping on LSD every other day. I have no idea how they pulled that off. They must have had some filters or something, or they were able to drive a car on the stuff. I don’t know how they did that.

Rick: I did that, but boy, it was powerful stuff. I couldn’t have done it every other day.

Tom: So I don’t know if it was a tolerance or if they just blocked it, because to me, something like that opens you so wide. Your whole constructed world falls apart.

Rick: The first trip was kind of nice and fun. The second trip was like I went to a place that was like, “Whoa.” It isn’t just about the hallucinations you’re seeing or the patterns in the wall or whatever. It was like, “This is not something that I want to do again.” It scared the living crap out of me—not literally, but I mean it was like, “Whoa.” And I had to get down from that.

About a week later, we were out in the park. It was at night. One of my friends and I smoked some weed together, and we lay down on the grass looking up at the stars. I didn’t really feel that high, but I was.

The Terrifying Collapse of the Constructed World

I’m looking up at the stars, and all of a sudden, everything disappeared, just like I was really going to sleep—consciously going to sleep. All of a sudden, when I started to come to a little bit, all I was was the stars. I couldn’t separate myself. I couldn’t find my body. It was almost like I was totally asleep. I was conscious as these stars; everything was just enmeshed and merged.

I was probably like that for quite some time, and then all of a sudden, the mind structure came back and said, “What’s going on? This is not good. You’re totally losing yourself.”

I tried to get up as I could sense my body coming back. I tried to get myself to stand up. There was just this urge to stand up because I thought, “Well, this will center me.” As I tried to push against the ground to stand up, it felt like the ground was jelly. There wasn’t anything there, which made me panic.

I got up and started walking around. It was like, “Well, there’s nothing behind me. It’s just this moment.” My whole world just fractured. My whole constructed world was seen through, and I’m going, “I don’t like this. This is more than I bargained for.”

It was like, “There’s nothing here. I don’t know who I am. There’s nothing here.”

It was a lot different from looking in the mirror and going, “You don’t exist” for a moment. This was like, “There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here. I don’t know who I am. There’s nothing here.” In that experience, I went home and thought it would clear, but I could never get my bearings again for the longest time.

Rick: And does “the longest time” mean days or weeks?

Tom: Days. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. Every time I went to sleep, I’d go into these lucid dreams, and it was like, “Huhhhhh.” There was no one to talk to about it. Nowadays, you go down the block and find your nondual teacher or something. We’re talking about 1970. The only thing I had was a Ram Dass: Be Here Now book.

Rick: Do you think that if there had been someone to talk to about it, you could have just relaxed into it and not fought it, and it would have been okay? You would have been able to sort of move through it?

There’s this lady named Suzanne Segal. She’s not alive anymore, but she wrote a book called Collision with the Infinite. She was in terror for 10 years when she had an awakening because she was fighting it the whole time. Then finally she relaxed, and it was fine.

I’ve heard that described also: People can have a genuine awakening to self-realization or cosmic consciousness or whatever, but without knowledge, it can be a terrifying experience. They can misinterpret it and struggle against it and just make a big mess of what could otherwise be a real blessing.

Exactly. If someone had been there who understood the territory and said, “Oh, this is what’s going on,” they would know. I do this with people when they’re freaking out. It’s like, “Well, just come here. Just come here. Be the felt sense here. Don’t follow the mind reacting to it, trying to move away and making you crazy.”

Tom: Exactly. If someone had been there who understood the territory and said, “Oh, this is what’s going on,” they would know. I do this with people when they’re freaking out. It’s like, “Well, just come here. Just come here. Be the felt sense here. Don’t follow the mind reacting to it, trying to move away and making you crazy.”

I couldn’t get to sleep at night, and that went on for three days. I wasn’t seeing my friends, so I was isolated.

Rick: Let me just probe you again here. You couldn’t get to sleep, and you mentioned that when you were trying to get to sleep, you would start having lucid dreams.

Tom: Yeah.

Rick: So again, it seems like maybe you could have gotten to sleep, except you were afraid to because it was a relinquishment of control or something—a surrender into something you didn’t know what it was. That’s why you couldn’t sleep, right?

Tom: Well, yeah. It was fear that I would drop off. The thing with fear is that you’re afraid of fear, and it just escalates. Yeah, that is exactly what was going on. The fear was keeping me up. I couldn’t drop below the lucid dreaming and just drop.

Eventually—I think it was the third day of this—I called up one of my friends. I wanted to go over, just to get out of the house, because I was hiding from my parents. My parents didn’t know I was doing drugs. I was being bad, right?

I talked to him on the phone. He answered the phone, but then, after three days with no sleep and all this going on, I hallucinated his voice. It felt like something—not that you can feel something inside your brain—but I could feel this “chooo” buzz through my brain. It was almost like I was hit with a hammer.

I just felt, “Oh my gosh. I am going crazy. I am going crazy. I am going to totally go nuts.” So I ran and told my mom what was going on, which eventually got me into the psychiatric place.

They gave me—I don’t know what they gave me. It was a nice drug. Maybe it was Ativan or something. It calmed me down.

I do remember they took me in the ambulance. This was a big deal, right? So they wheeled me into the hallway.

Rick: Your mom couldn’t just drive you down?

Tom: No, because I basically woke up. I finally did drop off to sleep that afternoon after I told her, and I think the doctor we took me to gave me a little bit of a downer, so I was able to go to sleep. But then, all of a sudden, I came to. I knew who I was, but I couldn’t find my mother or my body. It was almost like I was in this tunnel, trying to get out. Again, this fear was escalating.

I remember grabbing onto her, trying to get back into this reality. I think that just freaked her out, so she called the ambulance. They put me on a stretcher in the ambulance. It was dramatic, but what was she to do? This was new territory for her. She’d heard all these scare stories about drugs, and her son had done LSD and whatever.

So we were in the hospital, and I don’t even think she came along in the ambulance. They had me on a stretcher in the hallway, and I was freaking out. I was losing my mind. This paranoia was just going through me, and none of the staff was doing anything about me. They were just going about their business, and I was lying down on the table thinking, “I’m really losing it. Why aren’t they coming to help me?”

Finally, after about a half hour of this, I stood up. They said, “Oh, you finally decided to stand up on the table.” I was looking around. They weren’t making a big deal about this, and I was thinking, “Am I making a big deal about this? What’s going on?”

Anyway, they gave me a drug, and I slept that night. Then I was on Valium for a while. But I kept having the same feeling: “I’m disappearing.” I felt like there was a black hole constantly chasing me, even after I stabilized.

So there was, again, this spiritual impulse. There was this curiosity: “What is going on here? I want to find out what this is.” Then there would be this other voice: “No, no, no, no. Don’t go there. Don’t go there!” That was my life from then on until I was, what, 40 or 45, I think, in 2000. Something like that, yeah.

Rick: So for about 25 years, you were kind of on a seesaw between wanting to know what this was and then being afraid of it and backing off. You were just sort of in this limbo state all those years.

Tom: Yeah, so I read more books. I did Transcendental Meditation. Do you know Bruce Randall, by the way? He was the guy who turned me on to Transcendental Meditation.

Rick: It doesn’t come to mind. I might have met him. I was a TM teacher for a long time, and I was on the East Coast mostly, but I don’t remember Bruce.

Tom: Well, he would have been at the university there in Fairfield for a bit. I visited him there one summer.

So anyway, I did Transcendental Meditation, and that was kind of nice. It sort of settled me, but the problem I had with it was that I’d get very spaced out with it. I would really get lost in thought, to the point where I was sort of not really here in my body.

Rick: You mean during the practice or afterward?

Tom: During the practice.

Rick: During the practice, you’re not necessarily supposed to be functional in activity because you’re withdrawing the senses from their objects and going right within. So that’s not really a problem. But some people get spacey even afterward because they don’t stabilize it or integrate it enough.

Tom: Later, I got into Self-Realization Fellowship. I took Kriya Yoga. I did Kriya for many years—a hardcore meditator, you could say. So there was that going on.

But if you talk to my wife, once we get on this conversation, there were times when we’d be driving in the car. The motion in an airplane or driving a car would bring this black-hole experience on. She always talks about one time when we were driving back from eastern Oregon, and I was having a big time in the car. I couldn’t find the car. I couldn’t find my body. I was flailing around in the car, looking for something to grab onto. I always felt like everything was going to disappear and explode, like there was nothing really here.

Rick: I don’t see that as pathological. I mean, something like that could be, but I have a feeling that you had one foot in the transcendent, to the extent that it wasn’t integrated well with your relative experience. Things could shift you into that state, and then you’d have trouble functioning in the relative.

Obviously, eventually—and probably you’re there now—you have to integrate it so that you can be as deep and profound as anyone can be, and yet you can drive the car, pay your taxes, and do all the concrete, mundane stuff that needs to be done. So it’s a matter of integration.

Obviously, eventually—and probably you’re there now—you have to integrate it so that you can be as deep and profound as anyone can be, and yet you can drive the car, pay your taxes, and do all the concrete, mundane stuff that needs to be done. So it’s a matter of integration.

Tom: Yeah. Well, that was the process. That was my life until Dawn, my wife, dragged me to the Center of Sacred Sciences one day. She had been going there for a year, and the part of me that didn’t want anything to do with it was saying, “I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to do this. I know where this is going to take me, right?” But the curious part said, “Yeah, but why not?”

Actually, Joel—Joel’s a good guy. He was the first guy who said, “Oh, you know, you have fear. Fear is just fear, right?”

Rick: So you’re referring to Joel Morwood, who’s been on BatGap, if people want to look that up. There’s a link to the Center for Sacred Sciences on his page there. Go ahead.

Tom: Yeah. He’s very knowledgeable.

Rick: He is. I remember that about him.

Tom: Yeah. His niche is seeing that, in all this stuff you can find, every mystical tradition or every religious tradition has a mystical element to it.

What was beautiful about him was that when I would talk to the monks in Self-Realization Fellowship about this, they’d say, “Well, you’re supposed to feel bliss. You’re supposed to feel joy.” Well, I do get some joy—don’t get me wrong. But when I really, really get into meditation, it turns into this: There’s nothing here, right?

Rick: Essentially, those monks didn’t have that understanding in their toolkit because it is pretty universal. There are probably hundreds of interviews that I’ve conducted in which that kind of topic comes up—the more difficult aspects of the path, the dark night of the soul, and all that kind of thing.

Tom: Well, to be fair, there were only two I talked to. The first guy wasn’t a high-class monk. He was the one who said, “Oh, you should go to some therapy or something. You’ve got psychological problems.”

The second guy, Santoshananda, was really a very beautiful being. He was helpful. He did get it.

Rick: One time, a friend of mine was going through a real spacey phase like that, and he asked Maharishi what he should do. Maharishi said, “Go get a job loading trucks.”

Tom: That helps sometimes.

Rick: Just something really gross, mundane, and physical.

Tom: Well, I remember I had one friend who knew one guy who totally had one of those experiences. All of a sudden, his head disappeared and he spread out all over. The advice was, “Eat some meat.”

Rick: Yeah, they say that too. Smoke cigars, eat meat—whatever, something grounding. But there are ways of integrating and stabilizing. If you’re doing a lot of spiritual practice and a lot of meditation, you need to get grounded. You need to alternate it with something grounding.

Tom: Yeah, well, I do building construction or gardening or something like that. It’s nice just to get your hands on something every once in a while, if you’re here.

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: Or walk.

Anyway, at the Center for Sacred Sciences under Joel Morwood, he’s very big on practice. Joel has just a basic breath meditation. You just wander, and you come back to the sensation of the breath. You wander again. You’re not—just—that’s your anchor, right? You just come back to this.

What I sort of morphed that into was—I think they call it shamatha—where I would just focus on the out-breath. When the out-breath came, I was the out-breath.

I would get these bouts of fear: “Oh, the black hole is coming in. What’s going to happen?” Every time that happened, I would breathe out into it and just sort of sigh—again, integrating the body. I’m coming here, right? Rather than going into mental land.

Once that little mind takes off, it can go places, right? It’s a tricky little devil. So: “Oh, a black hole. I can’t feel my body. Where’s my body?” The mind freaks out, and then the next out-breath comes in: Ahhhhhh. It would be like this sigh, and I’d feel myself coming out of this mental-thought-land place.

Rick: Wow, so each breath would be—there would be a wave of it.

Tom: Yeah. Wave after wave after wave.

And so I’d start to feel, at first, this intense fear in the body, right? Breathe out into that fear. But what I learned was that intense fear, which is the mind’s worst enemy, is like a dog trying to run. I breathe out into that, and what I found was that if I just stayed in that raw, felt sense of that fear energy, it was like it got me here, and there was an okay-ness. It was like a relief. It was like, “It’s not so bad.”

Don’t push the river. There’s a wisdom to the unraveling.

I was like, “There’s nothing here, but that’s an idea, right? I’m here. Something is here. This intense fear is here.” And so I just did that. And again, the Center for Sacred Sciences was always talking about, “Oh, you’re going to get your Gnostic awakening if you keep at this.” This little carrot. And in doing this practice, after a while, it was like I didn’t care about a Gnostic awakening. It was like, what—it was just so rich, just to sink into here. There was no—

Rick: Sounds like the Gnostic awakening happened. The carrot got in your mouth.

Tom: “You’re going to get this,” and all the other fellow students are going, “Oh yeah, we got it. No, no, no, no, we’ve got to get this. We’re going to get this, but yeah, awakening.” Yeah, it’s like, like you said, the Gnostic awakening was sort of seeping through. It’s like, no, it’s okay just to be here, and so it just got to be so nice. It was just like, “No, I’m just here.”

And it’s not to say that the black hole of fear wouldn’t come up, but there was a way of going, “Oh.” It was like a welcoming of it, so to speak, rather than a running.

Rick: Do you have an explanation for what was causing this fear? Maybe now, in retrospect?

Tom: Fear of annihilation. It’s a fear of losing my pseudo-constructed self, seeing that it’s fake. It’s just a mental construct. Yeah, I mean, that’s very scary. And basically, it was that construct freaking out. It wasn’t the real me freaking out.

Rick: Yeah, I’m glad you said that because I don’t think it would have been an intellectual fear of annihilation. It’s more like a visceral fear based upon the fact that the ego structure is actually starting to dissolve. And when it does that, there’s a sort of gut reaction to resist dissolution because it wants to retain its identity.

I’ve seen this many times in conversations with people, but it’s kind of like this threshold that has to be crossed, in which the ego just relaxes and dissolves. And there’s a fear that comes up as we approach that threshold, much like there’s turbulence that arises if we’re flying a jet close to the speed of sound. It gets really turbulent as you cross the sound barrier, and then it’s smooth.

Tom: Yeah. There’s that transition point, isn’t there?

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: Yeah, it’s that point in between that’s the real rough place. So that was going on, this just sort of sinking and being present, and this okay-ness with uncomfortable sensation or uncomfortable energy, you could say.

So we went on a five-day retreat at the Center that Joel and his firstborn were co-teaching. And all I’m doing, I’m going there and the fear would come up: “Oh, I’m disappearing. I’m spreading out.” Still doing the same sort of practice: “Okay, breathe out. I’m here.”

There was one night on the retreat— I think the fourth day—where, all of a sudden, I just felt so connected to everything. Everything was like I was in this zone. Anything I touched or did was like doing itself, so to speak. And so I’m going, “Wow. Wow. I can’t believe this.”

I mean, the structure had been so closed down, and it’s like opening, like, “What’s going on? This is incredible.” And so I went to Joel that night, and I told him. I said, “Well, Joel, I think I’m waking up. I think I’m getting enlightened. That’s what I think.”

And he just yells at me, “Who’s getting enlightened? Who’s getting enlightened? Because nobody gets it. It gets itself.” He says, “I want you to go to the last night of the retreat.”

So the next day, maybe it was the fifth day, I can’t remember. It was the last night of the retreat, so the next morning, we’re leaving, right? So he says, “You go back to your room or go back in the meditation hall, and don’t you give up until you see that you’re enlightened.”

Rick: Hopefully, if you’re eating dinner with Joel and you say, “Please pass the salt,” he doesn’t say, “Who wants the salt?”

Tom: No, he does give you the salt. Sometime when I was co-teaching with him, I was leading them on: “Well, you know, it’s all sensation. If you don’t follow the subject-object thing and you’re in the diner, like, you hear the coffee pot going, it’s just sound. It’s just sound, right?”

And I’m leading them on this, and then Joel has to correct me. He says, “Well, it also means that the coffee’s ready.”

Rick: Yeah, exactly, which is true. We interpret the sound.

Tom: Right, right. So it’s both. It’s both.

And so all night long, all of a sudden, I’ve lost this beautiful in-the-zone state. I’m sitting there trying to get it back, and I can’t get it back, and I can’t get it back. And I’m just thinking, “Oh, what am I going to do? My time is almost up.”

And so I think it was that night—it’s like four in the morning—and I’m just lying there in my bed, awake and just in this very peaceful place. I’m listening to the sounds of the birds as they’re chirping in the morning, and there’s just no thought. I’m just—I just feel myself as the bird, but it’s just wonderful, right?

And then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, the mind comes back in and thinks some dumb thought. One of the things I’d been doing all along in the out-breath, when the mind would come back and then think, I would sort of give it compassion. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

There wouldn’t be— I was getting rid of this beat-up syndrome that we all have. It’s like, “What’s the matter with you? You’re a bad meditator.” And so there’s this welcoming of that.

And all of a sudden, the little voice says, “What’s the matter with you? You are almost there. You should have had it, man.” But then the “Oh, you’re okay, too” came in. And this, again, is like a mystery. You can set the table, but you can’t make it happen.

Something all of a sudden—this “aha,” very, very deep-felt, saw that the thought of the mind was exactly the same as the sound of the birds. There was absolutely no difference. The whole thing was equal.

Rick: Yeah, just another sensory experience, right?

Tom: We can talk about that intellectually, but when it was grokked the way it was grokked, it was like all of a sudden everything spread out because, “Well, I have these special thoughts, right? Wait a minute. They’re like a bird.”

The thought of the mind was exactly the same as the sound of the birds.

And so it was like something really fractured at that point. And then, of course, at breakfast, Joel was saying, “Hey, you haven’t seen it yet. You’d better get busy and go for it.”

Rick: Sounds like he’s a bit of a taskmaster.

Tom: Oh, he’s a teddy bear mostly, but he even told me later, “I’m sorry I was so harsh on you.” But he needed to be. It was part of the game, really.

Rick: There are a few thoughts from what you’ve been saying that have come to mind. One is that I think what you were undergoing was not just a mental or psychological transformation. It’s a physiological transformation.

Tom: Absolutely.

Rick: Both the gross and the subtle physiology have to undergo this shift to a new style of functioning in order for the consciousness, or the awareness, to be in a new style of functioning. And that doesn’t happen on a dime.

They talk about neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change its structure and function. But that doesn’t happen in an instant. It takes time for the neurons and whatnot to reconfigure themselves, so it’s good to know that because if a person feels that it should happen instantly, it’s a misunderstanding.

Tom: Yeah, well, that’s what I always tell people: “Don’t push the river.” There’s a wisdom to the unraveling; you let it do your unraveling. Because you’re right—everything is getting rewired on every single level, and that takes time.

That’s when people will burn their circuits out if they just push and push and push. There were times when something would really open prior to this meditation retreat. One time, it was just sort of like, again, I felt this black hole, like I couldn’t get out of it.

And finally, the movement was, “Okay, go downstairs. Go on the internet and distract yourself.” Back then, the internet was really slow, but it took a whole half hour until I could get back to my normal sense.

Rick: And sometimes distracting yourself is really important. It’s like, don’t push it—take a break. You know when you need a break; honor it. Don’t be a martyr here.

Tom: Right.

Why Every Awakening Path Is Different

The other thing to keep in mind is that everybody’s path to knowing who they are is slightly different. One size never fits all. Don’t compare yourself to Ramana Maharshi or anybody else. We each have a dharma, a course of action that is most conducive to our evolution.

Rick: The other thing to keep in mind is that everybody’s path to knowing who they are is slightly different. One size never fits all. Don’t compare yourself to Ramana Maharshi or anybody else. We each have a dharma, a course of action that is most conducive to our evolution.

Tom: Yeah. So their wiring, where they were at, is very different. We all think, “Yeah, I’m going to have this little awakening, and then I’ll be like Ramana Maharshi.” No. Good luck with that. Maybe.

Rick: It sounds like that was your watershed moment there.

Tom: Well, actually, it went on. It was like we left the retreat, and to me, there were lots of watershed moments, but really the biggest one was what Joel referred to as a Gnostic awakening.

And after that, to me, it went on. I went to another teacher, David Waldman, but that night, coming back from the retreat, I went to sleep. In the morning there was this thing again. We talked about the transition between knowing you’re the structure and my world coming back versus “I’m this vastness.” That place where I just wake up, where we just wake up—that’s a transition.

That would always be a very, very difficult thing for me because, all of a sudden, you’re just the primal soup. There’s nobody looking. You just did. There’s no one here, right? But that’s what it is right now. So when the world comes back in, to feel that coming back in and touching this human experience, this thing, it’s a shock. It’s a shock, and that used to generate fear.

So this time when I woke up, rather than the fear coming in, the response was, “I’m so tired of this,” and I just relaxed. Tired can be very useful. Exhaustion can be very useful. So there was just this exhaustion. It was like, “I can’t keep doing this.”

And so I got up and thought, “Well, what should I do now? Maybe I should meditate.” And the thought was, “Nah, I’m so tired of meditating. I’ll just make myself a cup of tea.” Everything was just sort of flowing, and there wasn’t any looking for anything.

I’m making the cup of tea, and I looked up across the room. When I looked again, I was looking as a child.

I knew myself as the room. I knew myself as the cloud. That’s when it came back, because that’s what that kid was looking at. Everything was myself. Everything was myself. Not my ego self, but the ego self was just a reflection off it. It was just part of it.

It was so ordinary that it was extraordinary.

It wasn’t some bells-and-whistles thing, although it had a bells-and-whistles quality. It was so ordinary. It was so ordinary that it was extraordinary. And all of a sudden, every little thing was so connected.

Later that morning, I think I told Dawn what had happened. Our daughter had to go to the doctor, so I took her to the doctor. Here it was, this blasted opening, right? We’re sitting in the waiting room while she’s seeing the physician, and this little kid had these shoes on that, when you move, flash lights.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve seen those.

Tom: Yeah, well, I’d never seen those before.

Rick: You thought it was some kind of hallucination or something?

Tom: I’m going, “What? No, no, it can’t be!” Finally, the mind puts it together that there have to be little flashing lights going on.

That was really knowing the space and opening of the head center, and opening the heart to a certain extent, opening the belly to a certain extent. But it just went on after that.

Rick: A lot of people conceive of awakening as being some endpoint after which there’s no more development. Even some people who have had an awakening think that it’s finished, and eventually I think most of them discover that it isn’t.

Tom: Okay, good. I’m glad we’re going there, because to me, that’s more important. I think there are two types. There’s a type like in my experience, where at some point there was a definite demarcation. And I think there are also the oozers. They kind of ooze into it, and you can’t find one sharp point.

Rick: Yeah, and even if it is a relatively sharp thing, as it somewhat was in your case, it still keeps going.

Tom: It keeps going because there’s a spacious element to it. Like I said, the head center opened. I couldn’t believe a thought anymore. Even when I was believing a thought, it was like—sure, I can entertain them, but sooner or later, they just pop.

Rick: When you say you couldn’t believe a thought anymore, does that mean you didn’t have opinions?

Tom: I still get that, but it’s like I have my opinions, I have my preferences, and I can follow them—and sometimes get kind of heated about them.

Rick: But they’re not as solid or compelling?

Tom: Because when I say I can see through thought, it’s like when you have the experience, the thought is no different than a bird. How can you take it too seriously? It becomes a game. Sometimes, in the moment, the thought is right on in the reality of the moment, but then it was relevant for that moment.

Otherwise, it’s just conditioning that we play, but I still entertain them, sure. I’m a Democrat, you know.

Rick: Yeah. You know, people tend to want to think in black-and-white terms. I like to think, “Oh, wait, let’s look at it from God’s perspective.” Since everything is God, all these perspectives must be God’s perspective, and obviously there’s a great diversity of them.

We are not drops in the ocean. Each of us is the entire ocean in a drop.

Tom: Oh, that’s so sweet. That’s what I mean. It’s like, “Yeah, I can have thoughts, but the thoughts don’t have me.” Sometimes they have me. That still goes on. That’s part of God too, right? It’s like anything goes, basically, is what you see.

You can’t take a—I become positionless, even when I’m taking a position. We could have a very sharp, pronounced awakening, so to speak. But if you’re like Ramana Maharshi—and even then it went on for him. It’s not to say it didn’t.

Rick: Oh, he did, sure. He sat in that cave for umpteen years.

Tom: Right. Or even Yogananda. You read about him and find out that he was fretting about money, going through bouts of sadness, and being ostracized. We emulate these people and say, “Oh, they’re so perfect,” but they’re just imperfect human beings like everybody else.

I ran across another teacher, David Waldman, also known as davidji. He is working mostly with the heart. You just go and sit there with him and do nothing, basically, but sit.

Rick: Does he talk, or—

Tom: Yeah, yeah. He talks. He is a devotee of Ramana Maharshi. He’s a very beautiful being, and again, an imperfect human being too, as we all are.

I started going there, and he said, “Well, your eyes are really, really clear, but there’s a piece that you’re missing.” So I went on one retreat, and the fear was coming up.

And again, the beauty now is that awakening is sort of like what’s climbing to the top of the mountain. So you hit this plateau, and it’s like maybe three months of honeymoon. Then all of a sudden, more stuff is moving through, but you’re on the downhill slope. You don’t believe you’re a doer anymore. It’s sort of like you’re coasting. It’s still hard, but it’s not like it was. You’re not seeking. You know you’re there, so to speak. It’s all okay.

It’s sort of like nature is doing the work for you.

Tom: Right, which it was in the beginning too, but now you know it is.

Rick: Now you experience that.

Tom: Yeah, you’re being baked, right? Let yourself be baked.

Rick: And actually, it can accelerate at that point because an ocean can dissolve clumps of mud a lot better than a little glass of water.

Tom: Yeah, right. So you’re on easy street and may go through some intensity. David always talked about purging. Your body would heat up and something would be releasing.

So anyway, I go on this retreat with him, and he has me come up to the chair because we do dialogue in the chair, and he says, “Well, just connect with me.” So I connected with him. I started weeping and sobbing, and all of a sudden everything sort of opened up and disappeared. It was just a whole different level of being here and feeling everything. I jumped up, and I wanted to run. He grabbed me and said, “No, no. Stay here. Stay here.” Very good advice: stay here.

The next morning, we used to sit hardcore. He would get up, and we’d be sitting at about 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning before the official sit would happen. So I went there, and he’s sitting there. The story was, “Wow, this guy cares so much for me that he’s willing to come up there and sit with me.”

But what was really felt was that the beloved one I am is willing to take all of me, to give it all to me. And I just started weeping, just from the belly, weeping these tears that felt like bliss. It was just like, “What a relief, what a relief.”

Later, it was pointed out to me that there’s a lot of pain there too. For the rest of that retreat, it was like I was reliving very early-childhood and infant trauma.

That went on for about six months or a year. I’d sit with him, and immediately I would just double up, and tears would be coming out of my eyes and snot coming out of my nose. It was very preverbal stuff. I can’t describe it, but the outcome is more and more to feel like when I was with Grandma and feeling her pain in my body, to see that the touching is—there’s such a depth to the touching. There’s really literally no separation, and that’s ongoing. I still feel like I’m walking around in the dark, but that’s what was the opening of the belly.

Rick: Adya talks about awakening happening sequentially, sometimes with head, heart, and gut. You’ve talked about head and heart. Have you had a gut thing that you could distinguish between the head and the heart awakenings?

Tom: Oh, yeah. The gut, to me, is where our survival instinct is. You need that, but it wants to survive. And so you have to meet it, and it’s scared. It’s like a frightened little creature.

For me, most of that is pre-verbal. The only thing I can do with that when it comes on is just be with that raw felt sense. It’s the pain coursing through the body, or the fear coursing through the body, or usually I’m just crying.

The byproduct is that you feel more connected to what is, rather than feeling like it’s empty. You feel this—the aliveness really has a substantiality to it. It’s like a touching. It’s not just at a physical level. It’s a real touching past the physical.

That’s belly energy. That’s like being the creature, being here, being everything on a visceral, real level. Belly energy always goes back to early childhood, where something shut down. Eventually, it’s like being a baby coming out of the womb. You’re just pure being. You’re the fluidity of the moment.

Rick: Since we’re speaking about pain, I think this might be a relevant time to ask a question. Francis O’Hara asks, “Please speak about your experience with prayer and how to help a loved one who has died. Our brother chose suicide. How might we help our Billy?”

Tom: Hold him in your heart. There’s the pain of feeling the loss of him. Those who have passed on and are no longer in a physical body, the minute you think of them, you can feel their essence. You can feel them. And when you’re feeling them, you’re holding them.

In fact, the more you just—not so much feel the story about what he did or his life, but just feel who he is, the basis of who he is—because everybody has a different feeling of presence. Billy has a presence. Every time you bring him into your mind, you can say a prayer and say whatever you believe: “God help Billy.” But when you say that, feel his essence in your heart. That’s the best thing you can do for him.

And in that, you’ll feel your own pain. So you’re holding both your pain and his essence and his pain, and you start to see that there’s a larger holding for both of you—that it’s all just part of you.

Rick: That’s nice. And the way you’re phrasing it implies that Billy still exists in some way, shape, or form, which I think most of the people listening to this show would agree with. Billy’s still around on some level, and by holding him in your heart, as you’re saying, you’re directly connecting with him in a real way that’s beneficial.

Tom: Yeah, exactly. I do that with my father, who died in ’91 very suddenly of a bee sting. The minute I bring him to mind, I feel him. I feel his essence. He’s there. This goes on. Why would it just end? It goes on.

Rick: Because you and I are talking about continuing evolution after awakening. Most people don’t even get to awakening, but obviously there’s a purpose to the universe and a purpose to our lives. They’re not just meaningless, random events. The purpose is ultimately what we would call evolution.

Tom: I think so. I can’t prove it, but it goes on. You know it goes on because what we are is an eternal expression of the One. We’re like windows in the One.

Rick: The essence of what we are continues to grow.

Tom: Right.

Rick: Even now, in what we look like—this material world, this physical reality—what you start to see is that it’s so alive and interconnected.

Tom: And if this reality is that way, we construct it and say, “Well, no, this is solid. When I leave there, there won’t be anything.” But really, in a very real sense, this is just a slowed-down dream.

Rick: Can you remember a time in your life when the world looked dead and lifeless, and now, by contrast, it looks extremely alive and full of intelligence?

Tom: The funny thing about it is that you forget how it was. When I look back at any experience—even if it felt bleak and dead—I feel the life that is beneath the bleak and dead. So my memory is colored. There’s only now. Even the memory’s a now. So I think it transforms.

Rick: A lot of people might be able to relate to this because think how many people are on antidepressants in this country. If it doesn’t seem as rosy as you and I are describing it, there’s hope.

Tom: It’s funny. I just talked to someone who struggles with depression. If you can—it’s the last thing we usually want to do—be that felt sense of the depression without the story, allowing that yucky feeling to be your anchor out of the mind, you start to see that something bigger is holding it. The aliveness is holding this yucky feeling.

It’s like letting go of who you think you are and your problem, but it’s rough stuff. It’s not an easy thing to deal with.

I remember one time working with a person in a retreat who has Parkinson’s disease. She said, “I can’t stand this.” I said, “Well, you know, the thing is to let it be what it is—to accept it.” But then I realized, who am I to say that she should just accept this? I don’t have this disease, and she does.

I said, “I bet that pisses you off, and you want to slug me in the face.”

And she says, “Yeah!”

And I said, “You need to embrace that anger over the Parkinson’s. You’re ripped off. Go there.”

That really did something for her, because she never felt permission to be mad about her condition. She was supposed to be a good little spiritual person and accept it as is. You have to start where you are.

Personal expression and divine will

Rick: Sometimes people talk about having lost a sense of personal self as a result of their awakening. It seems to me that if we’re alive, there also still has to be the personal expression.

Tom: There are different levels of personal self. There’s the personality, your structure. It’s good to still have access to that stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But what I see is that the personal self—the idea of a “me” on a personality level—is like a rainbow. When you see a rainbow, it’s there, but yet it’s not there. It comes and goes.

To me, there’s a deeper personal self—we call it the personal essence—where it’s the vastness, and I touch it as me. The vastness touches itself as a human being. It’s being personal.

That comes and goes, too. Sometimes you’re just the vastness. The personal essence comes and goes like everything else, but I think another word for that would be the soul.

Rick: So if you’re nothing but the vastness, is there any functionality at that point?

Tom: Well, if you’re totally inward in that, there’s no functionality going on, right? But it all depends on what your situation is in life. If there’s someone to take care of you, feed you, or whatever, or you disappear.

It’s like we’re going up and down an elevator. Being is so amazing.

Rick: You can sort of think of life as progressing or spanning a wide range of frequencies, from the totally unmanifest and impersonal, absolute universal, to much more specific expression, with all kinds of gradations in between.

Tom: You watch through life, and you get actively involved in something. The idea of a personal doing something can completely fall away into what it becomes. I call it pure occurrence.

It’s like reading a book. You get totally swept up in the book. There’s something that’s aware of the reading, but your sense of a personal one who’s reading a book is totally gone.

Rick: You hear great athletes describe being in the zone. They’re just playing basketball or whatever in such a spontaneous, automatic way that there’s not a lot of thought or choice happening.

Tom: That’s sort of what it gets to, for me: what evolves gets to be more and more like that. Yet even then, there is a personal essence that’s flavoring that movement for that form.

You go to different masters or whatever, and they’ve all got different flavors, but you start to see it’s all doing itself. There isn’t really a doer. But sometimes the doer arises. Sometimes it’s necessary to have a doer.

Rick: What’s your take on the idea of free will?

Tom: What I find is that, just like there’s a personal expression of God—God being personal—there’s an aspect of God that is will.

The difference is that usually we, believing we’re a separate one, say, “Here’s my will. I have this will.” But rather than following that right away, if you just sit down and receive from it, you become this dark, wide-open receiving. If there’s a will, the will from this deeper will takes over and expresses itself.

I would say that ultimately, God has a will, but sometimes that God-will can be used via what we think of as the personal will.

When I teach or do satsang, this rainbow in here doesn’t have a clue. It’s just receiving, and it’s almost like being on the telegraph wire: “Okay, say this. Say this.” I’m always amazed. Sometimes the mind says, “Don’t say that.” And it says, “No, it’s coming through.”

Rick: When you really do that, is there really any individual will left? Or is it just the will of God functioning through an individual structure or expression, which has become a pure instrument of the divine?

Tom: Yeah, so the question sort of falls apart in a way.

🕊️ Discrimination and spiritual pitfalls

Rick: Some people have a problem with the idea of God because they think, “How could any loving God allow all the horror to exist in the world, and all the suffering and the Holocaust and all the terrible things that happen?”

Tom: Sometimes I watch these nature films. You go, “Kangaroo! I hope it can get away from the dingo dog.” Nature, if you look, as beautiful and peaceful as it is, is eating itself apart. It’s devouring itself.

And we as humans, we have that animal nature. Again, the survival instinct: I need to get mine.

But we have this ability to actually consciously know that we can rise above this dog-eat-dog world. We have this ability to feed everybody in the world.

If you know you’re connected—that everything is you—when you create harm out there, it’s almost like it’s hurting your own body. It stops me short. Something bigger is governing me.

And so, to me, while there are still going to be mishaps in the world, if everyone knew this, we’d think twice, three times, ten times over before we denied an immigrant entry across the border. We’d do something about the problems in Central America because it’s all us.

But again, to me, this world, this play, can never be perfect. To even have this play, you have to have black and white. You have to have good and evil. If you don’t have those opposites, there’s nothing here.

Rick: If you’re going to have a relative existence, then there have to be relative qualities. That means it can’t all be perfect. There needs to be a spectrum, a span.

It’s important to act as if it’s your body to take care of. You have to act out of love. But ultimately, it’s to see: I am more than this passing show. I am this vastness that can never be destroyed.

Tom: Yeah, we should take action. We should take care of the garden, so to speak.

Rick: Profound, beautiful spiritual teachings can be corrupted and twisted. If you really are experiencing unity, then you do see the world as yourself, and you would not inflict harm on anything.

Tom: Someone can open very, very widely in the head center, and yet their belly and their heart are not so open. All of a sudden, they become what I think some call an enlightened ego because they don’t have the belly and the heart tempering.

Basically, it’s just a continual wearing down. You just get more and more humble. Who is doing it? I’m just a servant. How can you harm somebody? Even when you’re harming, you know it stops you short. We’re not perfect, but to do what that teacher was doing, clearly there’s a shadow side that hasn’t been met.

There are probably sides of him that are totally open that people are attracted to, but then there’s this shadow side. I think we call it the sick guru.

Rick: People say, “Well, I don’t like the sound of that, but this guy is supposed to be enlightened, and he’s kind of impressive. Therefore, I will doubt my own common sense and just continue to go along with this thing.” And you can go way down the rabbit hole thinking that way.

Tom: Right. You have to trust your gut. You have to trust what you know. You have to feel what is going on. If it feels a little off, get the hell out.

Rick: So how are things with you these days, Tom? What are you doing for a living?

Tom: I left. I was doing building construction part-time while I was teaching part-time, and I was a licensed contractor in the state. But I gave that up at the beginning of the year. It takes too much away from the teaching, and my body’s getting too old to work out in the hot sun.

I still need to fix up my house. I am trying to teach full-time, and we live pretty cheaply. We’ve got all our debt paid off. Still driving an old car, a 1988 Toyota Tercel.

Rick: That’s really old. This is my gig; it’s pretty much just teaching now. Great. Well, I hope you get a nice bump from the interview.

Tom: Yeah, I hope so. I hope it’s not too big. We’ll see if I can handle it.

Rick: And in terms of your personal development, what kind of stuff do you feel like you’re going through these days?

Tom: To me, I think a lot of my growth comes through the teaching. Sometimes I tell people, “You think I’m the teacher? I feel like I’m the student.”

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Tom: “You’re teaching me.” It’s an interchange. Don’t count yourself short. What you’re seeing in me that you emulate, rather than saying it’s coming from me, is a reflection of something that’s already inside you, or otherwise you wouldn’t see it.

So I think what’s going on is just a deeper, deeper collapse into letting what the aliveness that’s behind this form, that’s moving this essence as itself—as the drop in the ocean, so to speak—it just keeps deepening. And yet what is isn’t going anywhere; its expression keeps expressing itself closer and closer to its love.

And that’s pretty much what I think my gig is right now, moving in that direction and still living a life. I hang out with my wife, we garden, and every once in a while we might go to a party. We do watch television.

Rick: Do you feel that functioning in the role of a teacher increases the voltage for you?

Tom: Oh, yeah.

Rick: Because you’re in this role, it’s sort of like the powers that be say, “Okay, boys, we got a live one here; let’s give him some juice.”

Tom: I’ll do these four- or five-day retreats, and then I’ll do solo gigs. A few days before a retreat, usually there’s a bracing, like, “Uh-oh, the voltage is going to amp up.”

When I do retreats, it’s like there’s so much energy running through me—probably three-quarters of it I don’t even know is there—and usually the form feels a fatigue. More windows, more doors are going to open up.

So the retreats, and the teaching in general, juice things up.

Rick: Yeah, I think it accelerates your own evolution to do it.

Tom: Right, so it’s my dharma right now.

Rick: If you want to learn something, teach it.

Tom: I’m always learning something. Whatever comes through here is getting pretty darn good at it. It just knows the right thing to ask at the right time. Not that I don’t slip up, but when I slip up, it’s sort of funny. It’s like, “Oh, that didn’t work. Let’s go this way.”

Rick: It doesn’t sound like you’re boasting. It’s like you devote your life to anything and eventually you get good at it.

Tom: It has found me. They found me and said, “You’re going to teach,” so here I am. Now I’m hooked.

Rick: This heart thing is a nice thing to end on because the heart has a protective value against many of the pitfalls of the path.

Tom: You’re correct, because what the heart does, the heart loves everything, the heart feels everything. When you’re feeling everything, you’re guided. You know, “Oh, there’s something off there—move this away.”

I think the key, if anything, to take away from this interview is the willingness to receive rather than to go out there. To receive first and then move—the yin quality versus the yang. We’re such a go-get-’em culture. How about receiving first and seeing what wants to guide you versus going out there?

Receive first and then move.

Rick: Yeah, rather than you trying to call the shots.

Tom: Right, and so the more you receive, everything starts to come to you. When something’s off, you receive that and you go, “Oh, I don’t know if I like this.” The sensitivity just grows.

I can remember years ago, post-awakening in 2000, when I had this executive management job. One time I had to write an evaluation for somebody who was really good, but she could really slam people if she didn’t get her way.

My boss said, “You have to write this. You have to bring this up.” I kept going because the conditioning says, “You’ve got to meet the deadline.” Yet, at the same time, if I’d been listening, I would have felt in my gut, “Something’s off.”

The evaluation was a disaster. She got very defensive, put a big schism between us, and the information was there if I had stopped and listened.

So I’m better at it. I’m getting better at it. Receiving is the key. It’s the stop and listen, and then move.

Rick: When you say that, I get the sense of a softness, gentleness. It almost reminds me of Carlos Castaneda’s books, where there was a whole lot of emphasis on awareness and being attentive to every little nuance that happens around you.

Tom: Every little thing you start to see is giving you information. It is, I think, a Sufi saying: “Every expression is God revealing itself to itself.” Every little thing has meaning. You start to see that the littlest things can move you.

Every expression is God revealing itself to itself.

Rick: Yeah, that’s nice. All right. Well, let’s leave that for people to ponder.

Tom: Yeah, that’s a good place. A crack across the room will move you.

Closing and upcoming events

Rick: Earlier on, Hannah from Portland, Oregon, sent in a note saying, “Tom, please don’t forget to mention that you teach here in Portland too.”

Tom: Yeah, that’s my Hannah. This coming Friday and Saturday, I will be doing an evening and an all-day event up in Portland. And it’s going to be at Hannah’s house. The information’s on my website there on the home page.

Rick: You mentioned that you have a group in Charlottesville, Virginia, and that you actually go there once in a while, so theoretically anybody who’s listening to this could get together a group in their area and you could go there too.

Tom: Yeah, that can work. That’s how that one happened. They found me, and I talked with them. I’m open to it if someone wants to host me. And then there’s more connection, and then this online thing. When I do an event online, especially with the Virginia people, it’s like there’s no space, there’s no time. I feel like I’m right there. It’s amazing.

Rick: I feel that with this too, doing these things.

Tom: You do some really good work. I’m amazed you can do one a week, man.

Rick: Well, it’s balanced, and I have a lot of help. All right, well, good. Thanks, Tom. It’s been a nice conversation.

Tom: Yes, there’s information, email, and phone.

Rick: I hope that everyone’s enjoyed this interview. I have. There are other very interesting ones coming up in the future. So there’s no end of fascinating people to talk to, and we’ll continue to have this program for the foreseeable future. If you’d like to be notified when new ones are posted, subscribe on YouTube. You can also subscribe to the email list on BatGap.com.

There’s also an audio podcast if you’d like to listen while you commute. Thanks for listening and watching, and thanks again, Tom.

Tom: Well, thank you, Rick, for having me. I mean, Rich—Rick.

Rick: It is, right, yeah.

Tom: Okay, well, you’re Rick. Sorry about that. I’m not exactly rich, so Rick Rich is probably more appropriate.

Rick Rich, yeah. I have a good friend who came through town the other day. His name was Rich. I think that’s where the slip came from. But thank you so much. It’s been a real joy.

Rick: Good spending time with you.

Tom: Okay.

Rick: All right. Say hi to your wife.

Tom: Okay, will do. Thank you, Rick. Bye-bye.

Rick: Bye. [Music]