Tom Stine Interview

Tom Stine Transcript: Illusion of Choice, No Free Will, and Awakening

Key Takeaways

• Spirituality is about the life you are actually living, not a separate topic.
• A sincere path begins by questioning what you really know to be true.
• Many teachings are meant to awaken, not to be merely understood intellectually.
• Presence can transmit recognition and catalyze awakening beyond words.
• A path may be useful for a time and then become a dead end for further growth.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is spiritual awakening in everyday life?
• How can a sincere seeker tell what is actually true?
• Can teachings or teachers really catalyze awakening through presence?
• Why do some spiritual paths stop being enough and lead to something deeper?

Full transcript, edited for readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Tom Stine. Tom and I have been going back and forth for almost a year trying to set up an interview and there were various complications and he went on a little sabbatical for a while but now he’s back and so we’re finally doing it. Tom lives in Springfield, Missouri, in the heart of the Bible Belt, I suppose we could say. Does Route 66 go through there?

Tom: Yes, it certainly does. Springfield was the first stop on Route 66 from Chicago to LA. When I was 18 years old I hitchhiked from New Jersey to LA, most of the way on Route 66, so I’m sure I went through Springfield.

Rick: I’m sure I went through Springfield.

Tom: You certainly did. Had some interesting experiences in the Ozarks with my long hair. In those days the hillbillies didn’t have long hair.

What Spiritual Awakening Means

You know? And what’s really fun is how their followers never want you to know those things. I love that part. I think it was Yogananda who had very painful feet, and he could barely walk on his own feet. I mean, let’s be honest, Ramana was beautiful, but at the same time he was not really a very functional human being. He kind of sat on a lawn cloth in a building.

So generally these interviews have two main components to them, it kind of works out that way. One component is what it is the person likes to say or teach or reveal about reality as they see it. And another component is how they got there, what their credentials are, so to speak, what their story is.

And it’s funny because I get emails from people and some people say, “I love the stories, that’s so interesting to hear that this person is just an ordinary person like me and yet they’re having this experience.” And other people email me and say, “Enough with the stories, I don’t care whether the guy was doing this or that, I just want to hear what he has to say.” So in deference to both those factions, I try to do both, and I think it makes it more interesting that way for a broader range of people.

But I like to also give guests the option of deciding where to start, because some people would rather just start with what they like to express, if they’re on a bus with somebody for 10 minutes, what was it they’d like to say, and others like to go through a chronology of how the whole thing developed. So how would you like to do it?

It really doesn’t matter to me at all, you lead the way. I’m happy. I actually do best in response to questions, I love questions.

Rick: Okay, good. So let’s pretend we’re on a bus or an airplane. We just met each other, we’re on an airplane. So Tom, what do you do for a living?

Tom: Well you know, that’s a funny question. That’s a very funny question. I do a little bit of several things, but mostly I like to stare into a video camera on my weekends and talk to people about something called “spiritual awakening.”

Rick: And what is that? It sounds religious.

Tom: Oh boy, is it religious? In a very broad sense, you probably would call it religious. Spirituality and religion have an interesting, what would we call it, incestuous history together, I guess? They’ve spent too much time together, but they probably should spend a little more time apart. The way I look at it, really in the broadest strokes, unfortunately for most people, spirituality is really about the very life they’re living, no matter what form that life takes. And I say unfortunately, because most people are completely unaware of the fact that there’s this seemingly separate piece to it called spirituality.

And so, for good or for ill, a lot of people find themselves, especially today, I don’t know if it was really that way 100 years ago, but it certainly seems to be that way today. Maybe it’s just the fact that we can all communicate with each other much better than we used to. People are finding themselves with a drive, or a push, if you will, to explore and to find out about something beyond what their eyes and ears tell them about. I think, as the Buddhist said, there’s an inherent unsatisfactoriness with typical human life, and that propels us in many different ways.

Some people it propels them in completely non-seemingly spiritual ways, and others it drives them to find out, what’s this thing all about? What is this life that I’m living, that I seem to have virtually no choice about living? What is this thing about? What am I doing here? And for most people, how the hell do I make it better? How do I get out of the typical human mess that I find myself in, and get to something that’s hopefully more peaceful, more loving, more relaxing, and not so much of a struggle? Because I think that’s where most people find themselves on a daily basis, in the midst of struggle.

Rick: I think maybe this sort of sentiment is more popular than it was 100 years ago, or whatever, but I think it’s always been there. I mean, you look at the history of every culture, there are people who realized there was more to life than meets the eye, and they wanted to figure out what it was, and whether they got into some sort of spirituality or took hallucinogens or whatever they did, they wanted to change their consciousness and see life differently and hopefully more deeply.

Tom: I would agree with that Rick. It seems like the writings in India are probably the oldest that we know of, you know the Vedas and the Upanishads and the teachings of the Buddha, so it’s certainly been around, and it certainly hasn’t looked like typical Western religious history. It’s looked, you know, what we want to call more spiritual in some respect, I don’t know. But it seems certainly that people have a lot more, what is it? I guess they have more possibilities these days. I mean, if you were my great-great-grandfather living here on a farm, about 10 miles south of where I’m sitting right now, your possibilities for finding out how to alleviate that dissatisfaction were pretty limited.

You know, local church, I don’t even know if a train went through here, I guess it did, but you know, horse and buggy, that’s all they got here.

Rick: Yeah, you might be lucky to pick up a copy of Emerson or Thoreau or something.

Tom: Yeah, exactly, that was probably about your only avenue to something more than what they taught at the Methodist Church or the Baptist Church.

Rick: And yet there was that drive even then, you know, which is why the Methodist or Baptist Church existed. I would say that the religious institutions are ultimately founded on the same motivation as what you and I are talking about and doing, it’s just taken a different form, perhaps not so directly experiential, it’s more belief-based, but it’s still that fundamental motivation to find something deeper, clearer, truer.

Tom: Yeah, I think as with all, well you know, probably with every spiritual movement, there’s always the guy who has the vision, and then there’s the people who follow, and you know, sometimes they don’t quite get it too right, I guess we could say, I don’t want to say right necessarily, but you know, they get a little off, and funny things happen, but yeah, everything from the more shamanic, you know, I don’t want to use the word primitive, that seems very condescending, but something that was more spirit-based, more of a natural based, all the way up to the most intellectual, high-brow, sophisticated, modern spirituality you could talk about, they all have that common urge to know the truth.

That’s the bottom line.

Rick: So at what age did that urge initially dawn in your awareness?

Tom: Wow, you know, unlike most of my contemporaries, I grew up, I more or less grew up here, on a farm actually, and unlike most of my contemporaries, my parents were very non-religious. They didn’t do anything, and I was more of the intellectual type, which was an odd mix for being on a farm, so I had nothing, nothing even remotely spiritual going on whatsoever, and by the time I was 17, 18 years old, I pretty much had it figured out, you know? You were born, you lived, you died. End of story, forget the rest, and basically you’re an idiot if you think anything otherwise. I was a snobby intellectual.

Rick: Were you reading existentialist philosophers or atheistic philosophers?

Tom: Oh no, I just rejected the whole lot. It just seemed all silly to me. I was far more, I was very materialistic, let’s say. So I went to college, same deal. College was over, I ended up back here, which was kind of a surprise, and I was, I just, I started feeling ill, you know? I wasn’t sick, I didn’t have any health problems that you could find, but I didn’t feel good all the time. And so it got me kind of looking at alternative medicine, you know, what possible help is there here. And lo and behold, I discovered that a man named Norman Sheely, doctor, is here in Springfield, and he was the founder of the American Holistic Medical Association.

And he came to Springfield 20 years ago, no more than that, that’s when I saw him was 20 years ago. So he’s been here for 30 years. And I went to see him, and he gave me a head-to-toe, I mean, went over every last possible square inch of my physiology. And then we sat down in his office, and he looks at me, and he said, “So tell me what you believe.” And I looked at him and went, “Believe about what?” And he said, “You know, about life, and what happens to you after life, and God and Spirit.” I’m looking at him like, “This man is freaking nuts!

I’m here for my body, dude.” And I looked at him and said, “Well, you’re born, you live, you die.” And he got this kind of real fatherly look, grandfatherly look actually. And he said, “Well, you know,” because he’s a very interesting man. If there’s research on the issue of mind-body, he knows it.

And he gets this look in his eye, and he just very politely said, “Well, you know, about 5% of the population thinks like you do.” And he said, “But I just have to tell you that, based on the research, people who believe in something beyond themselves tend to be healthier.” And there was this pause, and I’m looking at him like, “Uh-huh.” And he said, “So if I were you, I’d get a spiritual life.” And after about 15 seconds, I went, “Well, how the hell do I do that?” I mean, it sounded like the craziest thing in the world to say to me. And so, he gave me a copy of a book that he had co-written with a woman named Carolyn Myss.

Rick: Oh yeah, her I know.

Tom: Yep. And they were research partners for a number of years. Norm basically studied her, and was blown away by what she was capable of doing. And so, I read the book, and then I discovered that Springfield had one New Age bookstore, and I went and practically lived there for a year. I probably bought 100 books. And you know, that was the beginning. Just one thing led to another after that. That was, when was that? 1989, I was 24 at the time.

Rick: Okay. So you started gobbling up spiritual books.

Tom: Sure did, yep.

Rick: Did you?

Tom: Oh, go ahead.

Rick: No, you go ahead.

Tom: I was just going to say, I ended up at A Course in Miracles, which is where I finally landed.

Rick: Okay.

Tom: And that was kind of my, I guess it was probably about 12 years.

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: 12 years the Course was my thing.

Rick: So you kind of surveyed the landscape, and A Course in Miracles really resonated with you, and you did that.

Tom: Yep, and it was kind of freaky in a sense that, you know, you can’t read A Course in Miracles without realizing there’s this big Jesus thing there. And you know, where I live, getting mixed up with Jesus is an interesting thing. And here I was getting mixed up with Jesus only way out in left field. That was even stranger.

Rick: Yeah, it wasn’t going to win you any brownie points with the local Baptist church.

Tom: No, I certainly didn’t tell anybody that I was reading A Course in Miracles, that’s for sure.

Rick: So I don’t know too much about A Course in Miracles, but did it involve actual practices, or was it more like just a set of beliefs?

Tom: No, if you really do the book, you’ll spend theoretically one year, more likely ten years, doing what’s called the workbook, and diving into it daily, hourly.

Rick: So you go through meditation-type practices or whatever, in a systematic way?

Tom: Yeah, there’s some that look more like, what should we say, kind of almost Byron Katie-ish, you know? Some exercises, there’s other things that are almost like a mantra, set hourly. Meditations, yeah, it’s a pretty complete thing. The problem with the Course more than anything else is that it’s just really difficult for most people to get a grip on what it’s saying. That’s kind of the hard part.

Rick: Just sort of abstruse and far out there.

Tom: Yeah, and it’s written in a way to have an impact on you more than just understanding it. It’s kind of like a thousand-page Zen koan. It really is.

Rick: So what did it do for you?

Tom: It woke me up to a greater possibility, and it kind of set the stage. It clued me into the fact that there was more to me than I thought. I’m not just this guy. I’m not just this human flesh walking around the world, which was, I’d say, out of those first 25 years of my life, a good 20 of them probably lived that way. I’ve always been fairly, oh God, I just realized that I live in Missouri. Missouri is the “show me” state, and I’ve always been kind of that way.

Rick: Show me kind of guy.

Tom: Yeah, I don’t really take things for granted. I don’t really take things just because you say so. I don’t necessarily have to have evidence, but man, it’s got to make sense at least. So since most spiritual things didn’t make a darn bit of sense to me, I didn’t see any point in going that direction.

Rick: Yeah, I’m kind of more and more that way myself, more so than I used to be actually, which is not to say that I don’t give people the benefit of the doubt, you know, I don’t say they’re wrong, but I don’t sort of just swallow things whole because somebody says them.

Tom: Exactly. I think now I would sum that up in a very simple teaching, one that you hear Adyashanti say a lot, and it’s really just the bottom line question to ask yourself about most things is “Do you really know this is true?”

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: I mean, do you actually know it?

Rick: And of course, Byron Katie, that’s her first question too.

Tom: Yeah, exactly. Is it true? And when you really stop and ask that, it’s amazing the things that just start going and going.

Rick: Yeah, there are very few things that you can say yes with any sort of certainty to.

Tom: Yep, I mean, take something very matter-of-fact, your brain. Do you know you have a brain? I’ve never seen my brain. I have all this evidence to indicate that there’s something going on here. I have seen a live human brain in a skull. I’ve actually seen surgery being done on, which is quite bizarre. I’ve seen somebody jerk their arm from a stimulus to their brain. I guess I’ve actually seen some things that would lend me to believe, but I don’t think really one should deny, as a habit, certain things about the world.

But at the same time, there’s a certain skepticism, a certain questioning attitude that one needs to have, otherwise you’d be accepting all kinds of things that really don’t do you a bit of good to accept.

Rick: Yeah, and I mean, there have been cases, to take the brain example, of people who, it was discovered, didn’t have a brain. They just had a thin, like a coconut sort of layer of cells inside their skull and the rest of it was fluid, and yet they were normal, functioning human beings, or else they had half a hemisphere and didn’t realize it until there was some accident and they had to be operated on, and yet they were actually doing okay. But I mean, obviously things like brains are a lot … we take those for granted and we can be fairly certain that on some level, generally people have them.

But then there are other issues, like are there angels, is there reincarnation, is there life after death, all those sorts of things. And you can’t put an angel on an operating table and examine it, so it all gets into the realm of faith.

Tom: And really, when you get right down to it, the only way you’re going to know, for instance, about reincarnation is if you reincarnate. I mean at this moment, I don’t have any memories of a previous life.

Rick: And yet there’s some pretty good research that makes it very convincing.

Tom: And then there’s another, we could go into that if you want to, but there’s some interesting questions to ask. How do you know it was your life? If you remember a past life, how do you know it was yours? What does it even mean to be your life? I mean it just keeps going and going. If you’re open to the questioning, you start discovering that you know less than you think you do, which I think is the point.

Rick: Exactly. I’ve interviewed a couple of people who said that after their awakening they came to the realization that there isn’t any sort of discrete entity which migrates from life to life to life, it’s more like taking a bucket out of the ocean. And maybe there’s a few molecules of the original bucket that was dumped into the ocean, I don’t know, on the other side of the world, but it’s a whole new bucket. For me that’s neither here nor there. I have my opinions and beliefs, but they’re just that, and who knows?

Tom: To go along with that analogy, I’ll just say this. There’s a man who I heard him give a couple of talks, he’s someone that’s associated with Adyashanti, and I really like the way he says it. He just says very simply, “What’s looking out of your eyes is what’s looking out of my eyes.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.

Tom: And if that’s the case, then what’s looking out of Napoleon’s eyes is what’s looking out of my eyes, and on and on.

Rick: I like that. Or as the incredible string band put it, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.” Who was that guy by the way?

Tom: You know, I knew you were going to ask me that.

Rick: Doesn’t matter if you can’t remember.

Tom: I’ll think of his name in a minute.

Rick: I’m just curious because I’m going to be interviewing a guy that might be…

Tom: He’s a banjo player from Tennessee.

Rick: Oh, different guy then.

Tom: Absolutely the most unusual person you would ever run into who has experienced awakening. He’s a good old boy from Tennessee who plays banjo at the Grand Ole Opry. Mike Snider, that’s his name. Mike Snider.

Rick: Very interesting.

Tom: Yeah, really cool guy.

A Course in Miracles and Moving On

Rick: So after a dozen years, did you sort of feel like your Course in Miracles karma had burned itself up and you began to feel antsy for something different?

Tom: Yeah, that would be one way of saying it. I’ll be honest with you, the thought that came to me at the time was, “I need something more and the world of A Course in Miracles doesn’t offer it.” The Course has a really interesting history and I’ve kind of gotten lucky in that I’ve gotten to know some really interesting people in the world of A Course in Miracles. I was actually on the board of directors for an organization in Arizona that’s involved with the Course, so I got to hear the whole history of the thing. It’s one of those interesting stories. It came into the world and it kind of got abandoned.

There will be those who will say, “No, that’s not really the case.” It wasn’t like, to put it in very simple terms, it wasn’t like some enlightened guy wrote the thing and was there to tell everybody what it said, if that makes sense. It came through a channel and she just really didn’t want to have anything to do with it. She got it out there and that was it. Then it was left in the hands of some really wonderful people, but they’ve just done the best they could. It’s helped innumerable people and it’s had a huge impact on the world, but really, when you get right down to it, if your gut says, “I’ve got to keep going,” it’s kind of a bit of a dead end, at the moment at least.

Well, at least it was for me, how about that?

Rick: Yeah, that makes sense.

Tom: It was a dead end for me.

Rick: Yeah, many things for many people are untransitional things. You do something and eventually it outlives its usefulness for you, which is not to say it won’t still be tremendously useful for the next guy.

Tom: Absolutely, but I just knew that I needed something more and I needed something to go the next step. I had no idea what that was, not a clue.

Rick: So what did you do, go back to the bookstore?

Tom: No, actually, it’s really kind of funny. I had had this really bizarre experience at the time, when was this? ’99, yeah it was ’99, when I was married at the time. My ex and I went on a trip to Hawaii. She had a lot of family in Hawaii, and we came back and oh man, did I want to move to Hawaii. Wow, I would have moved the next day. She and I did something we had never done before and never did again. We sat down together and meditated to see what we might get. The weirdest thing is that I’m not very prone to big, flashy experiences, but I had this kind of big, flashy experience. I saw pictures and heard words. At the time, I was involved with this organization in Arizona, in Sedona actually.

So I was left with these words about moving to Sedona someday. Well, kind of put the end to the thought of moving to Hawaii. It all actually worked out really well because my mom ended up with emphysema and died a few years later. So it was really good that I was here and I’m really glad that I didn’t move. So around, I don’t remember when it was, 2005 maybe? I was sitting around thinking, okay, what is that Sedona thing all about? So I thought, okay, let the Google gods tell me all about Sedona. So I Googled Sedona, and at the time, the first thing that came up when you Googled Sedona was the Sedona Method.

Rick: Oh yeah, right.

Tom: So I thought, well that’s interesting. So I pulled it up and went, no way. Not a chance. But you know how those things work. You reject it the first 12 times and it just keeps gnawing at you, so you finally go buy the book. Then, I actually started going to Sedona to retreats with the Sedona Method people. About that time, I got divorced. My life kind of did this amazing flip-flop. I think this is a fairly common trend in a lot of people’s stories. I think I kind of got tossed out of my ear, so to speak, and kind of roughed up a little bit, which forced me to get a lot more serious.

Rick: Tossed out of what?

Tom: Tossed out of my comfort zone. I was in this immense comfort zone.

Rick: Did the Sedona Method get you out of your comfort zone?

Tom: No, my life did. The Sedona Method was kind of the next piece of the spiritual puzzle. It gave me a different way to go, a different direction. Then strangely, if you know anything about the Sedona Method or what you would read if you went online and looked at it, if you go to the retreats, you find out that it’s a lot different in person than it actually is in the books you would read. The guy who teaches it, Hale Dwoskin, he’s been really influenced by Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta, and more of the Advaita ilk. The teaching is a lot more geared toward what you would call spiritual awakening teaching.

That really got me looking at, really doing that more inner inquiry about what I am and who is actually sitting in this chair. That actually led me to Adyashanti, and it’s kind of all downhill from there.

Rick: Does the Sedona Method actually prescribe self-inquiry type things like that?

Tom: Not overtly, but you can tell it’s the kind of intellectual, scholarly bent in me. I really get into the history of these things, so I really tried to find out as much as I could about where the Sedona Method came from. It’s a very interesting story, I won’t bore you with the details, but the man who originally created it, his story was a bit like mine. You wouldn’t have called him religious or spiritual in any way. Instead of feeling a little sick, he was sent home to die. He was determined that there had to be some answer to life, and that led him on a process that eventually resulted in awakening. Then he lived another 40 years.

He was completely healed from it, which was truly remarkable. The Sedona Method itself is a bit more self-help oriented, but there is an undertone under it, there’s a base under it that really is more about awakening than anything else. But it’s not really the overt teaching that most people run into. So it was a good thing for me to run into, that’s for sure.

Rick: Yeah, so it added a piece to your puzzle. So it sounds like Adyashanti was the next major step.

Tom: Yeah, Adya was a big step. I ran into somebody at a retreat in Sedona, and he leaned over to me and said, “You know, he sounds a lot like Adyashanti.” I said, “Who?” It’s usual. That got me to looking at Adya’s stuff online, and oh god, I think I probably bought over 200 hours of his recordings. I listened to them constantly. There was a phase there where I was just pretty, spending probably anywhere from 8 to 10 hours a day meditating or listening or doing something.

Rick: That’s amazing. I think I’ve got about 150 hours of his stuff on my computer, and I’ve listened to every single bit of it on my iPod. In fact, I just calculated it because I know I have 6.2 days on there, so I just multiplied that by 24. And the funny thing is, and I’ll probably say this to him when I interview him in a couple of weeks, is if somebody asked me to say, “Well, what is the essence of what he teaches?” I’d have a hard time answering them. I’d just say, “I don’t know, he’s just really clear.” And when I listen to him, every single sentence is like a zinger, you know? It lights something up.

Tom: Let me get a drink of water real quick.

Rick: Yeah, go ahead. So it’s interesting.

Tom: I know what you mean.

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: Well, you know, one of the things that Adya likes to say, I think I learned a lot from him, not just in terms of spirituality itself, but in terms of what it really means to be a teacher. One of the things he really likes to say is that teachings are not meant, spiritual teachings are not meant to be taken as a formal teaching. They’re not meant to be dissected into an outline form that you can go, “Okay, this is point A, B, C, etc.” The purpose of every teaching of his, or any teacher for that matter, is to speak to that in each of us that is able to hear what’s being said, and that which is actually going to wake up.

And the teaching speaks to that, and whether the words that can be, it can be a wordless teaching for that matter. People used to go sit with Ramana in his cave and he wouldn’t say a word. Whatever the teaching is, it’s speaking to more than the front persona, ego-mind. It’s speaking to that which really can hear the teaching, and it’s not meant to be really, you know, like I said, dissected and outlined, and you know, point A, point B, point C. I’m like you Rick, I couldn’t tell you what Adya’s teaching is, honestly.

Rick: Yeah, you’ve listened to a couple hundred hours, but it enlivens something as you’re listening. It’s like a little bellows blowing air on the fire, and each sentence is another squeeze of the bellows.

Tom: I don’t want to make Adya sound like he’s some superman, but I will tell you this. First time I saw him in person, I went to one of his retreats, and a person got up and did a bunch of talking about what was going to go on at the retreat. We were sitting there waiting, and then that person leaves the stage and I hear somebody start walking up from the back of the hall, and there’s like 350 people in this place. And like I said, I’m not big on, I don’t have very many spiritual experiences, so I’m sitting there and all of a sudden, I have for years had an experience of what I would call light inside my head.

And when I heard this person start walking in the room, it was as if a 10,000 watt bulb went off in my head. And it was so bright, I felt like I was sitting in full sunlight with my eyes closed. And I kind of let it go for a few minutes, and I hear the person walk up to the front, go up on the stage, and I look up and there’s Adya. And you know, I think it has more to do with my connection with him than anything else, but still that teaching can take any form it wants to, and for me at that moment it took sunlight going off in my head.

Rick: Well just today as I was listening to him as I was cutting the grass and he was talking about something along those lines about transmission and how there’s a sort of a power in presence, or whatever word you want to use it, that can be extremely transformative on all levels, even your health and stuff. And you know, I’ve experienced this a number of times over the years with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with Amma, the Hugging Saint. I mean, there are certain people whom you sit in their presence and there’s a darshan, to use the Indian word, which is palpable. It really zaps you if you are attuned to that person.

And I suppose with some people you don’t even have to be that attuned, because the energy radiates out. I wouldn’t say “out,” because I don’t think it has that relative directionality, but it sort of enlivens everything in the vicinity. And Amma used the analogy of a brightly burning log, which if you put an unlit log next to it, after a little while the unlit log will be burning too. There’s just sort of this contagion that takes place.

Tom: Or if you take it, if you go back to that little phrase from the man Mike Snider, “What’s looking out of your eyes is what’s looking out of my eyes.” So what’s looking out of Adya’s eyes is the same thing that’s looking out of your eyes. So just because I don’t, or you don’t, or whoever doesn’t necessarily know at that moment what they are, it doesn’t change the fact of what you are. So what we have going on is like meeting like, and you just happen to be the spot where that recognition is occurring. And sometimes it can be rather mind-blowing.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it’s like, you know, what’s looking out of your eyes and my eyes is also what’s looking out of my dog’s eyes, or what’s looking out of a mosquito’s eyes, and so on and so forth. But you know, the question is, is this mechanism with the eyes and the ears and everything else, is it in a fit condition to enable self-recognition, to enable recognition of one’s own essential nature, or is it not? And I think one way of looking at spirituality is it’s a reorientation of the mechanism, of the apparatus, the whole makeup, so as to allow that recognition to take place.

Tom: Yeah, I’d buy that.

Rick: I’m sort of making statements rather than questions here at the moment, I’ll get back to questions.

Tom: Sure, you’re fine, you’re fine.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s why in some cases I take objection to those in some spiritual circles who dismiss the whole value of practices, you know, saying, “Oh, they just reinforce the notion that there’s someone who has to practice,” and so on and so forth. But practices, you know, if they’re good ones, are like tune-ups, they tune the physiology, and as Suzuki Roshi put it, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practices make you accident-prone.”

Tom: You know, I had heard Ken Wilber say that, and I didn’t know he was quoting Suzuki Roshi, but now I’m glad I know where that quote comes from. I love that, I mean that is absolutely apt, that’s absolutely perfect. I mean, we’d all like to think that we’re going to have a Ramana, you know, that we’re going to hear about somebody dying, lay down, 15 minutes later, boom, it’s over, done, go live in your cave. But you know, no.

Rick: And even he sat and meditated for years after that, with bugs chewing on his legs and stuff, you know, before he was moved to come out and speak.

Tom: You know, in a certain sense, I don’t want to say that he went into a psychotic state, but in a certain sense, the human being Ramana was shut down, and it took a long time to get the human being Ramana kind of back up to working again, you know? It was that powerful.

Rick: Well, speaking of Adya, this is another thing I heard him say just today, now that I’m remembering specifics for the first time, but he was saying how there has to be a sort of adaptation or an integration, you know, you can have a shift in consciousness but you really can’t, it has no practical significance until it’s integrated and you learn to function in that shifted state.

Tom: And you know, it’s an unfortunate point that, you know, you always hate to sound critical or be critical, and my point of what I’m about to say is not to be critical, it’s simply to point out what can happen. And you see it all the time in the spiritual world, there are any number of teachers out there who have experienced, I mean there’s no question, absolutely no question that they’ve experienced awakening. They’ve woken up, period.

They have seen what they’re, you know, they know the end of the road, and yet for various reasons, sometimes because their teachers told them they were done, sometimes because of the good old ego jumping back in with both feet, and you know, they’ve gone out with that realization clear, teaching something very clear, and yet it hasn’t integrated. And personally, you know, as a human being, they’re a wreck. They’re addicted, I’ll just name a few, they’re addicted to Valium, they’re hitting on their followers, they’re abusing children, they’re assholes from the word go, they’re alcoholics, they’re womanizers, I mean, you know.

Rick: Great teachers come to mind, and you say each of those things. I don’t need to name any of them, I’ll just name their faults, and they pop out. And yet you call them on that stuff, and they say, “There’s no one doing this, it’s crazy wisdom, it’s happening, I’m fulfilling the karma of my chelas.”

Tom: We have a word for that around here, it comes out of the back end of a cow. You know, really and truly, the truth is the truth, right? But if the truth led, the only place it led was to being an absolute asshole to everybody in the world around you, screw the truth. I’d rather have a really nice, pleasant human being than someone who knows the truth. I mean, honestly. Now, I say that with a bit of a, take it with a grain of salt. I suspect the truth, I know the truth is far more transformative than that.

It’s not like everybody that bumps into the truth is going to walk around being a jerk, or have all these dysfunctions, but there certainly does seem to be the case that when one has a glimmering, even from the smallest bit of realization to almost the full Monty, that that truth is going to get you in the end, one way or another. It’s almost like it’s bound to determine to clean you out, and if it’s got to do it through some really harsh stuff, it’ll do it through some really harsh stuff. You know, just to name one name from our little list there, I doubt Osho sat around really loving the fact that he was sucking Valium down like candy.

Rick: Yeah, and nitrous oxide.

Tom: Yeah, I mean, you know, the man had to have looked in the mirror and just wanted to cry, you know? Absolutely. I can’t see it any other way.

Rick: It’s an interesting issue, and it’s come up in the last two or three interviews I did. Three interviews ago, Wayne Lickerman, he was talking about how there is no correlation between behavior and awakening. And I kind of kept probing and prodding and trying to say, “Yeah, but could Hitler have been awakened?

Could Charles Manson or one of these characters?” And we finally got it down to the point, “Well, possibly way out on the tips of the bell curve there’s that possibility, but the correlation, although somewhat loose, has got to be there to some extent, that awakening is really going to transform your behavior.” And I think the reason a lot of people argue that it doesn’t or shouldn’t or needn’t is that from the subjective perspective of being awakened, at least at a certain stage, it can very often seem that there is no connection whatsoever between the so-called individual personality and body and so on, and that which you essentially are, the two seem to be unrelated.

And so how could one influence the other?

Tom: You know, I see that, and yet, well here we go, here’s a good old “show me state” kind of response. You know, the teachers that I’m most attracted to are the ones who not only have experienced their own awakening, but have spent the hours sitting in the chair cleaning their garbage out. And, you know, who do you want to sit with? Do you want to sit with someone that, you know, would just as soon hit you over the head with a baseball bat, or someone that actually looks at you with love because they really honestly love? I don’t know, the one is so much more appealing. It’s you know, isn’t that, I think it’s somewhere, it’s a Jesus saying, “By their fruits you shall know them.”

Rick: It is a Jesus saying, yeah.

Tom: There you go, so you know, that to me, because really when you get right down to it Rick, what in the world did we as the One, what in the world did we create this world for? You know? I mean, what’s the point of it? I mean, on the one hand, it probably doesn’t have a point, nothing that you and I will ever be able to get, nail our fingers, you know, nail down, but it certainly seems to have certain currents, and it’s really intriguing to watch what humanity responds to. Humanity responds to Mother Teresa’s far more than it responds to awakened assholes. You know?

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: Just as a general thing, people gravitate toward loving kindness, and yeah, you know, there have been some loving kind people that have been run over by a bus, certainly, but you know, we remember the Gandhis, we remember the Mother Teresas, we remember Jesus as described as the Prince of Peace. We remember, you know, some of the most revered people throughout spirituality are some of the most gentle souls you could ever ask for. Gentle, well, I say gentle, I don’t want to get that wishy-washy gentle, you know, the kind of gentle that you couldn’t knock over, you know, that kind of gentle?

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: Firm gentle. Yeah, probably you couldn’t mess around with Mother Teresa. As a matter of fact, I heard she kind of had a little bit of a, you know?

Rick: Yeah, she was a dynamo.

Tom: Yeah.

Rick: And by her own admission and by Gandhi’s, you know, neither of those people were self-realized in the sense that we use that term. And yet, you know, to harken back to your earlier phrase that we’re all the same person looking out of different eyes, we’re all the same thing looking out of different eyes, you know, from that perspective, that thing, if we want to call it that, actually, you know, we’re all sense organs of the infinite, and we all as such have different roles to play.

Tom: Right.

Rick: And you know, perhaps ultimately the goal of one’s life or of life is for self to realize itself in each individual expression that it can, but that’s not its only purpose. I mean, obviously all sorts of roles are needed to be played by all sorts of people.

But you know, you were saying earlier about does life have a purpose, and it’s hard to say whether it does, but if you think of it, if you look at the trend of things, the way things seem to work, there’s always this trend toward greater complexity of form and greater sort of ability in that complexity to manifest the intelligence that’s sort of essential to life, to express and display and live that innate intelligence that in the deepest sense has given rise to the whole universe. You know what I’m trying to say?

Tom: I think so, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like there’s an evolutionary current, in other words. There’s a force, there’s a drive, and it seems to be motivating everything from the grain of sand to the wildflower to animals and humans and everything else, and it’s as if we’re all in this current, and the current is flowing along, leading us and taking us toward, well, in a word, higher evolution. Not in the Darwinian sense, but ultimately in the spiritual sense.

Tom: It certainly seems to be taking us in a direction it wants to go. Yeah, I guess we could say it’s in a certain sense higher. I think the only thing I would disagree with you about in what you were saying is that it still makes it sound like we have some willfulness involved in this.

Rick: But whose will is it?

Tom: Exactly, I’ve become quite the radical with regard to who’s actually driving this boat. And wow!

Rick: Well, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Tom: We are puppets for life, I think is the only way of saying it. We are puppets of life.

Rick: I interviewed Chuck Hillig about a year ago, a year and a half, and I don’t know if you know who he is, but he took that nursery rhyme, “Row, row, row your boat,” and gave it a very beautiful interpretation. If you think of the words, “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream,” okay, there’s a stream, you’re going with the stream, and you’re going gently, you’re not thrashing about, but you are rowing. There’s some sense of, “Okay, I’m not just going to let it go off into the branches, I’m giving it some …

insofar as I perceive myself to have individual volition, I’m exercising it gently.” And then merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, repeated four times, for emphasis, “Life is but a dream.”

Tom: Life is but a dream.

Rick: It’s a beautiful thing when you think of it that way.

Tom: Huh, I never thought of that, that’s cool.

Rick: Yeah. But back to your point about authorship of action, which I talked a lot about with Wayne Lickerman. You can sort of, with any issue like that, I think you can take various perspectives, individual perspective, ultimate perspective, everything in between, and my sense of it is that if you perceive yourself as having volition, as having some sense of authorship, then exercise it wisely. You know, you’ve been talking a lot about compassion and so on. And if you reach a stage at which you are just completely a witness to your activity and there’s no sense that you are doing anything at all, that it’s just happening all by itself, then more power to you.

But don’t mix stages, don’t take a description of that stage and try to apply it to your current stage if it’s not something you’re actually living, because that can really muck things up.

Tom: Yeah, I’ll apply that.

Rick: I’m not really robbing this bank, you know, it appears to be getting robbed, in reality there is no bank.

Tom: It’s just God’s will. It’s God’s will to rob this bank. You know, you’re right, there’s definitely a trap that one can run into with that. I mean, if somebody asked me, you know, do you want to eat a hamburger or a steak tonight? Well, I’m going to answer, and apparently, I think the thing to recognize with all this is recognize what’s going on. I mean, certainly it seems like Tom is making a choice, and Tom is going to answer. Something is going to come out of my mouth. But isn’t it amazing to notice the simple and obvious fact that you don’t have the slightest idea of what’s going to come out of your mouth until it actually comes out of your mouth?

How many times have you actually been sitting there going, “Wow, I’d sure like a hamburger, I’d sure like a hamburger.” Hey Tom, do you want a hamburger or a steak? “Uh, steak.” You know, isn’t that remarkable that that happens? And it happens all the time. I mean, we do that constantly. We’re constantly going left when we think we would go right. You know, when it actually comes down to that moment of seeming choice, how little choice we actually seem to have. I don’t want to say we don’t have any choice, because that sounds too absolutist, but I’ve yet to find where this little thing that I call “me” really actually gets to choose.

I haven’t really been able to find that actually happening.

Rick: But do you have, no you can’t find it as a little guy inside pulling levers, but do you not have a sense of personal volition? Maybe you don’t. If I say, “Tom, raise your arm,” do you have a choice of whether you’re going to obey that instruction or not?

Tom: Well, no. I mean, I’m either going to or I’m not.

Rick: Well, if I say, “Tom, poke yourself with a pin,” you might say, “Heck no, I’m going to choose not to do that. I don’t have to follow this guy’s instruction.”

Tom: But here’s the question. The question is, when I tell you I’m not going to do it, am I telling you because I’m not going to do it, or am I telling you because I’ve chosen not to do it? Do you see the distinction? And so, take something more, you know, that people are, let’s say something more typical. Oh, here we go. We all know, well, I don’t want to choose an example that’s got, you know, potential physiological addictive aspects to it, although that seems even more clear. I mean, nobody in their right mind smokes a cigarette today. Nobody. If you could choose, if you really could choose to smoke a cigarette or not, you wouldn’t. I mean, it’s that obvious, and yet people do.

And obviously, we could get into the whole nature of addiction, but you know.

Rick: If they knew what was actually going on.

Tom: Yeah, but if you look at what most people do on a daily basis, how much of their responses to life are that programmed and automatic? I mean, you know, I’ve had conversations with people on any number of subjects. One of my favorites is when people, especially spiritual people, love to spiritualize sex. And who knows, maybe there’s a massive spiritual component to it, I don’t know. But I will tell you this, the vast majority of people’s responses to sex is almost identical to an addiction.

I mean, if you look at the physiology of, you know, the typical sexual experience, if you look at the neural chemistry that goes on in the brain from an orgasm, not a whole lot of difference to shooting heroin. It’s a very similar thing. People are, for more or less, we have a similar response to an addiction to sex. And hey, thank God for the human species, because it drives us to reproduce. It’s got great evolutionary, I mean, in terms of human evolution, it’s got great utility. Make the reproductive actions so intensely pleasurable, people will do ridiculous, stupid things constantly to do it. And wow, do they ever.

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: Humanity loves to mess itself up around sex, there’s just no question about it. But you know, I mean, so, again, when we put it in terms where we can point to things like addiction and things like that, it becomes very obvious that you are not choosing. But I think you can make a pretty good case for just about any aspect of human behavior. And being far more run by something else, whether it’s the subconscious, God, addiction, whatever you want to call it, versus this “me” making choices.

Rick: Your cigarette example brought Nisargadatta to mind, who of course was addicted to them.

Tom: Yes.

Rick: And gave plenty of people secondhand smoke in addition to profound wisdom.

Tom: Oh yes. Oh yes. Yeah, I mean, it’s remarkable to me. My mom continued to, even after she found out she had emphysema and knew she was on the way to lung cancer, you know, you’d still catch her smoking a cigarette here and there. Fifty years, she couldn’t quit. Unbelievable.

Rick: But I mean, the essential question here I think is, sure, we can understand the physiology of addiction and the cycle of action, impression, desire, and all that stuff, but that kind of begs the question, “Well, is there a person, or not a person, is there any choice whatsoever that can be exercised to override such tendencies, to steer the course of life in a different direction?” I mean, what attitude should one adopt, if any? Just a sort of fatalistic attitude, “I’m just going to do whatever I do,” or can there be sort of a, you know, can one have a sort of a “go get ’em” kind of spirit, where, “Okay, I’m going to prove my life in this way,” or is all that kind of predetermined?

And whichever attitude you have, you didn’t even have a choice to have that.

Tom: You know, it’s far more in the realm of predetermined, and I don’t want to use the word predetermined, I’m going to coin a new phrase because I’ve never thought of this before. It’s almost spontaneous determined. I mean, again, we come back to what’s looking out of my eyes.

I mean, if we stay with the notion that what’s looking out of my eyes is looking out of your eyes, if that which is looking out of my eyes is the very thing that is the blood flowing through my body, if that’s the very thing that’s the rock, the trees, the desk, the computers, the sky, the sun, and every single aspect of existence, if the very awareness which is aware of what’s going on is the actual substance of everything, then what’s choosing? You see, I mean, the word choose almost becomes nonsensical because it’s the totality doing whatever it does. I don’t think you could use the word choose. How does the totality choose? I mean, it’s choosing itself?

Rick: Well it only makes sense on a relative level. I mean, if you’re going to use the word water glass as being a thing which has some existence independent of my hand, then on that level you could also use the word choose. But if you really want to boil everything down to its essence, there is no water glass, there is no hand, it’s all pure being, appearing as water glass, appearing as hand, and so on.

Tom: So, on the one hand, yeah, of course, I think you asked me earlier, do I have any perception of individual choice? And I think where one ends up is, one ends up just as, you know, you don’t stop seeing the water glass. You also don’t stop seeing choice. I mean, that’s part of the human experience, you know? But at the same time, as this whole awakening thing goes deeper and deeper, you become less and less hooked into the fact that you’re doing any choosing. I mean, because you’re not. Ultimately you’re not, that’s the bottom line.

The key though, as one of your favorite teachers of mine likes to say, as Adya always likes to quote one of his teachers, “Yes, it’s all one, but a fat lot of good that will do you if you don’t know it.” So yes, you’re not making any choices, but it doesn’t do you a darn bit of good to know that unless you know it. Unless it really has become the way you live, it’s not really going to do you a lot of good. So of course, there’s still the experience of choosing, but let’s be real. What’s making all this turn? What’s making it all happen?

Rick: Right, and “know it” doesn’t just mean sort of have an intuitive understanding of it, having listened to some talks and read some books. There’s a Tibetan saying which is, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.” And then the second part of it is, “Don’t mistake realization for liberation.”

Tom: Yes, there’s a Zen phrase that I absolutely love, “To encounter the Absolute is not yet enlightenment.”

Rick: Very good.

Tom: If you’re going to hang up a spiritual teacher shingle, you should be required to remember that one daily. Don’t think that because you’ve seen, because you’ve had this whatever happen to you, it doesn’t mean you’re done.

Rick: Right, and this is a common theme in my interviews because there are a lot of people who feel that it does mean you’re done. You know, they’ll have an awakening, it will be very intoxicating, very profound, and it seems like whatever it is about the person’s experience, it feels to them like, “What more could there be? This is it.”

Tom: Right.

Rick: And I actually have a friend who thought he was enlightened for like a dozen years or so, and then eventually realized he wasn’t at all. I don’t know why people don’t like this idea, people who feel this way. It would seem to me that they would be inspired by the notion that there could be even more enrichment, more unfoldment, more clarity, or whatever, but for some reason it’s very common for people to feel like, “This is it,” you know, there couldn’t be anything more because there’s no one to gain anything more, and so on and so forth.

Tom: You know, actually Rick, I’ll tell you, this very thing we’re talking about has made me almost want to ban the word “enlightenment.”

Rick: Yeah, good idea.

Tom: Of course we would just invent another word, but enlightenment has got all these connotations, all these super-magical mysteries, super-being, whatever you want to attach to it, and there are so many myths, so many people out there who say that he’s enlightened, she’s not enlightened, he’s not enlightened, and good Lord. It points to something really real and vital, and at the same time, it’s a trap. You know, probably the only way that you’re done is probably when you die.

Rick: And even then you may not be done.

Tom: I know. Let me put it this way, let me redo that one. The only way Tom Stine is done is when this body gets laid down, and then whatever is looking out of these eyes will have another experience after that. I’m pretty certain that that will take place.

Rick: And whether it contains a lot of the baggage that we call “Tom Stine” or not is a moot point, who knows?

Tom: And where will it go, what will it do? Will I experience the causal realm?

Rick: I don’t know, read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So let’s get back to you a little bit more. What is it in your experience that has informed all these things you’ve been saying? I don’t feel like you’re just spouting philosophy that makes sense to you, there must be some experiential foundation for the convictions you have, maybe conviction is too strong a word, and how did you get to that point? We kind of left off your story with meeting Adya and hearing a bunch of audios and going to a retreat or something, but take us from there.

Initial Awakening

Tom: Well, I guess probably to answer both of those would be, you know it’s really funny, when this first happened to me, I’ll be honest, I was much more interested in talking about it at the time, but now that time has gone on I find myself, I don’t want to say reticent to talk about it, it’s a funny thing. It just seems so, in retrospect it seems so ordinary, even though I guess it isn’t. But about, I don’t know, I guess it was about six months after going to that retreat with Adya, I sat down one evening to meditate or do some kind of process, I don’t really know what I was intending, but I sat down and when I sat down in my chair, I just had this overwhelming desire to just rest.

I just wanted to sit there for a few minutes and just rest. I just relaxed, and I was just sitting there and I have no idea how much time went on, I think it was no more than a minute or two. Then this thought kind of ran through my head, real quickly, it didn’t even feel like my thought if you know what I mean. The thought was, it’s kind of weird in retrospect, but the thought was whenever you say “I am”, there’s always this emphasis on the word “I”, but never on “am”.

As soon as that word “am” left my mouth, or left my mental mouth, I had this experience of, it was like dropping through a trap door, you know, it was like the bottom just dropped out, and it was just more clear at that moment than any moment I’ve ever experienced of anything ever in the world, that this word “I” doesn’t mean anything. I mean literally, there’s nothing that it refers to. I mean it’s a word, and you know if we say “microphone”, you go like this, but that word “I”, I mean I knew in a way that I can’t even begin to tell you, I knew that that word meant nothing.

And I started laughing, and I sat there, just sitting, I don’t know how long I sat, but it was probably a good 10-20 minutes just going, “I’ll be damned, I’ll be damned!” And I was like, “I can’t believe it, I’ll be damned!” And then, the word “I”, I started laughing every time I said the word “I”, because I was saying a word that didn’t mean anything. And then I spent about 24 hours unable to say the word “I” without breaking into hysterics, which was kind of weird. Unfortunately, my son was at his mom’s house, so I was quite alone, so I could be all weird. And you know, it was, well, it’s what Adya would refer to as an initial awakening. And so, there I sat, you know?

And so, to answer your question though, about what’s, okay, that would be the answer to some degree, what’s informed some of these thoughts I’ve been sharing with you. That’s informed that, from the standpoint of, it took away some things that I thought I knew, like who the hell I was, and what I was. It took that away. It’s been, I mean, even though I can get wrapped up in what we can call “Tom stuff”, even though things can still seem to have a sense of me to them, you can never unsee what you’ve seen, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Tom: You can never be a virgin again. Yeah, and sure enough, so you know, when you start seeing in a very real, experiential, non-intellectual way, that this self that we’ve been spending almost 24/7, for our entire lives focused on, doesn’t even really exist, then it kind of has a tendency to change things. It changes the way you look at the world, it changes the way you think about the world, changes the fact that you even think.

Rick: So it’s a real shift for you.

Tom: Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Rick: So did you find that a week or two later that you had gotten back into the same old same old, or was it really a shift which was irreversible and things were different thereafter?

Tom: Both, both. I got back into the same old same old, but it wasn’t the same old same old. Sometimes honestly, there have been times it’s been like, I mean, sometimes I have sat thinking to myself, how in the world is this possibly happening? How is this even, you know, it’s just remarkable to me that the grooves that have been worn into our mental-emotional system, because you can see in no uncertain terms that it’s just as empty as you could ask for, and yet, there it is. And so I’ve been fortunate I think to have had enough help along the way to know that those are just opportunities for greater clarity, they are opportunities for greater seeing. And so fortunately …

Rick: “They” meaning that sort of awakening you had when you sat there and relaxed.

Tom: No, I’m talking about the times when you are sitting there going, “Holy crap, how can I be experiencing this again?”

Rick: Oh, I see, I see.

Tom: How this mental-emotional junk can come back at you. It still seems to have a life of its own, even though it’s clear. I don’t know if it was Ramana who coined this phrase, or someone of his ilk did, the analogy of the fan being unplugged.

Rick: Oh yeah, I was just thinking that analogy.

Tom: Yeah, I mean the fan has been unplugged, right?

Rick: Keeps spinning.

Tom: That’s clear, but you know, the darn thing just hasn’t quit spinning, you know? I don’t know that it ever does, to be honest with you. I would be lying to you if I said, “And the fan will quit spinning.” How do I know? I don’t know that it will, it might.

Rick: It seems like it spins all of one’s life, I mean, I’ve never …

Tom: Could be.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve never seen anyone that appeared to have been spared the onslaught of challenging circumstances. Even the greatest saints I’ve met, they still have their issues.

Tom: Oh, absolutely. Once you start diving into it, it’s really remarkable how deliciously flawed our saints have been.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Tom: You know? And what’s really fun is how their followers never want you to know those things. I love that part. I think it was Yogananda who had very painful feet, and he could barely walk on his own feet. I mean, let’s be honest, Ramana was beautiful, but at the same time he was not really a very functional human being. He kind of sat on a lawn cloth in a building.

Rick: Lived a recluse life. Although he did engage himself in editing, and in fact, he went and worked in the kitchen and did stuff like that.

Tom: But whatever the particular flow of that experience for Ramana was, it resulted in a person that probably wasn’t going to go out and get a job.

Rick: No, you’re right.

Tom: He had certain limitations, and that’s okay. I love one of Gandhi’s, and we could debate about where Gandhi was on the relative scale of things, but I love one of Gandhi’s followers saying that it takes a lot of people to keep Gandhi living in poverty. I love that.

Rick: That’s a good one, yeah. It reminds me of Dolly Parton saying, “It costs a lot to look this cheap.”

Tom: Oh, she does it well. She does it so well. And I should point out that just down the road from me is good old Branson, Missouri, where Dolly has one of her … what’s she called the thing? The Dixie Stampede.

Rick: Ah, okay. So was that awakening that you had, sitting in the chair there, I guess we could call it an awakening, I think you called it an initial awakening. Were there subsequent awakenings of comparative significance?

Tom: Of comparative significance?

Rick: Yeah, other milestones that you could look back on and think, “Okay, this was another big jump.”

Tom: That’s the funny thing, Rick. I think my experience is probably similar to others in that they’re not as big after that, because they don’t seem as big. But there have definitely been … it’s more like an ongoing thing, but there have been moments, sitting and looking at a tree and being the tree, little things like that. One time I was an airplane, that was kind of fun.

Rick: Well yeah, you light a match in a pitch black room and it’s, “Whew, what a contrast.” You light a second match, it’s contributing just as much as the first match did, but it doesn’t seem like that much of a contrast this time.

How Awakening Changed Daily Life

Tom: You know, it’s funny though, I would rather point out, interesting given our conversation earlier, I’m more inclined to point out less the flashy spiritual stuff, and more the transformative aspects. What has it done? How has it moved in the world?

Rick: For you, you mean?

Tom: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Tom: Okay, well, I’d been married for 13 years, and my ex and I, we split up, and we had a 5-year-old son. And you know, it seemed crazy at the time, and it still seems crazy in a certain respect, and yet it’s the most natural thing in the world to me. My ex and I live next door to each other. We have houses.

Rick: Even now, you mean?

Tom: Right.

Yeah, yeah. We live right next door to each other, and my son just goes back and forth, and I made it a real, well, no I didn’t. I started to say I made it a conscious intent, but I did not. I felt like I didn’t have a choice. I felt like, because of my love for my son, I had to love his mother as much as I did when I was married to her. That kind of drove me for a good couple of years. One of the effects of that was, it’s going to sound kind of, it’s not going to sound very manly, but after about a year of us being split up, I went through a month where every time I saw her or talked to her, I broke down and sobbed, and I couldn’t stop.

Rick: In her presence?

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t help myself.

Rick: And what was your feeling while you were doing that?

Tom: I had no idea. I was just like, in hindsight, I can tell you that it was some sort of releasing, letting go, just letting the emotional attachments dissolve, and letting what really existed there to be there. And so, now that, you know, it’s been six years since we split up, and you know, I actually think I like the woman better now than I did when we were married, and I’m pretty certain I love her more now than I did when we were married, and yet there’s zero, I mean, not even a hint that she or I would ever want to be together.

Rick: Has she gotten remarried, or does she have boyfriends?

Tom: No, she’s dated quite a bit, you know, she’s kind of gone her own way and done her own thing. But you know, we get along great, and I’m just amazed.

Rick: Do you get together for meals once in a while, and stuff like that?

Tom: Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, my son definitely knows that his parents are divorced, and they’re never going to be married again, and he thinks it’s great. You know, he’s got two parents that treat him like, well, honestly, you know, my parents stayed together until the day my dad died, and honestly, I think my ex and I make a better family for my son than my mom and dad did, you know, staying together in the house.

Rick: Oh, I could definitely say the same thing.

Tom: So you know, I’m just grateful every day that I have this, you know, I even have friends that still can’t really figure out how I do this, but I don’t really do it, it’s just kind of the way it’s done.

Rick: Yeah, and I guess what you’re saying, and the reason you brought it up, is that you’re offering this as an example of the kind of influence that this spiritual shift has had on your behavior.

Tom: Exactly. I mean, you know, you’re not supposed to love your ex-wife as much as I do, but I do, and so it makes life a hell of a lot easier. So yeah, yeah, definitely.

Rick: So one thing I’m wondering, Tom, is, you know, what is your subjective experience as you go through your day? In other words, let’s say you’re walking down the street, you’re driving a car, you’re eating food, you’re doing all the normal things people do, do you find yourself reflecting from time to time? I’m sure you don’t think about it constantly, because that would be unnatural, but do you find yourself thinking from time to time? It sure is interesting living as I now am, seeing the world as I now see it, seeing myself as I now do, compared to what I was like 10-15 years ago, such a different perspective on life, or not?

Tom: No, no, that doesn’t … you know, it’s funny, just as I was hearing you ask that question, Rick, and the thought that came to me was, that makes it sound too special. I mean, it’s just, the first time I heard somebody say that waking up was the most ordinary thing in the world, I thought that sounded silly. But that’s why I said, I’ve gotten to the point almost where it’s almost not even, I mean it’s funny that I sit here in front of a camera and talk about it every week, but I don’t talk about it personally, you know? Because it just … I mean, you didn’t want to do these interviews to talk about my excretory functions.

Rick: I wasn’t going to ask you about those.

Tom: I mean, everybody does it, you know? It’s just so ridiculously ordinary, forget the gross aspects of it, but you know, it’s just ordinary. Why would you even talk about that?

Rick: Well everybody does it, and for every awakened person who has become accustomed to that state state is not a good word, but you know what I mean it becomes ordinary, in the sense that you’re not kind of oohing and aahing and drooling, it’s like you’re just living your life. But sometimes I just find it fascinating.

I was in a business meeting this week, and it lasted for a couple of hours, and I was sitting around a business table, a conference table with a whole bunch of people, and I talked quite a bit, other people talked, and I sort of almost entertained myself during the meeting by just observing with some fascination and delight, what my perspective was on the experience of just being alive, having this meeting. And what was charming about it was, in my case, there was just this profound, kind of bubbly silence, just deep silence, and joy, as if bubbling up out of that silence.

And at the same time I’m talking about all this computer stuff and all that I needed to talk about with people, but it’s just delightful, you know? Isn’t this sweet?

Tom: I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I’ll tell you what I have more than anything else, is usually it’s a memory of something 10, 15, 20 years ago. This seems to occur more lately because it seems like everybody I went to high school with has found me on Facebook. So if I bother to actually pay attention to what they’re all posting on Facebook, it usually tends to trigger old memories, and I see a name and I’m like, “My God, I haven’t thought of that person in literally 30 years.

This is really remarkable.” And what I find more than anything else, it’s less of a “wow” about right now, and it’s more of almost a stunned disbelief that there was some other way of seeing all this 30 years ago. That’s what’s really more like, “Huh, that couldn’t have really… Nah.” It’s like my own memories aren’t even really real anymore. It’s like, “It just doesn’t even make any sense.” I think that’s the thing more than anything else. This has become so ordinary that that actually seems extraordinary.

Rick: Yeah, Maharshi used to talk about enlightenment as being normal life, normal human life. He said everything other than that is sort of sub-normal or abnormal. It’s funny, sometimes when I hear criminal trials, they’re arguing whether the person should be defined as insane or not, and my thought is, “Of course they’re insane!”

Tom: It’s like, “Why would they kill somebody if they weren’t insane?” Does a rational person kill somebody? Yeah, really.

Rick: It’s just where we want to put the bar as far as what sanity is.

Tom: Just sane enough so we can kill them.

Rick: Well, it’s interesting, I mean, I bet you – speaking hypothetically here of course – but eventually if you were to somehow magically be instantly transported to the state of mind or consciousness or whatever that you were in 30 years ago, you’d find yourself writhing on the floor in agony. And conversely, if you were somehow to be transported from that to this, you’d probably find yourself in ecstasy, but we acclimate very well, and so hey, it’s normal.

Tom: Yep, yep, I agree. Yeah, I would probably have a panic attack. Probably so.

Rick: All righty, well, is there anything that you feel like we ought to have touched on that we didn’t?

Tom: No, not really. I mean, it seems like we covered all the spiritual bases.

Rick: Yeah,

Tom: quite well as a matter of fact. Thank you.

Rick: Oh, thank you. So you do a little satsang. Firstly, you do a little email thing that I’ve subscribed to for about a year, and I always enjoy getting those. I always read them.

Tom: Oh, good.

Rick: Yeah, I always read them, I always enjoy them, I always think, “Right on, I like that.” So people can go to your website, which I will link to from my website, and they can sign up for that if they’d like to get that email.

Tom: Yeah, good, because my goal is to hit 100. I’m up to 48 shortcuts. A friend of mine gave me that name for them. I absolutely hate that name, but honestly I can’t think of anything else better to call them. “Shortcuts on the Spiritual Journey,” what the heck.

Rick: Yeah, well they’re nice, keep doing them. Go on past 100 if you like, and go to 108 at least. Also you give satsangs now. You have some very nice equipment there, and it’s a video satsang, right? That you do online every weekend or something?

Tom: Yes, I’m trying to do three times a month on the weekends typically. But yeah, I do it live, streaming video over the internet.

Rick: And so people can find out about that if they go to your site also, which is what, tomStine.com is it?

Tom: Yep. I have a portal on my site that tells the upcoming satsangs, and then when you see the time on there, about 30 minutes before that time, the page to view with the video player goes live. So then you can just tune in and watch. And then you won’t find it if you go there now, but hopefully by the end of August, I’m having my site redesigned to put more of an emphasis on video, because I’ve really gotten into the video, obviously, with all this equipment. And I’m going to have all the satsangs that I’ve done so far will be available for audio downloads.

Rick: Like an archive.

Tom: Yeah, pretty minimal cost, just enough to cover bandwidth and expenses. And then I’m going to do a subscription service for the videos. So you’ll be able to subscribe, and that will give you access for a month to all the satsangs I do that month, plus the entire archive. So you can watch the satsangs online to your heart’s content. So I wanted to make it, I kind of wanted to do a little two-fold thing. I wanted to make the live presentation totally free and available to anybody, and then have the ability to go and watch them later, or listen to them later.

Rick: So I listened to a couple of them, and I enjoyed them.

Tom: Oh good, glad. I kind of like your down-to-earth, what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of style. My son, I clearly, obviously from the way I talk and the way I look, the word “hillbilly” doesn’t apply, but my son gets a kick out of calling me a hillbilly, because these phrases will just escape my mouth, they’re just good old Midwestern country expressions. I can’t escape my roots, that’s for sure.

Rick: Yeah, well ultimately we’re all growing out of the same root.

Tom: Yep, ultimately.

Rick: Good, so thanks Tom. So I’ve been speaking with Tom Stine on, I think, episode number 82 of Buddha at the Gas Pump, which is an ongoing series of interviews with people, generally what I would define as ordinary people, who have had spiritual awakenings. I think ultimately everyone is ordinary, but sometimes people get to seeming kind of extraordinary, and we begin to associate specialness with spirituality or with spiritual awakening, and then we begin to feel like it couldn’t possibly happen to us.

So part of the motivation of this series is to speak with folks who are living relatively ordinary lives, whether or not they have dedicated themselves to doing this full-time as a teacher, and to see from their example how it shows up in a great variety of ways, and if it can happen to them, there’s no reason it can’t happen to you. So that’s the idea. So thanks for watching, and if you would like to see the whole archive, go to www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. You can sign up for an email newsletter to be notified every time a new interview is put up. There’s a podcast you can subscribe to so you get it on your iPod.

There are little discussion groups that form around each interview, and people sort of banter about different ideas that have been brought up in the interview. You can participate in that if you’d like. All that’s available. And I will see you next week. Thanks for watching. [music]