Mystic Girl in the City – Kiran – BATGAP Interview (#204)
November 2, 2013
{BATGAP theme music plays}
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the gas pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Kiran. Welcome, Kiran.
Kiran: Hi.
Rick: My first trivial question is: Kiran is a man’s name in India and how did you end up with the name Kiran?
Kiran: (laughs). Kiran is also a woman’s name in Sanskrit, so there’s a lot of KIRAN, KIRANA.
Rick: Okay.
Kiran: And it’s the first ray of light that hits in the dawn. So, just when it’s all dark, that first ray of light is a KIRANA in Sanskrit.
Rick: Oh, nice.
Kiran: So yeah. So it’s actually really, really, common in Fiji or any of the Indian countries. The way I spell it: K-I-R-A-N, is a female version.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Kiran: The male “Kieran” is an Irish Saint, or the Japanese Dragon. (laughing)
Rick: Huh.
Kiran: So there’s lots of versions of it, but mine … it’s a great story how my name came about – because when I first popped, my mind, my mind blew a fuse. And you read the book and we’ll talk about more of it … But it was so radical. It was such a spontaneous … I had no background, no orientation, and I was suddenly without any form, and navigating the world after a few months was so hard for my family, my friends, everybody. Because it was an entirely different human being, in front of them, like, radically different. Sudden, like now. So a friend, a really, really, good friend of mine, Christopher (who the book is dedicated to) said: “You know, sometimes people change their names; that’s what a name change is. It helps everybody clear out the identity and start again. Why don’t you change your name?” And I was like, “Oh, you know, that’s so flakey. That’s so new agey (laughing). I’m not going to change my name”. And then I thought about it, and I thought, “Whatever helps, if anything helps”. So I had my first boyfriend; his name was the Irish “Kieran” and I loved the name. I’ve always loved the name. I thought, I’m going to name my kids Kiran or my dog Kiran. And so walking in the woods one day, I thought, “Maybe Kiran is my name, because I love it so much”. So I went to my sister and I said to my little sister, “What do you think about the name ‘Kiran’ for me?”, and she said, “I love it. I love it!” And I said, “Okay, how about you just call me Kiran and let’s just see how it goes”. Because I was really nervous about doing this sort of flakey, new agey thing. And my sister told my mom, and my mom called me, and was like, “I love it. I love that name! I’ve always hated your name. I love that name! I’m going to call you that name.” So my friend Christopher, my mom and my sister, for six months, called me Kiran – and they were the only people. And they all loved it. And it fit. And it was a few days later I asked my sister, I said to my little sister, “How do we spell it? How should I spell it?”. My sister said, “Phonetically: K-I-R-A-N, spell it just the way it sounds: Kiran.” And I was like, “Okay!” And then literally, maybe two and half years later, when I start to learn about spirituality and that people, you know, “Guru will give you a name”, to refer to this other thing, and usually it’s this sort of Sanskrit kind of a name. I type in: “K-I-R-A-N” to see what that is, and I find out it’s the Sanskrit word that means “The first ray of light that hits the dark” (laughing). So I called my sister and said, “You are my guru! You named me!”
Rick: (laughing) It’s good.
Kiran: “God named me!” (laughing)
Kiran: So that’s where “Kiran” came from, yeah. But I think most people know me as the “Mystic Girl in the City”. I think that not a lot of people know that it’s “Kiran”. They just think of “Mystic Girl in the City”.
Rick: Well, now, now a lot more people going to know about it as “Kiran” because we just talked about it. (laughing)
Kiran: Yeah!
Rick: Alright, so you had, you just alluded to, and in your little bio you sent me, you referred to what you called “a massive spontaneous awakening”. You “died of a massive spontaneous awakening into your true nature”. I found this most interesting. I read your book Tools for Sanity. It’s not a long book; I read it on a plane flight from Dallas to San Francisco, and what made it extraordinary was that most people who have, there are exceptions, but most people who have spiritual awakenings have done a certain amount of spiritual practice, sometimes years of it. And they kind of long and yearn for this thing, you know … and you’re just, you know, clueless about this stuff. You haven’t really focused on it at all in your life. You were a dancer, and this and that, and all of a sudden, one day, out of the blue, “KA-BLAM!”, you had this incredible shift … and then you spent years trying to adjust to it and restructure your whole vehicle to accommodate it. So I’d like to explore that with you, in quite some detail.
Rick: So tell us the story, as you told it, in the book about your life prior to that. Not at great length, but as much as you feel is relevant and then what happened when you had this awakening.
Kiran: Yeah, well … As you mentioned, I was a professional artist. I had a fine arts degree in theater and dance. And I was an actor and dancer, and that was the practice of my whole life. I’d actually been dancing and acting since I was two, and professionally and semi-professionally through my teenagehood. I worked, you know, all over the U.S. and all over Europe, and I had a really deep identity as an artist. A lifetime career, you know?
Kiran: So I guess in some ways, that was my spiritual practice … a deep practice of artistry and creativity. Um, maybe. (laughing) But yeah … and I also, which is really relevant to my story, and to myself as a teacher, I had a really challenging life with a tremendous amount of violence, and tremendous amount of trauma. Like, “off the charts” levels of trauma and violence.
Rick: You mean, like, domestic violence kind of thing? Your father or something?
Kiran: Yeah, yeah, my household, my … a truly mind-blowing amount of childhood abuse and … just cycles and cycles of unbelievable trauma at every level.
Kiran: So, although I was so fortunate to have this successful artistic career, I actually lived it on the fringes of my life. And although I was very successful as an artist, the primary movement of my life was trying to survive and function in profound psychological, physical, and emotional damage that included very, very extreme Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from all the events and all of the trauma. And then also having survived that, I was recreating it in many ways in my life, in many areas of my life. There were levels of insanity and violence that were just on a perpetual cycle.
Rick: It’s interesting because in most models of spiritual development, that would disqualify you from any kind of imminent awakening … One would assume that a great deal of repair work had to take place and purging of all these deep impressions before you could even get close to some kind of awakening.
Kiran: I’m so grateful that you’re seeing, that you point that out because that is a really, really, strong line in so many … Advaita, Buddhism, when you go into these indoctrinations, that is a really strong through-line there.
Rick: Yeah, they got all these vasanas, all these kleshas, and all these impressions in the nervous system and they’re deeply rooted, and they’re going to keep you bound and restricted until they’ve been gradually, gradually, worked out. That whole line.
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it’s not true.
Rick: In your case anyway.
Kiran: In my case, and in many, many others. Many, many others. You know, that the actual death of the self is irrelevant of the forms. One of the forms being your psyche. One of the forms being your mind. One of the forms being your body. That, “It all God, anyway!”
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: You know, it don’t have to take a shape to know itself, you know.
Rick: There’s a famous saying though, from some Zen guy, which is that enlightenment may be an accident but spiritual practice makes you accident prone, and I’ve often quoted that, and some people have taken exception with it and say, “Well, I’m not sure that there’s any evidence for that”, and kind of anecdotally, it seems like there is, because people who are engaged in spiritual practice seem to be more likely to have awakenings. But you were certainly the exception, and I wonder if some kind of really objective study were done, we might find that maybe, that all that spiritual practice accomplishes is easing the transition when the Awakening does happen … so you don’t have so much to work out afterwards.
Kiran: You know, it’s so interesting and it’s a really great point – and my opinion is more at the front end of that – people who are called to a spiritual practice already have a sense … there, it’s all reality, reality is already touching them. Which is why they’re called to go there. So having a calling to move to spirituality is the same calling that’s going to make you predisposed to awakening, possibly. I think a very soft, separate will, which is often, you know, ninety-eight percent of people in the spiritual house have found reality, found the forms, like the world so painful and there’s some kind of idea, or sense, or very direct experience of something else, of kind of a mystery, that moves.
Kiran: And so, the person … this calling inside of people makes you accident prone, I would say … it’s not the practices, although the practices are beautiful and there are bazillions of them and the ones that call to you, that you undertake, always have some level of devotion or love that is guiding you towards that movement inside of you to begin with … that made you show up. So I think that’s true. I think that makes you accident prone, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, but you can go decades, most people do go decades, between first sensing that gentle voice inside, that calling, that there’s something more, and having the sort of … realization that you had just more or less out of the blue.
Kiran: Yeah. And I think that God … I think a lot of things about that, one of things about that, was my own personal experience: that when I eventually stumbled into the halls of spirituality, finding out that that’s where this is all being talked about, I was shocked, repulsed, and repelled because the distortion that I was hearing was so thick. I used to say to people all the time, when I first discovered spirituality – which is, you know, two years into being awake – it was the only place that God didn’t live.
Rick: Hm.
Kiran: There was only one place in the world where there was no God, and that was a spiritual house. (laughs)
Rick: Huh.
Kiran: And I used to – because I needed to be around sanity, I needed to be around clarity, and the teachers, all these different teachers were that voice of sanity and clarity – but in order for me to hear them, I would often have to sit outside the building.
Rick: Hm.
Kiran: Like, I couldn’t even be in, because as soon as I walked in the doors … it was like God being sucked right out of the whole essence, of the whole place.
Rick: How come? I mean, we could name teachers, but you probably don’t want to in this context, but I mean, everybody knows who all these well-known teachers are, especially that you might be likely to see in the Bay Area … You tell a story of going to see Adyashanti and getting up on the mic and more or less yelling at him for giving these people, for actually luring these people into this realization, which they actually had no inkling of the radicalness of it; like, “What are you trying to do to these people?”, “If these people had any idea what you were trying to get them into they’d run out the door”. Basically, that’s what you said.
Kiran: (Nodding) If they actually knew for real. You know, the actual teachers are … I think Adya is the most incredible teacher, I mean, he’s … I call him and my friend Eckhart … those are the big guns – I call them my “Big Guns”.
Rick: Eckhart Tolle?
Kiran: Yeah, they’re as clear as clear gets. And they’re fantastic teachers. And I’m so thrilled about their work. What I … the distortions that I was discovering were like the deep cultural storylines that were filtering the information the teacher was saying.
Kiran: Now, I was only interfacing with these very contemporary, very modern, quite clear teachers – but it was inside of the home of Buddhism and you know, quite honestly, I have found a lot of Buddhists that I love to death and I think are incredible teachers, but I have never found a Buddhist teaching I agreed with yet … I’m totally open! I’m totally open! But I … if you tell me about meta-practice, if you tell me about mindfulness. I can get into a rashy itch of irritation, because it is so full of distortion.
Rick: (laughing) Okay, so let me see if I understand it correctly, so you’re saying, you’re not faulting, say, Adyashanti or Eckhart Tolle or Gangaji, or any other well-known teacher. What you’re saying is that by the time what comes out of their mouth goes into the ears and through the brain of the audience, it becomes something very different from what they’re actually saying … you’re saying things get muddled in the transmission. Is that what you’re saying?
Kiran: They get muddled in the deep cultural ground of these hallowed halls that are already saturated with a culture and a storyline that’s a distortion … Acceptance practice for instance: “Acceptance Practice, Acceptance Practice”. There’s this inside of it, it’s just kind of this; in the halls of spirituality, it’s known, it has Advaita versions and Buddhist versions, and all the different versions of it, and New Age versions and it’s saturated in the halls. And always, it’s pointed to external circumstance – “Just say yes”, you know, “a deep bow of whatever shows up”. But externally, I mean. And there’s the first distortion: externally is the mirror. That’s the illusion. There’s no power there. The power is internally. So, the acceptance practice is about internal acceptance, because that’s the only thing there is. That’s it. There’s no external anyway.
Kiran: So there’s these slight … you end up walking around with a bunch of ideas: that my job is to just say to “yes” as my neighbor comes up to me and say, “Can I borrow the tractor?” And, “I’m a good spiritual person and I’m into acceptance, so I say yes”. And then he says, “Can I have your lawn mower?” And I say, “Yes”, and I just say, “Yes.” And then … (laughs). There’s no freedom in that, you know, versus the internal.
Kiran: My neighbor comes up and asks for the lawn mower, and I feel what arises inside of me. And what arises inside of me is total irritation. Because this fucker breaks everything he ever borrowed.
Rick: (laughing)
Kiran: I never want to lend him anything and my new lawn mower cost me $1500, that’s what arises, and you know what? That’s compliments of the mystery. Like, that’s not … people think they have to get through “all that” and move into some profound position of surrender. The position of the surrender is to honor that internal movement and surrender to that, and then find, ideally, a very gracious way to express a real boundary that’s coming up, which is, “I understand it would be great, I’m actually not lending out my tractor. I noticed the last thing I lent you was broken, and I haven’t got a replacement yet. But I’d be happy to accept that.” (laughs)
Rick: That’s a good example. So what you’re saying is that, without really discovering and fine tuning their inner compass, people externalize these teachings – that being a case in point, and in this case, become kind of sheepishly cooperative with whatever presents itself. But that’s not what was intended by the original teaching of whoever espoused it.
Kiran: And so many … We’re in a really interesting spot in the world and in the planet right now, because so many … How do I say this? You know, Ken Wilber has a thing about this … people are more awake now than they used to be. So the Buddha has the same freedom that I have, but it’s more awake here, because I live it, by paying a mortgage and having relationships and having community. Like, I’m actually living this awakening in so many layers of matrix. I’m not sitting outside of society in a role of “teacher” that excludes me from real relationships – equal-powered relationships, and under-powered, and over … I’m not sort of taking the crown that says, “I am the Buddha”, “Nobody question me”, and a lot of yes men, and I walk around just speaking. I’m not assuming that was Buddha’s life. But that’s the way his teachings – five hundred years later – get written down as, and all these distortions get filtered in, and filtered in … and all of the interpretations of Jesus’s teachings … and they’re so distorted.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: And that’s the saturation of the culture of the hallowed hall. So you walk in and there’s already this thick layer of distortion of everything. Which is so innocent, I mean it, it’s really, really innocent to walk into this space … A teacher says … And a lot of our teachers come from lineage, so they’re using the same verbiage, the same vocabulary, which may or may not be relevant. It may or may not be appropriate in a moment, and they just keep using the same verbiage because words are difficult. They’re too big, they don’t fit, really, what we’re actually talking about. So we’re … so they keep using the same words, and these same words, and I think that in there are the natural distortions that happen.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: In that, I interfaced with when I walked in those halls, and I was like, “What the heck is, what is this?!”
Rick: (laughing) There’s a saying, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance”. So you would walk in those halls and there’s just a sort of almost esoteric antenna pick up of the operant mindset in the hall, that would freak you out so much it would … because maybe, usually it’s just the teacher speaking and everybody sitting there passively listening, but it somehow just went against the grain for you the moment you walked in there, because you somehow picked up on where the audience was at, versus what the teacher was saying?
Kiran: Well yeah. And more specifically, and because you’ve read the book, I go into this little bit … what happened for me is that when my mind blew a fuse, I no longer had access to my mind. And without the mind … uh, the mind is a tool. So I know very directly what mind is, because my mind blew a fuse – when it’s gone, you sure the heck know what’s missing, you know. So my mind … when it blew …
Rick: Let’s back up. Hang on a second. We kind of skipped ahead … Let’s really get into it … Yeah let’s really get into that right now. Tell your story about when your mind blew and all that, and then we’ll kind of pick this up again in terms of …
Kiran: Okay. Sure, that’s great. So we had been talking before, I had this beautiful artistic career, quite successful and very full, but the primary movement of my life was trying to heal and survive from this, you know, from my trauma, and most disturbingly, the post-traumatic stress disorder which made my world entirely small; very, very hard to function – because of that particular trauma. What you see in movies – with like, people come back for more and stuff; what post-traumatic stress disorder just sort of looks like; it’s highly dysfunctional. You can’t really function. So that was the majority of my life. So the point and the reason why I think that’s so important both from my story, and my story as a teacher is that the journey of healing for me was that I always needed to find truth in a situation. So for me it wasn’t a kind of a spiritual thing. It was like: two people are talking, and I am not safe, because I’m never safe. I’m always on alert and I’m always about to be harmed brutally somewhere, whether most of the time that wasn’t true, but in my head it was. And so I have to find out what’s true here – what’s true here, what’s true here, what’s true here. So, so many years of digging for what’s true. I think that’s what predisposes someone to awakening, and I think that’s what brings people into the spiritual house … that they have this sense that there’s something else here, that all of this going on isn’t necessarily true. And it’s painful on so many levels. So I think in that case, I am the same, but mine looked at … mine came across from needing to do it through healing. Through healing. Through healing my psyche. But I had actually gotten to a point in my life … this is the part that’s unique: I had actually gotten to a point in my life, just after my thirty-second birthday … a very functional … unbelievable levels of functionality, given my history. So tremendous peace. Tremendous ability to search, to just live life not so on the fringes; I was actually healing. And just, you know, skipping along living my life. I was in Vancouver, Canada, at the time; I was an actor – working in my career had led me to mostly film and TV at that point.
Kiran: And it was just … I was having this great life, you know. I lived in that girl in … you know, like that girl’s house. I had a little great apartment in the city and my great friend, and the blossoming, exciting career … and one day after going for lunch with my mom and her twin sister, I just came home to change shoes to go out and meet a friend … And as I was putting my shoes on and tying my shoes up, I noticed that my body, my hands were just made of light. And it was really, it was sort of inconsequential, in the same way that you would be grabbing your keys and wallet, out the door – you don’t really look at your keys and wallet. It was in the same way. I wasn’t really looking at my hands, I just was like, sort of in the background was, “Wow, they’re just “golden light” … and then this sort of off-thought of, “Wow, you know, my whole, our whole bodies are just so beautiful (laughing) … our whole bodies are so beautiful, they’re just golden light”.
Kiran: And then I think I caught that thought and actually stopped, and when I looked … I kind of looked at the wall – there was no wall. There was no room. There was no me. Nothing was here – I blew a fuse … the filter that takes energy and creates it into a wall was gone. It left, and it never did come back. It was just one hundred percent done. So, all there was … was basically seeing the quantum field – and that was all I could see … this sort of wave of energy, and even as I say that, it’s so … because we so consistently have minds that filter information. It’s not like I could see the wave. I could just … when I lost the mind, I suddenly had access to about a thousand percent more than seeing. It was like vast and vast fields and fields and fields of information were suddenly accessible to me, that before were inaccessible because my mind was filtering it, and just creating “wall”.
Rick: What kind of information?
Kiran: Well, everything. Everything. You know. Choice.
Rick: Like radio stations? I mean, what were you picking up on? (laughing)
Kiran: I mean … pretty much … kind of a much more … deeper than that… um, much more. Like, well … as it exists for me now. You know, this morning, Rick, I knew what time you woke up.
Rick: Huh.
Kiran: (laughing) And started to research today. So … I’m asleep, for three hours, in a different time zone. There’s a part of me that’s always awake.
Rick: What time did I wake up?
Kiran: For me it was about … I think it was about six or six thirty your time, for me it was a little earlier.
Rick: Well. First I woke up around 4:15 because the cat woke me up and then I lay in bed for a while and decided, “I’m not gettin’ back to sleep”. So I went in the other room and started meditating, and I meditated for a little bit and then I lay down and slept some more and then I woke up again, at … I don’t know. It might have been after seven, a little after seven or something.
Kiran: It would have been that first time, when you woke up and meditated in that space.
Rick: So that would have been like … um … two thirty in the morning your time, or something.
Kiran: Yeah it was a quite … it was the middle of the night, my time. I didn’t look at the clock, but I was like, “Oh, Rick’s awake.”
Rick: And so was this one of … one of many little tidbits, all over the planet, all over the world?
Kiran: Many, many, many.
Kiran: Streams all over the planet. All over the world. Movements going all the time. Absolutely.
Rick: Do they seem irrelevant, or is there a reason that you’re picking up all these things? Are you actually … are they actually enhancing your experience or enabling you to function better, or are you actually helping facilitate these different things that you’re picking up on?
Kiran: It’s just what happens when you don’t have a mind.
Rick: (laughs)
Kiran: I just don’t have the filter. So this is, I think it’s just the actuality … and this is very, very, very rare. This is totally rare. This is like, you know, when I sit down with Adya or Ben or any of these people – you know, they’re always quizzing me about this. It’s a very rare form of it. It’s a very specific … it’s not the case for everybody.
Rick: You see angel’s? Subtle beings?
Kiran: You know, I’m very, very uninterested, not as a stand, but literally completely uninterested in those alternate claims of reality movie. It’s like …
Rick: So you’re picking up stuff on this plane, but stuff that we shouldn’t ordinarily be able to know – mainly on this level. This plane of existence.
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, on an ordinary plane of existence.
Kiran: Yeah. I’m just … it’s basically in order to feel or see you … the way I describe it to people is that I’m actually seeing the coding of your being and reading that coding to see brown shirts. You know, to see … I always point back to the movie “The Matrix”, because it’s so good – it was, in so many ways, the way it is. So in the way that they write code to see. You know. The world. So in reality, we don’t actually live in a ship that’s gray. And you know, in reality we live in total, we are total bliss. Total light. Total fabulousness. And then all the rest of it’s coded, and I see code. And over time my systems learned to read the code, but in the first few days of awakening, I couldn’t.
Rick: Yeah, you were like …
Kiran: It was like … overwhelmed with information. But unbelievably … awesome at navigating, because the mystery is moving. There’s not, there’s no separate identity, separate mind moving. It’s just this mystery totally moving … But it certainly took a while to … to navigate that dance.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: (laughing)
Kiran: That is not for everybody. I had, for many, many years, I had a lot of people around me, sort of have this little prayer they would say every night, “Please don’t make me wake up. Please don’t. (garbled)
Rick: (garbled) … they didn’t wanna be like you.
Kiran: They didn’t want to have to do what I was doing. And then, you have to want to go through this. It was like, “Oh my God! Scratch any request for me to EVER … NEVER, like, never let this happen to me, please, never.”
Rick & Kiran: (laughs)
Rick: Yeah, well that’s interesting. You know, I mean, in high school science class, when you learn about the electromagnetic field and all the different frequencies that exist and how visual light is just a small percentage of that, they tell you, “You wouldn’t want to see it all, you know, there’d be too much.” So they teach you, even in high school, that we’re kind of like filters, which our senses can pick up a certain sliver of the full range of possibilities of. And same with large and small, you know, we’re kind of at a scale where we’re not seeing the very large or the very small, we’re just kind of tuned in to a certain level of perception. So what you’re saying is … There’s also the gross and subtle thing. I just was chatting with a friend, who has been a friend for quite some time, and he just happened to tell me he sees angels all the time. I never knew that. And then I started asking him every little thing, like, “Are they here? Or here?” … we were …
Kiran: Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Rick …in an airport elevator and I said, “Are any of them here in the elevator?”, and he just kind of smiled, and afterwards he said, “So they just told me, “Don’t point us out to people; if they’re meant to see us, they’ll see us””. So I guess you’re meant to see what you’re seeing, and it’s not necessarily the celestial fields, the angelic fields. You’ve just somehow lost your filters, in terms of perceiving all kinds of things that people ordinarily can’t perceive.
Kiran: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: Luckily, the dominant theme of what I’m accessing is up against … So I call, I have a couple of layers, and one of the layers is just that, authentic impulses, moment to moment, that are moving. So in some ways we have to keep using words. They’re a little too big, but we’ll try. For me, it’s like in Oneness. They’re just these authentic movements in Oneness. But how it’s perceived, is like … for you or for me, like … you woke up at whatever time in the morning. I don’t … the first level of perception is just this unique essence that, and we haven’t actually met, but I read your essence … to read, just even in hearing your voice. It’s an essence I’m reading. And so it’s just the Oneness has this essence moving. It’s just an essence moving. And it’s me reading it to go, “That’s Rick, and Rick’s awake.”
Rick: What state were you in at that time of two thirty in the morning, your time ,where you were what people would conventionally call “asleep”, and you were aware during sleep and therefore having these experiences?
Kiran: Yeah. I have a funny relationship with sleep. It’s sometimes like this, but not always. Sometimes I sleep like a normal person sleeps, and I quite love it and it’s wonderful when that happens. And it happens and it’s great. But lots of times it goes like this: say you’re with somebody sleeping and they ask you, “Are you asleep yet?” You know, that little moment. Like, “Have you fallen asleep yet?”. And I have to look … at what’s going on, and I think, “You know, I don’t think I always drive this car, and I don’t always talk to these people. So I think I must be dreaming.” So, I’ll say, “Yes, I’m asleep”. You know, so I have … I’m always awake.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: And so I’m awake inside of a dream, or I’m awake inside of THIS dream. (laughs)
Rick: And even when you are not dreaming, you are awake inside of deep sleep.
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a level that’s always awake.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: It’s always, that’s always awake here. Yeah exactly, and the thing that turns, the thing that filters information and turns off, blew for me. So, I don’t have it – so it’s always, I’m always open. You know, like it’s always … I’m just one. I’m just the oneness, you know, the form is quite separate …
Rick: Yeah, well. What would happen to the universe when that slept?
Kiran: (laughs) Well, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It’s reality, because reality is awake.
Rick: Right. Right. Yeah.
Rick: I’m kind of interested in litmus tests of awakening, in a way, because there’s such a cheap word these days, where everyone says, “Oh, I had my awakening”, and you know, it’s a word.
Kiran: That’s a cheap word.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: I agree.
Rick: I feel like the culture, the spiritual culture, could use greater clarity of definition in terms of what we really mean by “awakening” and a number of other such terms … So that they just might have another …
Kiran: Oh my brother, brother from another mother… (both laugh) … (garbled). Yes. It would help, it would help people to have that. Because I don’t align to a hierarchy, which is all in my books and all in my blogs. I don’t give a flying fuck if you’re awake or not. It doesn’t particularly matter. I’m sorry, I have gutter mouth. Does this all have to be edited? (laughing)
Rick: No, it doesn’t.
Kiran: (laughing) But I don’t actually care if you’re awake or not. But … And I think that all these people are extraordinary teachers whether they’re awake, whether … There’s extraordinary teaching, but if there’s some kind of clarity about what the teaching is, it’s so helpful. And so I couldn’t agree with you more, that these are very general terms that define … for me, it’s a very narrow …. you know, what I define as awake is very, very, very narrow. But you know, for instance, my buddy Adya has a much wider one, and other people have much, much bigger, much more wider categories.
Rick: Mhm … Well, it’s kind of like the word “education”: someone asks, “Are you educated?” And you know, maybe you’ve graduated from high school, is that educated? Or is it a college degree that’s educated? Or graduate school? I mean, at what point do you say you’re educated?
Kiran: Or a PhD.
Rick: Or a PhD.
Kiran: Exactly.
Rick: Yeah. And so it’s kind like that with awakening and … (garbled)
Kiran: Unless you’re on the other side. Like from this point through, it’s very, very, clear where identity begins or where no identity ever begins. If nobody’s home at all but you have to be … It’s a kind of a sense that … it’s a kind of a sense organ that only opens the other side, after you die.
Rick: Right.
Kiran: You know, like death being enlightenment or the awakening, awakening into your true self. It’s like when you’re fully awakened to your true nature, you have this unbelievable amount of sense organ, and part of that sense organ is very aware of when there’s identity with form, and when there’s not. And it’s … Although I know people like to think they can sense it, and likely they can. It’s like blaringly obvious, on the other side.
Rick: So, mostly like people are wearing a sign or something.
Kiran: Yeah, yeah. It’s like they’re actually reaching out and touching you. You know … it’s like someone … like this was awake (slapping on cheek), so that when it not … But it’s so … the reason I think it’s so hard to talk about, it’s almost sacrilege for you and I to have this conversation, is because of the ingrained idea of hierarchy – that somehow being awake is like the ultimate thing to do. I mean, it’s a huge part of that cultural saturation that I talked about, that’s such a distortion. That this is the ultimate thing for a human being to do, is to, you know, fall into their true nature. And I totally understand why some people talk about that, and some teachers. But it’s a very clear pointer, in a specific way, but all of these pointers are a … As I keep saying, again and again: they aren’t a platitude you can write on a sign and hang outside and use it for all occasions – they’re alive. These pointers are very alive … they only have relevance in a moment, and then they fall apart again. And so … Because that’s not true. (laughs)
Kiran: You can be totally be awesome and that was … we were talking about that: totally awesome, totally amazing, totally a brilliant teacher, incredible contributor, incredible human being, with tons of clarity, tons of sensitivity. Tons of life and beauty. And you … you’re not only into your true nature. You can live a gorgeous life. You can have total fulfillment and total peace. It’s not a prerequisite. And in fact, it’s a big can of whoop ass. Like it’s, it’s an unbelievable roller coaster ride that you don’t get to get off …
Rick: Well, hang on a second … So, the kind of things you just alluded to: totally awesome, totally incredible. I mean, we can pick out great people, like Einstein or Nelson Mandela or some like that. Those who are just these amazing wonderful personalities who contributed so much to the world. That doesn’t imply that they’re awake to their true nature, and I think most people understand that. It does … just being amazing in a relative sense doesn’t mean you’re awake to your true nature and being awake to your true nature doesn’t mean you’re going to be a stand-out in a relative sense, you might be quite, you know, nondescript.
Kiran: Yeah. I mean … Yeah. Exactly. Because I think the call to awaken to a true nature has this, some kind of recognition of specialness, which is actually true: you are incredibly special. You’re the One. You’re, you couldn’t be more special in your life as it is right now. And being awakened to your true nature doesn’t make you more special than before you were awake.
Rick: And you’re not special in some way that the world is necessarily going to applaud or recognize.
Kiran: No. No.
Rick: So we got that.
Kiran: Yeah, and you … And I think that the other reason that people are sort of gunning in this direction is because they live with a lot of suffering, and the idea is that in that place there’s no more suffering, which is true – but it doesn’t mean there’s no more pain.
Rick: Sure.
Kiran: Pain is the human form. That’s what happens. And you can … but you can actually have quite a suffering-free dream and not be awake to your true nature. You can live with ease, you can live with fulfillment, and you can live with peace. And that has a lot to do with healing, knowing how to heal the traumas in your system. So you can have a free, fulfilled, still, peaceful life at some level along the continuum. And all of this isn’t to say, “Give up the dream of enlightenment”, by any means. All of it is to say … that every step in the journey, move as you are called, and ultimately at each of those steps, you have equal access to peace – because it’s your true nature, whether you are awake or not. To fulfillment, to love, and to awesomeness. (laughs)
Rick: (laughs)
Kiran: You know, every one of us are so incredibly unique, with so much to offer, as we are. And to just not miss that … heading on a quick train to get somewhere.
Rick: Oh yeah. Don’t pass up the present for some glorious future.
Kiran: Don’t give up the beauty of your own present moment and who YOU are …
Rick: Right.
Kiran: … to get to some idea that that’s when it gets good, over there.
Rick: No, I agree with that. But a minute ago you said that you don’t necessarily buy into the notion that falling into your true nature of self-realization is the ultimate goal post of human life. I must admit that, that’s kind of been my model all long that, you know, people might be awesome in various ways, going through all kinds of experiences and so on and so forth, but there’s this kind of evolutionary stream in the universe that tends toward self-recognition, and that forms of our nervous systems are evolved to be more and more sophisticated, more and more complex, so as to be capable of that self-recognition. But a stone isn’t going to accomplish it very well, or, you know, an aardvark or something. But that, with this human nervous system, we have that possibility.
Kiran: I would agree in some of what you’re saying, and not agree in others. So … I think … I mean, obviously I’m living proof of the correctness of that, you know, that ultimately, regardless of what kind of pains in the system, or whether you’re even aware or not, your true nature’s going to find you.
Rick: Yeah, and if we regard the universe as being orchestrated by some vast intelligence which wants … wants your true, wants to find its true nature in that place.
Kiran: See, that’s where I would disagree.
Rick: Okay.
Kiran: It doesn’t need to find itself. It’s itself. And a rock is as valid and essential, and the world would be less without a rock.
Rick: Oh. I agree with that.
Kiran: So that doesn’t … Rocks don’t need to wake up.
Rick: No, and rocks can’t wake up … you know, because …
Kiran: Well, this is it. There are actually some rocks that are awake. There are some mountains that are awake.
Rick: Oh true. (garbled)
Kiran: Big Sur, big chunk of Big Sur is very awake. So yeah, no, rocks can wake up, but not all have the need to. And it’s not, it’s not important to rock nature, and Oneness loves being rock.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: It doesn’t want to be awake. It wants to be rock, it wants to be Rick, it wants to be Kiran, it wants to be … it is what it is, it’s not looking for itself. That’s not God doing that.
Rick: Okay, so let’s keep chewing on this metaphysics for a minute. Do you see, do you see there being a kind of a …? I mean, we’re trying to filter this through human understanding here, which might be totally inadequate, might not be possible, but …
Kiran: Well, we’ll give a try. We’ll do our best. Please forgive us the errors.
(both laugh)
Rick: Do you see there being … Andrew Cohen always talks about “evolutionary enlightenment”, and he … I guess the basic principle was that there’s a sort of an evolutionary momentum or purpose to the universe. That it’s kind of evolving in order to sort of … And we start with, you know, the big bang, and then we get stars – and the stars eventually explode and that causes, creates heavy elements. Heavy elements can create bodies and, to make a long story short, those bodies can have a conversation, like you and I can, so … awakening can take place, through the instrumentality of a body, as was your experience. So, do you see that as kind of, part of some cosmic game that, that everyone is playing and that has certain kind of stages?
Kiran: No. That’s what I see as, that’s the mental mind interpreting reality. It starts to tell the story. Minds start to tell stories. Minds need an “A”, “B”, a “C” equals something. So it’s putting that filter on, really, beautiful, glorious, creative movements that are fulfilled in themselves. They don’t need a better purpose. They are the purpose. It’s just the joy of creativity that’s moving. So to filter it and say, “Well, the Big Bang was in order to get to where we are today”, that’s a mental filter on a creative movement. And you know, sure, what the heck, throw that filter on, but it isn’t necessarily reality’s filter, because reality doesn’t need to be filtered. It’s already said it. It’s said it. It said, “Big Bang”.
Rick: So. Today so we have laws. We have laws of nature, right. We have gravity and we have the speed of light and we have, you know, all kinds of things that govern our physical universe. And would … as illusory as though they may be on some ultimate level, they certainly function well on relative levels. Now, would you say that – and this is just to belabor this point we’re already discussing – would you say that there’s a force of evolution that’s like a law of nature, that is some kind of driving tendency, that on some deep level motivates things in some way?
Kiran: Yes. Absolutely.
Rick: Elaborate on that.
Kiran: I would. Absolutely. What I see, when I’m reading the code, when I’m watching that, there is a movement. There is a momentum of creativity. So, at the level of energy, for instance, the electron is actually magnetically attracted to the proton, and it moves. That’s what makes it move …
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: … so there’s an elementary form, that movement. The reason it’s magnetically attracted is before it is that electron, before it’s quarks, before it’s fractals, it is Love. The very first form. So the universe itself, you, right now – are looking out your eyes talking to me, listening to me, being here together. This is One. Just One. And it is a vast, still, unbelievably silent thing, and that’s what we are, very literally, in this moment, right now to each other, with each other. Just this; but this, although we use the word “silence” or “stillness”, it’s not the right word, because it actually has movement, and that movement is love. And that love is the first form of the universe, and that form, that love has movement. And it comes into forms, which then become fractals and quarks and electrons and protons, so that magnetic movement of an electron, constantly attracted to a proton, is Love! Magnetically attracted, right; Love! And that’s what’s moving, and propelling form, and we have creativity, rocks have creativity. Animals have creativity. Because we are one, it is one. And it’s that creativity, that creates. And that’s the momentum. And what happens in our life, so much more practically, in my body, in your body, in everybody’s body: we have authentic joy; that when we are in embodied in our joy … you know our joy, it’s just something that happens. You know, I’m having this awesome time right now on this interview, it’s super fun to be with you and have this level of conversation and connection, and that “Me” embodying this is creative. It’s going to create more of these opportunities. You know, it did for you, if it birthed Buddha at the Gas Pump as an actual series, as an ongoing series. And just before we went live, you had this beautiful creative juiciness that, isn’t it so fun to have … imagine if I was doing this every morning … that’s creation. That’s momentum.
Kiran: We also have inside of us unconsciously moving pain. Trauma, trapped in the system, and partly, because it’s unconscious, it’s an incredibly powerful Creator, and it is basically filtering the way we see things. So, we’re seeing, we just see that filter, right? So if I have a pain body that’s about rejection, and I’m afraid that what I’m saying to you might be rejected, I’m just grabbing something that comes along, so every time I interface this conversation with you, I’m going to see rejection, because this is the pain. Rejection, rejection. It filters it, and then creates it. I’m going to have a lot more experiences of rejection, in the same way, when I … because I’m standing in rejection and I’m embodying it, and it creates. So that’s my two-and-a-half-minute conversation.
Rick: Alright.
Kiran: Attempt.
Rick: Let me try to …
Kiran: The movement of the force inside of the one that’s creating.
Rick: Let me try to restate what you said, to make sure I understand it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. So, what you’re saying is that there’s a fundamental force that creates the universe, really, and that’s love. And that it’s responsible for everything from the microscopic, subatomic particles going around to the macroscopic, probably you would say, has to do with the interaction of the galaxies, and is just this.
Kiran: Yeah, the magnetic attraction of planets.
Rick: Yeah … you have different forces. Sometimes it’s gravity and sometimes the weak force and the strong force and all that, but what you’re saying though is that this pure force gets filtered or thwarted by some filters that get structured into our relative apparatus. In the case, you mention the pain body and that … And so, then, when filtered, this creative force of love kind of still expresses, but it can express itself in a distorted way, because of those filters. So you’re …
Kiran: Yes.
Rick: The abuse that you suffered as a child, for instance, physical abuse and so-on …
Kiran: Distortion.
Rick: Endured one that was pure love, distorted through the filters of whoever was the abuser.
Kiran: That’s so beautifully Yes! Yes, because I mean ultimately that’s the foundation of me as a teacher and my teaching. The first form of the universe is love, and love is effortless. We know it. When you fall in love, it’s effortless. When you think of your loved one … you love to think of the people you love because it’s just that effortless quality of love. And it gets distorted and distorted and distorted. And the absolute end level of distortion is basically … we call it “pain”. We call it “pain”, because we’re actually labeling the effort, there’s so much effort. That at that point, it has been so distorted away from effortlessness, it’s so full of effort, it’s pain. It’s totally, wildly, distorted. And my entire work, as a spiritual teacher, is to show people how to take that pain and unwind it back to effortlessness.
Rick: Nice.
Kiran: That everything that we can, that we have … We have equal ability – awake or not awake to your true nature – to embody effortless peace. It’s your, it’s who you are. It’s literally, you’re not just your birthright. It’s hearing these words. It’s looking out of your eyes, identified as a person, or not – it doesn’t make a difference. It’s who you are. And it’s what you are, what you’re able to do. So my work as a teacher is to show you how to do that. To take that and make it effortless.
Rick: Isn’t it easier if you’re awake to your true nature to do it? To function, in an effortless way, because you’re kind of … if you’re not awake to your true to nature, aren’t you sort of caught up on one level over another, or you’re estranged from … ? I mean, nature itself functions according to the principle of least effort. If you throw a ball, it takes the most efficient possible path through the air, given all the forces and influences that are acting upon it.
Kiran: Yes. Yes. Which is so beautiful. I love that thing that you’re saying. ‘Cause that’s a great point, but actually, I would say in theory? Yes. Yeah. In actuality, no. I mean, we know a lot, we hear about all the time very clear, awake, teachers who just, they just, they still have their DNA – they’re still humans. Their DNA is still moving in effort, they still have sexual addictions running, power addictions running, you know – delusion. And I mean, our world, this planet and most of the people listening to this conversation have been harmed by some level of delusion, through a spiritual practice or spiritual teacher. So in practice, no. And all of us know people … and you know, for me with that, my first boyfriend – he was a totally peaceful, effortless, very, very, clear human. He had a very karmically clear pathway inside of him. He had very little suffering. I mean, my beautiful friend Adyashanti, although he experiences pain, was a very clear, karmic being before he woke up. There wasn’t much trauma, there wasn’t much pain.
Rick: So you know, even after he began to wake up or had several stages of awakening … Nature put him through a lot of difficulties and health problems and everything … because that’s the way …
Kiran: After awake! (garbled)
Rick: Yeah, yeah, you know. Because he kept trying to ride bicycles and … And nature kept, if we wanna further this with nature, kept saying, “No buddy, that’s not what you’re meant to do, so stay in bed for six months until you get the point.”
Kiran: Yeah. And that is one awake dude … Adya, my brother, is so clear – crystal, crystal, clear. And that guy got Bell’s Palsy, a few years back … it doesn’t stop pain from happening. It doesn’t stop. But how he lived with it, was effortless.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: That’s how he embodied it. So, theoretically, yeah. But in actuality, no. We have equal access to it; we just need to know how. Whether it’s unwinding severe trauma … In my offerings, I have a, I work one-on-one with people, or I do classes with people, or I work in person with people … In those different offerings, I work with people who have severe, severe trauma. Like the ritual abuse layer, or just insurmountable, if you were actually working with a mind or psyche. They couldn’t unwind that level of trauma. So I work with that, all the way down to people who have quite normal functioning, you know, normal dysfunction, just quite nice lives, but they’re moving inside of the insane culture and they just don’t … I have a class coming up through the holiday season, and it’s my first year doing it, but I think it’s going to be annual. I’m just focusing on food and I think in the future it’s going to be food, booze, sex, and drugs, or something like that (laughing) because the holidays are when it brings it all up. You know, this tough time.
Kiran: So it’s living in the insanity of our culture and not knowing how to be effortless, just in relationship with people or in … so I have this class coming up on food and how do you have an effortless relationship with food, because we, every one of us, have such a management program with food. We’re just constantly managing it, for the good, the bad, whatever. But there’s an effort. All this effort. Or dating, or financially, or whatever, with this external management – which is stealing the peace. Stealing that effortless peace of every moment. So that’s my work as a teacher; is the “how”. How to do it. From severe trauma in your system, it becomes hard to figure out how to be effortless, to know trauma in the system. That we’re living in a pretty crazy world that’s built on a lot of ridiculous assumptions, and I don’t know how to date or eat dinner or whatever effortlessly, without some level of management.
Rick: Hm. So there are a lot of levels to what you’re saying. And it actually sort of weaves back to your own story, in which you have a profound awakening. Really radical, but that wasn’t the end of it. Because then ensued years of what we might call house cleaning and complete restructuring and refabrication of your whole …
Kiran: Everything.
Rick: From the DNA on up.
Kiran: From the DNA and up, exactly.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: And in fact, even this Christmas last year … So last year, for nearly three months my whole pelvis just went offline, and it was literally to change the cell structure, the bone structure, everything just spontaneously redesigned itself. (laughing)
Rick: Yeah. Let me throw out a quick thing about effortlessness and then get back to this point. It seems to me that you can give people tools for being effortless with regard to food or this situation or that situation, but ultimately don’t we want to arrive at a state in which we’re spontaneously effortless the way nature itself functions, because we’re functioning from the level at which nature functions? And I mean, that’s where we have our stand and therefore everything that our relative personality, and body, and everything to do are so attuned to that, that we kind of display the qualities of nature itself in our relative life, and yet effortless …
Kiran: Yes.
Rick: In this being one of those qualities.
Kiran: Yes. Absolutely. And if I can jump in, because I feel like it’s where you’re headed … And yes, one of the ways to ideally and theoretically possible get there, is to awaken into your true nature. However, why don’t you start that, that direction right now? (laughs)
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: It’s not the only way to do it, there’s other ways to do it and you could start heading in that direction, right now, and just have a much more peaceful, much more easy right now.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: And if you just guide, moment to moment, like that – ultimately, you may end up awakening into your true nature. Just … it may just happen, or it would be irrelevant because you’re having this effortless, peaceful taste of yourself, in life.
Rick: Yeah. Well, two metaphors come to mind: one is if you want to make a tree more healthy, you can do things to the leaves and branches, but probably the most, you’re going to get the most bang for the buck if you are the root that’s going to help the whole tree flourish. Another is that … I’ve used these analogies many times in these interviews …
Kiran: I know, exactly. It’s the best we can do, because words don’t really fit; yeah, it’s great if we call into poetry, I love analogy, go there.
RICK: Yeah. And another would be a table or a chair has four legs. And you can get the whole table to move by pulling any one of the legs, and the other legs and the whole table are going to come along. So there are a number of different kinds of ways that you can approach this thing, and whichever angle you take, it’s going to kind of move the whole thing. Although perhaps to stretch the analogy a bit, there might, you might do more with less effort by pulling a particular leg. In other words, you can muck around on the surface levels for the rest of your life and never affect a really fundamental change, but if you can somehow get to a more root level, more radical level, then all the other things can come along as a consequence of that.
Kiran: Yeah. It’s a beautiful analogy. Sometimes I like to wander in and just be a little more precise, because distortion and delusion are so easy, in this field. So yeah, I would totally agree, it’s a beautiful analogy, the source, the quickest access to source in any moment, for you, is internally. Just move inside. You know … it isn’t enlightenment that’s the source or, you know, some deep owie, deep traumatic piece in your system … you don’t have to journey far to the source.
Rick: Right.
Kiran: The source is just what’s arising internally, in this moment, for you. And the effortless approach is a very warm welcome of whatever is arising.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: It’s that simple. It’s that, right now.
Rick: And that is not to say …
Kiran: But that’s hard to get to, it’s very hard for people to get to. They would rather get on a treadmill that says, “One day, enlightenment”, than to in this moment, right now, warmly welcome themselves, what’s arising. Sometimes that’s Herculean.
Rick: Yeah. And would you agree that, in doing that, you’re not, that doesn’t imply that you’re going to kind of click into the level of clarity that you clicked into, in your big Aha moment, or that someone like Adya lives as a kind of a matter of course throughout his life. But at least there’s some, you’re moving in the right direction, there’s some taste of that. And the reason I want to say that is that if you give people the expectation that just accepting the moment, turning within in the moment is the full enchilada, it’s going to create doubts in their minds. Because they’re going to feel like, “Well, I know there’s more than this. This is good. It’s good that I’m doing this, but I know there’s more.”
Kiran: Well, this is why they buy the book; the book is awesome: Tools for Sanity. It’s on Amazon, just type in “Tools for Sanity”. It’s a short book, like you said. It’s simple, and there are four steps, and that’s just one of them.
Rick: Okay.
Kiran: But there are four steps to take. And, to not belittle feeling good; feeling good in this moment allows for creativity of more feeling good.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: And that more, like that moment where you’re saying, “I am stopping here, and this actually feels good.” Let’s let it linger, in that, the value of that. You know, if everybody on the planet had just one moment, right now, of just feeling welcome, this internal warm welcome, just as you are, with nothing needing to change at all, it becomes this one spot on the planet where peace lives in this moment.
Rick: Mhm.
Kiran: .And if we were all doing that, that’s a lot of peace.
Rick: Reminds me of Bob Marley, remember that? You know, “One world …” (sings)
Kiran: “One love …”
(Singing together) “Let’s get together and feel all right.”
Kiran: That’s a powerful song. We like that song. ‘Cause there’s power in that, without slipping into a kind of cheesy, new agey oversimplification, but to actually resonate in … The only place any of us are really broken is not knowing how incredibly loved and welcomed we are, in every movement of us, every movement. When we can just touch into that ourselves …
Rick: So you’re saying that a state of greater well-being exists within us and is accessible, to some degree, at any moment, and that the more we access it, the more perhaps we are able to access it. And that it is a kind of a positive feedback loop, and … it’s like a barometer or an indicator that we’re moving in the right direction when we tap into it, to some degree. And we can acquire the kind of automatic ability to tap in. The more we tap into it, the better we get at tapping into it.
Kiran: Yes. And what we’re talking about – tapping in – isn’t, because this is a delusion or a distortion that can happen a lot … activating a feeling state in myself where I just feel good. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Rick: No.
Kiran: That’s an external efforting to manage. What I’m talking about is …
Rick: Drugs might do that temporarily.
Kiran: Drugs. Exactly. Drugs can do that. A thousand affirmations a day can do that … Just some external processing where you’re going to walk into the room, and even if something’s crappy, you’re going to find the silver lining anyway. You know, you’re going to look for the good in every situation – there must be a reason for something. There must be a reason: what is it? All of that mechanism, all of that, that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is cultivating a state of profound love and welcome and compassion, for all of you that arises in a moment. So, this very warm, compassionate embrace – because that’s the piece that’s missing, not a “constant state of joy”, what’s actually missing is that deep loving and welcome – because that’s our true, that’s your true nature. What the heck is true nature if it’s not that? You have it in this moment. Don’t think. Don’t take the trip I did – it’s too long, it’s too hard. It’s too awful. (laughing)
Rick: You still haven’t talked about your trip as much as we’re going to. (both laughing)
Kiran: We have two hours. (laughing)
Rick: I know. (laughing)
Kiran: We’ve just begun.
Rick: And there are a number of threads in this conversation I want to come back and build up on more, but since you mentioned this: how do you do what you just said?
Kiran: Yeah. How do you do that well?
Rick: How do you do that? Well, how to cultivate it?
Kiran: Yeah.
Rick: Especially in a busy life, as you mentioned earlier, you know, we’re not the Buddha sitting under a tree. We’ve got kids to pick up. We got soccer practice. And da da da.
Kiran: Yeah. And if you’re, if it’s me, as a teacher, that’s where I want you to be. That’s actually the only place you’re going to get it, you know, in reality, in an effortless way, in the paying of the mortgage, or in the picking up the kids, or the making the dinner. Or the (garbled) … that’s where the joy of creativity is, that’s God, that’s Oneness.
Rick: Yeah, but for a lot of people that’s … they feel beleaguered, they feel exhausted. You know, there’s just too much coming out of …
Kiran: Exactly. So, again, the book is going to unwind that very, very specifically and practically, I think. That was my intention, anyway, of that book. So, step one – which is the first tool for sanity, which is awareness, which is very effortless. There’s no part of you that could turn off awareness; you’re always aware. Even in deep sleep. If somebody crawled into bed beside you, you would be aware. You may not remember it in the morning, but you would be aware. So it’s always about you. It’s totally effortless. It’s actually one of the most, the most effortless quality about you is awareness. And it’s using that awareness to be aware of what is moving internally, in you. So there you are, overwhelmed by whatever. Dinner’s on, the kids are in, the dog is barking at you, and your partner is demanding some kind of something, and you haven’t even landed from your day. Can you be aware of your internal movement, of what’s happening? Frustration, fatigue, exhaustion, wanting to please, wanting to love, wanting to connect. And we don’t. We very habitually block being aware of our internal space and instead, project out. And that is the beginning of exhaustion. Right there. So, the internal greeting of yourself, in that moment … again, it’s just one …. So when we’re greeting ourselves – that dog, that child, that partner, that would (garbled) is being greeted. And again: I recognize I have a privilege of seeing way down here at the core, you know, at the code level, that we’re all one, we’re all greeted. When we’re greeted … And the power’s internally, not externally. But I realize that might be a bit of a leap. So that’s where I think, read this chapter, it breaks it down a lot more. But essentially, that’s the first step, cultivating a willingness to receive ourselves without story, without judgment. Because that’s where the block is: “I’m not allowed to feel angry”, “I have no time to feel overwhelmed”, “I shouldn’t feel exhausted”, “I don’t know what to do about my exhaustion, so I’m not going to feel it”. We’ve got this storytelling, you know, like, “I’m not a very good spiritual person or advanced spiritual practitioner if I want my kid to shut up. I’m not going to feel that, even if that’s there.”
Rick: And the word cultivating implies that it takes time to cultivate. It’s not like … you don’t learn to play a violin like an expert in one day. It takes time to rewire the neurons. But you start making sounds the first time you try it.
Kiran: Yeah. Well, exactly, you start making. The time isn’t huge because it’s self-authenticating, because it feels so much better. So it’s an act of courage, the first time. Even the second or third. But then you can’t give it up. It actually takes more, it takes effort for it to block, it’s actually more effortless to be aware. There’s actually something externally efforting to block this awareness, and so when you’re, for the first few acts of courage to actually undo those blocks and acknowledge it, it’s more effortless, so it’s very quickly self-authenticating because it becomes actually a little bit hard to pick the blocks back up again. So if …
Rick: So if someone’s doing this, would they tend to drop chemical methods of blocking, such as … alcohol or whatever? Would that feel, would that thwart or hamper one’s ability to culture the kind of awareness you’re talking about? And therefore they become distasteful?
Kiran: Let me think about that. Lots … are doing … chemical (garbled) … , whether it’s prescription medication or a cigarette or … all the addictions we have. People are addicted to sex … go in for touch, or attention. Sexual attention. So we move into these addictive patterns for many, many reasons. And those, and it’s usually pain in the system that’s doing that. So when we unblock and begin to be aware of the pain, sometimes the compulsion to do it is even stronger …
Rick: Because the pain is so, because the pain is more acute.
Kiran: Pain is more available. The pain is more available. And part of the block.
Rick: But if you get into that compulsion, aren’t you going to kind of defeat your purpose and … ? In really becoming more aware?
Kiran: I don’t think so, at all. The mind would definitely think so, but I disagree, because I believe this is how we begin to unwind that compulsion. It’s how we begin to heal it. It’s an essential … You can’t have healing without awareness; it doesn’t exist. So it’s an essential step on ending these patterns. But it’s an essential step in also coming home to your true nature, your true ability. Whether it’s an awakening to it, or not, it’s essential. So it’s not a, it’s not optional. (laughs). It’s essential.
Rick: Well, the awareness thing is essential, I was saying that, but I was just saying, I mean, it’s a different question. It was whether this kind of new orientation to life that you’re espousing might cause artificial means of altering consciousness or blotting out pain to become distasteful and that … they would drop off.
Kiran: Yeah, and I don’t think step one will, but step two definitely will.
Rick: Which is acceptance.
Kiran: Step two is acceptance. And for me, what I mean by that word … again, a very big word. It’s really hard to know what that word means. What I mean is a very warm welcome, and by warm I mean the beloved guest at the door. Like your loved one shows up at the door, and that joy, the welcome, the warmness. That’s acceptance. That greeting that arises with the warm welcome. It doesn’t take effort. When I talk about greeting a beloved at the door it sort of feels like you have to stop what you’re doing and go to the door, and, you know, it feels like effort. It’s a simpler movement than that, but I’m just trying to give the visceral sense of it.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: But it’s just this compassionate response, just a warm willingness. So, you’re walking in the door, the spouse is screaming at you, the kids are screaming at you, dogs are screaming at you. You know, there’s mail everywhere, you’re still thinking about the conversation you had with boss on your way out … it’s all … “Ahhhhh” (gestures). In that moment, there’s this awareness that I’m all “Ahhhhhhh”, you know. “I’m overwhelmed and stressed; I want to please”. And there’s this warm welcome to it. Primarily, compassion. Yes.
Rick: I think a lot of people, right now, are thinking: “Easier said than done”.
Kiran: Yeah. It’s actually the most simplest thing in the world to do and every impulse in our body wants to do the opposite.
Rick: Right.
Kiran: We are conditioned to insanity. We are conditioned to effort. We are conditioned to pain. Yet, we don’t have to … Every one of us … look around the world … yeah. However, it is self-authenticating. So it’s an act of courage the first few times. But it’s actually more effortless because what your actual nature is, awake or not, is love. We are very loving. Almost every action every one of us does on the planet is traced to love. I mean, it literally is love, but we move, the reason that we have the spouse, the kids, the dogs, is love!
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: The reason that we came home was love. The reason we went to work, was love. To pay the bills, to support these … to love. Love! We, the only thing we’re doing here is loving – dancing in love. That’s what we’re doing. And so …
Rick: If we refer back to what we’re talking about earlier, taking it to extremes, even the suicide bomber or the rapist or something, it’s just a very severe, severely filtered, distorted expression of love.
Kiran: Exactly. Exactly, it’s entirely filtered and incredibly distorted. It’s a movement of love. So for us to greet what’s rising inside of us in this moment with love is quite effortless. It actually takes more effort to push it away, to judge it, to condemn it. To repulse it. That’s effort. It is self-authenticating. So the first few times, yeah, it’s an act of courage. And maybe it happens in quieter, spacious times the first few times, not when it’s all coming down on you, but in spacious … and maybe it’s with simpler emotions, like just trying to find your way to be really accepting in a frustration, or overwhelm, and just meet it in love. And work your way towards jealousy, rage, hatred. You know, to warmly welcome, in your heart, which is effortless. To just love. Like my … If you subscribe to my website, I give you a teaching every month. And I have to write them ahead of time because I’m terrible at grammar and I have to give them to somebody to edit. So, I just finished writing next month’s, which is December, which is the glory and beauty of rage. Like, how incredibly awesome and beautiful rage is; an essential. You know, these helpful tips.
Kiran: I’m a huge fan of rage. Huge fan of anger; it’s extraordinarily beautiful. And to greet it in ourselves, and to welcome it, and to allow it … maybe it takes a little while. But the first, or second, or third time we do it, is only, that’s the only time it’s an act of courage – because then it’s just too much effort to condemn it. It’s too much effort to judge it. You know, just like you said: the trajectory of that tennis ball … all things in nature move towards effortless. It’s more dominant, because it’s the. default of everything, you know, it’s home. It’s home ground. Everything moves home. So when you’re embodying that movement of effortless you can’t, it’s too hard to pick it back up, the effort up again. So, that’s up too.
Kiran: Yes, I absolutely think, if you are giving your own frustration or overwhelm a beautiful internal hug, you are not going to need to reach for the glass of wine, the cigarette, sexual attention from somebody in the room, whatever your compulsion, however it moves. Chocolate, a piece of cake, whatever it is. It’s going to have less of it. Yes. But, I would warmly welcome most compulsions, also. (laughs). When they move, it’s going to, ironically, ease it.
Rick: Okay.
Kiran: But then the third step is really, really, really important, which is healing, which is what I call “alchemy”. Which is that all things return home. So, like you’re talking about the trajectory of the tennis ball, or like … I think it’s really easy for people to … I use this analogy, because it’s easy to access … that all the creeks and all the rivers on our planet move to the sea. They flow to the dominant current. Love is the dominant current of all things. Everything’s flowing in that direction. But in order for a creek to actually be pulled into the river’s current, it has to touch it. So if we’re sitting on the river bank and we’re watching the creek flow and beside it is the river, we have to get off the river bank and move the rocks and twigs so that the creek touches the river. And as soon as it does, Whoosh, the creek will push into the bigger stream. So in the sense that pain is effort, pure effort, as soon as we touch it – in the same way the creek touches the river – we touch that pain with tenderness, with effortlessness, with love, it flows in that direction. That’s where it goes. So when we meet … This is what I call alchemy. This is a process, and this is primarily …. when I’m working one-on-one, I’m primarily doing healing work, and teaching people how they can heal themselves. It’s not me doing it to them, it’s me showing them how they do it to them. They do to themselves. Because in my class work, we just look at sanity patterns, we move towards effortless patterns, in the world …. it’s kind of this set up. But anyways, when I work one-on-one with people, that is primarily what I am doing. I’m showing people how to touch pain with love, with effortless, and how it unwinds. Because I’m up at that form level, I’m right at the code … I’m right at the energetic level of how I’m seeing everything. For me, it was a huge part of my process; when my mind blew a fuse and I popped open, this began to spontaneously happen. All this love, that was now unfiltered and moving, was hitting the extraordinary amount of pain, I mean off the Richter scale level of pain. So in reality, there’s almost nobody on the planet that has the depth, the dark Karma, that I had … I was the heaviest as it can come, you know …
Kiran: So it was hitting this pain. And because also, the filter of time was out, so the DNA … our DNA is old, very, very, old. It’s as old as humanity, it’s the same forms, it’s the same information growing itself. So it’s hitting lifetimes of it, you know, all at once. This love, and what it is doing, it’s touching it, it’s hitting lifetimes of it. All at once. This love. And what it’s doing is, it’s touching it, and as soon as it touches, the pain is unwinding …
Rick: Mhm.
Kiran: … and filtering. And that process … I mean, it’s all out of time, but we filter everything with time. So, yeah that took, it took years. Years and years to unwind these patterns, and even as early as last Christmas, there’s whole new levels of rebuilding in my system that spontaneously happen. But, I’m channeling such an immense amount of energy often, and I’m working with so much pain, just not even here anymore, but just in the Oneness. That isn’t everybody’s experience.
Rick: I want to delve back into your experience a lot more, before we’re finished, after we finish going through these four points. But you just said something, “Not very many people on the planet are dealing with the same level of pain that I dealt with”. Did you mean people who have awakened? Because, I mean, you didn’t get kidnapped from your parents and put into a brothel at the age of twelve, or anything of that nature.
Kiran: I did. I did at that nature. And actually, even darker than that.
Rick: Really? Wow.
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don’t like to go into that story, because the mind likes to pick it up and start to … and it loses my teaching … But, no, no. Both the events of my life and the levels of trauma, in this lifetime and others, yeah, are on that Richter scale.
Rick: Okay.
Kiran: And I also never go into it, because most human psyches can’t handle the details. So, it’s not worth talking about.
Rick: It would overshadow the message that you really want to convey.
Kiran: It deeply overshadows the message. But it is important enough to say that I had a gruesome walk, before awakening and after awakening, and it has brought me to a place as a teacher to be able to help. (laughs)
Rick: Two interesting points in there. When the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail … but this thing about it helping you as a teacher. Very important point, I mean, if we live this rosy, nicey-nicey existence and woke up, how can we relate to everybody in the world, you know, who is really going through it? So you went through it.
Kiran: It’s a different teaching, because we do, we have some beautiful teachers on the planet that have … we even have one that I know of who has no access to pain, period. Like, suffering. Never. Never been in this lifetime. Not a broken bone, not a broken heart, nothing. And that is … Adya knows pain … Adya knows pain, obviously he knows pain, but he’s a very light karmic being. And these are magnificent teachers.
Rick: Yeah. Are you talking about Bentinho, in the first one?
Kiran: Yeah, yeah. I love it, because Ben’s as light as it gets, on the planet. and I’m as dark as it gets on the planet.
Rick: He’s asking for broken bones, man. With his rock climbing. But I’ve been teasing him about that.
Kiran: (laughing) But he’s a gorgeous teacher, amazing, beautiful teacher. And this is me. I mean, it’s not particularly fair for me to put words on his work.
Rick: Sure.
Kiran: That’s for him to do. But my interpretation, to be very clear, is that he is a magnificent teacher of limitless possibility, which is a really essential part of our nature, awake or not. We have access to this. Both you and I talked earlier about this creativity, you know, and that is what is so awesome about him and he’s … the world’s foremost because he is literally living it, there’s no block to that creativity. There’s no pain interfacing or creating something different, right? So, it’s just joy-body creating. So I think they’re very important teachers. It’s really essential on our planet, and they have specific different teachings.
Rick: Yeah. All right, so the teaching point from that exchange we just had is that there are all sorts of teachers on the planet, and they’ve all been through different things, and that is all well and wisely put, because they’re each going to resonate with a certain kind of person or a certain group of people who can best benefit from their particular experience and the way they convey it.
Kiran: And when we come together we’ve got all the points on the rainbow.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Kiran: You know, when Adya and I talk together, or Ben and I talk together … a lot of people really love when Ben and I talk together because it’s so whole … All of us teachers are so unique, and we have these different flavors and they’re beautiful in the rainbow and definitely my piece is the healing work. I’m here to bring the love and the healing and the clarity, for sure.
Rick: Okay. Let’s get on to alignment.
Kiran: Yes. Okay. So that’s a healing thing, that alchemy, and all of our systems need it. And then fourth, an essential in it is what I call alignment, which I more specifically refer to as “standing in the yes”. So that’s that place where you and I are talking about that creativity earlier, where … You know, this is so fun. We’re having this awesome … you know, for me it’s Saturday morning, for you, it’s in the afternoon … but this awesome connection, and it’s super fun, and it’s really joyous, and this is the most delicious place I could be right now. There’s just nowhere else I would rather be, and no one else I’d rather be talking to, and this is so fabulous. This is my “Yes!” And I stand in it and I embody it, and that is my authenticity, right? That’s basically me living in my authenticity. And I talk about alignment as guiding moment to moment, by standing in that … I call it a “Delicious Yes” because I’m trying to articulate the visceral sensation. It’s not a mental placement. It’s an internal deliciousness, so at any moment … You know, you walk in the door, the spouse is yelling, the kids are barking, you know … the dogs are barking. the kids are yelling. What is …
Rick: The kids are barking; the dogs are yelling. (laughing)
Kiran: Yes! The dogs are yelling, the kids are barking. (laughing) (garbled). That’s totally true, my dogs totally talk to me. The kid often yells … my nephew, who shares the place with … I don’t have my own children … but yeah. So, all that’s moving. And what is it that you would love to be doing, right now? The most delicious, awesome thing for you to do right now? And then go do it. And all of that is simple but it’s hard to do. Because you’ve got to actually be aware enough to know what that is. Then you’ve got to go find the words to tell people that’s what you’re doing. And maybe that’s lay on the couch with the kids on you. Or maybe that’s walk into a different room and close the door for a second and meditate. Or maybe that’s go upstairs and lay down in your bed. Or maybe that’s walk out, and you get back in the car and drive down the coast … whatever it is.
Rick: Or maybe that’s walk out of your office cubicle and go take a hike in the woods, but then you get fired and then you have a problem. So, it’s …
Kiran: But here’s the key. Here is the “then you get fired and have a problem” that actually isn’t true. Because that becomes the moment too. When we stand in our authentic “yes” in every moment, there’s only one of us here. There’s only one of us here on this planet. We don’t actually have, in real authentic movements … we’re not conflicting. We’re not, they’re not conflicting movements. There’s actually every moment … because … I’m able to talk about this because I’m looking at it, all the time. Every moment is right, for every single person to be standing in that perfect yummy place. Every moment is created for that, because that place of the most delicious yes, on this visceral level, is actually where there’s no self, no separate self. Because all of the “shoulds” and the “tryings” and what I’m supposed to do, what they’re supposed to do, and my role – that’s all the separate self. That’s all courtesy of separate self. So the movement of just in this moment, I would love this: that’s God, that’s your Oneness. That’s the vast reality that you are, whispering where to put your foot next. And when you actually put your foot there, and when you actually do it … And I’m talking moment to moment, not generally; “I would generally rather be in Jamaica with a piña colada than working my job”. I’m talking moment to moment. Just, it’s only as big as this moment. When you actually stand there … you’re in the Tao. You’re in the waterway. You’re in the right harmony. And that vast intelligence that’s flowing through, this whispering, “Go there” is actually the Oneness that is. The mind can’t conceive of it, because the mind has the filter, but it’s actually filtering Oneness. So it’s the perfect place for your boss, it’s the perfect place. It’s taking in all of those considerations. It’s deeply in love with your boss. It’s deeply in love with you. It’s deeply integral. It’s filtering this, all this information that your mind couldn’t possibly filter. So, the experience of … well, let’s just say in the spouse and the kids, moving or something. When you walk in the door your spouse is yelling at you, “Did you get the milk? Go and get the milk. There’s no milk for breakfast in the morning”, that’s your job, you know. And in your head, you calculate, you’re like, “Oh my god, I forgot the milk, that’s what I have to go do.” But the true, visceral sensation in your body is to just go lay down. You have to find the words to say that, which I recognize as courageous. And the language itself is conditioned. We have to relearn how to speak, in many ways, to figure out how, because language is manipulative, and it’s very conditioned. So to find those words and then to actually go and lay down, is the right movement for everybody. And inside of the spouse, there’s going to be this actual awareness … truth always liberates. No matter what it is. It always liberates. Delusion always hurts. It’s always effort, it doesn’t matter what it is.
Rick: So it’s a very hypothetical situation, but maybe you say something like, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I did forget the milk. I’m really exhausted right now; if I go out now, probably have a car accident. Let me just go lie down for half an hour, and then I’ll run right out and get the milk”. You know, some little thing, like that.
Kiran: Go for it. Exactly, give it a try. For me, I would say something like, “Oh, it’s true, you did ask me to go for milk, and what I’m going to go do is lay down, because that’s what I need to do. You know? (laughing)
Rick: Yeah and then I’ll get the milk.
Kiran: Or I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. I really, I’m not going to get the milk, until it’s a deep “yes”.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: Because I already know that life is going to provide me what is needed for the morning. I just don’t know how, and I don’t know if it’s milk.
Rick: A cow may show up on your doorstep, you never know.
Kiran: Well, we have this mental story, right? But we just guide moment-to-moment, and then it turns out that we end up having this awesome meal. The partner is super glad because the kids just had a little nap with you, the kids’ nervous systems settled down and connected, which is all they needed, and the spouse, your wife or my husband, whoever the spouse is, is able to actually just have a moment of nothing, and able to make dinner, and we maybe have a great meal. And then maybe a neighbor calls and says, “I’m comin’ by for tea. Do you need anything?” (garbled) … she says, “I’m at the store. What do you need?” Or we go for a great walk, the whole family goes for a walk afterwards, and we forget there’s a little corner store. we always forget that corner store. We get milk or … I don’t know. I don’t know how it gets provided, but I promise you: it gets provided.
Rick: Would you agree that it might be easier for you to function this way and to go through these four steps if those with whom you’re close are also doing it? Or doesn’t that really matter?
Kiran: It doesn’t. It doesn’t actually matter, because truth always liberates. Period. Delusion always hurts. Period. So, it doesn’t always matter. Because just one person standing in truth is a relief … It’s more work for the person standing in truth when the others aren’t, because they’re still … I use the example in the book … that thing of a bike ride … It’s such a “yes” to orchestrate this big bike ride and everybody comes from all over town, and everybody’s got their bikes on Saturday morning. And it is suddenly a deep yes for you to not bike, at all, with these people. And you find, you gotta find the words. And when you find those words, you … ‘cause there’s a, again, there’s a self-authenticating mechanism, first few times – it’s an act of courage, but then you start to notice, just like in our hypothetical situation: everybody just got served so much better.
Rick: I can see this being abused too, though. Where people start indulging in their whims and they just start, whatever little impulse comes up, they do it. And it ends up just, you know, that’s really not a true alignment with truth, it’s more like just a childishness. Where they’re, you know, just, “I want to do this. I’m going to do this now.”
Kiran: It’ll show up. It’ll show up really quickly, because delusion hurts, and truth liberates. And yeah, I mean. I had a … There’s a great blog entry on my website from last month, called Living for the Now or Living in the Present Moment”, because they’re very different. And living in the now or indulging those ones that are, actually, a true, visceral yes, they tend to be actually an avoidance of pain. There’s some level of control and avoidance, is what living in the now is. It’s still pain or delusion at the wheel, and it comes back to get you in the butt.
Rick: Do you feel we’ve done justice to those four points you have in your book? At least in the context of this interview? Obviously there’s a lot more detail, but have we covered them adequately for now?
Kiran: I feel like that’s great. Yeah, because ultimately you gotta read the book to get in there.
Rick: Yeah. And even the book is just a taste. I mean, there’s obviously … you go into it in much more detail than the book even affords.
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so too, exactly. So hopefully … did you find the book was clear? Like you were able to …
Rick: Yeah! I was a little tired, I was on an airplane, but it seemed clear and it really impressed me. I mean, when I got off the airplane the next day, I called you, I said, “Wow! That was a great book. Let’s try to connect.”
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah, I was grateful for that. Thank you.
Rick: So, did these four steps kind of … did you go through these yourself and that’s how you discovered them, when you … after your awakening? This is how you learned to adjust to the whole thing?
Kiran: You know, it wasn’t that specific for my process. These tools came along when I was working with others, so it became the interface of others, of trying to point out that path of effortlessness …
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: … that path of pure peace, that’s available in this moment. And I kept referring to these same positions.
Rick: Okay. good. Now let’s go back to your story, a little bit more. Because I think it’s really fascinating, and I don’t think … we still haven’t done justice to it in this conversation. So you’ve alluded to various stages of it, and how difficult it was, in this and that, but let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Earlier in the interview, you talked about how you had this profound awakening and you saw everything as light, or as energy … as oneness … And it took you a couple years, I think you said, to even put this in a spiritual context. Kinda similar to Eckhart’s thing, where he had this awakening and didn’t know what the heck it was, and then eventually began to put the pieces together.
Kiran: Yeah. Again, you know, what we were just talking … with alignment … In a way, Oneness is totally, deeply taking care of us in every moment … Every one of us can look at our lives and see these miraculous moments, where things just aligned so beautifully. So definitely, when I woke up, there was no alignment. My friend Christopher was … I was living with a roommate at the time, and my roommate had a crush on a boy, who I thought was just one of those flaky, spiritual boys. I like cowboys. (laughing)
Kiran: These days I date Zen Cowboys. (both laughing)
Kiran: So I thought he was just one of her flaky, spiritual boys that she likes. And in reality, Christopher had an amazing, amazing, awakening five years earlier – at the Richter scale of mine, with nearly … not as dark as my karma, not at all, but in that category, in the world. He had a lot of pain and had this same Richter scale of awakening, very spontaneously. And also, he was a quite a well-known actor in Hollywood. So he was same career, same profession, you know; we were so similar. And so I popped open putting on my shoes, and I actually went out, and it was so fun … But it’s the best story ever: I went out to meet this friend and ended up going to this part of town that would be like Rodeo Drive. And before I woke up, I would never have gone to that area. As a person, I didn’t feel that beautiful or that radiant, and I was so self-conscious, and I dressed slovenly, a little bit, so I would have been very self-conscious to go onto this high fashion street, but I was, it was all me! (laughing) Everything was me! And it …I still love the story, because it’s the absolute opposite of all spiritual stories of no possessions and living on a mountain top. I’m in the heart of a big old city and I’m popped open. And it’s all myself, and there’s no me, and I can’t even see form, it’s just energy, and it’s so beautiful.
Rick: So, it wasn’t freaking you out. It was like you’re feeling whatever this is, it’s really cool and I’m enjoying it.
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like an acid trip, I think, a little. Although Eckhart clarified and said, “An acid trip doesn’t even come close.” It’s very small to what it actually is. It’s like this massive trip I’m on and it’s all gorgeous. Yeah, it wasn’t an issue at this point. It was weird, I mean that there wasn’t enough me there to even try to track anything, it was just this amazingness. So I’m walking down the …
Rick: But you’re still able to drive a car and figure out how to get to Rodeo Drive, or whatever?
Kiran: Sort of. I mean, pretty … yeah, it was kind of the next day that all started to fall apart. But then, I was a little bit, I think … I can’t remember how I got there, all of that’s kind of a blur. You know, just the mystery moved it. At that time I didn’t have a car, so I was just riding my bike around the city anyway. I lived in this great apartment with my roommate … and wore my Converses, so I must have been riding my bike down there. So, I rode my bike down there. It was a (garbled) and she was a yoga teacher … she is a yoga teacher, my friend. First I met a date for dinner. I have no idea what happened after that, but what I did remember afterwards is walking with my friend and being on the street of super high fashion, and being like, “Buy it! Buy everything!” I’m going, “I’m gonna buy it all! Those boots, that belt, that hat, that make up … like, yes! Those fragrances! Like, all of it! Yes!” You know. Just this beauty and it’s mine and, “Of course, buy it!” and, “Of course, wear it!” … And this sense of, “Dress yourself in all this beauty” and, “You know, we’re so beautiful, we’re just pure light, gold light … it should have a gold belt buckle. And it should have those Manolo Blahnik’s, or whatever, they should have those shoes, you know, and they should have, like yesssssss!” And so it had this … that particular night was so hysterically opposite of what the “spiritual journey” should be like, it was like, “Yeah, baby! Bring it! Bring it”. There are irrelevant price tags, irrelevant. It’s just beautiful.
Rick: Did you actually buy a lot of stuff?
Kiran: I didn’t, actually. I don’t think I bought anything that night. I think she, I think the woman I was with, for that stage of the evening, was like (laughing), “What is … Who is …? What is going on here? What is happening?” The next day … I don’t think I slept that night. I think it was just this all-night trip or something, and in the next day I was unable to actually move or access the body … And that’s when the fear started to come in, because it was like, “I know I have a body. And I know the body needs things like food and water. And it needs hygiene things. And I don’t … I can’t access it. I don’t know how to. I don’t know what hunger is. I don’t know what thirst is. I don’t know how to read all this stuff.”
Rick: So were you just lying in bed, unable to move?
Kiran: At that point, I think I was sitting in bed just crying, crying, crying, because I couldn’t … I didn’t … I was like, “What is this?” It’s the beginning of a little bit of a, kind of a trying to track … like, “What, what is this? What’s happened?” I was pretty sure I died. It was pretty clear, “I’m dead”. I’m dead … but I don’t know.
Rick: But you can still see your hands move and stuff.
Kiran: (garbled)
Rick: So you didn’t mean literally dead. You mean the “I” died.
Kiran: No, I actually mean it, literally. Because the “I” that we have is actually only literally here. So your life, as you know it … when you die – whether it’s when you drop the body or whether you are enlightened, that’s your real death. That’s the only death you’re going to have. You’re not going to die again when you drop the body. You have one death. That death goes from: I’m a human being on a planet called Earth. And I have a history and I have a personality and I have people I love, and this is a life. And then it gets taken away, and you die. That’s it. Now for most people, almost everybody on our planet, it happens when we drop the body. That it goes. It all goes. I didn’t drop the body, but it all went. It was gone. I mean, it was death. It was my death. So I knew I had died. And it was a lot of bliss, and I didn’t know what it was. I was trying to orient. And then what ended up happening is, maybe that day, my roommate called it: I had “Eckhart Tolle’d”. She was like, “You’ve Eckhart Tolle’d!”
Rick: Turned it into a verb, yeah.
Kiran: She turned it into a verb. And she and I had watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart … back then Colbert was on the show.
Rick: “CO-BARE” (Colbert)
Kiran: Colbert. Yeah, I never watch these shows anymore … but he was in that show as a reporter, and he had done a skit on “Rapturing” and “rapture insurance”. And we loved it. We thought it was hysterically funny. And it was this whole skit on, you know: If you would rapture, could you buy insurance? Like, you know, an e-mail would pop up and let everyone know that you’ve raptured. (laughing)
Kiran: And your accounts could be cleared out and things … So, “Can you purchase rapture insurance?” That was the word I used for what had happened. I was like, “I’ve raptured” (laughing). Anyways. However, it came apart; the next few days, everything just came apart. It was really, it was a real mess. But eventually I found my way to a coffee shop. Maybe it was two days or three days later, I don’t know time. It was so out of time.
Rick: Did you have a job you were supposed to be going to?
Kiran: I had a great job. I had a great job. It was not a kind of a nine-to-five thing. It was a kind of a contract … these are your tasks …
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: … You know, tasks. Get these tasks done. So I had this kind of flexibility then, in it. So I didn’t … and it was close to where I lived. It was easy biking and walking distance to my office. So I did somewhere in there show up at the office a few times and just basically stare out the window at this gorgeous tree and have this total oneness and this affair with the tree outside my office. And then (laughing) it would be like, that’s ridiculous. And it was one of those days that I wandered across to the coffee shop, and there was my roommate and this boy that she had a crush on.
Rick: Christopher.
Kiran: . Christopher … and he was awake, and I just walked in, and rapture knows rapture, you know. And he knew my … you know, it was like, “Oh!”, and I was … (gesturing). (both laughing)
Kiran: But I knew him. I knew him, because I was at a time … I knew him as my husband, in many other life times.
Rick: Oh.
Kiran: I mean just in the same way if I asked you right now, Rick, if you remember your kindergarten teacher? Or if you remember the house you lived in when you went to kindergarten? You have to remember it. Right. So that’s how it is outside of the mind’s time … I can easily access that memory. And it’s not, “Did I or didn’t I?” It’s, “Did you have that kindergarten teacher? Are you sure you had that kindergarten teacher?” (Rick laughing) “How would you know? Prove it.” You don’t have to. It’s totally self-authenticating, and so, with Christopher, it was like that: watching, “There’s my husband …” and it was like “Awesome! … Here’s my husband. Great!”
Rick: Go buy milk.
Kiran: Yeah, yeah, exactly. (laughing) He didn’t … he’s not my husband in this life, he’s a good friend, who was awake, and so he was able to orient me in a way that I couldn’t underestimate his support and his nourishment and his clarity. It was so clear, to me, he’s actually like Adya’s twin brother, or something. They even have the same voice. So in a way, I had my own private Adya. Kinda carry me to …
Rick: You said he’s a well-known actor in Hollywood; is his name really Christopher?
Kiran: He was. It’s now Christopher Aslan. Yeah … I don’t know what it was before. Yeah, he wasn’t an A-list so he’s not, you had to be an actor to know him. But all the actors knew him, because he played the brother or the sister or the accountant, or the whatever of the main person.
Rick: I didn’t think it was Christopher Walken or anything.
(both laughing)
Kiran: No, no, no. Not Christopher … you wouldn’t know. He’s not an A-lister. So the average person wouldn’t know his name. In acting world … he’s a million-dollar movie actor, with thousands of hours on set and all the best directors and blah, blah, blah.
Rick: Cool.
Kiran: But he woke up and it all fell apart. And that’s just not what he was doing at all, because that’s what happens, it all fell apart. He was married. It all fell, it all crumbled. Which is part of that, “It’s a big can of whoop-ass, do you really want it?”, ‘cause nothing, nothing remains, everything falls apart … So he was, I had his support for the first little while and he was the first one to say to me, “It’s called …” He used very beautiful words. I don’t remember what it was now, but I wrote journals in those times, which are so incredibly beautiful, and we’ll publish one day because they’re extraordinary. But I read them often myself (laughing) because they’re so beautiful. In there I talk, “Christopher said this tonight” or “Christopher said that tonight”. He’d never use words like “awakening” or “awakening into your true nature”; nothing like that. He used much more actual real words like, “This is reality”. You know, “Actually you’re real now”. “You don’t live anymore. You are dead”. Kind of things like that. So he helped orient it. And he himself was also very, he didn’t have any spiritual indoctrination, either – so he didn’t have a lot of a vocabulary or verbiage or words either. So we just moved moment to moment.
Kiran: But I thought I was a … I didn’t know if I was … Because I had this thing where I was receiving all this information … in a mile radius, I’m picking up … because I’m just One, I am picking up cancers and food allergies and I’m literally hearing the whole conversations in people’s heads … I’m like, “Women are crazy. Women are so neurotic and men so repressed, are so dead”. Because I would walk by a field of just insanity barking through these women and nothing, like nobody’s home in the men, and I was like, “Wow, this is patriarchy. This is the gift of patriarchy.” It’s equally violent to both genders. Like nobody won. Nobody’s won with patriarchy, like W-O. And W-O-N not.
Rick: Right, right. I knew that. Yeah.
Kiran: Yeah. There’s no prize here. And I’m receiving all this massive amount of information and for many timelines. And this is … actually, it’s worth talking about, because this is … a lot of people who have had levels of awakenings, this is what happens: they access vast fields of information and they access different timelines. A lot of people I work with are like, “I can’t figure out what timeline. I can’t figure out what life time this is, it’s all colliding in this moment right now, and I don’t know how to maneuver it”. And I’ll work with people who … all these lifetimes are also are moving through, all these crazy fears, and suicide is a huge one, oh my god, people wake up and they just want to kill themselves. It’s amazing, the suicide movement. I had that whole chapter in the book, that little mini bit, about talking about it. It’s literally just a bug, a virus in the system. Because after people wake up, it’s so common that they’re accessing all of this stuff.
Rick: Do some of them do it?
Kiran: I don’t. I haven’t met anyone yet who has.
Rick: But there’s a temptation maybe, ‘cause …
Kiran: They’re … you come across it and certainly as part of my journey, I came across it, and it took me almost a year to recognize it was a bug in the system, because it was such a powerful movement. And I talk about it a little bit in the book, of literally … this is maybe two years or two and a half years into awakening, where the whole day, I just had to breathe and not throw myself off the balcony. That movement is so active and so big. And it took, even though I could see so clearly, it took a lot for me to keep seeing, keep seeing, keep seeing, until I noticed it’s a tiny byte of programming. It’s my great ability as a teacher, I get to say, “You know, you don’t have to do what I had to do. You don’t have to defend that you’re trying to not throw yourself off the balcony”. You know, “It’s just a byte of information; look, I’ll show you.” Like, “Go look. That’s all it is, ignore it”.
Kiran: So anyway, I had Christopher for a couple of years, who was … its own explosive friendship, because I had so much going through me. I was just “Uhuhghugh” … I just became … it just was hard. It was hard. It was really, really hard for another human to be around, what was exploding through here. But I … it must have been a weekend or something and I had … I talk about it at the end of the book … I was done with this nothingness, and I wanted to get back into the body … and I spent … I just did this. I just ran. I danced and ran and did this massive athleticism for hours, and hours, and hours. And ended up blowing out my knee, and ended up on the floor, with broken knees. And I spent the next few years quite immobile and quite unable to go to a doctor. Because inside was so disoriented, I couldn’t navigate outside, at all. So yeah, it was a hellacious, incredible, profound time of extraordinary healing and unwinding and undoing, and eventually it became an unbelievable liberation.
Rick: Hm. So I’m sure we could spend a lot of time going into all the gory details of every little thing, every little stage.
Kiran: And it might be … not necessary either, you know.
Rick Yeah, but then what?
Kiran: And if you are ever in a traumatic awakening, give me a call!
(both laughing)
Kiran: I’ll help.
Rick: But then you say in the …
Kiran: I was so mad! I was so mad, that no one did that for me. I was so mad! Because Christopher could only help this much. And Adya. … you know, he’ll say today he’s so sorry, but he didn’t know how to help. You know, he was there. He was a beautiful help, in his own way. But he couldn’t really, you know, and I was so angry. And especially when I became my own teacher, and I was like, “It’s so easy. It’s so easy to help! Oh my god”. But it’s not if you haven’t lived through it.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: You have to have lived through it. You have to have done it. You have to have walked through it. Everyone else has some fricking story that enlightenment is like the end of all suffering. You know, the end of all pain. The place of “all good”. You know. Whatever.
Rick: Well, it depends on how we want to define enlightenment, right? I mean, if you want to define it as the awakening that happened before you work through all that stuff, then, that’s one thing. But if you want to define it as … where you found yourself after all the stuff had been worked through and the dust had mostly. settled and things were pretty smooth and nice, then we could call it the end of all pain.
Kiran: … Maybe. Yeah, or maybe for me I think of it as a Buddhist word, and I try not to talk or use it that often. (laughing) Because it’s referring to a state I have no idea, I have no access. I don’t know what that is. I have no idea what that story of “it’s all good” is. Because even here, in a way … my great gift, which was a hard grace … the pain … Because there was so much pain, there had to be so much healing. So I’ve done more healing than most … awake people on the planet. You know, many awake people don’t have to undo their entire DNA. So the amount of embodied awakeness here is big and is deeply embodied, and I still wouldn’t say whatever, when these … When I get this projected story about what enlightenment is, I don’t know what that is. I have no idea what that is. And I’ve pretty much seen it all and done it all (laughing). That’s just storytelling. That’s just a fairy tale to chase around.
Rick: So you’re not saying that, whatever it is, you haven’t reached it yet. You’re saying that the word is useless because who knows what it really connotes. And … what you’re experiencing is just what it is, but you don’t want to associate with words which are undoubtedly going to be misunderstood.
Kiran: Yeah, I don’t want to associate what I … I don’t want those projections. I don’t want to have to defend my experiences, so I avoid those words. I don’t know if what they’re pointing to exists or not and all I’m saying is that I’ve experienced a lot of what reality is and I haven’t come across it yet. But it isn’t to say, maybe the Loch Ness monster is real or maybe the Sasquatch … Just because I haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But it is widely talked about as something that is attainable, and I would disagree with that.
Rick: Ehh. It still depends on what we’re referring to when we use the word.
Kiran: Yes, totally. It’s a vocabulary.
Rick: Maybe you get … what those who’ve established and popularized the words of the founders of spiritual traditions really meant was something akin to what you’re experiencing, that might be what they’re talking about. So maybe the “E-word” is completely appropriate.
Kiran: The “E-word” (both laughing), that’s awesome, Rick. Yeah. The “E-Word”. Yeah, it’s highly embodied with projections.
Rick: But on the other hand …
Kiran: (garbled) against a wall.
Rick: Yeah, but on the other hand, might be interesting to see where you’re at ten years from now.
Kiran: Yeah.
Rick: And how you would look back on where you’re at now, in comparison to that.
Kiran: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Rick: I mean you said just last Christmas you were still going through the ringer.
Kiran: Yeah.
Rick: Who knows how much more ringer there might be to go through?
Kiran: Yeah. What it feels like is that it’s eternal. And what it feels like is that it’s not … Sometimes the mind thinks, “I have to heal forever, that’s a drag, I don’t want that.” But every piece of it is so much more liberated …
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: … and it is like that’s an eternal pathway, and in fact, we sometimes mentally tell a story about happiness as it can be boring. You can have a limit. But it’s not true at all. In fact, joy is far vaster than pain and far more eternal and ever-opening. And I also feel like my job, when I take this place as a teacher … I don’t know if everybody has this or just I do, but I definitely spend my days hearing a lot of, “Thank God, thank God for you.” “You’re a ray of light in a dark room”, and “Oh my God”, and all kinds of … they need to see me as love. I’m here to love, you know, and that’s part of my job as a teacher, is to love you … when I’m not around, I know I’m coming to people or people are tuning into my energy and feeling loved and feeling met. And so I can hear that all day long, and it would be very easy for me to just fall asleep a little bit and answer somebody by rote or from a “me”, and delusion can creep in. And it is so important that I stay as honest as I can be. And that honesty includes my own pain and my own suffering. That I’m not above it. I’m not different. I’m not separate. We’re not separate. And I feel like …
Rick: Do you do anything in particular to stay honest or is it just … kind of second nature to operate in such a way as to do so?
Kiran: I think I have to make it conscious, a lot. I think I need to make it conscious a lot, you know, because people want to project that there’s no suffering and there’s no pain, and it would be easy for me to somehow wanna own it … I don’t get involved in the projections of who I work with, because it’s essential, for their journey. You know, it’s beautiful and it’s not my business … but as a spiritual teacher and as a very good spiritual teacher, you hear a lot how awesome you are. And it would be easy to think you could just ride that. In that, it’s not the mystery answering. Because a lot of the time, I don’t know. Somebody will tell me something and I’ll be like, “Wow, I don’t know how to do that.” But then I just open my mouth and this … But if I’m not honest, if I’m not totally honest I can delude it, or I can … you know?
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: So I think I just have to make it, I do, I make it a very conscious practice to be as honest as I can and include being honest about my pain and what happens here … and I … (laughing) I live. I’m a single woman, with no children, but I get to live around people I think of as my family and they sure as heck don’t think I’m special (both laughing). And that’s helpful, I’m just one of the family. I mean, they love me to death. And I … I’m beloved, but my little nephew, who I get to spend a lot of time with, he’s the most awesome fourteen-year-old in the world. He called me a wizard. So he doesn’t use the E-word, he calls me a wizard. And we do this thing when I pick him up from school … He gets to, he plays with his friends, he’s like, “Kiran! Tell Isaac. Is he hungry? Is he thirsty? Use your wizardry! Read him!” (laughing)
Kiran: And that helps, really, keep you real. Or it just keeps you. You know, it’s just a goofy thing that kids play. So my nephew says to me … I picked him up from school yesterday, or was it yesterday, yeah, Friday … and I start to ask him, “Are you …” and then I know what the answer is. And he says, “What?” And I say, “I just wanted to know if you were hungry, but I know that you’re not”, and he’s like, “You’re a punk.” (both laughing)
Kiran: He tells me all the time. That I’m a punk. (laughing)
Kiran: So I think having people around me who are very clear about their really loving relationship with me, and me making it entirely conscious, as best I can, to be honest, helps me align with that liberation. Which is, “I’m just here to love, like you, like all of us.” Right, I mean that’s all we’re here to do. And we need to serve, all of us. We need to serve. And we can do that best from a place of letting the mystery guide it. Not the separate self.
Rick: I think there have been a lot of gurus who could have used more of that, and didn’t have it, and ended up getting kind of grandiose.
Kiran: We have it today.
Rick: Everyone’s susceptible to it.
Kiran: There are a lot of people today … who teach. I hear teachers say, “There’s no such thing as enlightenment”, and I don’t think they mean the E-word, I think they actually mean they’re denying the experience that I live, because they haven’t lived it.
Rick: Yeah.
Kiran: And they teach that … And I think it’s a salve to those who have been on the journey for a long time, but it’s just delusion. And there are teachers who teach today, you know, they end up at my doorstep all the time, saying that “there’s no such thing as embodiment, nothing needs to embody, nothing needs to heal or unwind.” Because they haven’t, is all. So I think they need to be honest, and for myself, as well; essentially, very much for myself to be very honest about where the point of view is that we’re coming from.
Rick: Yeah, you know, we’re all as enlightened as we may be, we’re all blind men feeling the elephant, and nobody’s got the whole elephant.
Kiran: Nobody has it! Nobody has it. Eckhart doesn’t have it. Adya doesn’t have it. I don’t have it. We have a piece of the diamond we’re looking at, but it’s a whole diamond. And I have it and you have it. You have a piece of that diamond, I mean, right now, that I can’t see. Yeah. Yeah, you are that diamond. Right now, you know that’s not me as diamond, it’s you as a diamond. And it’s equally … it’s so breathtaking … it’s beautiful.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I feel like, you know, we could easily do another two hours. There’s a lot to talk about. You’ve written a lot, a number of interesting blog posts. What I would like to do is wrap it up, but then sometime in the next few months, maybe January, or some such thing, we could do another one. And we could both review this, what we’ve done here, and make some points that we’d like to elaborate upon, and I could read more of your blog posts and people listening could also read them, and listen to this, and send in some points that they would like to hear greater exploration of.
Kiran: Absolutely. And especially with the book if there’s questions, like where does the clarity need come? I love it, love it. That’d be great, Rick. That’d be great!
Rick: Yeah. So people can buy the book, if they want to do what you just said …go ahead and do what I just said.
Kiran: The blog posts are all free. You can read all the teachings; many teachings there.
Rick: Yeah, I’ll be linking to your blog from BatGap.com. So mysticgirlinthecity.com, right?
Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, mystic girl in the city and yeah.
Rick: And people can email me questions and points they’d like to see us discuss next time and I’ll just save them in a folder and then when we do it, I’ll get ‘em organized and we’ll do it.
Kiran: Yeah. That’d be wonderful, yeah.
Rick: So for now though, I’ll wrap it up, I guess, and do you have any final points?
Kiran: I was just going to say … my final point is that – I just want to thank you so much, this has been so fun, and I am so touched by this series. I love this series. It’s so intimate. You get to feel so intimate with the people you’re interviewing. And the depth of the conversation, I just love it. And I’m so grateful to you, thank you so much. And to Irene. And to Dana. And … I haven’t met.
Rick: Well, there’s Ralph. Ralph does post-production; he’s seen hundreds of hours.
Kiran: … Hundreds of hours …
Rick: … preparing all these videos. There’s a guy in India that helps. there’s a translation team and transcription team, there’s a guy up in Canada that cleans up the audio. And there’s always helpers … Then there’s that … so I really appreciate all of them, and I don’t often mention it but … the appreciation is there.
Kiran: I do too. I’m so appreciative of them. So I’m going to stick a whack-load of books in the mail for you to hand out to all these people, as a thank you so much from me.
Rick: Great.
Kiran: And yeah, just I’ve said. I’ve so much gratitude for this opportunity. Thank you so much.
Rick: Thank you. And you know, what you said about the kind of bond you form. I moderated a forum at the Science and Nonduality Conference, and I started my moderation by just saying that one of the nicest perks of doing this thing that I am doing, is that. I just form this bond, you know, with the people I talk to and this kind of deep friendship.
Kiran: Yeah.
Rick: And I kind of named several that were sitting in the audience, and then the several that were on stage to do the forum, and it’s just the sweetest thing, just kind of building this global network of friends. (laughing)
Kiran: I think it’s really important. And exactly, we’ve said … Now we’ve gotten to know each other, I feel that exactly. I feel like you’re my friend.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Kiran: And I love being with you, you know. And I think it’s really important because we need to, and this is the thing … that I’ve joined the Center for Nondual Awareness. But as teachers, we need to hangout and … we need to hang out together, because we all have facets of the rainbow that can shine more brightly, together. So cultivating those friendships, and what this show is doing, by making … all of these people who are going to watch the show, get to spend this whole two hours with both of us, so intimately, and that’s such a gift. So I’m so grateful you’re called to do this, and I love it and … it’s just awesome. And the whole team and everybody, you know, everybody I’ve been working with, that is a part of this … Irene has just been a total doll and amazing. And Dana was so fabulous to work with. And now all of these other people … it’s really great, so thank you.
Rick: Thanks. Okay, good. Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Kiran: Yeah exactly, so in a couple more months, we’ll connect.
Rick: Yeah, we’ll do another one.
Kiran: Yeah. Part two.
Rick: So let me … Don’t disconnect, I just want to make some final concluding remarks. So, for those who’ve been listening or watching … Obviously, you know what you’ve been listening or watching … This is an ongoing series. And if you just happen to have come across this, you can go to batgap.com and there you’ll see the whole thing archived; all the different interviews that have been done. There’s an alphabetical list and a chronological list, and you’ll also find a number of other things. A discussion forum. Then there’s a little separate chapter of it for each interview that you can participate in. A donate button, which I rely upon people clicking, when they feel moved to do so. A place to sign up to be notified by e-mail each time a new interview is posted, and a link to an audio podcast, in case you’d like to just subscribe to this on iTunes and not have to sit in front of a computer for two hours. And a few other odds and ends. So explore around. And it’s a work in progress so it’ll continue to grow and evolve. So thanks for listening or watching. We’ll see Kiran again in two or three months, and we’ll see all of you, who happen to watch every week, next week.