Trip Overholt Interview

Summary

The discussion explores awakening as a shift from a separate sense of self to awareness experienced as present everywhere. It also considers spiritual teachers, the value of ordinary progress, and how spiritual phenomena or doctrines can distract from direct experience.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What does it mean to experience awareness as more than the individual self?
• How can spiritual growth change the way we relate to ourselves and other people?
• What makes a spiritual teacher helpful without placing them above their students?
• Are spiritual powers and unusual experiences necessary for awakening?

Key takeaways

• Awakening can reveal awareness as not confined to an individual sense of self.
• Even modest spiritual growth can bring more joy, ease, and openness with others.
• A useful teacher directs attention back to the divinity and capacity present in everyone.
• Unusual spiritual phenomena may occur, but they are not required for direct realization.
• Spiritual teachings should not imply that fulfillment is somewhere other than the present.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest this week is Trip Overholt. And Trip is, he’s a guy who does something very similar to what I do. In fact, you’re doing it in the way that I originally intended to do this, which was on a low-power FM radio station in my town, with the thought of kind of putting it out there on the Internet also. And my low-power FM radio station just didn’t want to do it and I couldn’t figure out why. It seemed like they would. We’re in a town where everybody meditates and there’s all this spiritual stuff going on, just like yours. You’re in the Boone, North Carolina area, aren’t you? Yeah. And so they kind of forced me into doing it as a video at the local public access TV station, which turned out to be great because it made me do this as a video.

But they didn’t have their act together, so eventually I figured out how to do it on Skype and started doing that. Now this TV station does have their act together and they’re airing my shows that I record this way. So anyway, that’s my story in a nutshell. Let’s hear more about yours.

Trip: Well, smart move, because I think people prefer this information on video. Because if you go to the people that we’ve interviewed, you can see that they like to put up the videos up on their websites, instead of a radio interview. So I think that was a wise decision on your part. We’re not doing our show anymore. We aired our last broadcast in June.

Rick: What made you decide to stop doing it?

Trip: We just felt like we had done it. We’d done it for three years and we’d interviewed about 80 people, and we decided it would be a good thing to turn it into an e-book, so that more people could have access to it and kind of clean it up and make it more accessible.

✨ Trip’s awakening and abiding awareness

As I understand it, from having read the first part of your book, you yourself had a spiritual awakening, which I suppose was somewhat the inspiration for you doing the show that you did. Is that true, and could you talk about that whole experience?

Rick: As I understand it, from having read the first part of your book, you yourself had a spiritual awakening, which I suppose was somewhat the inspiration for you doing the show that you did. Is that true, and could you talk about that whole experience?

Trip: Yeah, I wouldn’t have had any interest in doing the show if I hadn’t had that experience, which happened back in 2006. Ironically, it happened in the bedroom of my friend and spiritual mentor, John Troy, who I do the radio show with. That’s kind of ironic, but up until that point I had been someone who was interested in having a great life and improving myself, but I really hadn’t had an overt interest in spirituality. In fact, I didn’t really understand it, and when I looked at sort of wise men that I would occasionally come across – you know, you’d see these Indian gurus and stuff – I had like no idea what that was about. I couldn’t get it at all.

But I had had spiritual experiences on psilocybin mushrooms numerous times, and I had been feeling just absolutely absorbed into love during those times, but then you’d come down and you’d be back into your identified self and things would be normal again. But I was walking through the wizard’s – I call my friend John the wizard – I was walking through his bedroom and there was a picture book of Ramana Maharshi’s. In fact, it’s this book right here. Let me see here, can you see that?

Rick: Yeah, I’ve seen that book, it’s nice.

Trip: And the type on the pages was really large, you see that? And because the type was large, I stopped and I read a line, and I picked up the book and I read a couple more pages, and I had a complete meltdown, tears were streaming down my face, and I suddenly realized that this localized sense of personhood that I’d had, that had been between my ears, this guy called Trip, I suddenly realized that it actually wasn’t located there, it was actually everywhere. Sentience was actually infinite, and that I was in fact that field of awareness. And what was remarkable about that was that it happened when I was just straight and walking around, and number two, that it stuck. That profound awe over that reality never left, it hasn’t left since then.

Rick: Does it leave when you go to sleep?

Trip: Well, when I say “never leave,” I mean I’ve had stretches of complete re-immersion in total sense of myself as a separate guy called Trip, just like I used to be. But increasingly now, I would say that even when I’m in a heated argument or almost during any activity, a portion of my attention is now enjoying attention itself. And do you know what I’m talking about?

Rick: Absolutely. In fact, I find it difficult to have a heated argument because there is such a major portion of me that finds that to be ridiculous indulgence in individual whim, and I can’t take it seriously. It’s like you are watching a movie and you can’t really be totally convinced that there are monsters on the screen or something, you know you are in a movie theater. Whereas if you completely forgot you were in a movie theater, maybe some people get that overshadowed in movies, it could be a really traumatic experience watching the monsters.

Trip: Exactly. So you know, almost inevitably, if there is an opportunity for a heated experience, I’ll go, “Am I going to indulge myself in this?” And sometimes I do.

Rick: Uh-huh, sure. I suppose it depends on the … I don’t know. Personally, I usually find that such things are counterproductive and I think, “Do I really want to create all this emotional trauma for myself and others by getting into this, or would it be better to just hold my tongue and wait five minutes and the whole thing will be over?” There is that sort of discrimination to be able to not completely go with any whim that pops into your head.

Trip: Yeah, well my persona is one of a kind of a cage rattler, you know? And so I still have some lingering sentiments that arise from that persona, and one of them is that I think that sometimes maybe anger is a useful emotion, it might be good for the person it is being directed to. Sometimes people need a little dose of anger because they are accustomed to not really listening up to anything other than that, you know, sometimes.

📚 Teachers, equality, and spiritual maturity

Rick: And just about any sort of guru you read about who is reputed to be extremely enlightened, you know, there are stories about them getting really angry with this or that person for various reasons. So if we can hold them as an example, then maybe that is an illustration of your point. Did you only interview 32 people who are in your book, or did you interview a great many and then you just selected 32 interviews to put in the book?

Trip: Yeah, we winnowed them down. John made the selection process. John has kind of been established as presence for a while, and so he was the one that made the decisions. And basically I would say that the ones that we picked would be the ones that most epitomized the qualities of what we would call an avant-garde sage. That would be people that are generally not caught up in some kind of guru persona, and who are usually in the woodwork, they are usually unknowns, so often they were interested in being on the program and agreed to come on the program. They were usually very fresh and authentic and simple, loving people with just big hearts, and it is hard to completely put them all in one basket, but you can kind of tell when you meet one.

Rick: Yeah, well I would say that none of your guests, many of whom have also been my guests or will be, would comfortably relate to the word “guru.” But “guru” just means “teacher,” and it actually is composed of two Sanskrit roots which mean “darkness” and “light.” So it is a teacher who can lead you from darkness to light. And that is what most of these folks try to do. If you listen to what Francis Lucille is doing, or Rupert Spira, or many of the others, they are helping people awaken. And so traditionally they would be called “gurus,” but there is a lot of baggage with that term, and so I can understand why people wouldn’t want to use it.

Trip: Yeah, now that I am processing the question a little more, I would say that one of the main features is looking out at others with an equality of vision. So the “teacher” – and most of them did not want to be called “teacher” either.

Rick: What are you going to call them?

Trip: Most of them were okay with “teacher,” but most of them did not want to be “teacher” either. They are looking out with eyes of utter equality. They are God seeing God. They are not on some teacher platform looking at a student.

Rick: But appearances can be deceptive. I just spent five days with Amma, the hugging saint, and she is definitely up on a platform, and people revere her, and she has worldwide fame and a massive following and all that. The first thing she does when she comes into the hall every time is bow her head to the floor, and bow to everybody in the audience. And I have heard her many times describe her own experience as being, like you said, God seeing God. There is just seeing oneness in everything, seeing everyone as that presence or God-awareness or whatever you want to call it. But roles are played, obviously, and she is playing that sort of role and has certain qualifications for playing it. So I am just not, personally I am not anti-guru. I think a lot of gurus have done a lot of things to sully the term, but you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There are some who kind of do justice to the term.

Trip: There are people who, in my opinion, an excellent teacher or guru is one who never lets go by the opportunity to redirect the adulative attention of the so-called student back onto themselves or onto each other. I think that a teacher has an obligation to continuously reflect that back to the person, to be a good teacher, because otherwise the student gets the impression that the teacher has something that they don’t have.

Rick: Yeah, and you know, I am really fond of the term “paradox,” because almost anything you say, you can find things to contradict it, but they don’t disprove it or refute it. The world is full of contradictions which are simultaneously true, each in their own domain, each in their own realm. So in a sense, nobody has anything that anybody else doesn’t have, but at the same time, they do. So on relative levels, it is like, let me take an example.

The 15-watt light bulb, little night light, and the powerful searchlight that warns ships off the rocks, they both have the same fundamental source, the electrical field, and they are both plugged in, presuming those powerful searchlights are 120 volts, I don’t know if they are, but if they could go deep enough, they would both say, “Yes, I am this electrical field, this 120-volt, 60-cycle-per-second field, that is what I am, essentially.” But from the outside, so to speak, in terms of their individual structure and the function which that structure is capable of performing, there are vast differences, so both are true at the same time. So somebody who is psychotic in a mental hospital or something, they essentially are that same being-self that Ramana Maharshi is or was, or whatever, however you want to put it, but they are not capable of performing the same function.

The wiring is screwed up, and so they can’t be of the same use to people as he was. They are serving their own function. If you want to say it this way, they are God experiencing psychosis, whereas Ramana Maharshi was God, a manifestation with enough refinement to experience himself as God, rather than this confused, miserable person.

Trip: Yeah, the thing I sometimes wonder about is, and it is just useless speculation, it has no purpose, but I sometimes wonder about the teacher or the student that is interested in the situation where there is a kind of a talking head at the front of the room who is giving excellent information, versus a situation where there is no talking head at the front of the room, but everyone is engaging everyone as an equal, and there is just continuous affirmation and acknowledgement of each other as divinity itself playing itself out. And so the wizard and I, we have gatherings that we do, and I just had a gathering in my house on July 3rd, and it was off the charts because it was just a total love-fest where everyone was engaging everyone like that.

There was no real need or benefit of having a kind of focused attention on a centralized teacher; the thing was playing itself out in kind of the 3D environment right there. And people had a profoundly fantastic experience, so I prefer that over kind of a classroom setting of a teacher or anything like that, where there is a person at the head of a mob or a big gathering. I prefer just people interacting, that is just a personal preference.

Rick: Yeah, no, that is cool. And it has its place, and it is a preference. I mean, if Ramana Maharshi walked into that gathering in your house, I think everyone would have sat down on the floor and gathered around him and listened to hear what he had to say. It would not be like, “Hey dude, have a beer,” you know? There would have been some kind of respect or some kind of recognition that there was an example here of a great deal of spiritual maturity and perhaps we could benefit by tuning into that. And so perhaps right then and there, the head of the room figure dynamic would have set itself up. But that was not going on; it was just a bunch of your peers all gathered together, having a mutually enlightening, enlivening experience.

Trip: I think that is true, but I also think that we live in different times, and we do not really know what Ramana Maharshi would look like in today’s times. Would he be looked over? Would he be given the respect? I find that whatever wisdom that I have to share is playing out in kind of a rough-and-tumble environment here, with a lot of competing stimulation and people with short attention spans. And furthermore, you know, if you are a local person and your local friends are coming, it is often hard for people that have known you a long time to recognize the fact that you may have matured significantly spiritually, that you may have something to offer. So it may be that that sharing has to take place amidst all of that noise and preconditioned ideas about who you are and everything. And so I do not know.

I look at some of the guys that I think are fantastic sages, like I have interviewed Scott Kiloby, like you have, and Rupert, and I am looking at my list of people here, Francis Lucille, or whatever. I do not know that they ever necessarily receive the kind of really focused respect that you might fantasize that someone like Ramana might receive, but they are completely established as presence. So I think it is beautiful.

Rick: I would accept that with a proviso, by putting the word completely in italics, because I think there are degrees and degrees and degrees and degrees of establishment or embodiment of presence. And if we take the Vedic tradition as any sort of authority, they outline at one point 16 kalas, which are said to be like levels of evolution. And human rocks are at one end, Krishna or something is at the other end, and humans are said to occupy maybe 4 through 7 or 4 through 8. So Ramana Maharshi would have been an 8 maybe, and then there are 8 above that, which would all sorts of higher beings that are said to exist in the universe. We can take that as theory or speculation, but personally I kind of resonate with that notion that there is never any change in presence itself. It is like the electricity, it is what it is, but you can go from a 15-watt bulb to a 25 to a 50 to a 100 to a 1000.

There is no end to the upgrades of the degree to which presence can be lived. And with those upgrades, it is not only a matter of more and more and more … it seems silly to say “more presence,” but really the degree of clarity and degree of transmission of that through one’s mind-body structure. But also all sorts of subtle faculties begin to develop as that presence permeates more and more into one’s makeup. And you see that in the greatest masters, you read Yogananda’s book or various things, there are all sorts of capabilities, which a person might say, “Oh, I don’t care about that, all I care about is presence,” but nonetheless that is the direction that it goes in as further developmental stages are reached.

Trip: I totally agree with you, but I think one danger with the truth of the fact that there are these very well-developed, say, possibilities for presence as in a Ramana or Nisargadatta, is that people tend to focus on that as this potential endgame for themselves, rather than realizing the tremendous benefits that come from just a thimbleful of enlightenment, if you will. And so, for example, with myself, I don’t begin to even try to compare myself with a Ramana Maharshi, but I am able to compare myself with who I was like ten years ago. And there is a radiant joy that is constantly present right here in my chest area, which I can simply give attention to and feel this joy, it’s a causeless joy there. There’s a comfortability in my skin, and there’s a capacity to engage people in a really deep way without wanting to turn away.

I used to look in other people’s eyes and I really couldn’t hold their gaze because there was a fear there, I guess, of really being completely seen, or I don’t know, maybe a fear of being loved on some degree. There was a kind of a shame mixed in. I think that almost every person has this shame on some degree where they don’t really feel deserving of being loved. And so because we don’t feel deserving of being loved, we are not able to really fully love others. And so when these opportunities used to come up where there would be a moment where I would really engage someone, I could only handle it for a few seconds or so. Now I just love to engage people, I love to look at them and appreciate them. And so I perceive that there is a tremendous amount more ripening that is going to happen within this form here, but I am really pleased with what has already occurred.

And so I want people to know that even a small amount of enlightenment, if you will, is going to really make a huge difference.

Rick: I completely agree, and that is my experience also. And it is funny to think about how adaptable we are as human beings. It is almost like I think of it sometimes as God’s mercy that we can be comfortable, to a certain extent, wherever we are in the big picture of things. Because if you were to somehow suddenly go back to where you were ten years ago, the contrast would be agonizing. You would just be writhing on the floor. And yet ten years ago, you were okay with it. You were living your life, you were doing your thing, you weren’t agonizing every day. But now, look at the contrast. Now if you were to somehow step ahead ten years from now and then get used to that, and then jump back to where you are right now, you might again be writhing on the floor, because of the contrast. And yet we have this adaptability which enables us to make life livable wherever we are at.

One thing I suspect is that as long as there is — and we can talk about this in non-dual circles — progress is a dirty word, but I don’t have a problem with it — as long as there is evolutionary progress taking place, there is ever-increasing joy and life is wonderful. If somehow that is thwarted or stymied, then we begin to suffer, we begin to feel like “Oh, there is something wrong here, there is some block I have got to clear through.” What do you think about all that?

Trip: I agree.

Rick: Okay, you better disagree with me a little bit. Somebody told me that — I just received an email yesterday from a guy who noticed that I was going to interview you — he said that in recent interviews you had become rather challenging of people who didn’t seem to fit into your mold. Do you know what he is talking about, and is there any validity to that? Do you have a mold? What is your mold?

Trip: I can only speculate, but I can take some stabs at it. One of them is that there are a lot of people in the spiritual community that are interested in all kinds of what I will call “spiritual phenomena.”

Rick: Right.

Trip: I don’t doubt the veracity.

Rick: Ooga-booga stuff, kind of, you mean?

Spiritual Lineages and Paranormal Interests

Trip: Okay, they are interested in dimensions, they are interested in astral projection, they are interested in Pleiadians, they are interested in dead spirits making their appearances, they are interested in auras, crop circles. Also, there are people that are interested in this idea of transmission, for example, that they are in a lineage, and that they have been anointed by a master as the direct carrier of some kind of spiritual lineage, and that they then have the power to transmit things to other people. All of those things are potentially true, but they are completely unnecessary, and they are really not worth a lot of attention, because divinity is present here and now. It is palpably experiential right now. And so, there is nothing added by those kinds of spiritual experiences, and I think they are a distraction.

And what happens is, people like to sort of carve out their niche where they become sort of the expert in auras, or they become the expert in whatever, and/or they discovered a secret text that they found somewhere in a cave in western Pennsylvania, curiously sounding very much like a reworked Vedic text or whatever. So if somebody is coming from one of those perspectives, they are going to get challenged by me.

Rick: Okay, no, I am with you. I see what you are saying, and again, I agree with you. Those things can be kind of interesting, they can be like junk food, they are kind of tasty, but they don’t provide much nutrition. And I have gone through phases where I have read about the Pleiadians and read various things, but it is more like entertainment, you know, it is not the meat of it, it is not the nitty-gritty.

Trip: So there was another, perhaps in some of the later interviews that we had, because I talked about the later interviews, I interviewed some folks from A Course in Miracles. The Course in Miracles, I challenged some of the people that were up at the top of the Course in Miracles, whatever it is, hierarchy, foundation. The text, throughout the text, the way the text is written, it is definitely dualistic in the way it is written. It talks about an externalized god. This god in the text is capitalized, capital letters are used so that it becomes this noun, okay? And I would understand the goal of the text, the purpose of the text is beautiful and it has been wonderful, but the text itself in certain places reads like, you know, there is an externalized god, it is also very Christian, it is very Jesus-oriented, or whatever.

And I challenged, for example, I challenged the hierarchy on this, and when I challenged them, they said, “Well, here is what she really meant to say.” And I said, “Well, okay, you have control of the text, why don’t you change it?” And then we had long conversations later, and I was okay with the fact that they didn’t really feel like changing it, okay? But I am, like I said, I got a cage-rattler persona, and if there is a person or a text or a teaching that gives anyone that is exposed to it any idea other than the fact that they are present divinity, and that the now is an absolutely complete experience, and there is nothing more that can be added to it, and that it is absolutely fulfilling when directly experienced. If they are going to pretend that there is anything else that you need beyond that, then they are going to get challenged by me because I know that is not true.

Rick: Yeah, I would agree with that again, with the proviso that people are at different stages in their spiritual development, and you know, it is like there is a whole lot of fundamentalist Christians in this country. I couldn’t be one, I couldn’t even sit through one of their sessions, one of their services, but for those people, you know, it may not be the highest teaching that exists on earth, but for those people it fits, for now, for them. And you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now for some of them it may not fit anymore. In fact, we know people, you and I have both probably met people who are kind of now into non-dual teachings and all, who at one point went through that kind of a phase. So I just sort of feel like, you know, the universe is vast and varied and there are all sorts of streams in the spiritual watershed that people might find themselves in at any given time.

Ultimately they are all leading to the ocean, but they might be quite far from the ocean in their characteristics at any point, you know what I mean? Do you get the metaphor?

Trip: I do know what you mean, and I also want to say that I grew a bit in my outlook. I was holding spiritual teachers to a higher standard. I was differentiating spiritual teachers as being some kind of special category. And when I was encountering some particularly obvious foibles in the way they were teaching, that was clearly narcissistic or clearly enjoying the adulation that was being poured on them for being an excellent communicator, rather than taking the opportunity to put the attention back on the student or whatever, I had a personal charge about that. I was holding them to a higher standard and judging them for that. And towards the end of the interviewing, I came around to seeing that I was doing that and I let go of that.

Rick: That’s good. I mean, it’s good to remember that spiritual teachers are human beings. It’s good for them to remember it, they don’t always remember it, but at least it’s good for us to remember it, because otherwise you are going to be disillusioned. I’ve been in close association with a couple of very well-known spiritual teachers, and there are a lot of followers who feel like, “Oh, this teacher is omniscient, they must actually be tuning into the conversation we are having right now.” And then at a certain point, something happens. Amma, for instance, there are a lot of people who feel that.

I politely differ with them without trying to shatter their faith or anything, I just feel like, “Well, she is operating in a human body, and a human body doesn’t have that capability.” And there is this one woman that I had this conversation with over the years, kept having it, and Amma gave her some sort of advice with regard to her health, and it turned out later on that she had breast cancer and didn’t know it, and the advice was inappropriate. And her faith was like, “Really?” She was so shaken by that, because I thought she was omniscient, how come she didn’t know about my breast cancer?

Why Spiritual Teachers Should Not Be Deified

And I said, “Because she is not omniscient, you should have gotten a scan or something.” So I think if we deify teachers to whatever degree, even though they might be very rich, mature, full embodiments of God, they are not God in a manifest form, they are not functioning as God, they can’t create universes through their human body, nor can they be omniscient through their human body. And if we think they can, we are in for a little disillusionment at some point.

And I said, “Because she is not omniscient, you should have gotten a scan or something.” So I think if we deify teachers to whatever degree, even though they might be very rich, mature, full embodiments of God, they are not God in a manifest form, they are not functioning as God, they can’t create universes through their human body, nor can they be omniscient through their human body. And if we think they can, we are in for a little disillusionment at some point.

Trip: Yeah, and I think there are kind of two categories of teaching that take place, just to be kind of grossly categorical. And again, I might ruffle some feathers by this observation I am going to make, because it is not always true, okay? But it seems to me, in the vast majority of the cases of the people that I interviewed on our program, I would say 90% of them had some sort of spiritual experience, for lack of a better term, where in the waking state they had a profound realization that they were more than just the mind and the body, okay? And it stuck, okay. Those people, when they go out and they go then and hang out with a spiritual teacher like I have for the last five years …

Rick: With the wizard in your case.

Trip: With the wizard in my case. The purpose of that was to clear any lingering doubts, and to affirm this experience that I had as being true, that that was actually true. It wasn’t just a fleeting mistake or something of perception, alright? In that case, the teaching was taking place on the heels of an already accomplished fact of a kind of paradigm shift in perception, alright? Then you have most people though that appear not to have had that kind of a waking state transformation take place, and then they go and they go see a spiritual teacher, okay? In that case, what happens is the spiritual teacher gives them this temporary charge, if you will, where in the presence of such clarity and such presence, they are able to palpably experience that as who they are, okay? And then they go off and then they have to come back and repeat it, you know? That is called the hell of seeking, alright?

And in my opinion, that kind of seeking is … I don’t know if I can say it is completely futile, but I look at it and it doesn’t look like a happy thing to me. It looks like kind of a waste of time.

🧘 Self-acceptance, practice, and everyday life

Rick: So what should they do?

Trip: I think that the number one thing they can most do is to be as utterly and completely themselves as they can possibly be, which means accept themselves, accept their foibles, accept their looks and whatever it is about them. And when you become so completely comfortable with yourself that you are able to really love yourself, then a lot of these anxieties and things that are causing all the mind-chatter that blocks grace coming in and delivering a profound experience of who you are, or even a subtle experience of who you are, that mind-chatter goes away because you are not grinding away on all these concerns that you have. And so it will take care of itself if you really accept yourself, I think.

Rick: Okay, well presuming they can really do that, great. But is there any reason why they shouldn’t do both? Is there any reason why they shouldn’t do what you just said and also go and see some teacher that passes through town and get a little shot of Shakti?

Trip: I don’t think that they have any choice in it. I think that they are going to see that teacher because that is what has been written for them.

Rick: That is what they feel like doing. They say, “Oh boy, Francis Lucille is in town, I think I’ll go sit with him.”

Trip: Yeah, I think it is fine, I think it is great.

Rick: Yeah. I think there is something to be said for the old cloth and dye analogy that they sometimes use in Indian spirituality, where you take a white cloth and dip it in the colored dye and then put it out and bleach it in the sun for a while, and it loses its color, but it becomes a little bit colorfast, a little bit of the dye is retained, and then you do that again, and you keep repeating that process until eventually the cloth is the same color, whether it is in the vat of dye or sitting in the bright sunlight. So I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with these intermittent flashes of realization that are then lost. Something changes when that happens, even if you kind of totally lose awareness of what had happened, you know, a week later you are back at work and everything is crazy and you have totally forgotten about it.

I think on some deep level there has been some shift, and those little micro-shifts can kind of accumulate to the point where there is a permanent realization of the nature of your own. So I don’t have a problem with that. I think meditation does the same thing, it can do the same thing. You are not sitting with a teacher, but you are going within and having this experience and then you seem to lose it afterwards maybe. But there is some little change, maybe even some physiological change, and then you repeat the process. And over time, you know, some Zen teacher once said, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.” There is a kind of a culturing or a gradual transformation that can bring you to the brink of an abiding realization.

Trip: Well, we are on an agree-fest right now.

Rick: So I am not one of these people that says, “Oh, practices, you should just drop all practices because they are only going to reinforce the sense of a practicer,” you know, I just don’t look at it that way.

Finding Spirituality in Everyday Life

Trip: I agree with you, but I will say that there is a tendency on the part of people who seem to be interested in cultivating their spiritual life to carve out this part of their life that they call “spiritual,” okay? So they look forward to, say, the weekend retreat with the great teacher. Meanwhile, though, right now, walking around in your underwear, feeding the kitty, and going down to the grocery store, every bit as spiritual. So that is where the rubber meets the road, and so I ask myself why – it is just a personal preference thing – but for me, I want to enjoy the miracle of this present divinity, 24/7, wherever I am, with whomever I am, and I do, and I partly ascribe it to a firm conviction that there is nothing outside of any present moment that is more spiritual than any other, and therefore, why waste the fuel?

I mean, if you want to, it is fine, but my point would be as a celebration. If you are going down to the grocery store and you are finding it really drecky and not fun, because it is not a spiritual environment with the kind of people you want to hang out with, then I would say that is where the work is, and I would say, make that your spiritual practice, and then when going to the grocery store is just as spiritual, then go back to the retreats and enjoy them even more, because it is just putting a punctuation mark on it. You know what I am saying?

Rick: Yeah, I know what you are saying. I actually know two or three people who have had a profound awakening while serving time in federal prison. You know, there was Satyam Nadeen, there was a guy named Ed Beckley, I have a friend right now who is in prison and he did some kind of financial scam, and I don’t know if he has had an awakening there, but I have actually been corresponding with him and he feels like all is well and wisely put, and he is really growing and learning under those circumstances.

And also, if we really do feel that God is this omnipresent intelligence that is governing the universe from within, not from afar, but from within every particle of it is present, then there is a vast intelligence innate in every experience, whether at the grocery store, picking up the dog poops, or whatever you are doing, everything is brimming with that intelligence and there is inherent value in every experience.

Trip: We had a couple on our show, Kenny Johnson and Brian Adler, who is in the book.

Rick: Yeah, I have got Kenny coming up in a couple of months. He is great.

Trip: Yeah, so prison is a great place.

Rick: Yeah, not that I would want to go there, but if the circumstances in my life were such that I ended up there, that is probably where I needed to be, and could gain from it.

Trip: Yeah. I wanted to ask you some questions.

Rick: Sure, and you ask good questions, by the way, I was going to say. That is one thing I like about your interviews. And you know, I intend to actually download all of your interviews and then listen to them as I am preparing for that particular person that I am going to be talking to. But I am impressed by the fact that you really seem to have the time to read the books of all these people. You know, it is like I am really lucky if I have half an hour before bed to read a little bit. And you ask very well-prepared, insightful questions, so I just wanted to say that.

Trip: Thank you very much. I felt if somebody is going to spend a year of their life writing a book, then I feel that to be thorough, I should read their book. So that was another reason that we wrapped up the show from my end of it, is I was spending about a day and a half a week getting ready for those interviews.

Rick: Yeah, I listen. I have my iPod and I am cutting the grass, riding my bike, brushing my teeth, washing the dishes, doing things like that, and I put in at least an hour a day listening to these folks while I am preparing.

Interviewing, fresh voices, and deepening over time

Trip: And I would go onto your site and oftentimes your interviews would be good prep for me. Oftentimes you get a lot more out of an hour interview than you do out of reading a book, I mean in terms of what you would want to interview somebody about, because they bring up so much juicy stuff. So what are some of your reports from the field? I mean, I have come to some conclusions about the folks that we have interviewed and the state of affairs here, of non-duality. Do you perceive yourself continuing to do these interviews for a long time? They are continuing to be rewarding for you?

Rick: Absolutely. In fact, I wouldn’t mind at all if this morphed into a career that I could do full-time for the rest of my functional life. I really enjoy it. I get new requests and recommendations every day. My hardest task is prioritizing people because I only do one a week and I have got people scheduled into next winter, and it is really hard to shuffle them around in some kind of fair order, so I don’t put people off indefinitely. And then there are all kinds of people that are hardly known that will make great guests on the show, but they don’t get a lot of recommendations and votes because nobody knows about them. And so somehow I become aware of those people and I try to squeak them into the queue. But in any case, I really love it. It is kind of a real boost to my life, weekly, something I look forward to, and so I have no plans to discontinue it.

Trip: You do a very good job of naturally engaging people, and when you interview them, you are more able to run with a thought thread or a conversation thread that is going, and kind of develop that. My style was more like I would go into their work and I would pick out things that I wanted to know more about, or if I thought there was an inconsistency in there, I would pick that out and take a look at that or whatever. So we have a slightly different… I too would like to do it as a career, but at this point in my life I need to focus on making a living.

Rick: Oh yeah, I have a full-time job, but I wouldn’t mind if it morphed in. I’m 60, almost 63 years old, so maybe this will be a retirement thing for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Trip: Well, one thing is there are not enough platforms for people to share from, so it is really good that you are doing this.

Rick: Yeah, and I actually, on my site, people may have noticed that little bit down, if you scroll down, there is a list of similar shows, including yours, that I link to. So I don’t feel like I’m trying to carve out some monopoly here, it is more like everybody has their own flavor and I enjoy listening to other people’s things, and so I don’t see why any of my listeners shouldn’t be notified of other things they might want to listen to. Like if I interview Jeff Foster for instance, and they like that, they might want to turn around and hear you interview Jeff Foster, or some other guy, Richard Miller interviewed Jeff Foster, just to get different takes on the guy.

Trip: You know, there are a few well-known spiritual luminaries out there. Have you contacted some of them to appear on your show? Like, did you ever ask Ram Dass to be on your show, or Gangaji, or anybody like that, or Adyashanti, or some of those sort of well-known folks?

Rick: Well, I’ve interviewed Gangaji and Adyashanti, they are there. I did inquire about Ram Dass and they said, “Well, he is very old and he has had this stroke, he doesn’t grant a lot of interviews,” so I didn’t push it. I understand that. There are a few, you know, I like to mix it up and have some of the well-known folks and also some of the unknown folks. So I would like to get Byron Katie and Deepak Chopra, whom I actually taught his original meditation course when he learned to meditate, and I lived with his parents for a couple of months in India, so I shouldn’t have trouble getting him, and Eckhart Tolle, I’d like to interview those folks. But I also really enjoy interviewing the housewife who just woke up one morning with her kundalini on fire and has gone through all kinds of changes and transformations.

I’m actually referring to somebody I did interview named Sarojini, and I think it was one of my best, most interesting guests, interesting interviews. So I know there are some interviewers who really try to get only the famous people and the well-known people, because they are trying to build viewership, and you know, you figure if you interview Eckhart Tolle, then all his people are going to sit and listen to it. So I confess to a little bit of that notion, but at the same time, I think the subtitle of my show is “Interviews with Ordinary Spiritually Awakened People,” and I like to keep that as an emphasis.

I hear you, that’s my bias. I mean, I have to say that there’s nothing more exciting to interview somebody that’s really fresh in their … and just lit up like a Christmas tree with their newfound realization or whatever, and I just love talking to people like that. Like we had one, Ilona Ciunaite was an example of that.

Trip: I hear you, that’s my bias. I mean, I have to say that there’s nothing more exciting to interview somebody that’s really fresh in their … and just lit up like a Christmas tree with their newfound realization or whatever, and I just love talking to people like that. Like we had one, Ilona Ciunaite was an example of that.

Rick: Yeah, she’s on my list, so I’ll be inviting her soon, yeah.

Trip: She was on fire, she was just beautiful. Have you interviewed Benjamin Smythe?

Rick: I did, we had a lot of fun.

Trip: Yeah, he’s a fun guy.

Rick: Yeah.

Trip: Let’s see, Eric?

Rick: And incidentally, just I want to say, this point you made about the person up on the podium, you know, with this “I-Thou” relationship with the audience, there can be that dynamic if you think of people like Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie as super special and you can never be like them. I think it can keep you following the dangling carrot indefinitely, and you’ve got to realize that it’s very likely that your own experience might be just as rich as theirs, you just don’t have their particular eloquence or gifts as a teacher or speaker, but you might be mopping the floor as a janitor, but your inner experience might very well be just as profound.

Trip: Yes, and I think it’s an important quality for an interviewer in this category to not be in awe of anybody that they’re interviewing, and to feel completely comfortable in their own skin and their own realization, and to feel that really there is no big quantifiable difference between themselves and the person being interviewed. I think that really adds to the interview because it allows you to get beyond the kind of superficial questions that an interviewer would want to ask about, and go into a deeper place, and I think people appreciate that.

Rick: Yeah, and I can be respectful at the same time, but there is that sense of, “We’re on the same boat here,” you know? Okay, so you were just about to ask me about somebody else.

Trip: Oh, I don’t know. It’s funny, you go through these people, and each one of these avant-garde sages is a different kind of a jewel, you know? Each one is beautiful. Like for example, Peter Fenner, did you interview him?

Rick: He’s on my list, and I met him out at the Science and Nonduality Conference, which I hope you’ll attend by the way, it’s a really fun thing to go to. But I haven’t interviewed him yet. Like I say, there’s a queue, I do one a week, which means 50 a year, and I’m moving through it, but it’s hard to prioritize people.

Trip: You know, I mentioned him as I’m just scanning down the list, because for example, I was just blown away by his ability to listen.

Rick: Ah, nice.

Trip: I did not, for example, this is the kind of stuff that you pick up from being an interviewer on one of these programs. I would walk away from every interview with something amazing from that person, you know? Usually a few little jewels, and Peter Fenner had a way of actively listening, with a kind of clear mind and focus on the person that he was listening to, that was just palpable, you know, and it was so delicious, it was noticeable. And I realized that there was a long way for me to be able to go in listening to people. For example, he neither agrees with or disagrees with the information that’s being presented. It’s not going into his cognitive processor, a guy named Peter Fenner who’s sitting there wanting to use it for some kind of egoic advantage, you know? He’s just with the information, just with it. I mean, that was a profound lesson that I got. So many …

Rick: That’s a good one, I mean, because it’s easy to just try to filter everything through your own conceptual apparatus and then extract from it the point that you want to make, as opposed to just really hearing what the person is saying and allowing yourself to be stretched to a new perspective.

Trip: Yeah. You know, another thing that I think is interesting is there are a lot of really young New Age sages now, for example, Bentinho, Benjamin, I go down my list here, young women like Lisa Cairns, Maren Springsteen here on my list, Regina Dawn Akers, she’s pretty young. And what’s interesting is there … I won’t say that this is true of … I don’t think this is true of … or Jeff Foster, I don’t think this is true of any of the people that I’m mentioning now. But there seems to be this kind of, I call it almost like “café non-duality” or something, where, “Hey, my girlfriend woke up next week and I’m going to wake up at the retreat this weekend,” or whatever. And it’s just like Burning Man has kind of entered the national consciousness, I go to Burning Man.

It’s like non-duality has kind of entered the mainstream consciousness to a degree, and people are aware of the fact that you can kind of wake up to a deeper reality. And then they think that once that’s happened, even if that happens, they think, “Well, okay, I got that, that’s in my hip pocket.”

Rick: Yeah, “I got that merit badge.”

Trip: And they don’t realize that it’s like a lifelong ripening that takes place, and that, like you were mentioning earlier, it’s just deeper and deeper and deeper. And when you interview a guy like Francis Lucille, for example, there’s just a palpable maturity, spiritual maturity there. And I love, I absolutely love the freshness, the young avant-garde sages are like, they’re so into free-fall, what you see is what you get. They’re like, right now, right in your face, like, “I don’t need any words,” and there’s this intimacy and an immediacy, they like to talk into the camera, and there’s this whole freshness to it. But on the other end of the spectrum, with the Francis Lucilles and the Ruperts and the John Troys and others, Jerry Wennstrom, people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, so the mature teachers, it’s hard for me to kind of give worded description to it, but they’re like a fine wine.

There’s just this mellowed, beautiful mellowed, kind of at-easeness, it’s hard to describe, it’s a kind of grandfatherly maturity. Ramana Maharshi had it in spades, it’s kind of this sweet, grandfatherly, spiritual maturity, you just want to hug them and kiss them because they’re just … it’s hard to say, it’s just sweet.

Rick: I know exactly what you’re saying, and this is a major pet peeve of mine, not a peeve, but the term “wake up,” “I woke up, I had an awakening,” I hear that and I think, “Okay, fine, it’s a nice start. Keep on trucking, dude.” And I’ve actually said many times what I’ve heard you say, which is that I really enjoy talking to some of these mature teachers like Gangaji and Adyashanti and Rupert and various people because … and Mooji is another one I’ve really enjoyed talking to, because there’s this sort of appreciation that the initial awakening is just that, and that there’s a never-ending maturation and deepening into the mystery that probably as long as you’re breathing is going to continue. So I just kind of shy away from the term “awakening” in terms of its kind of static, superlative connotation. I see it as a milestone, a stage, a nice development, but that there’s more.

In fact, when Adyashanti had his first awakening, he literally had a voice say to him, “Keep going.”

Trip: Yeah. Another thing that I discovered, and you probably have too, is that, for lack of a better term, sages, avant-garde sages are all over the place. I mean, we’ve interviewed warehouse workers, truck drivers, teachers, housewives, they’re all over the place, they’re in your community. So it’s not like great teaching or people that are truly, deeply established are that rare. It’s the rare person who really, really, truly wants to be around that. That’s the person that’s rare. That’s really ready. And the other thing is this idea that the general public on some level isn’t awake as well. I’ll grant you that the gatherings that I go to, like there’s a beautiful musical festival right near my house, it’s called Shakori Hills Musical Festival. It’s a grassroots festival.

When I go there, I go through the crowd, and it’s mostly young people, actually it’s a mixture, but I go through the crowd and everyone is just so joyous. And so I like to go through the crowd and just affirm all the people that I meet, every single person. I kind of share with them the glorious nature of the present experience that we’re sharing, and how divine it truly is, and how miraculous it is, and how absolutely perfect they are, and how nothing could be added to this experience we’re having right now to make it better. And not only that, that’s not only true of right now, but it’s true of every one of our moments. And so let’s celebrate this beautiful fact that we’re living this glorious reality. And I’ll go through a crowd of people, and in a given night I might have an exchange of that nature with a hundred people, or a hundred and fifty people, or whatever.

Every single one of them gets it. They all get it.

Rick: Sure, well they’re at a music festival, and sure they get it, and sure everybody has that spark of divinity within them, or whatever you want to call it. But like the infomercial says, “But wait, there’s more.” So again, it’s the both-and situation for me, where this is perfect as it is, and there’s more. And that will be perfect when more unfolds, and there will be more. So it’s kind of like, you know, I guess that’s the point.

Trip: I agree, that’s so true. I’ll also add though, that I think it’s very important. This is something that I think is true of myself, and I recommend it for others, and it’s this. I think it’s important to make the statement to yourself, the declarative statement to yourself, that “I am that.” I am that as totally as Nisargadatta, or Ramana Maharshi, and truly accept that there is not a shred of daylight in terms of that, between myself and Ramana Maharshi. Because any idea that there is, is just going to keep the direct experience of who you are further away from yourself. You have to accept that you are that. And I think that’s the biggest obstacle for people on a “spiritual path,” is to ever give that acknowledgment to themselves.

They hold a standard out there of a gifted teacher, like an Adyashanti or whatever, and then they make this, they come up with this idea that they’re not that, that they’re not just as divine.

Rick: Yeah, but there’s a Tibetan proverb, which I use in almost every interview, which goes like this, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization, don’t mistake realization for liberation.” So, while it may be true, and we can understand this intellectually, that I am that, just affirming that, even with great conviction, doesn’t necessarily mean that the full richness of that experience is going to dawn and be lived. There could be some work towards that, but it’s good to start with that understanding.

Trip: I agree with you.

Rick: You know, but it doesn’t mean … and we understand that … the 15-watt light bulb understands that it is the electrical field, just as much as the big bright lighthouse, but it doesn’t mean that it’s shining like the big bright lighthouse. It can’t guide ships off the rocks. And I say this because I sometimes see people using that concept as a cop-out for not doing any sort of work to progress further. They say, “I’m that, I’m there, what is there to do? You know, let’s party.” So this is just a precautionary note.

I was actually having a discussion about this with a friend just a couple days ago, who has spent the better part of nine years living in the Himalayas in an ashram, meditating many hours a day, and he actually knew the Sanskrit for this, but there are sort of two streams of thought in that the snake was always a string, it was never a snake, and you just have to realize that, if you’re familiar with that metaphor. And on the other hand, you have to sort of decondition yourself from the deep-seated misperception of the string as a snake, and there are levels and levels of vasanas, or impressions in the nervous system that have accumulated over who knows how long, that aren’t just going to go away in a flash just because you have the intellectual insight or understanding that “I am that,” there’s going to be stuff to work out.

Trip: Agreed. But I also think for every Buddha shining up on top of a cliff that’s warding off ships, there’s a thousand that nobody’s ever heard of and who have no interest in warding off ships.

Yeah, well look at the name of my show, “Buddha at the Gas Pump.” I mean, the implication is you might be pumping gas next to a Buddha and not even know it.

Rick: Yeah, well look at the name of my show, “Buddha at the Gas Pump.” I mean, the implication is you might be pumping gas next to a Buddha and not even know it.

Trip: Exactly.

🕊️ Living spiritual truth in the world

Rick: You know, for some reason, when I was thinking of your interview, I thought of Plato’s allegory of the cave, and I actually looked it up and read about it. Remember that from philosophy class? The way it goes is, people are in a cave and they’re chained in such a way that they have to look at a wall, they can’t do anything else but look at the wall. And behind them there’s a fire, and between the fire and them there are things moving along on a walkway, casting shadows on the wall. And they sit there and look at these shadows and regard the shadows as reality. And they try to understand what the shadows mean, they have arguments about the shadows and so on and so forth. And then somehow one guy gets a little bit loose in his chains and manages to turn around and see what’s actually going on.

Oh, there’s a fire and there’s objects moving, and the light is blinding to him initially and he can’t really look at it directly. Eventually he maybe gets acclimated and maybe gets out of his chains, and then eventually actually steps out of the cave into the full sunlight, in which he’s totally blinded and overwhelmed, but eventually gets accustomed to that over time. And then he goes back into the cave and tries to tell the people who are chained and looking at the wall what’s really going on, and of course they don’t believe him. And he can’t anymore take their argument seriously about how the shadows are being interpreted, it’s completely meaningless and ridiculous to him because he’s seen the whole picture. But I think it’s a beautiful sort of analogy or allegory for the whole process of awakening. We could delve into it, but I think the implications are obvious.

Trip: And I think I might have, early on in my process of becoming more established, and I know there’s a long way to go, I probably entertained the fantasy of affecting a lot of people, like “Wow, this is so amazing, I want to affect lots of people.” But as I’ve matured a bit, I realized that there’s nothing grander about simply affecting every single person that I meet, with as much love as I can. There’s nothing grander about doing it for a stadium full of people. There’s nothing more influential for humanity about that, I don’t think.

Rick: Yeah, well we’re all playing our roles, you know, and you actually have chosen a role in which you have affected a lot of people. I mean, doing your show and getting it out there has reached a lot of people, so good on you. But again, it’s a matter of the role we’re cut out to play. And also, there’s a question of what really produces an effect. I mean, it’s said in the mystical tradition sometimes that some of the people who are sitting in caves or monasteries are having a much bigger effect on the world than those who are out on the world stage doing something very publicly, because on a subtle level they’re propagating an influence which is influencing everyone.

Trip: So I guess I should mention, the book is “Conversations with Avant-Garde Sages.” It’s free and it can be downloaded from the Wizard LLC website. Anybody can download it anytime they want. What’s nice about it is it’s not like you have to read the whole thing in one sitting, you just pick anyone you want to read. They’re about ten pages long, and so you can just pick and choose and read as many as you like, so that’s a good thing. You know, I wanted to show you …

Rick: I’ll be linking to that too, by the way, from my website, I’ll link to your book and I’ll link to your website, where people can also download the audios of these things, right?

Trip: Uh-huh.

Rick: Yeah, okay, so go ahead.

Trip: They also can go to the person’s website and get all their stuff too. So it’s funny, I had this gathering on my property and I want my place to be a gathering place where people operate from the presumption of their non-physical reality and their divinity, rather than the presumption of being a separate individual, and that people engage each other with that intention, that it’s God seeing God everywhere, God seeing God. We had such a fabulous time, and there was a fire circle, and the drummers were magnificent, and I just had an idea that I’ll mention to you, I thought it would be really fun.

I was thinking of developing, maybe even developing a little performance piece, for example, where you would do kind of a motivational speaking thing, where you get people really excited about what’s going on here, and then you bring in, musicians would come in and they would sort of do their thing for a little while, and then you would come back in kind of as a motivational speaker, and then people might get up from the audience and they would participate, or whatever, and kind of create this traveling roadshow, almost kind of like a non-dual revival, or whatever.

Rick: I would do this, or you would do this?

Trip: So this is my little fantasy, just another way to do this, other than interviews or books.

Rick: Yeah, that sounds like fun, you could go around the country and hit all the hot spots, you know? I mean, you’re in one of them, and then there’s Fairfield, Iowa, and there’s Boulder, Colorado, and there’s Santa Fe, New Mexico, and there’s up and down the West Coast, all sorts of places.

Trip: Yeah, and what’s impressive is how together, so many just ordinary folks, I mean the people that are going to the Adyashanti retreat, or the people that, it’s just amazing how talented people are, ordinary people. They get up and they’re able to play the flute beautifully out of nowhere, or they can do poetry, or they can do fire dancing, and each one is a beautiful expression. And it would be cool to pull together a way for people to really participate and to express this non-dual reality in a joyful way, but have it be as a kind of a structured performance, where people are brought in and do things. So I don’t know, it’s just, part of the reason we wound up the show was to see what else wants to come in, you know? What new thing wants to happen?

Rick: Cool, well, keep working on it, we’ll see what you do. There’s another little pet peeve that I’ve had, and let me see if you’ve picked up on it, which is a tendency people have to confuse levels, I would put it. There’s a guy I interviewed named Timothy Conway, who wrote a very nice article about this, but there are, obviously from a physicist’s perspective, there are many levels to creation, and they’re all dissimilar but simultaneously true, and different laws apply on each one that don’t necessarily apply on the others. And so with consciousness, or our subjective perspective, there’s a level on which we sense or experience that nothing is happening and nothing ever happened, you know, it’s a field of pure silence.

And there’s a sense, there’s a level on which we see that things are happening, and yet they’re perfect just as they are, as you’ve said earlier in this interview, everything is divinely ordained and wouldn’t change it a whit. And then there’s a level on which things really suck and they should be changed, you know, the starving children and child prostitution and all kinds of things that should be dealt with and changed. And there’s a tendency for sometimes people to lock into one or another of those perspectives and to say, “Oh, you know, the starving children, it’s not really happening, nothing ever happened,” or “The starving children, it’s perfect just as it is, you know, it’s the way God wants it,” or something. And what I would say is a more mature perspective, we were talking about maturity earlier, would incorporate all those levels and not pit them against one another.

You know, if one is called to do so, one could dive into saving the children while at the very same time having the perspective that everything is perfect, while at the very same time having the perspective that nothing ever happened. You incorporate all those levels of experience simultaneously. So I call that a pet peeve because among even people I’ve interviewed, I’ve seen a tendency for people to lock into one or another of those levels to the exclusion or to the refutation of the others.

Trip: Mm-hmm, I agree, and so I think what’s critical is the assumption that you make about who you are. So if, for example, if you have made an assumption about yourself that you are a separate person, then as you go about being a do-gooder in the world, let’s say, saving children or whatever, you’re going to build up a lot more karma because you’re basically kind of in a contractual arrangement with your ego. The wanting to do good is coming out of wanting to be a good guy who maybe gets loved more or receives the affirmation of others, or lives up to his responsibility as a Christian, and it’s going to be fraught with doership.

Rick: Right, or wants to convert the children to Christianity, or has some ulterior motive, or something.

Trip: Yeah, yeah, but there could be anything, and then it could get really weird. And then that sense of doership kind of shrinking you down into this ultimately reactive, separate human being who’s living in fear. Or you can come from the assumption of the fact that you are actually – I like to say divinity itself, I notice most of the teachers don’t, but I say divinity itself, you’re an everlasting reality, you are awareness itself. And yes, okay, so the mortal body is happening, the children are starving, but when you jump in there from that perspective, you’re jumping in from a place of non-reactivity, and a beautiful, clear space, so that you’re not building up karma as you go about saving children. You’re not doing it for egoic reasons or whatever.

So I think that that’s really the critical aspect, is that whatever level you’re choosing to jump into or be called to, that it always comes from an understanding of the truth of who you are.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think it added to the point I just made, it was definitely something I really had left out, which is that if you do have this broader perspective which incorporates all the levels, then you’re actually going to be better at, not only in terms of not accruing your own karma, but you’re actually going to be more effective in feeding the children, because there will be a less egocentric orientation to the process.

Trip: Yes, for example, if you’re feeding the children and you’re doing it from an egoic outlook, and then some other organization wants to come onto your turf and feed the children too, you get into an argument with it, because, “Hey, these are my kids that I’m saving.”

Rick: Yeah, let’s say you’re a fundamentalist Christian and you’re trying to feed the children, and some Hindu group wants to come in and feed some too, then it’s the devil, we don’t want you in here.

Trip: There you go, you like that?

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. So what we’re really talking about here, and obviously we’re using feeding children as just a case in point, there could be a million different examples of it, but what we’re really talking about is a kind of a mature spirituality which incorporates all levels of life and which doesn’t exclude any, and which incorporates within itself a lot of paradoxes and is comfortable with that, doesn’t feel the need to sort of reject everything in order to hold on to a particular thing. And I think it’s a good notion to kind of put out there, because there are numerous violations of it in contemporary spirituality, which we might do well to grow beyond.

Trip: Yeah, and I think that that is kind of, if you will, where spirituality, mature spirituality, has evolved to, whereas earlier there was a bit of a focus on the absolute, on the nothing, on the void, of dismissing the temptations of the flesh, of the world, of going inside and leaving the world out there, and going into your cave, and working through all of these temptations you might have, and all of that stuff. And now I think people realize that where the rubber meets the road is out there in the chaos, it’s being really present to the grocery store checkout person or the poop, constantly basically being present to whatever is going on, and that’s absolutely where the rubber meets the road. You know, any moment is as spiritual as any other moment. Everyone is God, everyone you meet is a godsend, and then living that.

Rick: Yeah, great. So my nature is such that I could continue to think up things for us to talk about, but we’re sort of rehashing a little bit at this point. Is there anything that we’ve really left out that we might want to cover? I have no time constraints, we can take all the time we want, but we don’t want to bore people. But is there anything you feel like, close to your heart, that we haven’t brought up?

Trip: Well, not really. I mean, I want to say that I’m terribly grateful for all the folks that came on my program, as you must be as well. I learned so much from all of them, and I’m terribly grateful to John, my mentor and friend, and also he did all the work on the book, he did everything. He edited all the work, it was hundreds and hundreds of hours. And more than anything, I’m just so pleased and blown away that the existential bummer of existence that I thought was inescapable, except via death, okay? I was convinced that the only …

Rick: Life sucks, then you die, you know?

Trip: Yeah, I was convinced, up until five years ago, I was convinced that life was an existential bummer, and that the solution was death, and that it got murky after that, and I could recognize a belief system there that I really didn’t have a lot of confidence in, about an afterlife and a heaven, because it just wasn’t adding up, and because there was a burning hell and all of that. But my gosh, what relief, how fantastic that you actually can transcend the human condition. It can be heaven on earth, here and now, and I do feel that way about my life. I feel this is heaven on earth, here and now, and I just want to share with anyone listening that it’s totally within their reach to experience this, and that all it requires is a yearning heart for truth. That’s all that’s required, you know? And it absolutely will come to pass, and you can count on it, and rejoice.

Rick: That’s great, and it’s very well put, and it actually speaks to another little pet peeve of mine, which is this saying of “give up the search,” you know, that is often uttered very prematurely and indiscriminately. You know, if you have a yearning heart, that’s a sense of search, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Honor that, you know, flow with that, go with that, and see where it leads you. To my ears, “give up the search” almost sounds like, you know, just kind of sit on your haunches and wait for something to happen. But “seek and you shall find,” as Jesus put it. And of course there is a time and a place for giving up the search when you’ve actually found, but if you haven’t yet, then read books, see teachers, do some practice, listen to whatever floats your boat, and it will bear fruit.

Trip: I agree, and I’m convinced that if your heart is true and there’s a deep yearning in it for peace and for truth, and if you get yourself to a teacher who is a good teacher and there’s plenty of information out there about what makes a good teacher, and you just spend company with this teacher, and I think the hallmark of a great teacher is that they don’t want anything from you, okay? They just absolutely enjoy sharing with you, and if they’re a great teacher, they will be completely excited about your earnestness, okay? They will be overjoyed that you, this earnest person, has come to them, because there just aren’t that many people that are that earnest, okay?

And if you go to a great teacher like that, and you’re completely earnest, and you have a yearning heart, it’s absolutely inevitable that you will come into your own sense of peace and that you will absolutely find the heaven on earth that is here and now. It’s inevitable, you know?

Rick: Yeah, that’s really great, and I hope a lot of people hear that and that it encourages and inspires them. There’s no reason to be despondent, and there’s no reason to feel like it could never happen to me, or that I’m somehow flawed and incapable, you know, I’m going to just be a miserable person all my life. It’s like we’re all multi-millionaires, and a lot of us just haven’t discovered that we have that bank account that our great uncle left us, but it’s there, and it’s just a matter of making the connection and going to the bank and cashing in on it. As you say, heaven on earth is here, there’s a vast reservoir of fulfillment and joy and wisdom and bliss right in your own heart, there for the dipping into.

Trip and I concluded the interview, and then we couldn’t help but keep talking, and I realized at a certain point that we were saying a lot of good stuff that should be added. So if you see a kind of a sharp edit that seems out of context, that’s why, and the conversation that you are about to hear will be what we did after we had finished.

Trip: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Kind of a cognac at the end of the meal or something.

Trip: It’s possible that this is just a rock floating through space, there’s nothing divine, that there is no profound, absolute awareness that is who we truly are, and that it’s a cruel, hard, cold rock in space, and it sucks.

Rick: It’s possible, it’s certainly not my perception nor yours, but we can hold it as a possibility.

Trip: I agree, it cannot be disproven. And then there’s the other possibility that we hold is true. The only reason that I’m practicing, the only reason that I’m holding with great conviction what we now hold to be true is because when I hold that with conviction, happiness manifests in my life with abundance. Okay?

Rick: Yeah.

Trip: Alright, so I actually don’t know which is true, but on a practical level I’m happier when I embrace one outlook as opposed to another. When I, I don’t know whether Adyashanti or Ramana Maharshi or Gangaji has achieved some sort of deeper level of realization than I have, okay? I find that when I make the assumption that no, in fact, they have not, there’s not a bit of daylight between us, and that the realization that I’m enjoying is that, I find that incredibly liberating and I find it really quiets down the egoic outlook and puts me in a beautiful space of feeling that I, my God, Trip Overholt, have come home to this beautiful place and it can’t be improved upon, and no one else out there is enjoying some better space. This is absolutely beautiful, and it’s as beautiful as it gets. And I think that that outlook is, if your happiness pragmatism is the way to go.

Now it could be delusional, but nobody can know the answer to that question, so I say go for it, that’s my own view.

Rick: Okay, well I have a couple of things to say to that. One is, I think you might be putting the cart before the horse, because it’s like a person could say, “Well I have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, therefore my life is full of joy. I have adopted this conviction and it’s made me joyful.” So maybe they’re right when they say that, and maybe adopting a particular concept, you know, “Okay, the world is full of joy and divinity,” can actually make it real, as opposed to saying the world is a dead rock floating through space, which could be rather depressing. But I kind of think, the reason I say cart before the horse is I think that it tends to be the experience which engenders the conviction. In other words, if you’re experiencing life in its magic quality, in its beautiful beingness, divine quality, then sure, that’s what you believe.

You know, if you’re depressed and miserable and everything seems flat and material and empty, then you’re going to have that interpretation of it. And you had an experiential realization quite unexpectedly, which shifted your worldview. You know, you picked up that Ramana Maharshi book, read a few passages, and all of a sudden you had tears streaming down your face and your experience changed, and it wasn’t a big stretch for you after that to believe the sorts of things you’ve been saying. As far as this thing about being exactly the same as any great master who ever walked the earth, I’m okay with that. It’s not the way I tend to do it. I tend to like to think of myself as a beginner, even though I’ve been a spiritual practitioner for four and a half decades.

But I don’t have a problem with hierarchies and looking up to or respecting people whom I feel are farther along than I am in the whole big-picture scale of evolution, spiritual evolution. It doesn’t detract from my joy or my fulfillment or anything else, but I somehow feel it’s actually more, for me, more honest and realistic an understanding of things, because I do feel that there are levels of spiritual development, just as there are grades in school. The third grader might be studying a little bit of arithmetic or something like that. That doesn’t mean that he’s a postgraduate math student. There are … you know what I mean? I’m just …

Trip: I do know what you mean, but here’s what I want to say to you. When Jesus Christ was walking around teaching and telling ordinary folk that there was no difference between Him and them, and that they had this great opportunity at hand to be loved by loving one another, and the whole teaching, right? If there is any validity to this thing that we’re so interested in, that we want to promote to the world, if there’s any validity to it all, it cannot only be true at the end of some multi-decade effort, spiritual effort or whatever; it has to be true with a reasonable amount of spiritual effort.

And Jesus Christ didn’t go to these people and say, “You know, if you work at this for a really long time, like 30 or 40 years, you can begin to come into the kind of space that I’m enjoying right now.” No, he said, basically, “It’s here for the taking right here and now.” And I say that you are a wise man, right here, right now, that you are in the very cutting edge of wisdom embodied, and that you should go ahead and, I say, drop any idea that you haven’t completely arrived.

Rick: Well, you know, Jesus Christ said, “Whatsoever great things I do, even greater things shall you do,” because I go unto my Father and so on. But He was the one walking on water and multiplying the loaves and fishes; it wasn’t His disciples. He had a certain spiritual maturity and authority and potency which allowed Him to do those things if those things really happened. So it’s again the “both/and” thing. While it’s absolutely true that we’re all the same thing and that on some level there’s absolutely no difference, it’s simultaneously true that there are degrees of mastery of that, of not only the subjective realization of it, but the ability to translate that into the world. Go ahead.

Trip: Jesus said, and Ramana said, that the miracles that apparently happen around great sages like Christ are not produced by the sage; they are the by-product of the immense faith that is brought to the sage by the ordinary individual in the presence of the miracle. And so any miracle that you’ve experienced around some great sage or you’ve read about was only possible because of the faith that you brought. You are the faith and you are the miracle. There’s no separation between the miracle and you, and therefore you are that.

Rick: Yeah, no, it’s true. I’m always going to play devil’s advocate on this point, or rather, sort of like contrarian, because it’s a multifaceted truth thing, you keep coming back to it. How can I say it any differently than I’ve said it? And I’m not trying to convince you of anything or change your mind, because I feel like your perspective is perfectly valid. Like I said in the very beginning of the interview, if it’s true that there are like 16 kalas, which are kind of a rough road map of degrees of evolution, and that human beings only reach the eighth and there are actually others above that, then being at all of those kalas, all of those levels, it’s only pure being. The rock is only pure being. Does the rock realize that? Well, not so much. The dog is only pure being. Does the dog realize that? Well, more than the rock.

The average human being, the saint, there’s degrees of realization in the relative, insofar as consciousness or awareness is manifest in the relative, is experienced through relative forms such as our bodies, our minds, there are degrees of experience, degrees of realization. As far as consciousness itself is concerned, no levels, no gradations, no degrees, it’s all one amorphous wholeness with no differentiation within it, and that’s ultimately the reality. Any compromise with relativity is just a compromise with unreality for the sake of living, for the sake of discussion, for the sake of understanding. But all of that is just really a story that we tell ourselves, and in the final analysis, there’s only one of us and nothing is happening.

Trip: Well, I get your point. I’m going to make my final counterpoint, okay?

Rick: Okay, okay. Maybe it will be final, maybe I’ll make you do another one.

Trip: My final counterpoint is, as long as there is a permanency to the quality of your attention being at least partially placed on attention itself, like as you go through the day, there’s a portion of your attention that’s remaining on your attention rather than on the objects and sensations and thoughts that are going through you, which is true for me and I think it’s true for you, as long as that’s the case. Really the primary difference between a Nisargadatta, let’s say, and you, in my opinion, is the strength of conviction, both internal and external, with which that’s expressed.

Nisargadatta was very intense about saying, “I am the beyond, I am the beyond.” I look at these sages a lot of times and I say, “You know, the only difference between myself and some of these sages is their willingness to get up there and say, ‘I am absolutely the rock of God, the beyond.'” They say it with a conviction that makes it easier for other people to believe. That’s one aspect of it. The second aspect is that some of them are extremely gifted in the way they communicate this reality. But I would say that the 99th percentile important aspect of it is whether or not there’s a kind of permanency, a constancy, in where the attention enjoys being. And if it enjoys being on itself, then you are a realized human being, and I say you should grant yourself that fact.

And I think in the granting of that fact to yourself, you become a much more potent mirror in the community, because that conviction is palpable and it’s contagious.

Rick: Oh, that’s true, and I think doubt can be a dry rot that kind of undermines one’s realization. But I also think that honesty is important. And if I go out on the street and say, “I am the President of the United States,” and if I shout that from the rooftops, it doesn’t make me the President of the United States. Maybe that’s not a fair analogy because we’re talking about something that we all actually are, and we aren’t all actually the President of the United States. But there’s … Mariana Caplan, whom I interviewed, wrote a nice book called “Halfway Up the Mountain, the Error of Premature Claims to Awakening,” and she and I had an interesting discussion about that. Just proclaiming oneself as awakened doesn’t make it so.

It’s true on some level that we’re all awakened, but in the sense that we’re really talking about it, actual genuine awakening, just proclaiming it can just be bravado, can just be a lie, can just be a silly proclamation without any substance. And there are teachers, I think, who have gotten up and proclaimed themselves as awakened, who very much were not. In the Zen tradition, it’s customary to wait 10 years after awakening before going out and teaching, to just make sure it’s genuine and it’s stable and you know what you’re doing. So …

Trip: Well, Adi Da, for example, he wasn’t awakened, right?

Rick: Was not, you say?

Trip: He was awakened.

Rick: Was, yes.

Trip: Yes, he was awakened, and yet the full range of narcissistic, twisted behaviors came out of him, and I don’t need to get into them, but all manner of sexual deviancy and drug use and abuse.

Rick: Total sick stuff, yeah. I met a guy who had been with him for 17 years, and I’m not talking about Saniel Bonder, another guy, and the laundry list of stuff that Adi Da was into is just sickening.

Trip: Yeah, okay, so despite all of that, the man was awake because there was a constancy to his realization of who he was, okay? And so, you and I sit here, I sit here and you sit here, and you call Adi Da awake, okay? And yet, Adi Da was, you know, there were plenty of evenings out there where he had the cameras set up and he was making his disciples fuck each other, and he was screwing somebody’s girlfriend that came in total innocence to him as a teacher, and blah, blah, blah, right? And doing drugs and everything. And that kind of activity was going on like several nights a week or whatever. We sit here, and we sit here for a fact, and we know that man was awake, and we say that he was, and we say that he was because there was a constancy to his realization. I have a constancy to my realization, and you do as well. And I am not going to parse out Nisargadatta, Ramana, Adi Da, Adyashanti.

Matter of fact, I don’t think Gangaji’s got any bit more of a realization over me, for example. When I watch Gangaji do her thing, I see her really enjoying the adulation that she’s receiving from people, okay?

Rick: You do see her enjoying?

Trip: Yeah, I do. And that’s fine, but I also see them having an organization that brings a ton of money in as well. That’s fine too. I’m not putting it down, but I don’t think there’s anything superior about the way that realization is playing out over the beautiful one-on-one satsang and darshan that took place at my gathering here this past July 3rd, where it was just a complete meltdown, love-fest. I just don’t see it, and I guess I have a desire here that the beautiful light points of realization that are transpiring here, yourself a perfect example, I want to see more and more and more people, and I’m not saying that you’re not, but I want to see more and more people owning for themselves and acknowledging to themselves that, “Yes, I have arrived home, I have come home to this beautiful reality, that’s who I am.”

Rick: Yeah, well I can say that with confidence, and when we start getting into specifics and saying, “Well, this teacher or that teacher,” it’s difficult because it’s hard to really know what’s going on. But I think your Adi Da point illustrates a point I’ve been making all along, which is, to me, to my understanding, my way of seeing it, awakening in and of itself may not be worth a hill of beans, because it can be, in the big picture of things, very preliminary, and teachers who set themselves up as masters and yet have a whole lot of screws loose, a whole lot of blind spots that haven’t been looked at, can do a lot of harm. And perhaps, you mentioned karma earlier, are perhaps accruing karma for themselves that they’re really going to have to go through some stuff to work off.

So to my view, really mature spirituality means being a complete embodiment of all that is divine, and not a loose cannon that’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff and calling it “wisdom.” So I don’t care if somebody says they’re awakened. It’s like they could be still in kindergarten, in terms of what “could be.”

And what the wizard would say, and I agree with him, and what these guys that we’ve interviewed say, is there is no saintly model of behavior that you can point to that then validates somebody’s realization over somebody whose behavior doesn’t look saintly. The behavior of the human being is not an indicator of realization.

Trip: And what the wizard would say, and I agree with him, and what these guys that we’ve interviewed say, is there is no saintly model of behavior that you can point to that then validates somebody’s realization over somebody whose behavior doesn’t look saintly. The behavior of the human being is not an indicator of realization.

Rick: Yeah, and behavior can very much be a cultural thing. I mean, there are certain cultures in which it’s perfectly appropriate to have multiple wives, for instance, the Pandavas were all married to one woman and they in turn had other wives, those are Arjuna and his brothers, and that was Indian culture in that era. So there is that. And so it’s hard to bring any absolute yardstick to it and say, “This behavior is right, this behavior is wrong.” But I always have to do the “but.” And maybe it’s just my own bias, you know? And incidentally I am recording this, I just started the recording again because this is good stuff. But I just feel that we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There is some legitimacy to the notion of saintliness, and a person could be saintly like Mother Teresa and not realized, a person could be realized like Adi Da and not saintly, but I think the ideal package is possible, which is to have both, to have that realization and to have the culturing of the relative personality such that one really is a blessing to the world and an inspiration to the world. And again, it doesn’t have to be a famous person, it could be an unknown person, but there is something to be said for culturing all levels of life, absolute and relative, and all levels of the personality.

And like Ken Wilber, for instance, who actually was an Adi Da student and talks about lines of development, he kind of puts forth the notion that certain lines of development, say the consciousness line, the awakening line, can be very developed and other lines can be really stunted and totally undeveloped. And I believe he is an advocate of somehow bringing all the lines into their full development and not having that kind of lopsided thing like we saw with Adi Da.

Trip: Well, if I were agreeing with your perspective, and using my own life as an example, to take your argument and to agree with it, and then to use my life as an example, I was exhibiting, say, a significantly more obnoxious personality trait five years ago than I am now, and around me would agree with it. And those obnoxious personality traits were not dropped by directly looking at them and saying, “I don’t like that, I need to get rid of that,” and sort of trying to become more saintly. Those obnoxious traits dissolved of their own through a much greater loving acceptance of the entire basket of obnoxious guy called Trip that I was. And so if one wanted, really with your view on this, there is a saintly model of being to be aspired to.

The fastest way to get there is to completely, radically accept your obnoxious, complete basket of crap, and it will take care of itself, and then there will be a natural cohesion between you and people that like to be around nice people. But I don’t think that it’s true that the presence of those obnoxious behaviors invalidates your realization or makes you less realized than someone who’s more saintly.

Rick: No, I agree with that. In fact, that’s really what I was saying with my comments about the Adi Da point. I’m not saying his decadent behavior refuted the legitimacy of his realization, I’m just saying that his lines of development were very askew, very unequally progressed, and that evolution continues. There’s this force of evolution that is relentless and untiring, and if one line has been developed, it’s going to work on the other lines. And so your obnoxious tendencies that you confess to, perhaps your realization really brought some juice to the resolution of those, which you didn’t have the capacity to resolve before your realization. And that’s great. I think it’s also … and Maharishi used to use the example of watering the root of a tree rather than watering all of its individual leaves, and you’d take care of all the leaves simultaneously that way.

So in other words, get to the transcendent, get to the self-realization, and then all the personality stuff and the morality and the health and everything else is going to work itself out. That didn’t turn out to be entirely true in practice, either in his case or in all of his students’ cases. And so there could be some validity to actually giving specific attention to a particular leaf that looks withered, you know, doing some kind of therapy for this or that hang-up, or whatever. Point made.

I agree. My only point is, here you are, you’re a beautiful man, you’ve got what looks like a successful marriage, you’ve got a refinement into the fine points of reality like very few people on the planet, you’re doing this beautiful show. I mean, when the hell do you get to acknowledge to yourself that you’re living in Christ consciousness 20 more years from now, when you’re 85?

Trip: I agree. My only point is, here you are, you’re a beautiful man, you’ve got what looks like a successful marriage, you’ve got a refinement into the fine points of reality like very few people on the planet, you’re doing this beautiful show. I mean, when the hell do you get to acknowledge to yourself that you’re living in Christ consciousness 20 more years from now, when you’re 85?

Rick: No, I can say that now, and I can also say that as things tend to be progressing, 20 years from now I’ll even be in a better state. You know, it’s like I don’t have a problem with that, because it’s my experience, for God’s sake! It’s like it would be unrealistic of me to say otherwise, because, hey, I’m in a much better place now than I was 10 years ago, or 10 years before that, or 10 years before that. And even though the essence of it is exactly the same now as it was when I was 4 years old, and I can recognize that, the appreciation of that essence and the manifestation of that essence continues to evolve. That’s my experience.

Trip: Okay, yeah.

Rick: And I’ll bet it’s yours, I’ll bet it’s yours. I’ll bet you 10 years from now, if you listen to this interview, you’ll think, “Well, I’ll be darned, there’s been a lot of growth in the last 10 years, and things are even groovier now than they were then, even though then was just fine, completely perfect as it was, it’s even perfecter now!”

Trip: It’s true. You know what, it’s like both you and I are like a bit of yogurt culture right now. Our yogurt culture may get stronger, it may become an award-winning yogurt culture, but right now, my yogurt culture has been dropped into the milk of a few young people out here, I mean, in the world, and I will say, the absence of Trip, needing to fill the egoic identity called “Trip” with other people’s affirmations, not of who I am truly, but of Trip, you know, of my skill sets and whatever, you know? The dissolution of Trip has taken place sufficiently, even at this early stage, which I recognize early on in this ever-going process to which you speak, such that I absolutely have been an instrument of awakening and of profound shift in some people out there, right?

Rick: Yeah, me too.

Trip: You have too. Well, what the hell, man? I mean, you’ve already been an instrument of freaking incredible service out there. I just want you to acknowledge it.

Rick: Oh yeah, somehow I do give people the impression that I am still this desperate seeker who hasn’t accepted my own realization, and so maybe it’s just the way I ask questions, because I’m asking questions which I kind of know the answers to, but I want to ask them because I like to see what people say. And also I have this theme that I keep harping on of, “But wait, there’s more!” So that could seem very seekerish, you know, and very unfulfilled, but it’s not that. There’s a foundation of fulfillment which is unshakable, which I fully acknowledge, a foundation of realization and so on. But I just always … On the other hand, it’s like a fiddler on the roof. Remember his daughter would come to him and say she wanted something, and he would say, “Absolutely not!” And he would say, “On the other hand, there’s just always that … it’s the way I think.”

Trip: Well, there’s two kinds of humility that can take place. There’s a humility that can be expressed where somebody is feeling the responsibility for sharing with others that, “Gee, I’m just an ordinary guy called Trip, you know, I’m not God’s gift to humanity, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.” And to me, giving much attention to that kind of humility or expressing that kind of humility is a kind of false humility, because what it really is is a kind of egoic backdoor substitute for the deeper humility of actually witnessing the Divine in every single person and thing that comes into my field of experience. And so there’s no need, nor do I think it’s true of, say, you, that you’re a flawed human being, you’re an absolutely perfect human being, and there’s no need to sort of emotionally give any added weight to the fact that you’re a flawed human being who’s in a spiritual process.

Everyone, Ramana Maharshi was a flawed human being who was in a spiritual process. You’re a flawed human being who’s in a spiritual process. As long as you’re recognizing the Divinity of everyone that you come in contact with, then you’re being truly humble, I mean, you’re being totally humble. And then I think that that self-declaration should be made that you are that, you have arrived.

Rick: Absolutely. It’s like I said before with the three levels, when we were talking about the starving children. On a certain level, I’m a flawed human being, I’m not perfect by a long shot in many ways. On another level, I’m perfect, absolutely Divine, just as I am. On another level, I don’t even exist, there is no me, there is no Rick, there is no universe, it’s absolute unmanifest potentiality that never arose. And all those things are simultaneously true, and I just tend not to lock into any one of them, and I can jump from one to the other. So I can say them all in a single paragraph, and I just did.

Trip: Well okay, and I get it, so we beat this point, but I have locked into a perspective. I’ve locked into the one that is not a shred of daylight between Ramana Maharshi and myself, that I totally get it. I am a realized human being, I am Divine, and everyone and everything that I come in contact with is Divine, and I am locked onto that, because being locked onto that has produced an incredibly rapid rate of spiritual maturation.

Rick: Well that’s great.

Trip: And so I’m recommending, that’s why I’m so forcefully recommending it, because I think that anyone that adopts that perspective will find the same accelerated rate of spiritual maturation. You know what I’m saying? So yeah.

Rick: Yeah, that’s all right. Would you recommend that for all fields of endeavor, or just spirituality? Would you say that there’s not a shred of daylight between you and Andre Agassi or Roger Federer, or is there big gulf there in terms of tennis ability?

Trip: Well it would be like, it’s kind of like … which is a more relevant fact, that the dream … if I’m having a dream, and there’s a character in my dream called Andre Agassi who can beat the crap out of a tennis ball, and then I’m dreaming up this other character called Trip, and Agassi has invited me to play with him, and he’s like whipping these shots past me and everything, which is the more salient fact that that guy can play tennis better than me, or the fact that I’m the dreamer who’s dreamed up all the characters. So the utter absolute equality of being the dreamer is the only fact that has any real weight, and these relative facts that a guy can play tennis better or whatever, to me are not facts that I care to give much attention to anymore, because they’re not going to bring me peace.

Rick: Yeah, and I agree with that. And it’s like I said before when I brought up the different levels, ultimately the deepest level of consideration is the truest, and the others are just sort of concessions to relativity for the sake of discussion, for the sake of living, and so on. They’re not ultimately true. We can’t afford to dismiss them. We don’t ignore the starving children by saying that they don’t really exist and nothing needs to happen and everything is perfect. We feed them. But ultimately they’re not true. There are no starving children.

Trip: Right, well the second book that I read after I was turned on was “I Am That” by Nisargadatta, and he said what happened was that his teacher told him, “You are that,” right?

Rick: Yeah, good point, and he just hung on to that for dear life, like a pit bull.

Trip: He said, “I believed my teacher.” He said, “This is the only thing you have to do, is you have to believe that you are that,” and he said, “I believed it with every fiber of my body, and I gave my attention to that truth for three years,” right? And finally it became absolutely true of who I was.

Rick: Very good, a point well taken. I think you’ve scored a … you finally got one past Roger Federer there. No, that’s a great substantiation of the point you’ve been making, and I’ll swing over to your side of the fence here for a bit and acknowledge the value in having that conviction that you’ve just been saying. I don’t think it refutes the things I’ve been saying, but it definitely gives importance to the emphasis that you’ve made.

Trip: I want to thank you for having me on your show, and I want to say that you’re my favorite interviewer.

Rick: Oh no, you’re my favorite interviewer!

Trip: You’re my go-to guy whenever I was … like there were some books that I didn’t read, you know, and I’d go to your program and I’d download your …

Rick: Yeah, so I was the CliffsNotes.

You were the CliffsNotes. And I love what you do, and I love that you’re passionate about it, and people love being on your show. It’s all good, brother, and it’s been wonderful being with you and sharing with you, and I thank you.

Trip: You were the CliffsNotes. And I love what you do, and I love that you’re passionate about it, and people love being on your show. It’s all good, brother, and it’s been wonderful being with you and sharing with you, and I thank you.

Rick: Well, thank you, Trip. Let me make a couple of concluding remarks. As most people are aware by this time, I’ve been conducting an interview with Trip Overholt, who has his own interview show, although he isn’t doing it anymore, but he may resume it at some point. But all the interviews are still there on the internet, and I’ll be linking to them so you can find them. He also has a book which puts in print some of the highlights of those interviews, about 32 different ones, and I’ll be linking to that. If you have enjoyed this interview and would like to be notified of others, you can either subscribe to the YouTube channel or you can sign up for the little email notification thing on my site. I think there’s a little tag that says, “Subscribe to our newsletter,” or something, and the only emails you’ll ever get are just once a week when I post a new interview, you’ll be notified.

This also exists as a podcast, so you can listen in audio. I was just talking to a woman the other day that recognized me at that event I went to and said, “Hey, you’re the Buddha at the gas pump, you’re Rick, right?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “I clean houses for a living, and I just have my iPod and I listen to your interviews all day long while I’m cleaning houses.” So that was heartwarming. Next week I will be interviewing Andrew Cohen, who has an interesting take on some of the things Trip and I have been talking about, about the complete fulfillment of being and yet the urgency of becoming in terms of an evolutionary imperative toward deeper and newer forms of expression of evolution. He obviously expresses it a lot better than I do, so we’ll be talking about that with him. So I hope you’ll listen, and thank you for watching, and we’ll see you next week.

Trip: Thank you, brother.

Rick: Thanks, Trip. [Music] [End of Audio]