Trip Overholt Transcript

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Trip Overholt Interview

Rick Archer: 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 seems like they would we’re in a town where everybody meditates and all this spiritual stuff going on, just like yours, you’re in Boone, North Carolina area and you and, yeah, and but 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 us do this as a video. And but they didn’t have their act together. So eventually, I figured out how to do it on Skype, and started doing that. Now. 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, let’s hear more about yours.

Trip Overholt: 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’d like to put up the videos up on the, on their websites, right on 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 Archer: What made you decide to stop doing it?

Trip Overholt: We just felt like we had done it, we’d done it for three years, and we interviewed about 80 people, and we decided it would be 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.

Rick Archer: 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 your doing the show that you did. Is that true? And could you talk about that whole experience?

Trip Overholt: Yeah, I wouldn’t have had any interest in doing the show if I hadn’t had that experience, which happened back in 2006. And 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, you know, 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 I couldn’t get it at all. But I had had spiritual experiences on psilocybin mushrooms on numerous times. And I’d been feeling just absolutely absorbed into love on those during those times. But then, you know, 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 wizards were call my friend, John, the wizard was walking through his bedroom, and there was a picture book of Ramana Maharshi is in fact, it’s this book right here. I just see here. Can you see that? Yeah, I’ve seen Okay, nice. And it, the type on the pages was really large. You see that? Right? 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 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. There was actually everywhere was sentience was actually infinite. And then I was in fact that field of awareness. And that what was remarkable about that was it It happened when I was just straight and you know, walking around. And number two that it’s stuck. Yeah. That that profound all over that reality never left. It hasn’t left. Since then,

Rick Archer: so does it leave when you go to sleep?

Trip Overholt: Well, when I say never leave, I mean, I’ve had stretches of complete re immersion in 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. Yeah. And that, and you know what I’m talking about?

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

Trip Overholt: Exactly. So, you know, I almost inevitably there’s a heated up opportunity for heated experience. I’ll go, am I going to indulge myself in this? Yeah. And sometimes I do. Uh, huh.

Rick Archer: Sure. Yeah. I suppose it depends on the, you know, I don’t know. Personally, I usually find that such things are counterproductive. And I think, you know, do I really want to create all this emotional trauma for myself and others by getting into this? Or would a bit better to just hold my tongue and wait five minutes, and the whole thing will be over? There’s that sort of discrimination to be able to not completely go with any whim that pops into your head?

Trip Overholt: Yeah, well, I was, my persona is one of a kind of a cage rattler. 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 and might be good for the person, it’s sure enough, sometimes people do need to be need a little dose of anger, because they’re accustomed to not really listening up to anything other than that, you know, sometimes, so.

Rick Archer: And just about any sort of Guru you’re worried about who is reputed to be extremely enlightened, you know, there are stories about them getting really angry with, you know, 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. Yeah. 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 Overholt: Yeah, we went with them down. John made the selection process. John’s 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 that we picked would be the ones that most epitomize 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’re usually unknowns. So often, they were interested in being on the program and agreed to come on the program. They just they were usually very fresh and authentic and simple, loving people with just big hearts, and it’s hard to kind of completely put them all in one basket. But sure, you can kind of tell when you meet one.

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

Trip Overholt: Yeah, now that I’m, you know, kind of 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, quote teacher and most of them didn’t eat did not want to be called teacher either. They’re gonna call them most of them. Some of them were okay with teacher but most of them didn’t want to be teacher either. You know, they’re looking out with eyes of utter utter equality. They’re see they’re seeing their god seeing God. They’re not on some teacher platform looking at a student.

Rick Archer: Yeah. But you know that mean appearances can be deceptive I just spent five days with Amma the hugging saint and she’s definitely up on a platform and people revere her and she has worldwide fame and massive following and all that first thing she does when she comes into the hall every time is bow our head to the floor. And about everybody in the audience. You know, there’s, there’s a, and I’ve heard of many times describe your own experience as being, like you said, God saying, God, there’s just seeing one oneness in everything, seeing every everyone has that presence, or God, awareness, or whatever you want to call it. No, but roles are played, obviously. And she’s playing that sort of role and has certain qualifications for playing it. So I’m just not. Personally, I’m not anti Guru, I think a lot of gurus have done a lot of things to Solly the term. But that can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater there, there are some who kind of do justice to the term.

Trip Overholt: There, there are people who are okay, in my opinion, an excellent teacher, or Guru is one who never lets go by the opportunity to redirect the adulated attention of the so called student back onto themselves or on 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 Archer: Yeah. And, and, you know, it’s like, I’m 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 there, 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 that anybody else doesn’t have, you know, but at the same time, they do. So on relative levels, it’s like, let me take an example. The 15 watt light bulb, little nightlight, and the powerful search light that, you know, Warren ships off the rocks, they’re both drawing there. So they both have the same fundamental source, the electrical field, and they’re both, you know, plugged in presuming those powerful search lights are 120 volts, I don’t know if they are, but they’re, they’re both, you know, you know, they both if they could, if they could go deep enough, they would both say, Yes, I am, this electrical field is 120 volts 60 cycle per second field, that’s what I am essentially, but from the outside, so to speak, in terms of their individual structure and their and the function which that structure is capable of performing their vast differences. And both so both are true at the same time. So you know, somebody who’s psychotic in a mental hospital or something, they essentially are that same being, you know, self that Ramana Maharshi is or was, whatever, however, we want to put it, but they’re 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 theirs. They’re serving their own function, if you want to say it this way. They’re God experiencing psychosis, whereas Rahman Ohashi was God, you know, as a manifestation, it’s with enough refinement to experience himself as God as rather than this confused, miserable person.

Trip Overholt: Yeah, the thing I sometimes wonder about is, and I it’s just, you know, useless speculation. It has no no purpose. But I sometimes wonder about the teacher or the student that’s interested in the situation where there’s a kind of a talking head at the front of the room who’s giving excellent information. Versus a situation where there’s no talking head at the front of the room. But everyone is engaging everyone as an equal. And there’s just continuous affirmation and acknowledgement of each other as divinity itself playing itself out. And so I’m the wizard and I we have gatherings that we do and I just had a gathering in my house on July 3, and it was it was off the charts because it was just a total love fest where everyone was engaging Every one like that, you know, there was no, there was no real need or benefit of having a kind of focused attention on a centralized teacher, the thing was playing itself out and kind of, you know, the 3d environment right there. And yeah, people, people will have profoundly experience had fantastic experience. So I prefer that over kind of a classroom setting of a teacher or anything like that, where there’s a person at the head of a mob or a big gathering, I prefer just people interacting. That’s just a personal

Rick Archer: preference. Yeah, no, that’s cool. And it has its place, and it is a preference. I mean, if 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, wouldn’t 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 the right then and there, the so the head of the room figure dynamic would have set itself up. But that that wasn’t going on. It was just a bunch of your phone, your peers all gathered together, having, you know, a mutually enlightening, enlivening experience.

Trip Overholt: I think that’s true. But I also think that we live in different times, and we don’t really know what Ramana Maharshi would look like in in today’s times, would he be looked over? Would he be given the respect I, 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’re, if you’re a local person and your local friends are coming, it’s 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 sharing has to take place amidst all of that noise and preconditioned ideas about who you are and everything. And so I don’t know. I look at some of the guys that I think are fantastic sages. Like I’ve interviewed Scott killaby, like you have and, you know, and Rupert, and I’m looking at my list of people here, Francis Lucille or whatever. I’m not, I’m not, I don’t know that they ever necessarily received the kind of kind of really focused kind of respect that you might fantasize that someone like Rama might receive, but they’re completely established His presence. So I think it’s beautiful.

Rick Archer: I would accept that with a proviso with sort of a, with by putting the word completely in italics. Yeah, because I think there are degrees and degrees and degrees and degrees of establishment or embodiment of presence. And I, you know, if you said, if we kind of, like take the Vedic tradition as any sort of authority, they they outline at one point 16 collars, 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 set to occupy maybe four through seven or four through eight. So you know, Ramana, Maharshi, would have been an eight maybe. And then they’re eight above that, which would all sorts of higher beings that said to exist in the universe, we could take that as, you know, theory or speculation, but personally, I kind of resonate with that notion that there’s never any, there’s never any change and presence itself, it’s like the electricity, it is what it is. But there’s, you know, you can go from a 15 watt bulb to a 25, to a 50, to 100 to 1000, there’s no end to the upgrades. The degree to which presence can be lived and, and with those upgrades, it’s not only a matter of, you know, more and more and more, seems silly to say more presence, but really the sort of degree of clarity and degree of transmission of that through one’s mind body structure, but also, you know, all sorts of subtle faculties begin to develop as that presence permeates more and more into one’s makeup. And, you know, you see that in the greatest masters, you know, you read Yogananda his book or various things, there’s all sorts of capabilities which, you know, person might say, Oh, I don’t care about that. All I care about is presence. But nonetheless, that’s the that’s the direction that it goes and as further developmental stages are reached.

Trip Overholt: I totally agree with you. But I think one danger with the The truth of the fact that there are these very well developed, say, possibilities for presence as an brahmana or Nisargadatta is that people tend to focus on that as this potential end game for themselves, rather than realizing the tremendous benefits that come from just a thimble full of enlightenment, if you will. And so for example, with my with myself, for example, I don’t, I don’t begin to even try to compare myself with a Ramana Maharshi. But I do, I am able to compare with myself with who I was, like, 10 years ago. Yeah, and, and there is a, I have a, there’s a radiant joy that 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, I used to look in, 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, it was maybe a fear of being loved. On some degree, there was a kind of a shame, kind of a shame mixed. And I think there’s a, 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’re not able to really fully love others. And so when these opportunities used to come up, where there’d be a moment where I’d really engage someone, I could only handle it for a few seconds or so, you know, yeah. Now I just, I just love to engage people, I love to look at them, and appreciate them. And so I perceive that there’s a tremendous amount more ripening, that’s going to happen within this form here, but I’m really pleased with what’s already occurred. So I want to, I want people to know that even a small amount of enlightenment, if you will, is going to really make a huge difference.

Rick Archer: I completely agree. And, and that’s my experience also. And it’s funny to think about how adaptable we are, as human beings, we, you know, it’s almost like I think of it sometimes as God’s mercy, that we can be comfortable to a certain extent, wherever we are, and this great in the big picture of things. Because if you were to somehow suddenly go back to where you were 10 years ago, the contrast would be agonizing, you know, you would just be writhing on the floor. You know, and yet, and yet, 10 years ago, you were okay with it. You know, you were you were living your life, you’re doing your thing You weren’t like you know, agonizing every day. But now look at the look at the contrast. Now, if you were to somehow step ahead, 10 years from now, and then get used to that, and then jump back to where you are right now, you might again be riding on the floor, you know, because of the contrast. And yet, we just we have these adapt, we have this adaptability, which enables us to kind of make life livable, wherever we’re at. And one thing I suspect is that as long as there’s, I know, 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’s evolutionary progress taking place. There’s ever increasing joy and life is is wonderful. If somehow that is thwarted or stymied. Or you know that then we begin to suffer, we begin to feel like there’s something wrong here. There’s some block I’ve got to clear through. What do you think about all that?

Trip Overholt: I agree. Okay.

Rick Archer: You better disagree with me. Yeah. So, somebody told me that I just received an email yesterday from a guy who noticed that I was going to interview you. And 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’s talking about? Is there any validity to that? Do you have a mold? What’s your mold?

Trip Overholt: I can only speculate but um, I can I can take some some stabs at it. Or one of them is okay. One of them is is that there are a lot of people in the spiritual community that are interested in all kinds of what are called spiritual phenomena. Okay, right. I don’t that the veracity

Rick Archer: of bogus stuff, kind of you mean? Well, they’re

Trip Overholt: okay. They’re interested in dimensions. They’re interested in astral projection. They’re interested in palladiums. They’re interested in dead spirits making their appearances. They’re interested in auras. Crop Circles. Also, there are people that are interested in this idea of transmission, for example, that they’re in a lineage and that they’ve 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, okay? All of those things are potentially true. But they’re completely unnecessary. And they’re really not worth a lot of attention. Because divinity is present here. And now it’s probably exponential right now. And so, there’s nothing added by those kinds of spiritual experiences. And I think they’re 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 and whatever. And or they discovered the secret. You know, what texted they found somewhere in a cave in western Pennsylvania, seriously, you know, curiously sounding very much like a reworked beta text or whatever. Right? So, um, if somebody’s coming from one of those perspectives, they’re gonna get challenged by me.

Rick Archer: Okay? No, I’m with you, I see what you’re saying. And I, again, I agree with you, those things can can be kind of interesting, you know, they can be like junk food, they’re kind of tasty, but they don’t like, provide much nutrition. And, you know, I’ve gone through phases where I’ve read about the Pleiadians, and read, you know, various things, but it’s, it’s more like, entertainment, you know, it’s not the, it’s not the meat of it. It’s not the nitty gritty.

Trip Overholt: So there was another, perhaps, in, in our, in some of the later interviews we had, they talked about the later interviews, yeah, I interviewed some folks from A Course in Miracles. The Course in Miracles, when I challenged, some of the people that were up, up to the top of the Course in Miracles, higher, whatever it is, higher Foundation, the the text in various, throughout the text, the way the text is written. It’s definitely dualistic in the way it’s written. And it talks about an externalized. God. This guy and the text is, is a, it’s capitalized, capital letters are used so that it becomes this noun. Okay. And I would, I would understand the, the goal of the text, the purpose of the text is beautiful. And it’s been wonderful. But the text itself in certain places, reads like, you know, there’s an externalized God, it’s also very Christian, sorry, Jesus oriented or whatever. And I would I challenged for example, I challenged the hierarchy on this. And when I challenged them, they said, Well, here’s what she really meant to say, you know? And I said, Well, okay, well, you have control the text, want to change it. Yeah. And then we had long conversations later, and I was okay with the fact that they didn’t feel like changing it. Okay. But I am, like I said, I got to wrap their persona in if there’s a person or a text or a teaching that gives anyone that’s exposed to it. Any idea other than the fact that they are present Definity, and that the now is an absolutely complete experience, and there’s nothing more that can be added to it, and that it’s absolutely fulfilling on directly experienced, if they’re going to, they’re going to pretend there’s anything else that you need beyond that they’re going to get challenged by me, because I know that’s not true. You know?

Rick Archer: Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that, again, with the proviso that people are at different stages in their spiritual development. And, you know, it’s like, there’s 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 could that you know, exists on earth. But for those people, it fits for now, for them. And, you know, 1020 30 years from now, for some of them, it may not fit anymore. In fact, we know people, you’ve you and I have both probably met people who, you know, 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 and in the spiritual, you know, watershed that people might find themselves in at any given time. Ultimately, they’re all leading to the ocean. But they might be quite far from the ocean in their characteristics, at any given at any point, you know what I mean? So you get the metaphor, I do

Trip Overholt: what you mean. And I also want to say that I, 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, you know, clearly, you know, 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’ve let go of that.

Rick Archer: That’s good. I mean, it’s good to remember that spiritual teachers are human beings. It’s good for them to remember, they don’t always remember it. But but at least it’s good for us to remember it, because otherwise you’re going to be disillusioned. You know, I mean, I’ve been in close association with a couple of very well known spiritual teachers. And, you know, there’s a lot of followers who feel like, oh, you know, this teacher is omniscient, they must actually be tuning into the conversation we’re having right now. And then a certain point, you know, something Hello, I’m a, for instance, there’s 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’s operating in a human body, and the human body doesn’t have that capability. And this is one woman that I had this conversation with, over the years, kept having it. And Arma 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 she was her faith was like, Really, she you know, she was so shaken by that, because I thought she was omniscient, how come she didn’t know about my breast cancer. And so because you know, she’s not omniscient, you should have gotten a scan or something. So I think if we, if we deify teachers, to whatever degree, even though they might be the very rich, mature, full embodiments of God, they’re not God in a manifest form. They’re not functioning as God, they can’t create universes through their human body, and nor can they be omniscient through their human body. And if we think they can, we’re in for a little disillusionment at some point.

Trip Overholt: Yeah, and I think there’s kind of two categories of teaching that take place just to be kind of grossly, you know, categorical. And again, I might, I might ruffle some feathers by this obvious observation I’m going to make because it’s not always true. Okay. But it seems to be 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. Yeah. Okay, those people, when they go out, and they get spirit, go then and hang out with a spiritual teacher, like I have for the last five years, with with the wizard and your wizard. In my case, the purpose of that was to clear any lingering doubts, and to affirm 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. All right, yeah. In that case, the teaching was taking place on the heels of an already accomplished fact of a kind of paradigm shift in perception. All right. Then you have most people, though, that appear not to have had that kind of a waking state transformation taking take place, and then they go and they go see as a spiritual teacher, okay. In that case, what happens is the spiritual teacher gives them this temporary charge, if you will. We’re in the presence of such clarity and such presence. They’re 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’s called help. That’s called the hell of seeking all right. And in my opinion, that kind of seeking is I don’t know if I can say it’s completely futile, but I look at I look at and it doesn’t look like a happy thing to me. It looks like kind of a waste of time. So what should they do? 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 except themselves, except their foibles, except their, their looks and their, whatever it is about them. And when you become so completely comfortable with yourself that you’re able to really love yourself, then a lot of these anxieties, and then 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’re not grinding away on all these concerns that you have. And so it’ll take care of itself, if you really accept yourself, I think, Okay,

Rick Archer: 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, you know, some teacher that passes through town and get a little shot of Shakti?

Trip Overholt: I don’t think that they have any choice. And I think that they’re going to see that teacher because that’s what it’s been written for them. You know, that’s what

Rick Archer: they feel like doing. I mean, yeah, yeah. They say, oh, boy, Francis was seals in town, I think I’ll go sit with him.

Trip Overholt: I think it’s fine. I think it’s great. Yeah,

Rick Archer: I think there’s 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 color 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’s in the vat of dye or sitting in the bright sunlight. So I don’t think there’s 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’re back at work, and everything’s crazy, and you’ve totally forgotten about it, I think on some deep level, there’s been some shift. And those those little micro shifts can kind of accumulate to the point where there’s 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 can do the same thing. You’re not seeing the teacher, but you’re, you’re going within and having this experience, and then you seem to lose it afterwards, maybe, but there’s some little change, maybe even some physiological change, and then you repeat the process. And over time, you know, you there’s some Zen teacher once said, you know, enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident prone. You kind of there’s a kind of a culturing or, you know, a gradual transformation that can bring you to the brink of a, an abiding realization.

Trip Overholt: We’re on we’re on an agree fest right now.

Rick Archer: So I don’t have any I’m not one of these people that says, oh, practices, you should just drop all practices, because they’re only going to reinforce the the sense of a practice. And it’s don’t look at it that way.

Trip Overholt: I agree with you. But I will say that there’s 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. Yeah. So they look forward to say, the weekend retreat with the great teacher. All right. Meanwhile, though, right now, walking around in your underwear, feeding the kitty and going down to the grocery store is every bit is spiritual. So that’s where the rubber meets the road. And so I asked myself, Why 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, and I do. And it’s, and I, I partly ascribe it to affirm conviction that there is nothing outside of any present moments that’s more spiritual than any other and therefore, why why waste the fuel. I mean, if you want to, it’s fine. But my point would be as a celebration, if, if you’re going out to the grocery store, and you’re finding it really tricky, and not fun, because it’s not a spiritual environment, with the kind of people you want to hang out with, then I would say, that’s where the work is. And I would say, make that your, 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’s just putting a punctuation mark on it. You know what I’m saying? Yeah, no,

Rick Archer: I know what you’re saying. I actually know two or three people who’ve had a profound awakening Well, serving time in federal prison. No, there was succumb to Diem. There’s a guy named Matt Beckley. I have a friend right now who’s in prison he did some kind of financial scam and I don’t know if he’s had a awakening here, but he but I actually been corresponding with him and and he feels like Like, you know, all is well and wisely put, and he’s really growing. And, you know, learning and in under those circumstances. So. And also if you, you know, if we really do feel that, you know, God is this omnipresent intelligence that is kind of governing the universe from within, not from afar, but from within every particle of it is present, then there’s a vast intelligence innate in every experience, whether at the grocery store picking up the dog poop, so whatever you’re doing, there, everything is brimming with that, that intelligence and and it’s, you know, there’s inherent value in every experience.

Trip Overholt: Totally. We have a couple on our show, Kenny Johnson and Brian, Brian Adler. He’s in the book on

Rick Archer: good Kenny coming up in a couple of months. He was fun. It’s great.

Trip Overholt: Yeah, so prisons a great place, you know?

Rick Archer: Yeah. Not that I would want to go there. But if the circumstances in my life were such that I ended up there. That’s probably what where I needed to be. Yeah. And could gain from it. Yeah,

Trip Overholt: I wanted to ask you some questions.

Rick Archer: Sure. And you ask good questions. By the way, I was gonna say, that’s 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, you know, I’m gonna be talking to, but I always I’m impressed by the fact that you really seem to have the time to read the books. These people. Yeah, it’s like, I’m really lucky if I have half an hour before bed to read a little bit. But and you ask very, you know, well prepared insightful questions. So I just wanted to say that,

Trip Overholt: thank you very much. I tell if somebody is going to spend a year of their life, you know, 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 Archer: Yeah, I listen, I have my iPod. And I’m cutting the grass, riding my bike, brushing my teeth, and washing the dishes, you’re doing things like that. And I put in at least an hour a day listening to these folks while I’m preparing.

Trip Overholt: Yeah. And I would go on to your site, and oftentimes your interviews would be good prep for me, you know? Yeah. Oftentimes, you get a lot more out of an hour interview than you do at a reading a book. I mean, in terms of what you would want to interview somebody about, because, yeah, bring up so much juicy stuff. So I mean, what are some of your reports from the field? And then I’ve come to some, some conclusions about the folks that we’ve interviewed in the state of affairs here of non duality. And I don’t know, I mean, how do you do you perceive yourself continuing to do these interviews for a long time, they’re continuing to be rewarding for you. And

Rick Archer: 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. And my hardest task is prioritizing people because I only do one a week, and I’ve got got people scheduled into next winter. And it’s really hard to sort of like shuffle them around in some kind of fair order, you know, so I don’t put people off indefinitely. And then there are all kinds of people that are hardly known, that will be made 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, I try to squeak them into the into the queue. But in any case, I really love it. It’s kind of a real boost to my life, weekly, something I look forward to. And so I have no plans to discontinue it.

Trip Overholt: You do a very good net job of kind of naturally engaging people. And when you interview them, you’re more more able to kind of run with a thought thread or a conversation thread that’s 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’d pick that out and take a look at that or whatever. Sweden slightly different. I too, would have would like to do it as a career. But at this point in my life, I need to focus on making a living and

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

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

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

Trip Overholt: You know, there’s a few well known spiritual luminaries out there. Have you contacted some of them to appear on your show? Like, did you ever ask rom das to be on your show, or Ganga G or anybody like that, or Adi Shanti. Or some of the sort of well known folks?

Rick Archer: Well, I’ve interviewed Ganga Ji and Adi Shanti. They’re there. I did inquire about rom Das. And they said, Well, he’s very old. And he’s, he’s had this stroke. He doesn’t grant a lot of interviews, so I didn’t push it. I understand that. There are few, you know, I’d like to mix it up and have some of the well known folks and all some of the unknown folks. So, you know, I’d like to get Byron Katie and Deepak Chopra, who actually taught his original meditation course when he learned to meditate and I live with his parents for a couple months in India, so I shouldn’t have trouble getting him and Eckhart totally, I’d like to interview those folks. But I also really enjoy interviewing the housewife who just woke up one morning with a 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 tried to get all only the famous people and the well known people because they’re trying to build viewership. And you know, he figured if the interviewer Eckhart Tolly, then all his people are going to sit and listen to it. So I can’t I confess to a little bit of that notion, but at the same time, I think it’s, you know, the subtitle of my show is conversation interviews with ordinary spiritually awakened people. And I like to keep that as an emphasis.

Trip Overholt: I hear you, that’s my bias. I mean, I have to save it. There’s nothing more exciting to interview somebody that’s really fresh in there, 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’d one off. Ilona to not pay was an example of that. Oh, yeah, she’s

Rick Archer: kind of she’s on my list. So I’ll be inviting her soon. Yeah,

Trip Overholt: she was on fire. She was just beautiful. Have you interviewed Benjamin Smite?

Rick Archer: I did. We had a lot of fun.

Trip Overholt: He’s a fun guy. Yeah. Let’s see. And incidentally,

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

Trip Overholt: Yes, and I think it’s an important quality for an interviewer in this category to not be in awe of anybody because 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. Yeah, and go into a deeper place. I think people appreciate that.

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

Trip Overholt: Oh, I don’t know. Um, it’s funny, you know, you go through these people. And each one of these avant garde sages is is a different kind of, like, Jewel, you know, each one is beautiful. Like, for example, Peter Fenner interview.

Rick Archer: He’s on my list and I met him out of the science non duality Conference, which I hope you’ll attend by the way it’s really fun thing to go to, but um, he I haven’t interviewed him yet. He’s, it’s like I say it’s, there’s a queue. I do one a week, which means 50 A year and moving through it, but it’s hard to prioritize people.

Trip Overholt: You know, I just I mentioned him as I’m just I’m just scanning down the list because, for example, I was just blown away by his ability to listen. Ah, nice. I did not, for example, this is the kind of stuff you get to that you pick up from, from interview 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 had a way of actively listening with a kind of intent with a kind of clear mind and focus on the person that he’s listening to. That was just palpable, you know, and it was it was, it was so, so delicious. It was noticeable, you know. And I realized that there was a long way for me to be able to go and listening to people to not, for example, he neither agrees with or disagrees with the information that’s being presented. So it’s not going into his cognitive processor, a guy named Peter Fenner who’s sitting there wanting to, like, use it for some kind of egoic advantage. You know, he’s just with the information, just with just with it. No. I mean, that was, that was a profound lesson that I got. So many, that’s a

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

Trip Overholt: Um, you know, another thing that I think is interesting is there are a lot of really young New Age sages now, for example, Bentendo, right, Benjamin? I go down my list here. Young women like Lisa Karen’s manner, Marin spring senior on my list. Regina Dawn acre, she’s pretty young. And what’s interesting is there. I, I won’t, I won’t say that. This is true. I don’t I don’t think this is true. 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’s almost like Cafe non duality or something where, hey, like, my girlfriend woke up next week, and we’re going to wake up at the retreat this week, you know, this weekend or whatever. And it’s like, it’s like, it’s like, just like Burning Man is kind of entered the kind of national consciousness I go to Burning Man. It’s like non duality is 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 like, that’s in my hip pocket.

Rick Archer: Yeah, I got that merit badge. I gotta earn a badge. And they don’t,

Trip Overholt: 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, you know, and I love I have, I absolutely love the freshness, the young avant garde sages are like, they’re so into like freefall, what you see is what you get, you know, 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 Lucille and the Rupert’s and the John Troy’s and and others there, Jerry when strong 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 eveness it’s hard to describe. It’s a kind of grandfatherly. Yeah, shorty Ramana Maharshi had it in spades. It’s kind of the sweet grandfatherly spiritual maturity. You just want to hug him and kiss him because there’s, it’s, it’s hard to say

Rick Archer: this is sweet, 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, you know, fine, it’s a nice start. Keep on truckin dude. And you know, and I’ve actually said many times where I’ve heard you, I just heard you say, which is that I really enjoy talking to somebody who’s mature teachers like Gangaji and I just Shanti and, you know, Rupert and various people because Mooji is another one I’ve really enjoyed talking to because There’s this sort of appreciation that, you know, the initial awakening is just that, and that there’s a never ending maturation and deepening into the mystery that that, you know, 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. It’s, I see it as a milestone stage, a nice development, but that there’s more in fact, when Adi Shanti, had his first awakening, he literally had a voice say to him, keep going.

Trip Overholt: 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, truck driver Norio Khushi, truck driver, teachers, housewives, they’re 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, actually, I find it’s the rare person who really, really, truly wants to be around that. That’s the person that’s rare. It’s really ready. And the other thing is that this idea that I don’t know that the general public on some level isn’t awake as well, like I go to, 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 Shikari Hills musical Festival. It’s a grassroots festival. And 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 I’m 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, 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 that 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, you know, let’s celebrate this beautiful fact, we’re living this glorious reality, you know, and I’ll go through a crowd of people in any given night, I might have an exchange of that nature with 100 people or 150 people, whatever, every single one of them gets it. Yeah, they don’t get it.

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

Trip Overholt: I agree. That’s, that’s so true. Also add, though, that I think it’s very important, this is something that I think is true of my, this is true of myself, and I recommend it for others. And it’s this, it’s like, the, I think it’s important to make the statement to yourself the declarative statement to yourself that I am that, you know, I am 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, you know, and I think that’s the biggest obstacle for people on a, quote, spiritual path is to ever give that acknowledgement to themselves, you know, they, they, they, they they hold a standard out there of a gifted teacher like an Adi Shanti, or whatever. And then they they make this come up with this idea that they’re not that they’re not just as divine.

Rick Archer: 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 and with even with great conviction, doesn’t know necessarily mean that the full richness of that experience is going to dawn and be lived there, there could be some work towards that, which will mess it. But But it’s good to start without understanding which, which, which I agree with you, 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 light house. But it doesn’t mean that it’s shining like the big bright light house, it doesn’t it can’t guide ships off the rocks. So it could be and I say this, because I sometimes see people using that concept as a cop out for not doing any sort of spirit 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, there’s this. So, this is 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, you know, meditating many hours a day. And he actually knew the Sanskrit for this, but there are sort of two streams of thought, and, you know, the, you know, the snake was never, it was always a string, it was never a snake. And you just have to realize that, you know, if you’ve, if you’re familiar with that metaphor, and on the other hand, you know, you have to sort of decondition yourself from the deeply seated, misconception, misperception of the string as a snake. And there are levels and levels of Vasanas, that are 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 under insider understanding that I am that there’s going to be stuff to work out.

Trip Overholt: Agreed. But I also think for every Buddha shining up on top of uplift, it’s warding off ships, there’s 1000, that nobody’s ever heard of, and who have no interest in warding off ships.

Rick Archer: Yeah, well, look at the name of my show Buddha at the Gas Pump, I mean, the implication is you might be might be pumping gas next to a Buddha and not even know it. You know, for some reason, I was thinking of 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? There’s, oh, yeah, the way it goes is, you know, 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 then there are things moving along on a walkway, casting shadows on the wall. And they sit there and look at the shadows and regard the shadows as reality. And they 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, and it’s changed and manages to turn around and see what’s actually going on, oh, there’s a fire and there’s objects moving in. And it’s the light is blinding to him initially, and he can’t really look at it directly. Eventually, he maybe gets acclimated, and maybe he gets out of his chains, and then eventually actually steps out of the cave into the full sunlight when we’re in which he’s totally blinded and overwhelmed, and, and, you know, but eventually gets accustomed to that over time. And then he kind of 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 you know, and he can’t anymore take their argument seriously about how the shadows are being interpreted as completely meaningless and ridiculous to him because he’s seen the whole picture. But I think it’s a beautiful sort of analogy for or allegory for the whole process of awakening. We could, you know, delve into it, but I think the implications are obvious.

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

Rick Archer: Yeah, well, we’re all playing our roles, you know, and you have actually you actually We 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, so good on Yeah. But But again, it’s a matter of our, the role we’re cut out to play. And, and also, it’s a, there’s a question of what really produces an effect. I mean, it’s said in the sort of the mystical tradition sometimes that the 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 Overholt: So I guess I should mention the book, the book is conversations with avant garde sages. It’s, it’s free, and can be downloaded from the Wizard LLC website. Anybody can download anytime they want. And what’s nice about it is it’s not like you have to read the whole thing in one sitting, you just pick any one you want to read, you know, yeah, they’re about 10 pages long. And, and so you can just pick and choose and read as many as you like. And so that’s a good thing. You know, I wanted to, I want to

Rick Archer: 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? Yeah, okay. Okay.

Trip Overholt: Good. They can go to the person’s website and get all their stuff too. Sure. So funny. I’m, 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 and that people engage each other with with that intention that they see. It’s God seeing God everywhere, God seeing God and we had such a fabulous time. And there was a fire circle, the drummer’s were magnificent. And I just had an idea that I didn’t mention to you, I thought it would be really fun, like, you could even I was thinking developing, maybe even developing a little performance piece, for example, where you would kind of do kind of a motivational speaking thing where you get people really excited about what’s going on here. And then you bring in user missions 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 maybe traveling, roadshow of, you know, almost kind of like a non dual revival or whatever,

Rick Archer: you know, I would do this, or you would do this or so

Trip Overholt: my little fantasy, yeah, my fantasy, you know, just another way to do this, other than interviews or books. Yeah,

Rick Archer: you know, that sounds like fun, you could kick you around the country and hit all the hot spots, you know, I mean, you’re, 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, you know, up and down the West Coast, all sorts of places.

Trip Overholt: And what’s, what’s impressive is how together so many just, you know, all the ordinary folks, I mean, the people that are that are going to the Adi Shanti retreat are the people that, that it’s just how amazing how talented people are ordinary people, they, they get up and they’re able to play the flute, blue beautifully out of nowhere, or they can do poetry, or they can do fire dancing, and each one is a beautiful expression. And it’d be cool to pull together a way for people to really participate in to express this non dual reality in a joyful way. And but but have it be as a kind of a structured performance where people are brought in and do things. So it’s just, yeah, part of the reason part of the reason we wound up the show was to see what else wants to come in, you know, what, what new thing wants to happen, you know, cool,

Rick Archer: well, just keep working on it, we’ll see what you do. There’s another little, you know, pet peeve that I’ve had, and let me see if you picked up on it, which is a tendency people have to confuse levels, I would put it there’s a guy interviewed named Timothy Conway, who wrote a very nice article about this, but the there are, you know, obviously, from a physicist 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 true so with, you know, consciousness or perspective are subjective. irrespective, and there’s a level in 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 of, there’s a level in which we see that things are happening. And yet they’re perfect, just as they are, as you’ve said earlier in this interview there, everything is divinely ordained, and wouldn’t change it acquit. And then there’s a level in which things really suck, and they should be changed, you know, starving children, and child prostitution and all kinds of things that we should, you know, that should be dealt with and changed. And, you know, 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 really 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, you know, saving the children. And, well, very same time, having the perspective that everything is perfect. Well, 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 I, among even people I’ve interviewed, I’ve seen a tendency for people to lock into one another, those levels to the exclusion or to the refutation of the others.

Trip Overholt: 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 responsibilities as a Christian, and it’s gonna be fraught, it’s going to be fraught with doership.

Rick Archer: Okay, right, or wanna convert the children to Christianity, or, you know, has some ulterior motive something,

Trip Overholt: yeah, there could be anything, and then it could get really weird. And, but, and then that sense of doership, kind of shrinking you down into this, really, you know, ultimately reactive, separate human being who’s living in fear, or, you know, you can become from the assumption of the fact that you are actually defended, 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 know, you’re not being you’re not doing it for ego reasons, or whatever. So I think that that’s really, the critical aspect is that whatever level you’re choosing to kind of jump into or be called to, that it always comes from an understanding of the truth of who you are, you know?

Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think it added to the point I just made, 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 and feeding the children because there’ll be a broad, kind of a less egocentric orientation to the process.

Trip Overholt: Yes, but for example, like 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 to crime I get it, you get into an argument with it, because hey, this is these are my kids that I’m saving.

Rick Archer: Yeah, let’s say it’s let’s say you’re a fundamentalist Christian, you’re trying to feed the children and some Hindu group wants to come in and feed some to them. That’s the devil. We don’t want you in here. 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 what we’re really talking about a a kind of a mature spirituality which incorporates all levels of life and which doesn’t exclude any in which in 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 Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a good notion to kind of put out there. Because there are numerous violations of it and contemporary spirituality, which we might do well to grow beyond.

Trip Overholt: 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, you know, kind of going inside and leaving the world out there and going into your cave, and, you know, working through all of these temptations you might have, and being all of that stuff. And now, I think people realize that where the rubber meets the road is out there in the chaos, you know, it’s being really present to grocery store checkout person, or the poop, you know, constantly basically being present to whatever’s going on, you know, and that’s, and that’s absolutely where the rubber meets the road. And, you know, any moment is as spiritual as any other moment. Everyone is God, everyone you meet is a godsend. And then, and then living that, you know, yeah, yeah.

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

Trip Overholt: Um, well, not really. I mean, I, I’m really I’m really grateful for, I want to say that I’m terribly grateful for the older folks that came on my program as you must be as well. I’ve 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 it 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

Rick Archer: that, yeah, life sucks, then you die, you know? Yeah,

Trip Overholt: I was convinced up until five years ago, I was convinced that the life was an existential bummer. And that the solution was death. And that he got murky after that. And I could recognize a belief system there that I really have a lot of competence in about an afterlife in 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 it can, 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 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 look, like rejoice.

Rick Archer: 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 don’t, you know, I mean, some to my ears give up the search almost sounds like you know, just kind of sit on your hunches and wait for something to happen, you know, but, you know, if 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 you know, read books, see teachers, do some practice, listen to interviews, you know, whatever. Whatever floats your boat, and it will bear fruit.

Trip Overholt: I agree and I, I I’m convinced that 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 about out there about what makes a good teacher, and you just spend company with his teacher, and I think the hallmark of a great teachers 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, 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 you go to a great teacher like that, and you’re completely earnest, and you 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 you’ll find the heaven on earth, it is here. And now it’s inevitable, you know,

Rick Archer: yeah, that’s really great. I hope that I hope a lot of people hear that and 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, you know, that I’m somehow flawed and capable, you know, I’m gonna just be a miserable person all my life, it’s, you know, it’s like, we’re all multimillionaires. And you know, a lot of us just haven’t discovered that we have that bank account that our great uncle left us. And, you know, if, but it’s there. And it’s just a matter of sort of making the connection and you know, going to the bank and cashing in on it, that that as you say, heaven on earth is here, there’s a, there’s a vast reservoir of fulfillment and joy and wisdom and bliss, right in your own heart. There for the dipping into tripping, I concluded the interview, and then we couldn’t help it keep talking. And I realized at a certain point, that we’re seeing 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 Overholt: Thank you, Rick.

Rick Archer: Cognac at the end of the meal.

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

Rick Archer: possible. Certainly not my perception, perception nor yours, but now, we can hold it as a possibility.

Trip Overholt: I agree, it cannot be disproven. Okay. And then there’s the other possibility that we hold is true. Okay. 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, yeah. All right. So. 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 Adi Shanti or Rama Maharshi or Ananda Ji has achieved some sort of deeper level of realization than I have. Okay. I find that when I take 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 over hold, 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 pragmatist 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 what that’s why I’m here. Yeah.

Rick Archer: Okay. Well, I have a couple of things to say that one is, I think it might be putting the cart before the horse. Because it’s like a person who could say, well, I’ve 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 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, you know, 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 can the conviction. In other words, if you’re experiencing life, and it’s magic quality, and it’s, you know, beautiful beingness, divine quality, then sure, that’s what you believe. You know, if you’re, 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 a experiential realization quite unexpectedly, which shifted your worldview, you picked up that Ramana Maharshi book, read a few passages, and all of a sudden, you’re, you’re had tears streaming down your face in your experience change. And it wasn’t a big stretch for you after that, to believe the sorts of things you’ve been saying. As far as the this thing about being exactly the same as any, you know, great master, whoever walked the earth. I’m okay with that. If 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, I kind of, I don’t have a problem with hierarchies and looking up to or respecting people who might feel are farther along than I am, and 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 real realistic, an understanding of things because I do feel that there are, you know, their levels of spiritual development, just as there are grades in school, you know, a third grader might be studying. A third grader might be studying a little bit of arithmetic or something like that doesn’t mean that he’s a postgraduate math, you know, student there are, you know what I mean, I

Trip Overholt: know you mean, but here’s, here’s what I want to say to you, when when Jesus Christ was walking around, I’m teaching and telling ordinary folk, that there was no difference between him and them. Right, and that they had this great opportunity in hand to be loved by loving one another and the whole teaching, right? Yeah. Okay, if there is any validity to this thing that we’re so interested by, that we want to promote to the world, if there’s any validity to it all, okay. Yeah, it cannot only be true at the end of some multi decade, you know, effort, spiritual effort, or whatever it has to be true, with a reasonable amount of spiritual effort. And in Jesus Christ didn’t go to these people and say, you know, if you, if you work at this for a really long time, like three or 4030 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 like, in the very cutting edge of, of wisdom and bodied, and that you should go ahead and I say, drop any idea that you have, you haven’t completely arrived?

Rick Archer: Well, you know, Jesus Christ said, right, whatsoever, great things I do even greater things shall you do, you know, because I go on to 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 happen. So it’s, it’s again, the both end thing? Well, it’s absolutely true, that, you know, we’re all the same thing. And on some level, there’s absolutely no difference. It’s simultaneously true, that there are degrees to which the degrees of mastery of that have not only the subjective realization of it, but the, you know, the ability to sort of translate that into the world to

Trip Overholt: go ahead. Jesus said in Rahman, and said that the miracles that apparently happen around great sages, like Christ, are not produced by the sage. They’re the byproduct 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 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 is no separation between the miracle and you. And therefore, you are you are you are that?

Rick Archer: Yeah, no, it’s it’s true. You know, I’m always gonna play devil’s advocate on this point, or rather, you know, sort of like contrarian because, you know, it’s it’s the multifaceted truth thing I keep coming back to it. I thought, how can I say it any differently than I’ve said it. And I’m not trying to, like convince you of anything or change your mind because I feel like your perspective is perfectly valid. I still feel like I said, in the very beginning of the interview, if it’s true that there are like 16 collars, you know, which are kind of a rough roadmap of degrees of evolution and human beings only reached the eight then they’re actually others above that, then, you know, being at all all of those colors, all those levels, it’s 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 there’s a dog realized that well, more than the rock, you know, the average human being the saint. There’s degrees of realization in the relative insofar as, 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. Anything, 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 it’s just really a story that that we tell ourselves and in the final analysis, you know, there’s only one of us and nothing is happening.

Trip Overholt: Well, I get your point, I’m gonna make my final counterpoint. Okay. Okay.

Rick Archer: Okay, is maybe it’ll be final, maybe I’ll make it do another one.

Trip Overholt: Final counterpoint is as long as there is there is 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 of conviction, both internal and external, with which that’s expressed, okay. Nisargadatta was very intense about saying, you know, I am the beyond I am the beyond, okay, right? 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, okay, they say it with a conviction that makes it easier for other people to believe. That’s, that’s one aspect of it. The second aspect is that some of them are extremely gifted, in the way they communicate this reality. Okay. 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 much more potent force for you become a much more potent mirror in the community. Because that conviction is palpable, and it’s contagious. Oh, that’s

Rick Archer: true. And I think doubt can be a dry rot that kind of undermines one’s you know, realization. And 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 have a 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 United States. But there’s, you know, Mariana Kaplan, whom I interviewed wrote a nice book called halfway up the mountain the error, premature claims to awakening. And she and I had an interesting discussion about that. It’s, you know, 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 a bravado can just be a silly kind of proclamation without any substance. And there are teachers I think, who have gotten up and proclaim themselves as awakened, who very much were not. In the Zen tradition, it’s customary to wait 10 years after awakening before before going out and teaching to just make sure it’s genuine and it’s stable. And you know, you know what you’re doing. So, you know,

Trip Overholt: well, Adi, God, for example, okay, yeah, he wasn’t awakened, right? Was not so he was awakened, was yes, 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 in

Rick Archer: total sick stuff. Yeah, I met a guy who had been with him for 17 years. And I’m not talking about Samuel bonder. Another guy, and the laundry list of stuff that I did I was into is just sickening. Yeah.

Trip Overholt: Okay. So despite all of that demand was awake, because there was a constancy to Israel as to who he was. Okay. Yeah. And so, um, you know, well, you and I sit here, I see here, you sit here and you call Adi Da awake. Okay? Right. And yet, Adi Da was, you know, there are plenty evenings out there, we had the cameras set up, and he was making his disciples fuck each other. And he was, you know, screwing somebody, his girlfriend that came in total innocence to him as a teacher, and blah, blah, blah, right, and doing drugs and everything. And we, and even that was that kind of activity was going on, like, several nights a week or whatever. We sit here. And we know we sit here, in fact, 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, I’m not going to parse out Nisargadatta Rama, Adi Da, Adi Shanti. Matter of fact, I don’t think I don’t think Ganga G’s got any bit more of a realization over over me. For example, when I watched Ganga Ji do her thing. I see her really enjoying the adulation that she’s receiving from people. Okay.

Rick Archer: You do see her enjoying? Yeah, do? Yeah.

Trip Overholt: And that’s fine. But I also see them having I 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 side song and Darshan that took place at my gathering here, this this past July 3, where it was just a complete meltdown, love fest, and I just I don’t I don’t see it. And I, I guess I have a Do I have a desire here, that the the beautiful light points of realization that I’m transferring here, yourself a perfect example. I want to see more and more and more people. Like 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. Yeah.

Rick Archer: Well, I can say that with confidence. Yeah, and, and when we start getting into specifics and saying, you know, this teacher, that teacher, it’s difficult, because it’s hard to really know what’s going on. But I think your Rati dot 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 the hill of beans, because it can be in the big picture of things, very preliminary, and teachers who set themselves up as masters with 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 are in you know, perhaps you mentioned karma earlier, or perhaps accruing karma for themselves that they’re really going to have to go through some stuff to work off. So, so my view, you know, really mature spirituality means being an a complete embodiment of all that is divine, and, you know, not a loose cannon that’s, you know, doing all kinds of crazy stuff and calling it wisdom. But that’s so I wouldn’t, so I don’t care if somebody says they’re awakened. It’s like they could be still in kindergarten and in terms of what could be

Trip Overholt: the what the wizard would say and I agree with him and Um, what these guys that we’ve interviewed say is there isn’t 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 indicative an indicator of realization.

Rick Archer: Yeah, and behavior can very much be a cultural thing. I mean, there’s certain cultures in which it’s perfectly appropriate to have multiple wives, for instance, the Punnett of us, you know, we’re all married to one woman, and they in turn had other wives as our Juna and his brothers. And that was Indian culture in that in that era, so there is that. And so it’s hard to sort of bring any absolute yardstick to it and say, this behavior is right, this behavior is wrong. But I always have to do the but I, I, and then maybe it’s just my own bias, you know. And incidentally, I am recording this recording again, because this is good stuff. But I just feel that there, we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, that there is some legitimacy to the notion of saintliness, and no 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 sort of realization and to have the, the culturing of the relative personality, such that one really is a blessing to the world and an inspiration to the world. And, you know, and again, doesn’t have to be a famous person 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 das student, and talks about lines of development, you know, he kind of puts forth the notion that certain lines of development say the the consciousness line, the awakening line can be very developed, and other lines can be really stunted, and, and totally undeveloped. And I believe he’s an advocate of somehow bringing all the lines into their, their full development and not having that kind of lopsided thing like, we saw without a DA.

Trip Overholt: Well, if I, if, if I were agreeing with your perspective, and I’m using my own life as an example, to take you to take your argument and to agree with it, and then to use my life, as an example, I, I was exhibiting say, a significant, obnoxious person, a trait five years, and I am now and around me, would agree, okay. 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 of notches guide called trip that I was. And so if one wanted, really on with your view on this, they’re the saintly model of beast to be aspired to, the fastest way to get there is to completely radically accept your noxious complete basket of crap. And it will take care of itself. And then there’ll 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 make you less realized than someone who’s more saintly.

Rick Archer: No, I agree with that. In fact, I just that’s really what I was saying with with your my comments about your the audit point. I’m not saying his decadent behavior was refuted his the legitimacy of his realization. I’m just saying that his lines of development were very askew, very imbalanced in a unequally progressed, and that evolution continues. You know, there’s this force of evolution that is relentless and untiring, and it’s going it What if one line has been has been developed? It’s gonna work on the other lines, and, and so your obnoxious tendencies that you confess to, you know, perhaps your realization really brought some juice to the to the resolution of those which you know, you didn’t have the capacity To resolve before your your realization, and that’s great. I think it’s also and you know, marshy used to use the example of watering the root of a tree rather than watering all of individual leaves, and you’d take care of all the simultaneous that way. So in other words, get to the transcendent get to get to the Self Realization, and then all the personality stuff in 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, and so there could be some validity to actually giving specific attention to a particular leaf that looks with or, you know, doing some kind of therapy for this or that hang up or, or yeah, whatever.

Trip Overholt: Point. I agree. My only point is, here you are, you’re a beautiful, I’m, I’m just You’re a beautiful man, you’ve got looks like a successful marriage, you are, you’ve got a refinement into the fine points, the 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? Like, 80 when you’re 85?

Rick Archer: No, I can say that now. And I can also say that, you know, 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, you know, it’s like, it would be unrealistic of me to say otherwise. Because, hey, I’m, uh, 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 so I and even though that there’s the essence of it is exactly the same now as it was when I was four years old. And I can recognize that the the appreciation of that essence and the manifestation of that essence, continues to evolve. That’s my experience. Okay. And I’ll bet it’s yours. I’ll bet it’s yours. I’ll bet you 10 years from now, you know, if you looked listen to this interview, you’ll think, well, I’ll be darned, you know, there’s been a lot of growth in the last 10 years and it’s a things are even groovier now than they were then even though then was just fine, you know, completely perfect as it was, it’s even perfect or now.

Trip Overholt: It’s true, you know, what it’s like, both both you and I are like a bit of yogurt culture, right. Now, our yogurt culture may get stronger, it may become you know, an award winning yogurt culture, but right now, my yogurt culture has been dropped into the milk of a few young people out here and I mean, in the world and I have I am the the I will say the absence of trip needing to fill the egoic identity called trip with other people’s, you know, affirmations, not who I am truly, but of trip, you know, 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 in this ever growing process to which you speak, such that I absolutely have been a instrument of awakening and of profound shift in some people out there, right. Yeah. Do you have to? Well, what the hell, man? I mean, you’ve already been an instrument of freakin incredible service out there. I mean, I just want you to acknowledge it. I

Rick Archer: mean, yeah, I somehow I give them I do give people the impression that I’m still this desperate seeker, you know, who hasn’t accepted my own realization? And so maybe it’s just the way I ask questions, because I, you know, 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, you know, there’s But wait, there’s more. And so that could seem very seeker ish, you know, and very kind of unfulfilled, but it’s not that there’s a there’s a foundation of fulfillment which is unshakable, and which I fully acknowledge, foundation of realization and so on. But I just always, you know, on the other hand is like Fiddler on the Roof. Remember, he would his daughter would come to him and say she wanted something and he would say, Absolutely not. But then he would say, on the other hand, there’s just always that the way I think there’s two,

Trip Overholt: there’s two kinds of humility that can take place, there’s a pride there’s a humility that can be expressed where somebody is kind of feeling the responsibility for sharing with others that gee, I’m just an ordinary guy called trip you know, I’m, I’m not God’s gift to humanity. You know, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed and, you know, and, and, to me, like 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, into my field of experience, right. And so, like, 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 us in a spiritual process. You’re a flawed human being is 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, you are,

Rick Archer: you know, it’s like I said before, with the three levels, you know, when we were talking about the starving children, you know, on a certain level, I’m a flawed human being, you know, I’m not perfect on certain, by a longshot, 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, you know, there is no, Rick, there is no universe, it’s absolute unmanifest, you know, potentiality, that never arose. And all those things are simultaneously true. And I just tend not to lock into any one of them. So and I can jump from one to the other. So I can, you know, I can say them all on a single paragraph, and I just did.

Trip Overholt: 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 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. Well, that’s great. And so and so on. 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, I’m saying

Rick Archer: so yeah, that’s right. Would you recommend that for all fields of endeavor or just spirituality? Would you say that on that you’re, there’s no, there’s not a shred of daylight between you and, you know, Andre Agassi or Roger Federer, you know, or is there a big gulf there term in terms of tennis ability?

Trip Overholt: Well, it’d be like, A, it’s kind of like, which is a more relevant fact that the dream, if I’m, if I’m having a dream, and there’s a character in my dream, call Andrea, so you can beat the crap out of a tennis ball. And then I’m dreaming up this other character called trip, and Argosy has invited me to play with them. And he’s like, you know, witness these, you know, shots pass me everything. Which is the more salient fact that, you know, that guy can play tennis better than me, or the fact that I’m the dreamer who streamed 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

Rick Archer: peace. 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, because by saying that they don’t really exist and nothing needs to happen and everything’s perfect. We feed them, but ultimately, they’re not true. There are no Starving Children.

Trip Overholt: 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

Rick Archer: right? Yeah, no good point. And he just hung on to that for dear life like a pitbull

Trip Overholt: said, I believe to 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 believe that with every fiber of my body and I gave my attention to that truth for three years. Right? Yes. And finally, it became absolutely true who I was. Right.

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

Trip Overholt: I want to thank you for having me on your show. And I want to say that you’re my favorite interview.

Rick Archer: Oh, no, you’re my favorite.

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

Rick Archer: so I was the Cliff Notes. You’re the Cliff Notes.

Trip Overholt: And I love what you do. And 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, you know, being with you and sharing with you. And thank you.

Rick Archer: Oh, thank you trip. Let me make a couple of concluding remarks. I, as most people are aware, by this time, I’ve been conducting an interview with Tripp Overholt, who has his own interview show, although he isn’t doing it anymore, but you may resume it at some point. But all the interviews are still there on the internet, which and I’ll be linking to them so you can find them. He also has a book which puts in print the 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 a 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. It 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, she said I clean houses for a living and I just have my iPod and I listened to your interviews all day long while I’m cleaning houses. So that kind of was heartwarming. Um, next week, I will be interviewing Andrew Cohen, who has an interesting take on some of the things chip and I have been talking about, about the the complete, you know, fulfillment of being and yet the sort of the urgency of becoming in terms of an evolutionary imperative toward, you know, 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 hope you’ll listen and thank you for watching and we’ll see you next week.

Trip Overholt: Thank you, brother.

Rick Archer: Thanks, Trip.