Unmani 2nd Interview

Summary: 

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and if you’ve been watching this show regularly you may have noticed that I’m doing a lot of interviews out at the Science and Non-duality Conference out in California, which is what I love to do. So it’s really fun for me to be here to connect with new friends and old and here’s an old friend, Unmani. I interviewed Unmani about three years ago, I think it was, and I listened to her interview on the plane on the way out. And in that interview we mostly – and you can go back and listen to that one, incidentally I’ll have a link to it on the page, which you may have found this interview – but in that one we mostly covered kind of a chronological history of her spiritual unfoldment and so on, and various things she had done and places she had gone and people she had studied with, things like that. So we won’t repeat any of that. But one thing that came out in the interview, at least my impression as I listened to it, was that – and this fits very well with my philosophy – is that we’re all works in progress. I don’t care how advanced somebody is, they’re still progressing, in my opinion. So maybe Unmani differs in that opinion and will give us something to talk about. So I thought maybe we’d start by just playing catch-up and seeing what’s been happening with you in the last few years, and I’m sure that will stimulate all kinds of conversation.

Unmani: Yeah, well a lot of endless evolving and maturing has been happening, and I totally agree with what you’re saying. There’s no end to this opening, unraveling, unfolding. As this human, of course, who I really am, life itself doesn’t evolve, doesn’t need to evolve, but the lived experience of that is all about the evolution. And of course the mind doesn’t really understand how that paradox could be, but it is anyway, and part of the evolution is not buying into our beliefs about how things should be anyway. So yeah, it’s been more about that – seeing, growing, being touched more and more by the intensives that I run, the people that come, learning so much from them. What I always find funny is that they think that they’re coming to be helped by me, and actually they are touching me so much.

Rick: Yeah, it’s very true. I was a student of the Maharishi, as you may know, and when we were on teacher training course he said, “I’m going to tell you a secret, which is that the teacher always gains more than the student, always learns more.” So he said, “This profession of teaching is a very powerful evolutionary tool for you.”

Unmani: Yes, absolutely, I really find it that you’re in the fire constantly. By nature I was always quite a shy little girl, quite shy and insecure, and for me, sitting in front of audiences, I mean I’m much more used to it now, I’ve been doing this for like ten years or so, but still it’s about burning up in that fire. Any old ideas about myself or what I might be holding on to, or any position, or any even the idea that I’m the teacher that I know and they don’t know, or that I shouldn’t expose my own vulnerability. Yeah, it just all goes out the window more and more.

Rick: Your phrase “burning up,” I said this in the little talk I gave here at the conference, but one thing I’ve noticed is that when you put yourself in the position of being an instrument for people’s evolution, it’s like when you step into that role, the powers that be turn up the voltage quite a bit, because you’re an instrument of the Divine, you’re a tool for the evolution of humanity, and they want you to be as – I’m kind of anthropomorphizing it, I don’t know who they are – but they want you to be as bright and effective and powerful a tool as you can be. And I know some people feel like, “Can my nervous system sustain this higher voltage that seems to be coursing through me?” In fact, Adyashanti, who’s had this little problem with his health recently, he mentioned that when I teach, so much energy flows through me, it seems to really make this pain I experience due to this problem, whatever it is, is exacerbated by that intensity.

Unmani: Yeah, I mean it is intense. I feel often like I’m also a participant in a group of, you know, I run these resident 10-day intensives, and in those 10 days we go through all kinds of really intense stuff, and I’m going through it with them.

Rick: Yeah, it’s not like you’re bestowing large gifts upon the chelas or anything.

Unmani: No, not at all. But what I mean is that this, let’s say, life itself, consciousness, whatever, that speaks apparently through this person, I’m listening to it as well, and I’m hearing myself say things that “Oh wow, yeah, that’s good, I didn’t know that.”

Rick: On this theme, don’t you feel like it kind of gets you firing on all cylinders when you step into that role?

Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of quite a full-on role, and I’m quite happy to drop it at the end of the meeting or intensive. I love playing that role, and then I also love just chilling or being very ordinary and having very ordinary conversations with people, going shopping and stuff like that.

Rick: You kind of need to, you know? I mean, I think that 24/7 blast furnace mode gets a bit old after a while.

Unmani: Yeah, and there’s no need for it as well. I’m not looking for anything in it.

Rick: You’re not about to enlighten the cashier at the grocery store.

Unmani: No, no need to prove anything. So, yeah, the role gets played when it’s needed, and then ordinary life goes on.

Rick: It’s an interesting thought, you know, and a lot of times people come to spiritual talks and satsangs and so on, and it seems like there’s something special about the person up on the stage, you know, “Whoa, I wish I were like them. They seem so bright, they seem so eloquent.” And I mean, if you could live with them, if you’re married to them or something like that, you know, it wouldn’t seem that way. You’d really get used to the ordinariness. In fact, when I interviewed Mukti about a month ago, we were talking about this point, and she said, “Well, when Adya is in teaching mode, he’s my teacher, and there’s that relationship, but when he’s not in teaching mode, he’s my husband, you know, he’s not my teacher.” Maybe she tells him what to do or whatever, I don’t know. But it’s sort of like, almost like an actor on the stage, you’re not always Hamlet. You go home and you’re Richard Burton or something.

Unmani: Yeah, yeah, it’s a hat that you put on for a while, because there’s no need to play that role, to be that identity, you know, all the time. I can play lots of identities.

Rick: All right, I think we nailed that point.

Unmani: Yeah, I think so.

Rick: You mentioned the word “paradox” earlier, which is always one of my favorite words. I think the reason it’s my favorite word, or one of them, is that life is kind of paradoxical if you look at all the different levels of reality, and even from a standpoint of physics, there’s so many different laws of nature operative at different levels and they are so dissimilar to one another, and yet nature works quite naturally and automatically and harmonizes all those differences, all those different modes and levels of functioning. And so perhaps you could comment on your thoughts about the spiritual corollary to that, in terms of being able to incorporate paradox or incorporate all the different levels of life within one’s awareness or within one’s experience.

Unmani: The problem with a paradox is that it is a paradox and it doesn’t make sense, and the thinking wants to make sense out of it. It wants to say that this is how it works and box it into a nice package, but a paradox means that two things are opposites, simultaneously like that. So for the thinking it has to just go, “Okay, I don’t get it, it’s a paradox.” It’s the only way really for the thinking to kind of, it’s the only label that the thinking can put on how life is. By calling it a paradox it kind of gives the thinking some rest in trying to figure it all out, says, “Okay, it’s just a paradox.” And the main paradox, there are so many paradoxes, life is full of paradoxes, but the main one that I see and I know in my own direct experience is that, that we already mentioned, that I am life itself that doesn’t evolve, that doesn’t move, that doesn’t need anything, that doesn’t lack anything, that has no problem, that just is empty actually of any quality. And yet the paradox, the other side of it, is this human experience. And this human experience seems to include time and space and evolution and sensation, stuff basically. It’s full of stuff, seemingly. And knowing that I am emptiness for the thinking, it’s like, “Well, how can I be this human, playing at all this stuff and feeling all this stuff and thinking and experiencing when I am emptiness?” And what I see a lot of seekers on the spiritual path try to do is to become emptiness.

Rick: Without being the other.

Unmani: Yeah. Yes, yes. To try to empty their minds, empty their experience as much as possible, or to become really still, to not move, or to become really silent, to copy the qualities of the source, life itself. But there’s actually no need for the thinking to try to copy the qualities because I am already that. In fact, the thinking doesn’t have any idea how to be that. It couldn’t possibly. All it can say is, “Well, I don’t get it.”

Rick: The thinking gets the hang of it after a while, doesn’t it? I mean, if you’re really living it, the thinking learns pretty quick that it’s not going to be something that’s figured out on that level, and so just relax, take a back seat.

Unmani: It kind of says, “Well, who am I to know? I’m just a thought, I don’t get it. It’s not my realm of understanding.”

Rick: I have these two friends who are both physicians and they both meditate and they practice together, so I call them the divine pair of docs. Get it?

Unmani: Doctors?

Rick: Yeah, divine paradox.

Unmani: Oh, paradox, sorry. It was your American accent that slowed me down there.

Rick: Well, this has got an interesting point about people who try to be the silence. But I mean, if you look at, again, nature, of which we are sort of a part, obviously, there’s tremendous silence and infinite dynamism. And the infinite silence and the infinite dynamism coexist. And so, if – I don’t mean to get in teacher mode here, but if – you can bounce off this – if enlightenment or awakening or whatever you want to call it, is really supposed to be a knowing of reality, an experiential one, not an intellectual one, then it would seem that that knowing would involve an incorporation of both infinite silence and infinite dynamism within one’s awareness.

Unmani: Yes, absolutely. It’s knowing that my true nature is that infinite silence, as you put it, playing at being in motion, in movement, in this human form apparently. And in knowing that and not trying to become that anymore, then there’s the freedom to actually really live as this human, to feel it all, to get dirty and messy in it, you know? To really go through whatever you go through and not to stop trying to be perfect and perfectly spiritual and holy and pure, but actually to see that this human is an animal. And it doesn’t need to be perfectly fixed and healed. It is messy and it’s often uncomfortable, these body things have all kinds of issues and stuff that’s felt. But knowing that I am not limited to this body is the freedom for it to be a mess. And just that is such freedom, you know? When you’re trying to fix for so long, you’re making this assumption that there’s something wrong with me, as if I am this body, who I am is this body. But if this body is going through some emotion or physical sensation or all sorts of thoughts, that means that I have a problem that needs to be fixed. But if I know that I’m not this body or thoughts, then the mess can go on, the crazy insanity of life can go on.

Rick: Or you can fix it. I mean, if you’re overweight or you have high cholesterol or something, you’re not this body, but you might want to take care of the body.

Unmani: Oh sure.

Rick: It’s a useful tool.

Unmani: Of course. I’m not saying that you just kind of like …

Rick: Throw caution to the wind and start snorting meth or something.

Unmani: Well you could do that if that’s what you like doing. But no, I mean, there is more and more of a sensitivity to this body actually. In my experience, there’s more and more falling in love with this body, with this human experience, with this kind of character that seems to be here, and getting to know her and all her weird and wonderful foibles. Whereas perhaps on the spiritual path, she as a person was always rejected, “Oh, I’m not the person, I’m beyond it.”

Rick: But you know, I talked to someone just the other day, a friend, and that was her emphasis, “I am not a person.” And I didn’t handle it very well during the conversation, and afterwards I was talking to another friend and he said, “Well, the way I would address that is, of course you’re a person. You’re a lovely person, you know? You’re just not only a person.”

Unmani: That’s the thing, yeah.

Rick: You know?

Unmani: Yeah.

Rick: So it’s not …

Unmani: But people often have to go through a phase, and I certainly went through this as well, of rejecting the person. In order to really acknowledge that I am the absolute, that I am life itself, I had to say, “Well, I’m not the person.” I had to sort of throw off all the limits.

Rick: Yeah, kind of a neti neti phase.

Unmani: Yeah, and then come full circle back to the person. It seems like a maturing.

Rick: I wonder if everybody has to go through it that way.

Unmani: In my experience, it’s what I’ve seen with people that I’ve been working with, that they kind of have to go through like a rebellion stage of rejecting the person.

Rick: Kind of like teenagers, having to go crazy for a while.

Unmani: Yeah, something like that, and kind of hiding out in this new state, which is relatively new for a lot of people who’ve just had this amazing recognition, awakening, whatever you call it. And they hang out in this very peaceful state, which is lovely, but eventually life comes knocking at the door and the human experience starts screaming, you know, and you can’t ignore it anymore. Whether it’s through some tragedy that happens in your life or just little subtle things start to be felt more and you can’t shut it out anymore.

Rick: Yeah, and of course there are teachers who specialize in this “you are not a person” phase and keep beating that drum. So more power to them, I guess, if it’s a phase that people need to go through, then I guess there must need to be specialists in that phase.

Unmani: Absolutely, it’s a useful phase, but then it’s up to the individual to acknowledge that “I’m getting stuck in this phase” because it feels safe. It feels like I’m now beyond it all and taking a certain, let’s say, superior position in “I know it, I’m beyond it, I’m looking down on all these people who are kind of in the human experience still, poor them.” And eventually, it’s about humility actually, like diving back into this human experience that you thought you’d gone beyond. “Oh damn, here it is again!” But yes, it is here again, but it’s here to be acknowledged and actually, as I said, to be fallen in love with. Even if it’s not always about feeling loving, of course it’s not, it’s often uncomfortable, as I said, but it’s what’s actually here and it can’t be denied. There’s really no escape, inevitably, from this human experience. This body goes through stuff as it ages and then eventually it’s going to die, and there’s no escaping that.

Rick: You mentioned the word “love,” a lot of times a kind of unemotional dryness seems to be associated with the “I am not a person” phase, it’s a little bit notorious for that.

Unmani: Yeah, that’s what it’s good for, in a way, to escape feeling.

Rick: Yeah, and there have been some interesting talks here at the conference about devotion and non-duality and whether they are compatible or exclusive or something. Mirabai Starr was talking about it in her talk this morning, and one point that kind of came out was that if non-duality is really all non-dual, if it’s all inclusive, if it’s not just sort of cordoned off in some corner of life and everything else is out there, then it must include love and devotion and all the qualities of life within a vast totality.

Unmani: Yes, absolutely. And it’s also not limited to what we think is love or what we feel is love. It goes both ways. It’s not limited to this kind of awareness, dry, kind of beyond it all thing, but it’s also not kind of fluffy and just lovey-dovey, because a lot of people get stuck in that phase as well. That’s a whole other phase on the other side of it. They’re kind of equal phases, it depends which path you take. You can get stuck in this thing of, “I have to continually open my heart and have these kind of loving experiences.”

Rick: Maybe the foundation hasn’t been established yet.

Unmani: Yeah, and the thing is, it has to go together. And you have to recognize that you are empty, nothing, without any quality. And that’s not even a loving quality, that’s a no-quality. You have to let go of love, actually, to actually know real love. And it’s not knowing it in the mind, it’s not knowing it in a feeling, although of course it can include feelings and thoughts, but it’s knowing the love that is who you are, your true nature is love, and then you see it everywhere.

Rick: That’s a good point. I guess maybe another way of phrasing it would be, you have to know who you are before you can really appreciate who or what anything else is. If you don’t know who you are, then who is it that loves this thing or appreciates that thing? There’s no kind of foundation for it.

Unmani: Yes, yes, yes. Then it’s just grasping hold of temporary experiences that we call love, but actually they’re just nice feelings of expansion, but they’re temporary. And then we get addicted to chasing those experiences. We go to places or we hang out with people that somehow seem to trigger those experiences, and then when we’re alone there’s this contraction again, “Oh, I’ve got to go and get that again.” It’s that fix, it’s a drug basically. So either phase, it’s just a phase. Eventually you have to let go of any position that you’re standing in and see that there is no position to save you.

Rick: I hear people giving talks here at the conference and then I see questions from the audience and sometimes I get the feeling that people are a little frustrated because they hear a lot of words, they hear people saying all this beautiful stuff, and they don’t quite know how they can make it happen for them. It’s like they’re hearing a description but what they really want is a prescription.

Unmani: Yes.

Rick: You know what I mean?

Unmani: Yes, I hear that a lot, not only in this conference but generally in the meetings.

Rick: And so there are people promulgating practices of various kinds, so those could be considered prescriptions, and then there is the non-practice crowd, the anti-practice crowd. But what’s your stand in terms of how to actually help people make this an experience rather than a conceptual thing?

Unmani: Well, in one way I feel like if you personally feel like you need a practice, then you need a practice.

Rick: If you’re drawn to it.

Unmani: If you’re drawn to it, then you should find a practice, and then you are drawn to whichever practice you feel can help. And perhaps it gets to a certain point after a while of practicing whatever you practice, that you start to see, “Okay, that’s taken me to a certain point, but somehow it’s not helpful anymore for whatever reason.” So maybe at that point you then want a different practice, and you go in search of a different practice, and that can go on for a while. And perhaps eventually you get exhausted and you start to see that actually every practice essentially is just a crutch, something to lean on.

Rick: Which is handy if you have a broken leg.

Unmani: If you believe you have a broken leg. If you believe you have a broken leg, then you’re going to believe you need a crutch. But if you’re willing to see, to actually turn and have a look at your leg, “Do I really have a broken leg?” If you’re actually willing to question, “Is there really something wrong with me that I need a practice to hold onto?” Well that’s where I’m interested in working with people like that, who have got exhausted with holding onto something that they believe is going to save them, and at the same time reinforcing the idea that they need something or they’ve got a problem.

Rick: But the words you just used in there – believe, save, need – all those things, sure there’s plenty of people doing practices for whom those words would apply. And then there are people like Ramana or the Buddha, who after their awakening, meditated long periods of time for many, many years. Now, I don’t think they needed it or believed anything in particular about it, or they didn’t have broken legs, so to speak, but for some reason they were drawn to do it. Maybe it was to set an example, maybe it was to refine their physiology, I don’t know. But like you said, or like we began by saying, there’s no end to this development.

Unmani: Absolutely not. But then there’s different kinds of practices. I mean, let’s say not so much different kinds of practices, of course there are many kinds of practices, but there’s different kinds of motivation, let’s say, for practice.

Rick: Reasons for doing them.

Unmani: Reasons for doing it. So when you’re searching, the motivation is to fix yourself, because you believe that there’s something wrong with you. And then when you recognize that actually there’s no need for a practice because there’s nothing wrong with you, you may go through that rebellious stage of throwing everything out and say, “I don’t want to practice anything, and I’m not going to do anything spiritual, and I reject everything that’s got the word ‘spiritual’ in it, or ‘non-dual’ in it,” or whatever. But then you may want to come back full circle into exploring this human experience. Now that can happen in many different ways for different people. It can happen spontaneously, just through life experience, which is more my experience with that. And if there’s that real willingness to explore whatever life brings up, then actually every day, every moment is a practice by itself, without me trying to do it or remembering I need to practice. But all the time, in every relationship, in every interaction, even right now, there’s a continual checking out what’s going on physically, what’s happening here in this whole experience, more and more sensitivity, noticing any kind of holding, any stopping, any pushing, any … it’s all being felt. Now, now is the practice all the time.

Rick: I noticed that, yeah, there’s this constant self-referral, and it’s spontaneous, it’s not like you’re driving yourself crazy. It’s more of a gentle, natural self-monitoring process or something that just becomes routine or habitual.

Unmani: It’s like the light, I mean this is just an analogy, but the light of truth, if you want to call it that, shines more and more on this human experience in more and more refined, subtle detail over time, it seems. And so you become more and more aware of all these little subtle things that are going on. And where, for example, where I’m speaking from, am I speaking from agitation or am I speaking, “Ahh, ahh, ahh, that’s nice,” and just noticing the difference. And that’s just happening naturally.

Rick: Yeah. So this particular thing you’re describing now, have you noticed it growing? Let’s say since the last time I talked to you, it’s been more and more attunement.

Unmani: Yes, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I mean I find it difficult to compare how I am now to how I was then, because I have to remember, “How was I then?” And I don’t even know, I’d have to make up this whole story about how I was then, but I can’t really find myself as a point in time, you know? But people have said things, so okay, maybe they’ve seen and they’ve compared, I don’t know.

Rick: I just remembered a couple of great quotes. One is from some Buddhist sage, I forget his name, but he said, “Even though my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma,” meaning action or just the functioning of life, “is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” So it’s like this. And then there’s one from Don Juan, from the Carlos Castaneda books, he said, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability,” impeccable, which doesn’t mean we’re perfect, but I think it means what you’re saying, there’s this art of living that kind of …

Unmani: Yeah, it’s more and more refined. And I’ve certainly noticed that in the way I’m working with people. I do these very intimate dialogues, and people have described them like energetic surgery, which I wouldn’t have used that term myself, but it is like that in a way. It’s kind of really checking in myself all the time, what’s going on, and of course, you or whoever I’m sitting with is in me, and so I’m checking and noticing and feeling, and there’s that sensitivity.

Rick: That’s interesting. So you’ve got this internal barometer that helps you read the person you’re sitting with and interact with them.

Unmani: Yes, because I’m reading myself, and that’s how I can read you.

Rick: So let’s say for instance, “All right, you want to read something about me or you want to just use a more hypothetical example?”

Unmani: It’s not quite like that. I’m not going to read your fortune or something.

Rick: No, so for instance, if a person is, let’s say, hurting emotionally, their boyfriend broke up with them or something like that, and maybe they haven’t even told you that yet, but you’re sitting talking to them, do you begin to feel some sadness or hurt or abandonment feelings in your own physiology or something?

Unmani: Yeah, I mean I don’t necessarily have that word put on it, but I start to have a feeling of something, feeling a bit broken, maybe something like that, and a certain crushed sort of feeling. And so I may just start to respond to that or describe that, and then if they feel that it matches what they’re feeling, then they’ll be like, “Oh yeah,” and then they’ll start to open up, “Oh yeah,” and then we’ll talk about it.

Rick: Do you feel like you sometimes pick up on things that they themselves might not even have been aware of, and then you help them to become aware of them?

Unmani: Yes, because sometimes people don’t want to look at or feel things, and sometimes people will fight with me, like, “No, no, no, it’s not like that.” And then sometimes later on they’ll come back and say, “Well actually, you’re right, it was like that, I was too afraid or didn’t want to see it.” Because sometimes this message or this pointing can be quite confronting and threatening to what we think about ourselves. And so yeah, not everyone is ready or willing for that.

Rick: But I suspect that you don’t have a very confrontational style. I mean, there are some teachers that really like to skewer people and bust their egos, and they can be very harsh, really, even with people who haven’t asked for that. Maybe they’ve showed up at the meeting but they haven’t asked to be publicly pilloried.

Unmani: I find that in the way I work with people, the container is so important. And what I mean by that is that whether it’s the room that we’re in, or the fact that I say that everybody who’s here needs to stay here and not come and go, and they need to commit to the whole time that we’re there, things like that create a very safe container. And if those people are willing to really be there and show up and really commit to it, courageously, because it is about being courageously vulnerable, then that container can hold. Sometimes we’re being very strong with people, but because it’s held in a tough love kind of way, it can be very ruthless at times, but when necessary. Sometimes people just don’t know how to stop, kind of going along with their old mechanisms. They’re longing to stop, but they just don’t know how. And sometimes it’s like, “Stop it right now!”

Rick: And do they stop it sometimes?

Unmani: Yeah, sometimes it’s like, “Phew, they just need a bit of a slap.” But when it’s held safely, then it’s not like a public humiliation.

Rick: Right. Do you notice pretty profound transformations in people sometimes, or often, when they’ve gone through a retreat or something like that?

Unmani: Yeah, yeah. More and more as this …

Rick: Getting better at it.

Unmani: Yeah, I seem to get more refined. Yeah, big transformation. Not that people are suddenly walking out all enlightened and floating out the door, because that’s not really what I’m aiming for, if I’m aiming for anything really. But it’s more that they can go back to their ordinary lives and just be ordinary, and the weighty suffering that they were carrying that they can actually finally put it down and just live, live freely, enjoy life, start to go on with their own refined exploration. And that, to me, that’s a success story, that they can then go off and be ordinary, just live as ordinary people. They don’t need to be all enlightened. If someone thinks that they’ve got it and they’re all special after being at my intensives, then they really haven’t heard what the hell I’m talking about.

Rick: Yeah, there’s always more, as you said in the beginning. For some reason, as we were discussing this point just now, I was reminded of one of those moving walkways in the airports where you can go faster for a bit to get down to your gate. And I could see an intensive as being one of those things. You can just walk along on the carpet and get there, but you can step on a walkway for a couple of minutes and make some good progress.

Unmani: Speeds it up. Yes, for sure. In one way I can say, well, you know, who I am, life itself doesn’t need to do anything, doesn’t need to come to a meeting or an intensive or anything. Of course not, it doesn’t need anything. But this human experience is about forgetting and remembering and acknowledging more and more this living as that. And that’s what seems to happen in these intensives, when people are exhausted with trying to improve and fix themselves and they just want to hear it how it is, you know, “Can someone just tell me the truth and have my own experience confirmed?” People come like, “Am I okay basically?” is what they’re asking. “Am I enough? Am I okay?” And of course I don’t need to give them that answer, it’s about them discovering that for themselves.

Rick: Yeah. If someone were to ask me that I would say, “Yeah, you’re okay, but make sure we’re referring to the full package here, you know, because there’s a lot of buried potentials and you’ll really be okay if those can be unearthed and can be lived, but without those, life can be a little shaky.”

Unmani: Yes, but then we go through life assuming from a very young age that we’re not okay. So we’ve got so used to squashing our power, life itself’s power, that we automatically are putting those same beliefs that we had as children, we learned from our parents or society, we put that into the spiritual search in the same way. We’re kind of taught that we need to achieve, we need to be someone, we need to know where we’re going, what we’re doing, our purpose, all that. And then we do the same thing in the spiritual search, we try to achieve awakening, enlightenment.

Rick: Nirvana.

Unmani: Nirvana, yeah. We try to become perfect, but it’s not the same thing. It’s actually about going right back to the beginning and saying, “Well, maybe there was nothing wrong with me right at the beginning of it all, and if there’s nothing wrong with me, then it leaves me with absolutely nothing really. I then have to question everything I’ve ever been taught, and then what is reliable?” And in that, your whole world just blasts open, and there is the power, there is the freedom, the power, the love, in that breaking open of what you thought you were.

Rick: Yeah, in a way you can’t blame people for wanting some nirvana or grand awakening to take place, because everybody keeps reporting these things, you know? “Oh, I had this profound awakening, and this and that happened,” and you can read books about them, you can go to talks about them, and it’s enticing. When you hear that stuff, it sounds great, you want to experience it.

Unmani: You don’t hear about what happened to them after that experience.

Rick: Right.

Unmani: They had this great experience and then there was a great crash as well. Or maybe not straight away, maybe it was gradual, but life does come back in.

Rick: Or they thought they had it made and that was it, and they’re in like Flint and then …

Unmani: Yeah, and sometimes it lasts for a while.

Rick: Honeymoon period.

Unmani: Yeah, and then the thinking comes in to hijack it and say, “Well, I’ve got it now. I can now become a teacher because I’ve got it.”

Rick: Yeah.

Unmani: Yeah, and you know, great, from that place you can share your experience, but what tends to happen is that people hear it and it’s like, “Oh wow, they’ve got it and I haven’t got it.” And it just reinforces this idea that there’s something wrong with me because I haven’t had an experience like them. So it’s not about the experience, that’s what I really want to love to emphasize, that you can have any experience, any fancy awakening experience, but so what?

Rick: Well, but there’s a difference between a flashy experience. I was talking to Francis earlier today and he was saying, “You know, over the years I had so many interesting experiences, but then when I awoke it wasn’t really an experience, not like all those other ones. It wasn’t something which by its very nature could come and go.”

Unmani: Couldn’t.

Rick: No, it could not, by virtue of what it is. And then he said, “And I realized at that time that it had always been there, all my life, but just had been kind of overlooked.” And I’m just picking on Francis, but you hear those kinds of accounts. So I guess maybe what you’re saying here is, if awakening or enlightenment or nirvana or whatever is considered to be an experience in the sense of some really cool blazing of a thousand suns kind of thing that’s going to happen, and maybe such a thing does happen, that ain’t it.

Unmani: But it can even be more subtle than that, because many people say to me, “Okay, I don’t need a fancy special experience, but I just need an experience of a bit more ease.” So you can change the words, but you’re still hoping for an experience. And it’s not about any kind of experience at all. Actually it’s about acknowledging your nature, which as you were saying, Francis says, is beyond all experience. It doesn’t come and go, because experience does come and go. If you have an experience that wasn’t there, well, it’s come and then it’s gone after that. And if it does come and go, then it’s not it.

Rick: But then aren’t there symptoms of the kind of abiding awakening we’re talking about? One of them might be ease. I was talking to Rupert yesterday and he was saying, “Well, peace and happiness are hallmarks or characteristics of a genuine abiding awakening.” So there are these symptoms.

Unmani: Yeah, I would call them by-products.

Rick: Yeah, by-products.

Unmani: Yeah, because they’re not the point.

Rick: Right, they’re kind of offshoots.

Unmani: Well, if you’re aiming for peace and happiness, you’re going to be looking and searching for a long time, because it’s not about that. Life includes a lot of experiences that are not peaceful and not happy. But if you’re not searching for any kind of experience and you start to see, well, actually every experience is included, then that in itself is peaceful. So it’s actually when you let go of this wanting a particular experience, you get everything you wanted in a way, but not in the package you thought it was going to come in. So when you don’t even care about having peace and happiness, you might have a bit of peace and happiness, but so what? Who cares?

Rick: But again, those are by-products.

Unmani: Those are by-products. The real love is the love of what is true, who I really am. And actually I remember as a child, kind of making a pact. I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before, I hope not. But making some kind of imaginary pact or prayer to, I don’t know who I was praying to or what, but just give me the truth. I’m prepared to sacrifice the perfect relationship, living happily ever after, whatever that means, all the best, wonderful experiences, here, have them all. I just want the truth. And at that time I was a teenager, at that time I didn’t know what I was really asking for.

Rick: So did stuff start happening?

Unmani: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it had already started, that was already part of it.

Rick: I can think of a number of people I’ve interviewed who gave God an ultimatum like that. Pamela Wilson, this woman named Mirabai Devi, the latter just said, “I’m just going to sit on this rock and starve to death if I don’t get there.”

Unmani: Yeah, willing to die.

Rick: It was just like, yeah, they’d come to the end of their rope, so to speak. And I don’t think anyone who’s listening to this on YouTube can say, “Okay, that’s it, I want the truth.” There has to be a ripening before that becomes a meaningful resolution. Yes, and also many people say to me, “Well, I’ve never had that moment where I’ve really been wanting to die, and do I have to come to that point?” No, you don’t. It’s not the way for everybody. Some people do have a kind of gradual seeing, so you don’t have to have either a special experience or this kind of, “I want to die.”

Rick: Or the Master holding the disciple’s head underwater and saying, “You need it as bad as you want to breathe.”

Unmani: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t have to be like anything in particular. Everyone has such a unique journey, and I’m sure you’ve seen that with all the people you’ve interviewed. Everyone is totally unique, so however it is for you is just how it is.

Rick: That’s an important point, it’s a really important point, because what I’ve also seen is so many cases of people thinking it needs to be a particular way, like that guy describes, or like I read in this book or something. And it’s like their, what was that Byron Katie book, “A Thousand Names for Joy,” for some reason that came to mind, but it seems like there are as many paths as there are people. And everyone’s going to have their own unique fingerprint.

Unmani: Yeah, and it’s about your own authority as well. Not the authority of the thinking, which of course thinks it knows it all, but your real authority. As you recognize who you really are, then you know that that is the only authority, to know actually how it is. So as long as you’re assuming that someone else’s experience is better than yours, or your experience should be like theirs, or if you’re assuming that what your thoughts are saying or other people’s thoughts are saying are more true than your own direct knowing, then you’re moving in that very agitated, painful way. But in knowing who you are and acknowledging that actually, I am the only one who can know, because there’s no one else actually. How it is in this experience is the only experience. There’s no other experience, actually. There’s no outside of me. So how it is, is just how it is. No one can say that my experience is wrong or should be any different.

Rick: On the other hand, just to play devil’s advocate, there are people who tend to want to just wipe clean any notion of hierarchy or stages of progression or something like that. I’ve actually had people say to me, “There isn’t an inch of daylight between me and Ramana Maharshi,” meaning that because they had this pretty clear concept of what non-duality is, they were actually living in the same state that he was. And I think that’s hubris. I think there’s a lack of humility implicit in that. And back to the paradox word, we have to, on the one hand, not compare ourselves to others, but on the other hand, recognize that there may be some others who are a little bit more …

Unmani: I don’t know who it was that you were talking about, but it depends where they’re talking from. Because consciousness, life itself, there is no difference between me or anybody else, no matter how special or enlightened I am.

Rick: Sure, like you were saying earlier, as far as the absolute is concerned, it’s the same thing.

Unmani: There’s no separation, there’s no difference.

Rick: But as far as the embodiment of that, yeah.

Unmani: Yes, of course. And everyone is totally unique and special and different to any other experience. It’s a different expression. And in another way, we can’t even begin to compare, because we’re so unique. So we’re absolutely the same consciousness, but so different and so unique. But in the same way, we can’t start to believe, “Well, I’m at this level and he’s way up there and I need to, hopefully one day, maybe in the next ten lifetimes, I might get there.” Because that’s a whole other trick of the mind, to start to put other people up on a pedestal, even if they are, wow, amazing, and there’s a lot to learn from them. It doesn’t mean that they are somehow up there and then you are now down there, because that’s now not going with your own inner authority.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s interesting because if you hear, often great saints and sages speak, they say, “I just see myself. All these people here, we’re all the same person. I bow to them because in a very real sense, I’m not higher than them.”

Unmani: Yes, absolutely. As soon as you put someone else up or down, then you’re putting yourself separate, you’re building a wall between them.

Rick: It’s a funny thing though, because there is this paradox. I’ve had arguments with people that have tried to convince me that a frog is just as enlightened as the Buddha or something. In some sense that’s true, the frog, the self is the same in all beings, and the Gita says you see all beings in the self and the self in all beings and all that. But on the other hand, to quote the Fiddler on the Roof guy, “There are stages of development, there are stages of progress, stages of evolution. Frog is not the same as a human being, even in terms of its neural capacity to reflect consciousness.” So it’s kind of like you were saying earlier about the non-dualist, they kind of go over here and hang there and deny that. You kind of have to do both.

Unmani: Yeah, absolutely. There are endless unravelings and seeing through more and more that goes on until you die. I hope that there’s never an end.

Rick: Yeah, it’s more of an adventure that way.

Unmani: Yeah, exactly. But I wouldn’t say that there are stages or levels or something like that, because that starts to be like it’s now, the way the thinking works, it starts to map out all the levels and the stages.

Rick: No, the whole Buddhist tradition is just that, you know, they have all kinds of complex maps of all the stages of attainment and they have words for all these things.

Rick: That’s what the thinking loves to do, that, and there’s nothing wrong with it, of course. It’s just that when you start to focus on that, you start to deny your own authority again.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a balancing act, you know? It’s a balancing act, like riding a bicycle or something, you can go too far in either direction. You kind of have to have this both-and.

Unmani: It’s like holding it all lightly. Yeah, it’s like, “Okay, right, rightly.” “Yeah, okay, I can learn from that. Yeah, maybe, you know, that’s relevant. I’m not going to really find my identity in that.” Because that’s what thought wants to do, it wants to say, “Oh, which level am I? Am I nearly there? Am I below this person or above this person?” That’s really the aim of those kind of maps, you know?

Rick: That’s funny.

Unmani: “Where can I find myself?”

Rick: It reminds me of the first time I took LSD, we picked up this book by Ram Dass, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary, and it was talking all about bardos, and we sat around all night trying to figure out what bardo we were in. “We’re in the second bardo?”

Unmani: Yeah, yeah, I mean that’s the nature of thought. It’s always asking this question, “Who am I?” in lots of different forms, trying to map it all out so that I can know who I am. But the answer is never in thought.

Rick: Yeah. Well, how are we doing? 5.30, we’ve been going about an hour. This conversation is flowing nicely, I think.

Unmani: It’s lovely.

Rick: Yeah, I really enjoy talking to you. Are there any kind of things that you’d like to bring out that we haven’t really brought out as we’re going along here? Things that are important to you, things that come up in your teaching that you are telling people over and over again because they keep coming up, anything like that?

Unmani: We’ve explored quite a lot of the main things, I think.

Rick: Have we?

Unmani: Yeah, I mean, I don’t remember more right now.

Rick: So what’s up with you? Are you in the States for a while?

Unmani: We go next week to Vancouver, I say “we,” me and my partner. And then we go to Portland, and then we go to Washington and New York. So we’re in the States and Canada until the end of November.

Rick: And then back to UK. And of course this will become dated pretty soon because it’ll be up for years. But what’s your website?

Unmani: Die-2-Love.com. But you know, I’m always on the move.

Rick: But you keep your schedule there?

Unmani: Yes, I just mean I don’t have a base, I’m not going back to…

Rick: Oh, okay, so you don’t even have an apartment any place?

Unmani: No.

Rick: You live in and out of a suitcase?

Unmani: Yes.

Rick: Wow, that’s impressive.

Unmani: Yeah, for years.

Rick: Yeah, I did that for about 15 years, but I think I stopped doing it when I was about

Unmani: Yeah, that’s in the other interview.

Rick: Yeah. But you must have places you can go and just kind of get away from it all for a while.

Unmani: I have some favorite places, yeah, where I stay with friends or family.

Rick: Interesting, you must have a lot of frequent flyer miles.

Unmani: Yeah, although I only discovered that a few years ago, so I should have kind of…

Rick: You haven’t been collecting them?

Unmani: Well, I have recently, but not from years ago. I could have bought loads of free flights by now.

Rick: Yeah. Great, well, this has been a nice catch-up. So, Die-2-Love.com, and I’ll be linking to that from the page I’ll put up with this interview on BatGap. Have you written any books?

Unmani: Yes, not lately, but…

Rick: I probably linked your book from the last one.

Unmani: Yeah, well, I have two books. I Am Life Itself, which I wrote about more than 10 years ago, so about 12 years ago.

Rick: Is it getting dated? Is it getting stale?

Unmani: No, not really. It’s a very simple book, just kind of says it like it is, and it’s got my story in it as well. And then Die To Love, which I wrote probably about 5 or 6, about love and relationships and love itself as well, not just loving feeling. And I’m writing a third book, but that’s been going on for a while.

Rick: Do you have a newsletter that you send out or anything?

Unmani: Yeah, I do.

Rick: So they can sign up for that on your website?

Unmani: Yeah, on my website, monthly newsletter. I mean, it’s not always every month.

Rick: What you’re up to?

Unmani: I write an article each time. People seem to like my articles.

Rick: Good. All right, well, thanks. So I guess we’ll wrap it up. I’ve had this nice little getting up-to-date conversation with Unmani. It’s nice to kind of check in with old friends and see how it’s going. And as most people watching this will probably be familiar with batgap.com, but in case you’re not, that’s what it is, B-A-T-G-A-P. It’s an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. So go there and you’ll find all the several hundred interviews I’ve done indexed in several different ways. And you’ll find a forum where people have discussions and a place to sign up to receive my email newsletter, which just goes out about once a week, every time a new interview is posted. Although with all these SAND interviews, it’ll be a little bit more frequent for a while. There’s a “donate” button, which I appreciate people clicking if they feel the capacity and urge to do so. And there’s also a link to an audio podcast, which somebody was telling me just today that he really, it’s funny, the guy works at Apple and he doesn’t know how to subscribe to a podcast. And he said, “Well, I just download the MP3 and import it into iTunes.” I said, “No, you don’t want to do it that way. Subscribe to the podcast and it’ll come in automatically and the podcast remembers if you interrupt and it remembers where you left off.” So I figured that out. That’s worth doing if you like to listen to podcasts or things in audio. So thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you with the next one, which may be one more before I leave here. Thanks.

Unmani: Thank you.