Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done well over 400 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you will see all the previous ones organized in several different ways. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it to any extent, it’s important, and we appreciate your support. Incidentally, if you’re watching the video of this and you see all these marks on my face, I had some precancerous skin things burned off a couple of days ago, so it looks like I’ve been attacked by an octopus or something. But it’s nothing serious, it’s just a precautionary thing, and it’ll clear up. My guest today is Vera de Chalambert. I’ll just read her little bio here first. Vera is a spiritual storyteller and Harvard-educated scholar of comparative religion. She speaks and writes about spiritual culture, mindfulness in the modern world, and the divine feminine, and has been a speaker at the Science and Non-Duality Conference in the US and Europe, Sister Giant in Washington, DC, and other gatherings. Vera holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied comparative mysticism, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida in religion and literature. She also happens to speak about four languages fluently. Her work explores the meeting place of creativity, psychology, and spirituality, and is informed by insights from both Eastern and Western philosophies. Vera is a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, and has been a student of Jason Shulman’s non-dual healing work. She is deeply influenced by Buddhist and Kabbalistic lineages. Vera’s recent work has been on the topic of holy darkness, and exploration of the dark goddesses associated with transformation and initiation, found in the world’s great wisdom traditions, the most well-known of whom is the Hindu goddess Kali. Vera is a mother and a devotee of the mother. She’s working on her first book on the dark feminine. So, welcome Vera.
Vera: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Rick. You know, when you read that I’m always wondering like, “Whose bio is that? Why is it being read?” And that person seems like they have something figured out, and that is absolutely not the case for me. So, I am so grateful that you invited me. I’m not quite sure, as you know, why, but I’m really grateful to talk with you.
Rick: Well, I am too. I first really became aware of you sometime earlier this year, although I think you said we met at the SAND Conference, but I don’t remember that, actually. But I was reading a thing on one of those SAND Conference emails that go out, the Science and Non-duality Conference emails, and it was so beautifully written that I had to email Maurizio, the organizer of the SAND Conference, to ask, “Who wrote this?” And he said, “Oh, it was Vera de Chalambert.” And I said, “Wow, it’s beautiful, it’s deep, it’s profound, it’s so nicely written.” So, you know, I have to get to know this person. So, I started reading some of your stuff, and you wrote several articles about Kali, especially that one where a picture of Kali was projected on the Empire State Building in New York.
Vera: Right. Isn’t that cool?
Rick: Yeah, it was interesting.
Vera: How amazing.
Rick: They’re great articles, and I posted one to my Facebook page, and somehow or other that caught Marianne Williamson’s attention, and then she ended up inviting you to Sister Giant. So, in any case, you know, you’re kind of self-effacing and a little shy, and not used to all this publicity stuff, but I really think you have something to say. And, you know, I’m sure if we spoke 10 years from now, you’d have even more to say. But, you know, we’re all works in progress, and…
Irene:(Irene laughs)
Rick: What? What’s so funny about that?
Irene: It sounds funny. Irene says, “It sounds funny!” But really, I mean, you know, you’re very humble, and that in itself is a qualifier for being on this show, actually. (Laughter)
Vera: I’m not sure I’m humble. I just am very scared.
Rick: Well, it takes humility to say that. And it’s natural. I mean, there are some famous actors like, you know, Meryl Streep and people who still get butterflies when they have to do something in a public way. So, it’s just a human reaction. Okay, so you have a very interesting story, and I thought it would be interesting to start with that story, where you were born, some of your, you know, milestones growing up in terms of your growing awareness of God and spirituality and so on. It’s a fascinating story. So, let’s start with that. You were born in Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union.
Vera: Yeah, exactly, in the former Soviet Union. When I say that, I realize I’m older than I think. So, I was born in the former Soviet Union, and I was born quite premature. And I’m only mentioning that because, as I think about my life, I realize that’s actually a really big piece for me. I was born like about two and a half months premature, and I spent a lot of time in an incubator. And I think that that affected me in a particular way, like this early trauma, where I didn’t have a sort of a built-in container. My childhood was spent in this like boundary-less place, where I couldn’t tell where, you know, I was kind of feeling everything all the time. Everything was kind of directly moving through me. And I think that there is this way in which I’m still continuing to heal that gap, that kind of developmental gap of not having many boundaries or healthy boundaries.
Rick: It would seem that someone who spends their first couple of months in an incubator isn’t getting a lot of touching and closeness to the mother and all that. That must have an effect.
Vera: Exactly. Yes, and so as early as I could remember myself, there was really this sense of feeling everyone and kind of seeing everything from above a little bit. I even had this, I remember a really early memory of looking into my hands and then zooming inside my head into this black box inside my head, and then… whoosh!… just popping out. And that was an experience that I think I was born with a body, and when I was born I had casts. I was crippled, I was born with feet in and under, and I had casts for the first two and a half years of my life. And so I think having the experience of being in the body as I came into this world, wasn’t very comforting for me, and so I just hung out elsewhere. And so if I had to say, I would say that my path so far has been a path into this body, into incarnation, right, like learning how to tolerate the muchness and the beauty and the heartbreak and the discomfort of this world. And so, also, I think that went along or that kind of matched my very early sensibility of moving towards the Divine. I lived in this Jewish, secular environment where God was poetry and art and protest and literature, and my mother, instead of reading me fairy tales, would read me these beautiful, heartbreaking poetry from Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, these soul wailers of the Russian soul, if you will, right? People who have seen the shattering of their worlds, who lived through revolutions, and I think that really profoundly affected me. And I remember the first time I heard the word “God” as a child, it was outside of the home somewhere, maybe in a kindergarten situation, and it’s like my whole body landed. It was like, “Oh yeah, this is where I belong.” And then I’ve been like a one-trick pony ever since. It’s like my only interest, my only direction, my only devotion, and in so many ways. So as I was telling you, we talked a little bit before our interview, and I grew up in this city called Lviv, which before World War II was actually a Polish city. And a lot of Polish people loved it, and Martin Buber was born and raised there, many incredible thinkers and scientists. And so many Polish people loved the city so much that many of them stayed, instead of going back to Poland, once the city became Soviet. And that meant that I grew up in a trilingual culture, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and I went to a Polish school, where all the subjects were in Polish. And also, what we should know about Polish people is that they’re very deeply and devotionally Catholic. And although in the Soviet Union religion didn’t exist, it was like a topic non grata, it was not really allowed, welcomed, you could get into serious political trouble if you practiced any form of religion. There were nuns and priests coming into my school, because it was a Polish school, teaching subversively religion. And for me, that was just like heaven, that was all I ever wanted. And so secretly from my parents, because I figured that wouldn’t be so kosher, I studied with the nuns and the priests and had my first communion, secretly went and had my first communion at like 10, where I confessed that I’m not actually Catholic. And maybe this is not very kosher of me, but… And then the next, I came back home and I told my parents, and they didn’t know what to do with me, what do you do with this? My dad was like, “Oy vey!” My mother was like, “I don’t know what to say.” And so then I thought, okay, this is maybe very unkosher, because I was never baptized. So I went at the time, this is like right at this moment now, this is right as the Soviet Union breaks down. And there’s mass chaos, and there’s economic and social… really chaos, currencies changing all the time, people are wailing openly in the streets and digging through garbage dumps. There’s no bread, there’s no… It’s like a real collapse of my world at the time. And you know, where some kids kind of have this narrative of when their parents have a divorce, there’s like this little voice that says, “This is my fault that they got divorced.” Somehow the way it landed in me was that it was my fault that the world around me was collapsing. That somehow I wasn’t, I don’t know, pure enough, that I could have somehow been better. And so after the Catholic First Communion, they had mass baptisms at the time. And I snuck into a mass baptism in an Armenian Orthodox Church, because my mother’s father was Armenian. And I kind of thought, “Oh, wow, there’s a connection there.” And so I had a baptism there. There were Baptists coming in, in stadiums, kind of doing the Holy Spirit thing. And of course, that was my life. I was sneaking away to try and find God everywhere. And then we were very fortunate to become political refugees at the time. And we emmigrated, my family and I, when I was 11, to Florida. And when I came to Florida, this other world opened up, because you see, Judaism in the former Soviet Union was considered an ethnic identity, a national identity. It was something stamped in your passport that you had to hide most of the time, because there was sort of systemic anti-Semitism. So that was not something you wanted out there. And it was very pervasive. I mean, even as children, the teachers would say, “All the Russian kids, raise your hands. All the Ukrainian kids, raise your hands.” So until it got to me, I didn’t want to raise my hand. This is something you wanted not to. You wanted to fit in. You didn’t want to stick out. You didn’t want this to be your cross to bear, so to speak. And then I came to America, where all of a sudden, not only was it okay to be Jewish, but it was a religion. I mean, that was a great moment for me, where I thought, “Oh my God, there was something about my lineage that could connect me to the Divine, too.” And so then I kind of dove into the Jewish tradition. And because I came to America, I didn’t speak English, I felt like I was split and that my world was cut off somehow, in the sense that there was no way that I could communicate where I was coming from. The gray and the heartbroken and the devastated and the shattered. And then, into the Florida, sunshine, smiling people, large supermarkets, with 25,000 colors and cheeses and breads, while I was just coming… This is so interesting. It was that moment where people were waiting in line for bread. That was my only responsibility as a kid, for an hour or more than an hour, much more, until there was no bread when you got to the front. And I had these kinds of very difficult dissonance. There was such a dissonance between my new life in America and my old life. I had such a difficult time finding my place and integrating these various kind of narratives that formed me. And so what happened then, as I was becoming a teenager and felt like I still did not believe, is that I drowned myself in books. What I did is I went into the library and I read every New Age book in the library. I read indiscriminately, philosophy, religion, Ram Dass, everything I could get my hands on. And, not surprisingly, that led me, when I came to college, that led me into a pretty easy choice of direction, which was religious studies and comparative literature, at the time, as well. And I was extremely fortunate because I came to the University of Florida and at that time, the University of Florida had this emergence happening. And the faculty of the Arts and Sciences and the medical school at UF had these incredible professors who were all kind of profoundly interested in consciousness studies, who were very deeply influenced by the work of Ken Wilber, and who formed something called the Center for Spirituality and Health. And it was largely due to a patronage of Mickey Singer. I don’t know if you know who Michael Singer is?
Rick: I do, I’d like to get him on the show sometime.
Vera: Of “The Untethered Soul.’ So at the time he didn’t yet write a book, he wasn’t yet on the scene, but he already had this beautiful place called the Temple of the Universe in the woods in Alachua, where he would invite lots of different spiritual teachers. And he was one of the patrons of the Center, who made it possible for the Center to begin inviting some of the world’s great mystics and thinkers and spiritual teachers. And my mentor at the time was the director of the Center. His name was Shaya Isenberg, Sheldon Isenberg, and he was really my first spiritual mentor. He was a renewal rabbi and a Wilberite, a Wilberian kind of integral theory thinker. He was the chair of the Department of Religion at the time, and he really took me under his wing and mentored me. And actually, it’s funny, I just learned David Deida, also, he was his first mentor as well. And so I became the student director of the Center, and somehow at that time arose this community of students where we all had the same longing. We all had that same thirst for spirituality, for embodied spirituality, for paradox. It was really interesting. And who we got to meet were like, we had lunch with Ram Dass, and Father Thomas Keating was the inaugural guest. And, I mean, it was just such a… Reb Zalman would come and work with us. And this wasn’t like, oh, a moment or a talk. They would come and they would spend time with us. And they would do kind of weekend long workshops with us. And so I really felt so deeply shaped by that time, both because by 19/20 I read everything Ken Wilber ever wrote, so it was difficult to have a kind of magical, mythical understanding of religion. And also because I began to, and it felt like, receive transmissions from these elders, from these incredible teachers in our culture, who I got to experience firsthand. And also kind of grew this community of students when we came together and had a contemplative community that formed. At the time it looked like, in a very, like a wisdom circle, right? It was a very circular kind of process, but that we came together every Sunday morning or Saturday morning, I don’t remember anymore, and really shared our processes and integrate, trying to integrate all these different practices that we were being given. For example, Centering Prayer, when Father Keating came and taught us, right? We would do these practices together. We would see how they meet our ordinary human lives and, you know, post-teenage dramas. And it was quite a profound shaping time for me. And then I went off to Harvard Divinity School, where I also got a lot of pieces. And I was really fascinated by, on one hand, comparative mysticism. I was interested in how the experience of mystics across the spectrum of different religiosities and religions compared. What did they all experience? What was the language that they used? And then on the other, there was this other academic part of me that really was interested in discourses of power. What are the, you know, how does reason oppress? How does language trap us? And so, somehow I feel like these things are continuously moving through me, the questions of power, the questions of how we form identity. And how do we connect to the real? How do we connect to the real? And so then I went off and studied for four years in the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. And really for me, that was the real divinity school, experientially, in the sense in which it was all about working with trauma, doing profound kind of psycho-spiritual process work, where I didn’t just get to talk about being afraid. I got to scream it out and beat it out and, you know, kind of use my body in the healing process. And so that was really the beginning of my kind of descent into what I think as my incarnation. I think until that time I was really living maybe from the heart up, but maybe from the neck up. And it was in the Brennan School where there was a lot of core energetic work that was being done that I began to understand that this body is in something, too. Because I understood it on a mental level, I mean, you know, integral theory and such, but not in an experiential way. And so I also began to become more and more sensitive to subtle worlds and to subtle energy realities.
Rick: Like give us an example or two of that, how you experienced that.
Vera: Well, I mean, on a large scale, we go around thinking, okay, so even though I had these very expanded experiences from a very early age, where I wasn’t located in my body, let’s say, and all kinds of things happened, and I always felt like I was someone in a liminal space between this world and the next. So, there are so many kinds of experiences, right? But as, working as a healer, which was kind of what I was doing at the time, it was like an entire new … it was as if before there was an intuition and a general sense of something invisible being there. It began to be as concrete as a rock. So, running energy began to be as real as having rocks thrown at me, for example. It wasn’t something intuitive or amorphous. I began to perceive what different people’s traumas look like in their field. Sometimes I would be in a healing and these entire movies would open up about someone’s life, right? And then you would feel kind of, I don’t know, is this my projection? What is that? And I began to explore these more subtle realms and, yeah, it was quite an interesting process. And I want to say I had experiences, pretty profound experiences, especially at a certain point, of kind of psychic opening. When I was 18, I went to this retreat, it was kind of a silent retreat, and at some point I think my container wasn’t strong enough to kind of tolerate what opened up for me. And it looked like, people kind of seek enlightenment or awakening, but it looked like for me, a kind of a peak experience that my body couldn’t tolerate. Like I was in a kind of expanded state. I went to sleep. I saw a bunch of dreams and then I went into a darkness and I couldn’t turn off. I couldn’t turn off my awareness of it and it felt like an infinity, like an eternity. And then new dreams came up. Like basically what happened was that for a whole night I couldn’t turn off. And when I woke up I couldn’t tell if my body was real anymore. I kind of had this kind of break. And I remember like laughing hysterically and people were coming up to me and they were, “You should leave,” and they didn’t feel comfortable with me leaving. But everything just kind of…
Rick: Broke open.
Vera: It broke open, except it broke open in a very dissociative way. I couldn’t tell what was real. I couldn’t tell what was happening. And that was at 18/19 and I think that wasn’t very helpful for me, actually. I think that the rest of my time was kind of, from that point on, was spent mending what kind of broke open prematurely, integrating my personality. And luckily I was at the time in a context where I had mentors at the University of Florida. So this is just like an overall background. And then after the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, I started working with Jason Shulman, who is really my teacher, who is this wonderful Baba for me, who is not very known and I’m not exactly sure why, because I think he is one of the most integrated teachers on the scene.
Rick: We’ve been looking at him, and even before I knew that you were connected with him, over the last couple of weeks we’ve been looking at him and thinking, “Whoa, this guy looks interesting. I should have him on the show.”
Vera: He is absolutely extraordinary because he bridges the theistic, which means God-centered narrative or spiritual way of being, this devotional God-centered way, with the non-dual perspective. He is a Zen teacher. His lineage on one side is Zen and then what happened to him was that the Kabbalistic, Kabbalah opened up for him. Because if you know anything about Kabbalah you will know it is esoteric, it is impossible to understand, it is kind of heady, and it’s difficult to touch with a 10-foot pole. But what happened in his case was that the entire lineage opened itself up to him and kind of began flowing through him in the direction of how to use that lineage and that wisdom for healing, in a healing way. And so he brought the Buddhist and the Kabbalistic together and those two traditions have always been the sort of dominant shaping kind of narratives for me. For example, I worked with Reb Zalman, as I mentioned, and when I was 20-something, 21, I was one of the youngest people to … He used to be really, really interested in eldering and “aging and saging,” and I was one of the youngest people to do that work with him because I was so interested also somehow in where does wisdom come from. And so he worked of course a lot with the Kabbalistic lineages and I felt it kind of moving through me in some way. And when I met Jason, I mean actually I remember I just heard about Jason and my entire body felt like, yes, and I went and I googled him and I knew I had to work with him. It was like this, you know how it happens with teachers, he was mine. And I did another three years of working with him, really, really shifted the way I look at healing, the way I looked at the awakening process.
Rick: In what way did it shift?
Vera: I stopped using the spiritual life and the healing process to get out of my pain. His work was like a deep invitation for radical hospitality to everything, very tantric in its nature really in that way. And a real invitation to paradox, to not resolving, to not fixing things, to not using anything to save ourselves from reality, but rather using everything that arises for deeper intimacy with what’s here. And it’s like a lot of the teachings that I got before intellectually, or even maybe spiritually, began to be embodied, beginning to be embodied while I was working with him. And he has a number of really fantastic books. One of them is “The Instruction Manual for Receiving God,” and I really highly recommend it. It’s just a few seed passages that come through him and I love it so much. So Jason was a really deep, deep part of my heart and formative influence. And then I went off to Paris. Actually, I went off to Paris before that. I went off to Paris with my great love who was a French man. And very quickly I had children, which was another part of, I feel, initiation for me, motherhood. Talk about embodiment, you know, talk about spiritual teaching, right? Everything that you’ve ever wanted to deny about yourself comes straight up in your face and everything is triggered. And sleepless nights, it breaks you down, breaks you open. It really brings you into the body and as a woman you become the food, you become the food, you become of every kind, emotional, psychological, physical. That was extremely challenging for me, especially for me as my natural proclivity was not hanging out in this world, not knowing how to change the diapers, not knowing how to make the food, not knowing how to do any of this human stuff that was so abhorrent to me. And even though I could talk about embodiment, and I still do, and this is still where I wrestle, so please don’t, in no way do I want to say that I’m now beyond this. This is the territory that keeps moving through me over and over again, but when I became a mother it was particularly eloquent for me.
Rick: Well you know, you said something in the very beginning, and you’re alluding to it now, also, which is that, I mean if I could rephrase it in my own words, it’s like we’re all kind of learning how to live on this planet. And I think we all have a sense that perhaps we came from somewhere else or we ultimately belong somewhere else or something, and it’s intense here and it’s difficult and we never get a break in terms of having to learn and deal with stuff. So, I mean, and as we were discussing the other day when we were doing audio testing, you know, we’re all bozos on this bus.
Vera: I love that so much. I’m a bozo, we’re all bozos on this bus.
Rick: Yeah, everybody’s kind of in the same boat, and if we think that someone else has it all figured out and doesn’t have any challenges, then we’re just not seeing the situation clearly.
Vera: Yeah, you know, and frankly, what else but becoming intimately familiar with our own suffering can move us towards service, towards healing, towards the awakening process? Because what does that mean, the awakening to what? How many more men does it take to go up a mountain, you know, to stare at walls? So, we’re awake, it’s not such a big deal. I mean, I feel like for someone who’s kind of more prone to expanded states of consciousness, I’m constantly like, “So what?” And, of course, there’s so many different qualities of experience, but really on some level for me it’s always been like, “Cool, but so what? Like, what now?
Rick: Yeah.
Vera: What now? So, we get an insight. What now? How do we bring it down? How do we work with that broken and that human in us, you know, that isn’t about some kind of other state, but like here and now?
Rick: Yeah, just this morning I was listening to a SAND conference panel from a couple of years ago with Matthew Wright, Adam Bucko, and Francis Bennett.
Vera: Oh, I love that so much.
Rick: Yeah, and Francis Bennett.
Vera: I think it was the best SAND panel ever.
Rick: Oh, good. You listened to that? You heard that? And they were kind of talking about this very point of the non-dualists versus the sort of, you know, people who might be … Non-dualists meaning those who might tend to dismiss the whole thing as an illusion and you don’t deal with your personal stuff and all that stuff, versus those who have been there, done that, and realized that, you know, okay, what’s next, as you just said, is that you actually do have to deal with it all and kind of come down into it and learn how to live in it and so on.
Vera: Well, I mean, it seems to me, and I’m so grateful to be able to see this shift in our pop spiritual culture, I feel like that’s kind of … and even in the non-dual culture of whatever we … you know, the people … that there seems to be this movement of integration, right, this kind of descent back down into incarnation. And I think it’s like there’s also this way in which, you know, we talk so much about the emergence of the feminine in this time on the planet. And I feel like almost unanimously everyone can feel it in some way, right? And I write and think a lot about this, but there seems to be almost this natural emergence of a spiritual teaching through reality, through culture, through everything, where we are being made to face our reality here and now, right? Like we’re being brought back down into the mud, into the yuck, into the mess, into the heartbreak of it all. And my God, thank God, thank God, enough, enough already with like, you know, blissing out in mountaintops. And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t have deeply contemplative spiritual lives. We should and we must. But like, you know, Andrew Harvey always … and Andrew Harvey always speaks about sacred activism, right? When the passion and love of the mystic for God and the passion of the activist for justice come together, this third fire emerges within us that can actually be an offering to this world, right?
Rick: Yeah, you know, the farmer throws his corn into the mud and then gets much more corn that way.
Vera: Well, and you know, even I think in the yogic tradition there’s this very famous meme of, you know, “No mud, no lotus.”
Rick: Yeah.
Vera: No mud, no lotus. And so, my interest has always been in some way like the feminine movement. You know, the masculine is the movement towards up and away, towards transcendence. The feminine movement is down into the body, into our sensuality, into desire, into devotion. So, yeah, even when we were talking in preparation, I said, you know, “I’m really nothing.” If I’m anything, I’m like a devotee. Like I am at the feet of the mother. I will worship. I will wail. There’s like, I don’t have anything to offer but those qualities, I feel like, this heartbreak and longing of which my heart is woven. Right? And so, that’s a really downward movement.
Rick: And I’m sure you’re not suggesting …
Vera: And you said bhakta, right? Like that I have this bhakta. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. And I’m sure you’re not suggesting that it has to be either/or. Like there are these two camps, you know, the up and out and the down and in. It’s like integration, both/and.
Vera: Both/and. Always both/and. And for me, it has certainly been the initial movement is completely up, you know, up and away, and that natural tendency where I think we tend to use that as defense, as a way to save ourselves from all of this muchness and all of this pain. And so, but it seems to me that my work emerges from this other place. It seems to me that what is emerging on our planet right now is inviting us into this other place. Probably because this place, the feminine, really has been exiled. Because it must become integrated into our spiritual lives, into our political, social, ecological realities. Right? I don’t remember who said, Clare Dakin, right? She said, “The exclusion of the feminine has led us to a world on the edge of collapse. The re-emergence is going to be a dance to behold.”
Rick: Interesting, beautiful quote.
Vera: Right? And so, it’s like, yeah.
Rick: So, hang on a second. So, what we’ve discussed for the last three or four minutes I’m going to leave as a teaser, because we’re going to get into it much more, but I’m going to bring you back to your story. Because I think the whole complete story is interesting. So, you’re in Paris, you were raising these kids and life is great.
Vera: Perfect life, healing center.
Rick: Healing practice, great husband, great kids, great this, great that.
Vera: Beautiful, you know, like the fairy tale. The fairy tale.
Rick: Yeah, and then I think a critical point was you went to some Amma program, right?
Vera:Yeah, you know, so what I should say, fairy tale and a very deep sense that I’m containing. I can’t let go, I’m containing. Containing it to not change. Right? Like, there was already a sense in which I was living in a rigid way, which is actually not naturally who I am and how I am, but there was this sense of having to hold on, right?
Rick: Like, “I don’t want to lose this, this is so great.”
Vera: “I don’t want to lose it, this is all I want, this is all I need,” like a completely desperate, like, co-dependence with the moment, with the reality. And a kind of a real sense of becoming somebody. And not that I was really becoming somebody, but in my head there was this real kind of like, “What should I be? What should I look like? How should I present myself to the world? Oh, I’m a healer now. Oh, I should be wiser. Oh, I should…” like there was this real semi-unconscious, but really almost semi-conscious, like of wanting to become more perfect, of wanting to become more serious, more, less this mess that I am naturally, and more appropriate in the French way and in the normal social way. And, right, it was like this agenda that I was beginning to have. And having more spiritual experiences. I remember having this weird thought like, “Oh, I should really create,” it was like this really weird, like, “I should have a more serious meditation practice.” Like, I was trying, it was like I was compartmentalizing to make more of a perfect life. You know, and Amma came to Paris, and Amma comes to Paris once a year. And I wasn’t a big Amma fan. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s go see,” you know, because there’s such a Bhakti field around her, so many people who are devoted to her and who really experience her as the embodiment of the feminine and of the mother. That wasn’t at all my story. I just wanted to go and get hugged. It seemed like a fun thing to do, you know. And of course, you know, so I went into, she comes and she spends like a really long time in this huge compound that she comes into, this like, I don’t know, space. And just as I came in and I walked into the space and like, I mean, I say it’s funny to retell stories, but I found myself on my knees, wailing, like with all of my heart, like wailing into the ground, “Mother, burn me up.”
Rick: Which was kind of unanticipated, right? You weren’t a natural-born wailer, you were just sort of like …
Vera: I was a very natural-born, I’m a natural-born wailer. My family would cry at dinner time because we’d be speaking about things. I am like, when someone reads poetry, I will wail. I’m a natural-born wailer.
Rick: So, this wasn’t totally uncharacteristic of you.
Vera: It wasn’t totally uncharacteristic, but that moment in my life, it was uncharacteristic for that moment in my life.
Rick: Yeah, it was spontaneous, you hadn’t anticipated it.
Vera: It was spontaneous and “Mother, burn me up!” was not my language. And “burn me up,” for a person who was containing it all into … was definitely not what I was going for. And I kept repeating it and wailing and wailing and it wasn’t stopping. For a while I was just there on my knees. And as I was saying it, it was like automatic, words were coming out and I kept thinking, “Who is saying it? And stop it, I don’t mean it.” There was a fear. I’m like, “I don’t mean it, I don’t mean it, what the fuck does it mean?” It was like a very strange experience, you know? Oh, yes. So, yeah. And then kind of the evening unfolded and it was this beautiful field and you know how it is with the Amma energy. And the entire night there was this beautiful table of jewelry. You know they sell things all around, so there’s bracelets and prayers and all kinds of things. So you’re all expanded, you might want to buy something, it’s really good for business, I’m sure. But there was this table and I kept circling it, there was these beautiful objects, it’s like jewelry and some other beads and there was this earring there that I kept looking at, this beautiful golden earring with stuff hanging off of it. And it was like I needed it so much, I kept going back and then I was like, “I’m not going to be a spiritual material, I’m not going to consume.” And I kept being pulled back to the table, so finally I asked the lady, I said, “Listen, this earring, where’s the other one and I would really like to try them on?” And she said, “Oh, there is no other earring. This is from the altar of Kali, this came from Kali’s statue in Amma’s ashram.” Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I haven’t heard the name Kali before. I was a scholar of comparative religion. From a distance, at an arm’s length, I absolutely have known about this dark Hindu goddess, and I wanted to have nothing to do with it, like my Judeo-Christian kind of consciousness, really nothing. The hair on my hand stood up and I like bolted, I like got out of there, I didn’t want to have anything to do with that table or anything else. I didn’t exactly get the connection between Amma and Kali either, actually that freaked me out I remember, I had no idea. And so, you know, that was the night of Devi Bhava where she blesses people and marries people and blesses babies and you know what I’m talking about, yeah?
Rick: Oh yeah, I’ve done it many times.
Vera: And so then at the end of the night what she does is she throws rose petals on people and so you get showered by Amma’s roses.(Rick’s dog starts barking.) Do you need to go?
Rick: No, Irene’ll take care of it.
Vera: So, I was just blissed out and like showered by the roses and by love. Oh, what’s really interesting also is when you hug Amma, it’s not some kind of a lovely peaceful hug, it’s like, “Hug, next, hug, next.”
Rick: Yeah, especially if there’s a huge crowd like in Paris, she paces it according to the size of the crowd.
Vera: What’s interesting is that she held me, she pulled me out, she pulled me back in, and people tried to push me through, and she like held on to me and she pulled me back in, and I was like, “Whoa!” You know, she kind of held me for a while and then I moved through. And Rick, the morning, it’s like morning five in the morning, I guess it’s over six in the morning, I get into the car with a friend of mine, we get on a highway in the woods and maybe ten minutes after I leave Amma’s darshan, a red car, and we’re going at full speed, a red car comes out of its lane on a highway and at full speed rams into our car. And it’s like the traditional story, life in slow motion, everything slows down, you kind of have this weird life review, you’re going to die, some kind of stuff. It was like instant answer, right? “Mother, burn me up,” here you have it. I found myself, I was like on the ground, I didn’t know if I was alive, I didn’t know if I was broken open, I had no sense of where I landed, but I felt that same energy that made my hair stand up. I felt it move through me and in every cell of my body I knew that my life would never be the same. And then, very miraculously, except for having hernias, herniated discs and being dislocated, I was okay, you know, by miracle. I mean everyone who came on that scene said, “This is impossible, this is a miracle.”
Rick: You had your seatbelt on I presume. Must have.
Vera: Yeah, and I … yeah. So very quickly afterwards my life began to be … you know, I call it, I began to dance with Kali, immediately I could no longer work with people, the healing practice has to shut down, all of the uncertainty within me that I was containing, all of my confusion, all of my heartbreak, all of my kind of fear, I was like being shaken up, like the accident shook up everything that was held down in my cells, held down in my heart, held down, everything that was a no, not for me, not this, you know, and it was all beginning to come up. So I was like shaking through every day, right, like dislocated, completely overwhelmed, you know, like I’m generally overwhelmed because I’ve experienced so much and so deeply very often but this took it to a whole other level. So I couldn’t, you know, I don’t know, that began kind of an identity crisis, right, like, who am I now? What do I do? Everything I thought I knew I don’t know anymore. It was like I felt … it was like a really not an unusual or extraordinary encounter with death, you know, where everything that doesn’t belong and everything that isn’t true, kind of has this natural way of shifting out, right, like there’s … And then, within months, maybe three months, my father passed away, right, and my father, I mean it was like a tremendous, tremendous shock. And within a week my life in Paris closed down, everything I built, everything I knew, and I moved back to the States with my family. And another kind of stripping began where I became a fatherless child and this other way of… You know, it was interesting because it was there I was just being stripped and just beginning to reconfigure myself and just beginning to reconfigure my identity and just beginning to integrate something and kind of get a new sense of who I am or should be or whatever and then that got shaken up again, burned up, right, and as my father died I began to feel this tremendous, deeper and deeper levels of pain and trauma surfacing in me, and I think when my father died what began to happen is that I began to connect to like ancestral trauma. My father was a Holocaust survivor and I think that was very deeply in my field and in my cells and I remember that period felt very much like trauma that I couldn’t tolerate, that was beyond anything, was coming up and out and I think that was happening because it was just recently I was shaken up and then I was shaken up again so it was like deeper and deeper stuff and then just as I was beginning to reorient myself once again I began to move through a devastating divorce, right, and for someone who is, you know, confessedly a drama queen, meaning I don’t just feel pain, I feel like hard wrenching pain, right, like everything feels like, you know, tremendous in my field, just like joy and love and ecstasy, right, like I have this ecstasy agony place in me that is very big and tremendous. I have to say that death was nothing compared to what I experienced with the divorce because, really, the divorce shattered and threatened everything that I identified with; the perfect mother, the perfect wife. I was far from perfect but like in my head it was my story, the fairy tale, the fairy tale was such a profound part of my kind of false self, right, and like belonging to a particular kind of world that was comfortable and affluent and all of that being stripped all at once. And Rick, it was like I said about being burning, it felt like that entire period felt like I was being burned alive and in fact so profoundly so that I remember having visions of like being stretched like in those middle ages torture devices, rack, while being burned alive. One night I had such an extreme, and this was all psycho-spiritual pain, right, the pain was so physically in my body I passed out from pain. And actually that night the pain was so profound and I had this like I passed out from pain and for maybe like two, three days I couldn’t feel anything at all. It was like something in my brain kind of, you know, overloaded and blew out. It was like I blew out my capacity to feel any more pain.
Rick: And maybe you just got rid of such a load of it that you were given a brief respite from having to process it, maybe.
Vera: Yeah, maybe.
Rick: And I just want to interject here, I told Irene that story about seeing Amma and saying, “Mother, burn me up,” and then having a car accident and divorce and all this stuff and she said, “Oh, I hope she doesn’t tell that story because I wouldn’t want people to think that that happens to everybody who goes to see Amma or that it happens to everybody who gets involved in spirituality.” And it doesn’t, obviously.
Vera: I think that does, actually. Not everyone who goes to see Amma, I think, how the mystery unfolds itself through us and how life humbles us and how the process of spiritual maturation, how that unfolds for each one of us is completely unique. And our relationship with teachers and different fields of grace is completely unique to all of us. But I would have to say, to argue or at least to question, whether that doesn’t happen to everyone on the spiritual path.
Rick: Yeah, to some degree and in different ways. I think it depends on how quickly you move and how artful the process is, whether you’re using a scalpel or a machete.
Vera: Yeah, and I realize now that I prayed for that.
Rick: Yeah, you said, “Bring it on.”
Vera: I did, I said, “Bring it on,” because somewhere that bhakti place in me, that place in me where I just wanted to offer myself up, like from the earliest of ages, that was the only thing I really wanted. I think what happened was when I came into the field of Amma, my deep yearning in my heart, the deep yearning in my heart that I was containing, couldn’t take it anymore. And the deep yearning in my heart to offer myself up, to lay at her feet, to be her instrument, to be burned up, began to move through me. Even if consciously I couldn’t choose it, right, I couldn’t choose it, some part of me chose it. And so that began to kind of burn me up on a level that I think I consented to, I consented to in the deepest part of my being. And so, what was very interesting about that period of, you know, burning was that I began to have, I mean the pain was so extreme, the pain was so extreme I began to have visions. And it was like, you know, sometimes you can do something to help yourself. Somehow I knew, in some wise place within me, that there was nothing I could do to save myself from what was happening to me. And my prayer life began to change from, I used to pray, “Mother, please help me, help me,” because I was in so much pain and it seemed to be relentless. And I was a mother, it wasn’t like I could just be in my ecstatic pain, I was like I had to function. My prayer life went from, “Mother, help me, save me, help me,” to “take me.” There was this reorientation that happened of like, “Don’t ever stop, until there’s nothing else to burn.” That’s all I began to want. It was like maybe a weird masochistic kind of thing, but it was like the places that I began to feel most intimate with life and most intimate with God were those places of radical heartbreak where I couldn’t save myself. And God in her wisdom was kind enough to put me in a place where I couldn’t save myself, where I had nothing to hold on to, where all of my old defense mechanisms and structures weren’t working anymore. I had this one experience actually and I wonder about it. I had a number of weird visions that came when I had tremendous pain, but one of them, I was in a supermarket, I don’t know what you have up there, we have a Publix supermarket. I passed by the crabs, or what are they called? Lobsters. And Rick, I don’t know what it was, my heart just cracked open, like spilled over, and I kept moving past the lobsters, but all I could feel, suddenly it was like the pain of the lobsters and then it went into like the larger and larger fields of pain, the pain of the society we live in, of people having to survive, of war and genocide. It was like in some weird way, it was just like all of the suffering of the world began to flood through. It started with the lobsters, but then it just kind of … and by the end, it was just like I went from the beginning of the aisle to the middle of the aisle. By the time I moved to the center of the aisle, I was like being pierced from every direction. And this is one of the very few times where my physical world and my spiritual vision merged, and what I saw was gaping blood from me in all directions, and I actually couldn’t tell if it was real or not. And what I thought was like, “Oh my God, I’ve become a wound of Christ,” right? Like I had this kind of weird christological feeling, experience, and I was like holding on, I couldn’t see anything anymore, I was just like shaking and holding on to the aisle and like feeling this unbearable heartbreak and pain. And then as I began to sort of feel orgasmic, or an orgasm, so as I was standing there in like heartbreak and then like this weird energy was beginning to move through me and I couldn’t see what was happening, like tears rolling down my face, like I had to make my way through the aisle, out of the store, like in all of that continuing to move through me, I had to find enough like human concentration to drive myself from the store to my house so that I could lay down. And that was maybe one of the most horrifying, terrifying, ecstatic, beautiful experience that I had that I didn’t really know a parallel to that, but you know, I didn’t need to have my children that day. I just like, I stopped, it was something happened that was so tremendous which I think began to move, I don’t know, I don’t want to analyze, but it was a profound experience for me. And those kind of experiences for me began to unfold in that period a few times. And I almost wonder if that had to do with burning up karma or beginning to open me up in a way which I couldn’t hold anything at bay anymore, because I already had the language of intimacy with life, of leaning in, the tantric kind of saying yes to everything. I was even, way before I was even holding women’s circles and saying, you know, you have to use everything, fear, anger, despair, heartbreak, use it, it’s all Shakti, don’t turn away from it. I got it, I got it in many different ways, but I don’t really think I got it in an embodied way until that began to move through me in a more physical, direct way.
Rick: Well you know, I was listening to some interview you did with Chitheads or one of those shows and someone, maybe it wasn’t that one, someone asked you, I don’t know, what your inspiration in life, what the purpose of your life, some such question like that. And you said, “I just want to be used, I just want to be a servant of the Divine as much as I can be,” and you can correct me if that’s not quite the way you phrased it, but I can really relate to that and I have a feeling and have often felt that once one makes that, has that intention and expresses that conviction …
Vera: The prayer.
Rick: Yeah, it’s sort of like the Divine says, “Okay, we’ve got a live one here, let’s give her some juice, this person is willing to be an instrument, so therefore let’s transform this instrument as much as possible so she can be maximally effective and really serve to her full capacity.” And so, once you’ve sort of signed up for that, then it can become very intense.
Vera: Yeah, certainly it has been for me. This whole year has been like walking on water and I feel like everything I have to do, just someone as well might tell me, “You have to walk on water now,” and me saying, “What? How? How? I can’t do that, that’s not what I’m capable of.” I will tell you that a year ago, and this is all so new for me, all of this being asked to do an interview, I always feel so phony and like, “What does that mean? What do you have to …?” So I will tell you that a year ago I was still on my knees, I wasn’t sure what I have to offer. I went to the Science and Nonduality Conference and gave my first talk about Kali, which happened to be randomly on the exact four-year anniversary of my car accident. But I remember at the time it was like, “What am I going to do? Am I going to be a substitute teacher? How do I make a living? Who am I?” I don’t have … just in this still, total unraveling kind of in a way, right? And I will tell you that I started saying this thing, which actually, I would say, “Mother, use me or kill me. Use me or kill me. Use me or kill me.” And it became a mantra for a while. And I actually wrote an obituary for myself. I was so in so much pain and in so much sense of not being used. It was so interesting of feeling such deep separation and disconnection at that particular moment. And I wrote out the few things that I would be remembered for and I just kind of saw through it and I wrote this obituary. And then it was like kind of this kind of completing. I felt like I needed to complete my life as it was before. There was … I don’t know why, but it sounds weird. I’m kind of embarrassed by it actually. And like the next day, I’m trying to see if I’m lying, maybe the two days afterwards, I was at the ocean. I went at night and was laying up and I was looking at the stars. And then all of a sudden it started raining sand on me. And I was like, “What the hell?” And I sat up and a giant like huge turtle, huge turtle, like huge because sometimes they’re … what are they called? They’re all over Florida. I forget what this kind of turtles are. You know, yeah, there’s turtles, but this was like huge, like a mothership of a turtle at my feet was digging a nest. And I just sat there in like awe for an hour just looking at this mother turtle give birth. And I just thought there was something that was like an initiation for me.
Rick: It was an omen of some kind, yeah.
Vera: An omen of some kind. Like it was a huge beach. She could have chosen anything, like she came to my feet. You know, and afterwards very quickly … sorry, I lost my hearing … very quickly it seemed like overnight, you know, so I came back from SAND, I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and then the election happened. And this article that seemed to be like fully birthed, you know, in my head, kind of came out and went globally viral all over the world.
Rick: It was “Kali Takes America: I’m with Her.”
Vera: “Kali takes America.” It kind of took America, you know, got translated into German and Russian. It was like such a crazy experience. And then, you know, Marianne Williamson read it somehow probably, through you or somehow, and she called me up and asked me to come to Sister Giant. And I was like, “You have the wrong person. I am a nobody. What do you mean?” And then she was like, “Do not speak about yourself that way.” But like I was … it’s true. It’s true. And so somehow it like began opening doors. I began to be invited places. I began to, you know, this kind of different movement began to move through me. And I cannot say, I cannot tell you that, “Oh, I feel connected to my purpose.” In fact, I would say that’s my deepest pain still, not knowing if I am in fact being used, yearning to help the world more. You know, that pain and confusion that we all feel right now in the collective is also very deeply in me. But I can tell you that somehow my yearning to be an instrument is a million times clearer than it was, and it was so perfectly clear already. It’s like that yearning is becoming deeper and deeper. I don’t know if I’m actually being used, but I can tell you it’s like the one prayer in my heart, you know?
Rick: You know, I think that people see that in you, or else the fact that you are supposed to be used causes the Divine to inspire people who are able to connect you with a larger audience to do so. Like I kind of immediately got an impulse, Marianne Williamson did, Zaya and Maurizio of the SAND Conference, they’ve got you moderating panels this year and all kinds of stuff. So people see in you the ability and the capacity and the spiritual maturity to be an important contributor.
Vera: Thank you, I hope that that’s true.
Rick: It’s really obvious, and reading any of your stuff.
Vera: And you know what else is happening, which I think is actually really … I don’t know what to do with that either, and I think that’s how it works, right? It’s actually how life works, we’re given signs, we’re given … if we listen deeply enough, it doesn’t matter what the prayer in our heart is, if we are earnest enough and we are able to listen just in that place, right? There’s a communication that happens with life directly, right? Between us and her. But I’ll tell you something particularly interesting. So I’ve had some profound teachers who are not very popular, in fact people who I’ve really mostly worked with who have shaped me and profoundly transfigured me, who are my teachers and mentors, are not known completely. You know, Jason, Barbara, so many people, right? My teacher, Laurie Keene, so a number of people who may be beginning to be known but not really. But in the popular, in the dominant culture, the people that I felt most kind of affinity with would be Andrew Harvey, Mirabai Starr.
Rick: Charles Eisenstein.
Vera: Well, Charles, yeah, Charles is great, but I always loved his work but I didn’t know his work so much actually for a while. I’m just trying to think. Well let’s start with those two because that’s who I’m … Adam Bucko, for example, right? Matthew Fox.
Rick: All of whom I’ve interviewed if people want to look up these names.
Vera: Yes, yeah, exactly. So Cynthia Bourgeault, you know, I was hearing about since I was in Divinity School, like just people who … but what’s really particularly interesting is that those are the people, the people that I felt most connected to began reaching out to me. They were the ones posting my articles. You know, Andrew Harvey called me on the phone, Carolyn Baker, you know, like I was like, “Who is this?” He was like, “This is Andrew, darling,” and I was like, “Oh,” and I cried. I just wailed at him for like 15 minutes and I said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say.” And he said, “Don’t worry, never stop crying. This is the best conversation I’ve ever had.” You know, but like what’s amazing, and like before I read, before I wrote “Kali Takes America,” I read Mirabai Starr’s translation of “Dark Night of the Soul,” but it’s not just a translation, it’s also like her unique transmission, her interpretation of the “Dark Night of the Soul – St. John of the Cross.” And that’s, I feel like largely the article emerged from it. And then she called me and helped me and supports me and mentored. There’s this way in which people who were dearest part, just like these people out there who were like celebrity spiritual teachers who touched my heart on the inside, reached out to me on the outside.
Rick: Yeah, well that article struck a chord.
Vera: I am speaking to you, like a few months ago I was watching you on YouTube, like how is this happening?
Rick: Well I hope you won’t stop. And I’m just, you know, like we’re all bozos on this bus, remember? It’s funny, I mean just because someone gets known because they have some sort of public audience or something, doesn’t mean there’s anything particularly remarkable about them.
Vera: Of course not, of course not. We all know that, but it’s still kind of crazy. Marianne Williamson calling you is a little bit incredible, and like she is such an incredible example. I feel like for all the talk, for all the talk of uniting spiritual and human lives, all the talk of bridging and incarnating and integrating and embodying, she is the only spiritual teacher and author who actually ran for political office.
Rick: Yeah, that’s true. Well John Hagelin did too, he ran for president.
Vera: Oh that’s right. Well, but still, the only person to actually put her mouth, money, where her mouth is, it’s kind of quite impressive.
Rick: That was impressive. So anyway, what do you think it was about the Kali article that struck such a chord? I mean, what did you say in that article that really lit up everybody’s radar?
Vera: That’s such a good question. Well I think that it just came out at the right time because everyone was shocked. There was like a collective … so a lot of people, I think, after I read the article were like, “Oh, you think Trump is Kali?” And I kept saying, “No, no, no, no, I don’t think Trump is Kali at all.” The quality, the archetype of Kali that I saw emerging through Trump winning the election was actually through the complete shattering of our narratives. It was like such a tremendous shock for everyone. I think it was a shock for Trump himself. He got elected to become president, no one expected it. It kind of, it was a great disillusionment with our systems, with democracy, you know, like it was a great disillusionment and actually that’s the function for me of the process of spiritual maturation and of what holy darkness is all about. It shocks us into reality. It takes away our misconceptions, our self-deceptions. It is incredibly disappointing, right, like all of those ways in which we puff ourselves up and tell ourselves the stories and know things and have certainties, right, it comes and it shakes it all up and it leaves us in this place where life really happens in the uncertainty of it all, in this groundless nature of reality. And so I think what happened was that everyone felt that kind of a shattering of illusions that happened. I’m not saying there’s something great about Trump winning the election, I’m just saying it was such a surprise. It was such a disruption. It was such a disruption to the orders of things that I think there was a little tiny opening, you know, that began to let more real feelings come through. And so I think me naming that connected with people more than anything, and then the way that maybe I wove in a little bit of pop culture with the passing of Leonard Cohen that happened around that time as well, you know, and he had this album called “You Want It Darker.” And when he wrote the song, when people heard the song, all the reviews of the album had some version of, “Oh, Leonard Cohen, he has given up, he is depressed,” you know, but really what he was saying with that album was that, no matter, it was almost like a prophetic song, he was saying, “No matter how dark it gets, I am ready, hineni, hineni, I am willing, take me, use me.” It was like an offering, an offering of that part of us. He says, “There’s something in the human soul that yearns to serve when the emergency has become articulate.” And I think in a way we are living in this time, with climate change and with the political realities of the day, where the emergency has become articulate, right? And there’s something in a way in which I think I touched it and it got triggered, touched in all of our hearts collectively.
Rick: I was thinking about that and I often think, I’ve kind of felt since the 70s that we’re on the brink of some really dramatic changes in the world. And I’ve read books about this, as I’m sure we all have. There was one really interesting book by a lady named Moira Timms, which was called “Beyond Prophecies and Predictions, Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes,” and she correlated all the ancient prophecies from way back from Egypt on through with things that have actually happened and then took more of the prophecies to project what will happen if the track record continues in terms of the veracity of these prophecies. But in any case, you think back, the Civil War, World War I, the Depression, World War II, and you think, “Are we really in such dire times compared to all these other times? What is so … ” Go ahead.
Vera: Yeah, I say that’s such a great point and actually there’s a book, I forget what it’s called, recently with the gentleman saying actually we live in the best times that we’ve ever had. There’s less suffering now than at any other time in human history.
Rick: Less epidemics, less all kinds of things, less starvation, less poverty, it’s gotten better in many respects.
Vera: So yes, on one level that’s interesting, it’s very interesting, especially interesting if true. And someone somewhere is always living through an apocalypse. There is genocide, there is war.
Rick: Sexual slavery, tons of that.
Vera: Children, exactly. I mean, there’s human trafficking, there’s such tremendous amount of suffering on this planet, such tremendous amount of separation and cruelty and violence. And I don’t want to get into some kind of an idea that yes, this is the end of the world and such things, because it doesn’t actually matter, does it? It doesn’t actually matter whether the world is going to end or not because somewhere the world is always ending. And every moment that arises in some way is also a death. It’s like to live fully and to live deeply we have to be in such intimate relationship with death. But what is different about this moment is that our species has never threatened its own continuation on this planet, because this planet might be fine no matter what we might be able to do to it, but really we are threatening everything living on this planet and our own species. So in that way, since the development of the atomic bomb I guess, this is a new level of engagement with our planet. And regardless of what happens to the planet… You know, I have to also tell you, and I don’t know how I don’t talk about that so much, but I began, so again, I’m not a Hindu scholar, I didn’t know much about Kali, I began to be interested in Kali after I felt her emerge in my life, and it began to emerge in my heart, you know. But there are different kinds of archetypes of Kali began to give me like visitations.
Rick: And let me interject a question somebody asked and then let me have you elaborate on that. Mark Peters from Santa Clara, California asks, “Can you share how you’ve come to interpret the iconography of Kali in your own life?” So that’s a good segue into what you’re about to say.
Vera: That’s a great question, that’s a great question. And in general, the iconography of Kali is a great question, but I just want to say that there’s all these different other forms of the dark feminine that began kind of emerging, and in this weird way, like where I would see something and be like, “What is that?” and then find out that that’s actually one of the expressions of Kali, or everywhere I go in different cities I get guided to icons of the black Madonna, just like really interesting ways in which in my life it just like … and then there’s one … well okay, never mind.
Rick: Let me just ask you, I was thinking about this and I’ve heard you in several lectures and reading a bunch of your articles talking about the dark feminine. It almost seems a little sexist, why should just the feminine be dark? Is there a dark masculine?
Vera: Of course.
Rick: Is there a bright feminine? I mean, why lay all the darkness on the feminine?
Vera: Well, I mean, that’s such a great question. First I want to say is that in a way it’s not really feminine-masculine at all. For me, Kali, that quality of reality is beyond masculine and feminine, but that the great mystery has a feminine kind of essence to it somehow, right? It pervades, it pervades, and so, yes, it’s seen as feminine and there’s also something about the feminine that’s naturally dark. I mean, the womb is naturally dark, the yoni, I mean, it’s dark, the earth, the damp, dark earth from which gives birth to everything, certainly our civilization. This darkness and the feminine is very interconnected. The dark feminine is the full feminine, you know? I mean, Alan Watts used to start his lectures about Kali by an anecdote of an astronaut going up in space and then coming back and everyone saying, “So, you went up there. What is God like?” and him coming back and saying, “She’s black,” right? Because that holding environment of that darkness of space, the way it holds our planet, the way it holds everything. So there is a very strong association between darkness and the feminine. And Kali, there’s so many ways of speaking about Kali and I would, you know, whatever I say will be a blasphemy to somebody. I have a very particular kind of feeling and interpretation about it, so please don’t listen to me. This is just Vera, you know, Vera stuff. So for me, that quality of reality that is … it’s like, okay, when you think of the light feminine, let’s say in the case of Mary, right, like the illuminated beautiful virgin that gives birth to Christ, it’s like such a comforting image and maybe as a child it’s an image that invites you into the spiritual life. It says, “Yes, yes, you suffer. All my children suffer. I’m with you. I’m with you in your suffering. I will hold you.” You know, “Call out to me and I will be there.” And it’s an inviting image that kind of first pulls us into the spiritual life maybe, you know? And it’s important because there’s some kind of a majesty, a mystery, a magnetism, an erotic almost kind of a calling that I think the feminine aspect of reality kind of calls to us, like that our hearts hear and we want to respond, right? And very often it’s like that yearning for illumination, that yearning for comfort and connection and devotion somehow. But as we mature there almost is this kind of a … it seems to be universal and I say that it’s universal because in every culture and every spiritual lineage we hear stories of what St. John of the Cross, for example, would call the dark night of the soul. In other traditions this would be the death before you die, but some kind of a period of deep crisis which is necessary for spiritual maturation and for the eventual process of union with the Divine. And so it seems to me that the entry into that process, into that process, and what I mean by that is that process of direct relationship with reality, not through a teacher, not through an idea, not through a book, not through a concept, but direct relationship with reality. To me that’s what the dark feminine is. It’s like that quality of reality that initiates us into union with the Divine. And necessarily when you think of Kali and the forms of the dark feminine in the Hindu tradition, Kali Chinnamasta, I don’t know, Dhumavati, well not Dhumavati, but Kali Chinnamasta in the Chamunda, right, this great thin emaciated old Kali with weapons. She has ten hands and all the weapons of war, right? And in the Buddhist tradition we have the great Dharma protectresses, right? They are the great emanations of the dark feminine, too, like the Dalai Lama has his own personal Kali, expression of Kali, and she’s very fierce. And there’s Ekajati who is the protectress of Dzogchen. They are not for the faint of heart. They’re fierce, they’re surrounded by fire, they’re surrounded by clouds of smoke, because the smoke has to obscure the mind. Like in the Christian tradition, the cloud of unknowing, we have to enter the cloud of unknowing where our mind and our sense of self, it all gets clouded so that we can begin to have union with the Divine and those weapons, those weapons, it’s because that’s what it feels like. That’s what it feels like to make contact with the real. It’s not fun, it’s not cute, it’s not lovely, it strips you to the bone, it breaks your heart, it like cuts through illusion. It is a point, it is for me, the spiritual process is a process of deep disappointment. Jason Schulman says, “Everyone thinks that spirituality is about light and it is, but it is also a process of becoming disenchanted with our illusions.” And something has to do that and that will never be comfortable. And also, once… that will never be comfortable and it is the ultimate comfort as well, because then there is nothing that you have to save yourself from anymore. You know that wherever it is that you find yourself, there the mother is already holding you, because you know that there is nothing that you’re willing to turn away from any longer and that the mother is there holding it all with you. Tell me, you wanted to say something.
Rick: Yeah, I’m thinking. I mean tracing my own history of learning to meditate in the 60s when I was a teenager, at first it was all just infusion of bliss and greater strength and energy and so on, because I had so bottomed out at that point. And then eventually, over the years and decades, some real deep stuff had to be dealt with and it wasn’t pleasant, and that still goes on in my life. And even though there is still the infusion of bliss and divine energy, there is also the wringing out of anything that ultimately doesn’t belong there. And Gurus will behave that way with people too, for instance Amma, at first it will be all love and hugs and a wonderful scene, and then, if you really want to get close, then she starts really becoming more of the Kali figure and really knocking it out of you. And so that seems to be a sort of an archetype of the spiritual path, you know, first it’s all sort of inspiration and beauty and then you really got to go through it. But I think that there might be a final stage in the archetype, which is that you finally actually do process all this stuff and kind of step out into the sunshine again. And maybe this …
Vera: Union.
Rick: Yeah, union. And so it’s not always going to be like the stage of suffering and having your heart ripped apart and this and that.
Vera: Oh, please understand, I’m not saying that it’s always going to be that.
Rick: Yeah, I mean if I talk to you in 10 or 20 years, you could be singing a very different song.
Vera: I am focusing on a very, very particular part of the spiritual narrative, actually. It’s a very, very limited and particular part, it’s where I feel a resonance.
Rick: And a very important part and one that has been slipped under the rug a lot.
Vera: It’s where I think there’s a great gap. I think there’s a gap in our collective pop spiritual culture there. We’re unwilling to look at the shadow, we’re unwilling to mature, right? I think this is emerging, it’s an emergent quality right now. This is why I think actually, you asked why about the article, I think it’s emerging. It’s not like Vera decided to write an article, it’s like there’s actually a particular archetype that’s emerging right now and it’s emerging collectively, right? We are going to be faced with a deep, deep, deep reckoning of our collective karma on this planet, that is just a fact. Right now it’s just beginning and I think that in the same way as the power of the initiation of Kali, that power of being stripped down to only what’s real, you know, and that’s going to be happening for us collectively because it must, because this is kind of what we need on a deeper sense as humanity. So there needs to be a kind of a crucifixion that we enter.
Rick: Here’s a quote from Andrew Harvey that I think you had in one of your articles. You said, “In preparation for the birth of the Divine, the entire human race is now going through a global dark night, which will result in a new humanity that has been humbled and chastened by tragedy, so that it may open completely to the mystery of Divine Grace. There will be no resurrection of an embodied Divine Humanity without a systematic, perfectly organized, brutally complete crucifixion of everything in us that keeps us addicted to the systems of illusion that are now rapidly destroying everything.”
Vera: I mean, Andrew Harvey is such a prophet. If you need to know anything about anything, you know, truly, and I believe that, I felt that to be true. When I saw Kali on the top of the Empire State Building, to me that was the sign of the time. And it’s not about fear-mongering or us being afraid or not afraid. It’s about that quality that I think, if we’re lucky, we get to face … you know, I say we get to throw things up against death, or we get to be thrown up against death, where we begin to see what’s really important and where we can yield into it, where we stop splitting life and saying, “I can only have these experiences, and only those experiences are spiritual and good, but those other experiences, not so interested, I want to keep them at bay.” That’s for other stupid, uneducated, uninteresting, unspiritual people, right? Like when the spiritual life begins to be a defense, a kind of a cloak of protection, that’s where we have to ask ourselves, “Is that really what we yearn for?” Because I think there is a deep collective yearning for the real. That’s what we really most want, even if it takes a burning up, even if it takes deep suffering. I think that in the heart of hearts we’re all willing to offer it all up, just so that we can have the taste.
Rick: And I think that there’s something real valuable in this conversation and what you’ve been putting out there with your articles, which is that if a person doesn’t know why this is happening to them, either individually or to the world, collectively, it’s a whole lot worse than if you realize, “You know, there’s a catharsis taking place here and I’m just going to see it through and feel deeply into it,” and so on. Something good is happening ultimately. Like if the kid is having his ears scrubbed by his mother and he thinks his mother hates him and she’s punishing him, that’s different than if he realizes, “My mother loves me and I must have dirt behind my ears and I’ll just tolerate this.”
Vera: I mean this is such a vaster conversation, really important. We should have started with that actually. But first of all, the first spiritual truth, like the Buddha said, is that life is full of suffering. So, there’s a way in which we have to begin to have the right relationship with suffering, not as a punishment for something that we did that was bad or a karmic retribution or something that’s unique to me and mine, but something that is universal, something that is afflicting, that is a condition for incarnation. Suffering is the condition for incarnation on this planet in this shape of imperfection that is human. So there will always be suffering, there’s nothing special about suffering, and if anything, suffering is a great tool of connection, right? Like knowing that I suffer and you suffer and you are a bozo and I am a bozo and you are a holy mess and I am a holy mess and there’s no way of saving myself from that. Most likely we will have disease, we will be suffering, we will suffer from being away from our loved ones, from not knowing what our purpose is, from being away from the Divine, from being subject to climate change and to our loved ones dying. We will be subject to a number of natural suffering which we cannot escape. Accepting that is vital for a beginning of the spiritual life. Then there’s also a way in which I think there’s something about suffering and extreme suffering that also has a potential to purify, and I am not into purification, I am into the murk and the mess, I’m not into purification at all, but it seems to me that there is a function of suffering that seems to bring us towards union, to make us, when we can no longer protect ourselves, to make us yield to the Divine, right? There is something about it, when I suffer and I suffer a lot and relentlessly, and sometimes for silly things, sometimes in my weird spiritual ecstasy, but there is something about the movement of moving towards that suffering and allowing it to have its way with me that feels very different than when I keep it at bay. And I don’t think that’s the only way, I think, especially for those of us who have a lot of trauma in our system, it’s so important not to blow ourselves out, to be so gentle and so kind and so tender-hearted with the ways in which we suffer, you know, and to remember that however suffering arises in our lives, it’s not an abomination, it’s not an abomination. It’s also not something we need to recycle and glorify. When you do look through every tradition there is something akin to the Divine itself, breaking itself open, offering itself, being crucified, you know, that the brokenness is an inherent part not only of the human life but almost of the Divine life itself.
Rick: A couple of thoughts. One is, God is not a masochist. He or She doesn’t inflict suffering to get its yayas out. There’s an evolutionary imperative in the universe, I think, and being constricted and calcified in a limited perspective, like you were saying in Paris, you had it all together, everything’s cozy, everything’s right, but you needed to be broken out of that to move on to something bigger. So there’s that. Also, Kali is not a demon, Kali is a killer of demons.
Vera: Exactly, she’s the slayer of demons and there’s a lot of misconception in the Western world about Kali. She’s terrifying. I mean, as you can tell, my own reaction to the very concept of, you know, I ran out screaming. You know, actually in the Judeo-Christian tradition, if you remember well, the associations with God is awe and fear. God appears in the same way as Kali is like clouds and smoke, God appears as a pillar of fire and as a cloud. And of course, that part of God in the Jewish tradition is seen as the Shekhinah, as the feminine aspect of the Divine, too, so I find that interesting. But that natural fear we have of being naked before the Divine, I think is a necessary and very important function of Kali coming in. I mean, fear has an important function. Kali is terrifying and it’s important for us to get in touch with our fears so that we’re not containing them, right? She lets it all surface and she says, “You can’t turn away from that either. That too is my child. There’s nothing which I will exile,” so to speak. And the way in which she appears, actually it’s so interesting, in one of the tantric texts there is a story of Kali where, you know, do you have … how much more time do we have? I don’t want to sort of …
Rick: Just keep going.
Vera: So, there is a really cool story where, you know, in the Hindu tradition there is the Divine masculine which is Shiva and the Divine feminine which is Shakti. And so, Shakti, the Divine feminine, incarnates as Sati and then Shiva and Sati have this great love, this great love affair, and then Sati is the first incarnation of the Divine feminine in the stories of kind of Hindu pantheon. And in the story, Sati’s father isn’t so cool about Sati marrying Shiva because Shiva is like the Lord of the dead, he has dreadlocks, he is horrifying, he hangs out in cemeteries, he puts ashes all over his face, that’s like so inappropriate. Her father is like not having any of it. And so, he has this great sacrifice to the god, to god Agni, planned and he doesn’t want Shiva around his very important flock of socially advanced gods. And so, he does not invite them to the sacrifice. And Sati gets extremely angry because she is disrespected, the feminine is disrespected here. Sally Kempton, I think, tells the story, it must be where I got this actually. And so, Sati is disrespected and she begins to be very, very angry and she wants to go to her father to express her anger and Shiva says, “No, you will not go anywhere.” And now she’s disrespected twice, by her father and then by her husband. And in the text what happens is that she turns into a ferocious, fearsome, black goddess. And one of the stories is she turns into ten goddesses, one of whom is black and ferocious. But in this one story, she turns into this great terrifying goddess and Shiva himself becomes terrified and he says, “Who are you and what have you done to my beloved Sati?” And she says, “Shiva, don’t you recognize me? This is my true form. I only make myself convenient and beautiful so that you can take pleasure in it, but you will not disrespect me.” And then she goes off and she throws herself in her father’s fire and then it’s like a great drama that continues afterwards. But that’s to say that that’s so beautiful. Even the god of death himself was terrified in the face of pure reality. Pure reality is meant to be so terrifying that it strips us to only what is real. And I really love that. And to me, that’s what Kali does, right? She cuts through all the bull. And for me, I don’t know what it’s like for other people. You had to take everything out of my cold dead hands. There’s no part of me that would have been like, “Here.” There was something like a grace that needed to come through. I mean this was fierce grace, you know, but there was a grace in this kind of being faced with what was most terrifying.
Rick: Do you find that having been through so many waves of this process now that you are kind of used to the routine and you relinquish the grip more willingly or are you still being wrestled with on a regular basis?
Vera: Oh, I wrestle. I wrestle to the death every single time. I can’t surrender. I can’t feel my heart sometimes. It’s always, always, always a struggle. Also, I’m not in that vulnerable place that I was for a few years anymore, right? And I really was. It wasn’t like I needed to try to surrender. It was just like there was just this particular kind of an opening that was in me as I was moving through that. I think that happens for all of us when we just lose somebody or when we go through difficulty. You know, Pema Chodron in her book, “When Things Fall Apart,” writes a lot about that. There’s a particular intimacy with life that happens. So there was nothing unusual about that. We all experience that. But I think at this moment I feel like I always pray to surrender. That’s always my prayer. I pray to keep being polished. The Sufis say so that the mirror of my heart keeps being polished by joy and by suffering, but whatever God wants of me, by whatever God wants to give me, I think I trust more and more that whatever appears is the instrument of my spiritual process, right? Is what I need most to keep healing and awakening.
Rick: There was a thought I was having a few minutes ago and what we’ve just discussed a moment ago brought me back to it, which is that the surface of the ocean is always going to be turbulent, that’s the way the surface of an ocean is. And if that’s all you know, the surface of the ocean, then the feeling is going to be it’s all turbulence, there’s nothing but turbulence. But if you somehow accustom yourself to having access to the depth of the ocean at the same time and if that becomes abiding, then the turbulence is much more tolerable. And I think that spiritual practice and spiritual maturity do that.
Vera: Exactly. What’s really also interesting about that play and what you named so profoundly, I mean, that’s literally what Shiva and Shakti is, what Shiva and Kali is. Shiva is all-pervading, abiding, all silence and we are permeated with all-abiding consciousness, right? And Shakti is the play of life, is like the movement of life, is everything that arises and falls away. And so, you know, actually Shiva without Shakti is just Shava, which is a corpse. And so, the ways in which those two come together in us and the ways in which those meet in us, the ways in which we are both able to become silent, right, like make a relationship with that deep quietness and the ways in which then we allow ourselves to be penetrated by that in the dance of life, right? I think that cooks us very, very profoundly.
Rick: And as you know, there are millions of people in the world, billions, who are buffeted by the insanity of the world without necessarily having recourse to that deep silence and it’s very difficult for them.
Vera: It’s very difficult for me.
Rick: For you too.
Vera: It’s very difficult for me.
Rick: But you do have recourse to deeper silence, you have an advantage that many people don’t have, do you not?
Vera: I really wouldn’t know how to compare, but I do know that it’s really … so I’ve had experiences, like peak experiences, which… I feel like I’ve had experiences of emptiness, which is kind of … I’m not sure if that’s the same, but it’s only very recent for me that I feel like I’ve been dropping into or had any experiences with deeper silence, very, very recent.
Rick: Okay.
Vera: It never … yeah.
Rick: But even if you … I mean I’m sure that will grow, it’s always growing for all of us, but at least you have, if not the experience, and I’m sure you do have plenty of experience, at least you have the intellectual understanding that there’s a deeper mechanics to this drama that we see playing out, that there’s something very fundamental taking place, and that’s a solace in and of itself.
Vera: Yes, and as you’re speaking I’m also thinking that I think my way or my proclivity and maybe the way of the feminine is a little bit towards a bit of a different paradigm where it’s like you’re not trying to counter chaos with silence, but rather there’s a way in which then the pain and the chaos of it becomes the medicine. I just posted on Facebook, I wish I had it in front of me, something from Naropa and he says … actually I will find it and I’ll read it because I think it’s pretty good, because that kind of reorients it just a little bit so that it’s not like, “Oh, the silence versus all the mess,” right? But let me just tell you what it is. I read it and I just thought this is so good. He says, “The emotions are the great wisdom. Like a jungle fire, they are the yogi’s helpers. How can there be staying or going? What meditation is there by fleeing to a hermitage?” So that there isn’t this kind of dichotomy that we set up, silence versus the pain and suffering of the world, but that somehow it’s like this deep relationship that we begin to grow to everything that is here, that is us, that is within us, that is reality, as much to the deep quality of our essence in silence as to this dance of the holy and the broken. So that maybe it’s not always, you know, like do I have access to silence? Well, first of all, I don’t know that that’s actually true. I feel like more and more I just drop in and feel everything that’s there and it doesn’t necessarily feel very silent for me. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does, but sometimes in my deepest of dramas, where I am like on my knees wailing, you know, and where I’m confused and overwhelmed and not at all in those “awake” states, that somehow in just moving through that I meet a deeper calm than I ever knew.
Rick: That’s a key point. There is kind of a calm after the storm, it’s like once you have processed a whole batch of stuff that needed to be processed, then you’re able to rest in a deeper calm, a deeper silence, that buried stuff was obscuring or blocking in your experience. Does that make sense, does that resonate?
Vera: I think that’s interesting, yeah.
Rick: I mean, you know…
Vera: As I’m saying, I just realized, you know, it’s like there’s a number of models of kind of relationship with reality and I think that there’s always a question, sort of a feeling in me, that it’s not just arriving in some kind of a state, right, or some kind of a place, that there’s a weird, weird, vaster process taking place and that it’s like, yes, our nature and who we are and all of this stuff that happens, but then there’s a kind of emergence, a co-emergence with the Divine, right, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin used to say, “Union differentiates,” right, and it’s such like there’s a sense in which, rather than becoming, you know, like we imagine, less specific or less individual, somehow as we become more, just naturally move towards more and more union with the Divine, we actually also become … I don’t know, I’m now a little bit lost actually.
Rick: I think I know where you’re going with this.
Vera: It’s not like arriving to some kind of a place and now I’m awake and now I’m enlightened and now I feel the silence and great, right? There’s a way in which life is actually constantly trying to move through it. Sometimes I feel like an orifice and actually sometimes I feel like everything is an orifice. It’s like this pulsing of life and it’s relentless and it’s like, yes, how do we become the orifice willingly and relentlessly? And it’s like somehow in that there is this co-emergence that happens, new things, it’s almost like life is evolving, or God is evolving, like there’s this real kind of a process that’s more than just I’ve arrived in an awakened state, or at least that’s how it seems from where I am now, which is far from anything awake in any possible way, so let’s just be clear about that.
Rick: Well, I mean, look at some of these characters whom we admire as being fairly awake or profoundly awake, somebody like Amma, for instance. There is a very deep silence and sometimes she describes her experience as being just like nothing is happening and everything is just the Divine and so on, but then in terms of the manifest expression of that, there is this incredibly dynamic, charismatic personality which is not plain vanilla in any way, shape or form, but has actually become more vivid, more animated, more full of interesting qualities than the average person, by far.
Vera: Well, I mean, I know that for me, I mean, I have very particular, I think, sensibility, so I don’t want to say that this is what it is, just what it is for me. It’s like what I most value in the people who I consider my mentors, both as these more removed mentors like Reb Zalman, who I didn’t have a very deep personal relationship with, but I’ve met and worked with, and Jason Shulman, is how extremely and profoundly human and imperfect they are. There was never any pretense or exaggeration or actually even like, you know, that there is the willingness to be completely themselves. And you can see that in like Cynthia Bourgeault and all these really wonderful, wonderful teachers, it’s like they’re just so completely themselves. They’re like letting their freak flag, or their imperfect flag, not freak flag actually, but the flag of imperfection fly high. And I really feel like that place of self-disclosure as a human being is really, really, really important for all of us, so that we get out of the, a friend of mine just sent me something yesterday, of like the totalitarian chains of shame and separation from those very human, beautiful parts of ourselves. Like the more we disclose our humanity to each other, the more permission we all have to be who we are and to let people in our spiritual lives also just to be imperfect human beings, living imperfect human lives. There’s such mercy in that, such forgiveness for our humanity.
Rick: I think the point that we’re circling around here, it’s a valuable point, we’re kind of nailing it, but it’s just that there’s … my friend, Craig Holliday, wrote a book called, “Fully Human Fully Divine,” and there’s tendencies in the spiritual community, at least certain non-dual facets of the spiritual community, to de-emphasize the human part and to say things like, “It’s all a story.”
Vera: And that’s exactly …
Rick: Or, “There’s only this,” and that kind of thing.
Vera: That’s the same place which tends towards the transcendent masculine upward movement actually, right? And so in some way there’s a really strong correlation between … and so now it’s only beginning, right? It’s beginning to integrate, it’s beginning … we’re beginning … right? There’s the evolutionary and the involutionary movement.
Rick: And so the point I’ve been trying to get at here is that we should aspire for, or appreciate, the value of, or the necessity of, full blast on both engines, you know, and that’s why I’m trying to bring in this silence thing, not to overemphasize it or to use it as a place to hide out from the humanity, but that we can sort of go full blast and there we’re going to have a much bigger package than if there’s any kind of imbalance between the two.
Vera: Definitely.
Rick: Yeah.
Vera: I myself tend to … and I think this is where my … I suspect, I suspect that because I went so full on into this one direction … you know, isn’t it called tamas?
Rick: Tamas is the dullness, the hiding quality.
Vera: And the darkness also, like Kali, is very tamasic. So I went so deeply into this one way of perceiving … Tantra is very tamasic, right? Like there’s this … so because I swung so much in this one direction, my sense is that as I continue growing and healing, there will be more of a balancing that will continue emerging, because that’s what I feel is actually happening for me now.
Rick: Yeah, and that happens for all of us, you know, to think that awakening is some kind of monolithic place we arrive where all the various pieces and facets of our personality and our body and our emotions and our intellect and our senses and all this stuff have come in complete perfect alignment as our consciousness awakens is very unrealistic.
Vera: It’s ridiculous, you know …
Rick: You can’t find examples of it.
Vera: It’s ridiculous. I actually really, really, really have no interest in actually the terms “awakening,” “enlightenment,” all of those things. It’s somehow insulting, right? Like these kinds of idealized images are actually insulting to my heart. And I think, you know, it’s so passé, it’s so over. If I have any sense of what’s to come, I think more and more real, more and more grounded, more and more embodied, more and more imperfect, is sort of what we’re going to be seeing on the spiritual scene. I think that it’s great to have insight but the only thing that really matters is how we live it in our really ordinary, imperfect lives.
Rick: I’m preparing a talk for the SAND Conference about the ethics of enlightenment and I’m also leery of the “e” word, but the point being that there are so many examples of people who are supposedly enlightened or supposedly awakened who really have not behaved in ways that one would hope or expect some higher spiritual development would involve.
Vera: Do you think that it’s also because these people were placed in systems where they were expected to be not human? Like, where they’re not allowed to express their imperfect humanity so that they are not just some kind of a projection of the collective culture or their group, but something like a real human being trying to live it?
Rick: Yeah, and some of them actually in private have explicitly said that they don’t want to expose that more human side of them. I was once in a small room with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and about two other people and he was messing around with drawing something and he put a marker down, he got some magic marker on his dhoti and he immediately had to get up and leave the room and change dhotis and come back because he didn’t want to be seen with magic marker on his dhoti.
Vera: And then there’s this investment in continuing to feed that idealized image to the people who now are all hooked on you. There’s this really weird way in which … I mean everyone always quotes this, you know, the next guru, the sangha is the next guru?
Rick: Thich Nhat Hanh, the next sangha, the next guru may be the sangha, right.
Vera: Right, there’s something of that sense, but there’s definitely, I feel like this weird relationship between the teacher and a student on one hand is so powerful and necessary or can be so, so tremendously useful, and on another level it almost feels like it always outlives its usefulness and then turns into some kind of pathology. Or not always, but sometimes. Like I always question, at what point does it begin to … at what point does it outlive its usefulness?
Rick: Yeah, there’s a tendency for it too, and that’s something the individual has to decide I think because, for many people, being with a certain teacher for a certain amount of time is very valuable and then there’s a time when it’s valuable to leave, but that doesn’t mean everybody should leave, that doesn’t mean nobody should have a guru, the whole idea of a spiritual teacher is obsolete, I think. You know, there’s a place for it but it’s a very individual consideration.
Vera: I agree, I agree, I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t think this is actually my field so I don’t really know so much about this, but I just have some kind of impulsive thoughts about that. And I do feel like spiritual mentorship, that it’s important to have teachers and mentors in our life and that it doesn’t necessarily have to be some kind of a guru, an awakened person, right? That kind of a spiritual friendship and relationship that develops with our teachers doesn’t have to be that full on.
Rick: It doesn’t have to be hierarchical, it can be more egalitarian, more sort of peer to peer, and everybody’s got something to contribute, everybody’s got something to share. But at the same time, at the same breath, you have to say that, well, some people actually have progressed further.
Vera: More insight and more…
Rick: There is a spectrum of spiritual development and you can’t wipe that out.
Vera: And in a certain point of your spiritual development something is appropriate that is not appropriate, and another time of your spiritual development. And if we’re lucky and if we are graced with the teachers with enough integrity and kindness to facilitate what needs to be facilitated at an appropriate time.
Rick: And I would say, and maybe this will draw us to a conclusion, or at least a conclusion of this episode, but I would say that a real key ingredient is earnestness and sincerity, two key ingredients. If you have both of those, then you’re going to progress. I mean, look at you, with your sort of on your knees earnestness and sincerity in terms of willingness to undergo whatever it took. And if you have both of those ingredients, you’re going to progress quickly.
Vera: Yeah, I mean I don’t really know, and I don’t even know if progressing is the thing. Maybe all this emphasis on progress, you know, it’s like, that’s kind of a masculine tendency wouldn’t you say, like, “Oh, the spiritual life is so that we can progress, so that we can achieve something.” So I feel like I know this so deeply in me. I want to progress, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time there’s this other part of me that’s like, maybe I won’t progress. Maybe there’s a value to real surrender, and real surrender is like literally not even having the agenda of progress, right? Like of trusting that there is a deeper intelligence in life, a deeper intelligence that guides and unfolds each one of our steps, and each one of our spiritual lives, and that when we are in touch with that intelligence, it has its own idea of progress.
Rick: That’s a key point. I mean I was just going to say, “Yeah, I feel like I’ve been progressing all these years, but not necessarily according to my agenda, or my conception of how it was going to go.” I couldn’t have predicted or foreseen many things, but it has its own intelligence and the whole process is one of surrendering more and more to that intelligence and letting it. There’s a saying, “Brahman is the charioteer,” you know, letting Brahman take the reins.
Vera: It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, yeah. And I know for me that’s definitely the constant orientation, the constant direction, you know, like how do I orient myself, how do I offer myself up, how do I listen deeply enough so that that impulse, you know, like that impulse where something emerges from you and then it takes you to that next breath, to that next step, to that next … I’m always just trying to listen deeply enough so that I can follow that impulse, right? Like that true impulse, not some kind of idea that, “Oh, I want more of this now,” or “more of that now.” So, you know, may we all be so guided by grace.
Rick: Yeah, “Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace.”
Vera: “Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Amen.
Rick: Beautiful, Vera. So I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I’m sure …
Vera: Thank you so much.
Rick: I’m sure we’ll have others because you’re going to be progressing, my dear. And so am I, God willing. So I’ll see you in a week or two at the SAND Conference.
Vera: It’s coming up very soon.
Rick: Yeah, time’s flying. And anybody who can make last-minute plans, go to the Science and Non-duality Conference page or there’s even a page of it on my website under “Upcoming Interviews” where you can get a discount if you sign up through that.
Vera: You can watch the live stream. If you can’t go to the conference directly, you can watch the live stream and see all the main stage talks. If you do, if you’ve always felt like you wanted to be there but for some reason are hesitating, don’t hesitate, go. It’s all going to unfold. It’s like this beautiful field of miracles and synchronicity and soul connection.
Rick: It really is. I think this will be my eighth one. And there’s also a thing, I don’t know if everybody can do this or you have to have gone to the conference, I think anybody can do it, which is you can get them to send you the audios of all the presentations, like on a little memory stick or a DVD or something. And you’ll probably see a link for that on their website after the conference. But I did that and over the course of the last year I’ve listened to almost all the ones that I missed.
Vera: Wow, that’s awesome.
Rick: Yeah, I would listen to things while I ride my bike and cut the grass and stuff like that.
Vera: Oh, Rick, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure.
Rick: Oh, you’re welcome.
Vera: And I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Rick: Let me just make a couple of quick wrap-up points. So I’ve been talking to Vera de Chalambert. I’ll be linking to her website. She hasn’t written a book, well she’s writing a book, it’s not out yet, but if you go to her website, I’m sure you have some kind of thing on your site where people can sign up to get your little email newsletters when you send them out. I get them. And then people can be tuned in to what Vera is doing. Vera also does interviews, she does it for the SAND website and she interviews some of the same people I’ve interviewed and others like Charles Eisenstein and Kabir Helminski, whom I’ll be interviewing in a couple of months.
Vera: Oh, Kabir, he’s so delicious, he’s such a gift.
Rick: Yeah, he’s great. And I enjoyed your interview with him. So you know, check, you’ll be notified of those things if you subscribe to Vera’s email newsletter. And what else? That’s about it for Vera. In terms of this show, it’s an ongoing thing as most of you know, and if you would like to be notified of other ones as they are published, you can sign up for my little newsletter. There’s a link on the site, you get like one email a week. And there’s also an audio podcast of this and a bunch of other things if you just explore the menus, you’ll see some useful resources.
Vera: Hey, can I end with a poem?
Rick: Yeah, please.
Vera: Okay, so this is just a poem that really, really touched my heart and I think is quite appropriate for this time. It’s by Martha Postlethwaite.
Rick: I posted it on Facebook this morning. I saw it.
Vera: You did, isn’t it beautiful?
Rick: Yeah, I got a huge reaction, people loved it. Go ahead, read it.
Vera: “Do not try to serve the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is yours alone to sing falls into your open cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue.” So may we each find our clearing.
Rick: Beautiful, thank you, Vera. Let’s end it there.
Vera: Okay, thank you. Bye everybody.
Rick: See you soon.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
