Viivi Jokela Transcript

Viivi Jokela Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done over 700 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out the previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, please, there’s PayPal buttons on every page of the website that explain what you can do. All right, we’ll get started. My guest today is Viivi Jokela, and she lives in Finland. And I recently got to know about her through a mutual friend to whom we’ll probably be referring in this interview because the mutual friend has, he and I have had long conversations over the past year or so about all kinds of spiritual and philosophical things and he has given, and he’s a friend of Viivi’s as I just said, and has given us some valuable points to talk about also. I’m not going to read a long bio of Vivi because, partly because she didn’t send me a a long bio, but also because I’d like her to just tell her story. She had a deep awakening to true nature in 2022, followed by what she called a strange and at times intense acclimation, which she refers to as no self-realization or simply the natural state. And she hasn’t really been a spiritual teacher yet, but I think she’s kind of shifting into that, and she communicates a direct approach to realization grounded on experiential insight on the aspects of awakening and invites you to inquire into and recognize the awe-striking, immediate, inherently awake radiance of your own being and of all being. Okay, Vivi, so for starters, let’s get to know you a little bit. As a child, did you have any inklings of interest in spirituality, any kind of far-out experiences or anything like that?

Viivi: I don’t have too many memories from the early childhood and not really spiritual memories, but I do recall a very fascinating contemplation on the infinite. And it would be when my, I think my dad would give me some kind of books about the space, or the universe. And I would be reading, “Oh, the universe is infinite. It just never ends. It doesn’t have any borders,”. And then I would start to feel into that, and it would take me into this total state of “Wow,” or just some kind of cessation. And my mind would be very immersed into that. So, something like that. But it wasn’t really an experience. It was more like contemplation.

Rick: Yeah. Well, contemplations can evoke experiences. I used to lie and look at the stars when I was a kid or my parents would take me to the planetarium in New York for my birthday and I’d have, I still love space. My background images on my computer screen are all pictures of galaxies that rotate every five or ten minutes. I love it. It gives, it puts things in perspective. So when did you first reach, or when did you first consciously and intentionally get interested in spirituality? You saw an autobiography of a yogi on a bookshelf or something, that first woke you up to the possibility that there is such a thing?

Viivi: I think something like suffering, because I started to suffer intensely already at the early age, not in the early childhood but somewhere, I don’t really know exactly what age, but looking back at it there started to happen some kind of alienation from that direct experience and for me that was really painful, I started to feel more and more constricting and like something just didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel good in my body, I didn’t feel good with other people. I started to feel more and more anxiety. And I would say I had a relatively happy childhood, there wasn’t really anything that traumatic happening in my early early childhood. I can’t really explain why I started to suffer so much. But–

Rick: Was it like you were losing something?

Viivi: I think it more started to feel like a sense of isolation, and it started to highlight itself when I felt that I couldn’t be part of the way that the children were connecting when the school started to progress to the later stages, and the whole socialization, something about it just felt weird and I couldn’t really be part of it and then that increased the sense of aloneness.

Rick: I’ve interviewed some people who felt like they were in unity when they were children or even maybe some of them saw angels or something and then as they got into their late, single digits and early teens, it started to fade away, and they went through the whole teenage angst kind of thing. So maybe you’re referring to something like that, although obviously, you didn’t see angels and you didn’t, you haven’t said you experienced unity, but there was something when you had as a young child, it sounds like, which was fulfilling or comforting, natural.

Viivi: And I can recall that at that time, I had couple of friendships and they were so natural and so easeful and it was just so amazing to spend time together and do all kinds of adventures and there was this amazing ease and thought-free quality to it, and that’s the thing that got lost.

Rick: Yeah. Did you have a rough teenage years? I mean, I did. Just got really crazy.

Viivi: Yeah, the teenage years were really horrible. They were bad.

Rick: Kind of self-destructive, perhaps.

Viivi: So it kind of all really intensified. And then somewhere when I was about, I don’t know, bad day when I would reach again that type of suicidal thoughts and desire like wanting to die and having a very weird fight with my boyfriend at the time, and then I would end up walking straight in front of a car and a car would hit me. Yeah, and it had all kind of complications, the healing, so I spent a lot of time in the hospital, and that somehow hit me more than just physically, and I remember that in the hospital then there was a little library and in the library there was a little book about yoga, just a tiny little thing about some sort of wisdom of the oriental, nothing too complicated, and then I was like, I gotta find out more about that, right when I get out of the hospital, I gotta find more about it because it felt like some sort of voice of sanity inside all the craziness and suffering I was enmeshed in.

Rick: That’s great. Wow, that’s quite a story. Yeah, people say that, and I had something like that too, where I just first heard some little mention of this kind of thing, enlightenment. It’s like a little light bulb went off. Whoa, that sounds important, You got to check it out.

Viivi: Yes.

Rick: Yeah. So what did you do? Start learning yoga?

Viivi: Yes. What happened then that the first yoga school that I found and got enrolled with, that ended up turning into a 10 years of journey. And it wasn’t really a normal yoga school. So it was the kind of spiritual organization that I would, after I left it, I would find out that it was a cult, a cult that actually at the moment is in international court charged about human trafficking and rapes and so, all kind of heavy abuse happened there, and it was a weird mixture of many many elements like Patanjali’s yoga, Hatha yoga and neo-tantra and classical tantra and a lot of new age stuff and lot of Christian stuff. So yeah, I don’t need to go into the details. But it was a of conditioning. And it’s almost a miracle that I got out. But somehow that happened, around the age of 30, I left that behind.

Rick: Yeah, and fortunately it didn’t disillusion you because you continued on in your spiritual quest.

Viivi: Yeah.

Rick: Yes, I mean, obviously you did, you didn’t decide, “Okay, the whole thing is garbage, I’m not going to go in that direction.” You found something else.

Viivi: Yeah, actually, right after I left, I had a very powerful kundalini awakening and that’s the first time that I ever directly had this type of non-dual opening and then it made such a big contrast to that whole 10 years of nonsense that I had just been through, which was all about conceptualisation, increasing levels of identity fixation. And this what I experienced, when this non-dual opening happened, it was so radically different than anything that I’ve ever experienced. And at the same time, it was so familiar and it was so clear that this is what I’ve always been longing for. But it was energetically very powerful experience also. So it was hard to make sense of it. But because it charged me with so much freedom that it was so easy to leave the past behind me and just follow that inwards.

Rick: Did you feel that your participation in the yoga school for 10 years had somehow contributed to the kundalini awakening or was it unrelated?

Viivi: I wouldn’t say so.

Rick: So the kundalini awakening just happened out of the blue? You just had a kundalini awakening.

Viivi: I mean, I did have this orientation all my life, I would say, but it was, I didn’t really understand what any of these things are, like awakening or enlightenment, but the orientation had been there, even it was very vague and weak at that time. And that’s what pulled me into that yoga school in the first place. So maybe that did something, I don’t know.

Rick: I mean, you were doing a lot of yoga, I guess, and some kind of meditation or something.

Viivi: Yeah, a lot of yoga, a lot of meditation, but very progressive practice. That’s what’s the approach that organization was teaching. It was a very progressive path and a lot of effort and a lot of this type of really tense effort. And this was so different because it was very clear that it was very free. It was very spontaneous and it just didn’t fit that kind of willful striving. It had a very different quality, a very different fluidity to it, that energy that’s always been awake inside of me, always from that moment. And it’s like 11 years now and it never left me. It was a very powerful impulse. I could never forget it, even if it was a kind of opening. Yeah, it was a unity consciousness and all of that, but it closed, of course, because it was just an experience. But it brought me here, wherever I am now, whatever it is.

Rick: You remember Adyashanti’s story about how he was doing all this intense practice and it was like really pushing himself. At a certain point, he was on some retreat and he got to the point where he thought he was just going to go crazy if he kept pushing himself. So he left and he went home and he just had this attitude of giving up. And then boom, he had the big awakening, you know, his first big awakening. So when I hear something like that, I think, all right, all that progressive effort stuff probably contributed to what ended up happening, but the giving up was necessary, leaving it was necessary in order for the awakening to happen.

Viivi: Yeah, I love that story.

Rick: Okay, so as I understand it, you went through a lot of maybe purification after this kundalini awakening, there was a kind of a house cleaning that took place and some very kind of difficult adjustments, you said intense acclimation to what had happened?

Viivi: Yeah, that was the awakening two years ago.

Rick: Yeah, later on.

Viivi: But all in all, I can’t really separate the awakening from this whole process of 11 years journey that it’s been. It didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Rick: Right.

Viivi: So yeah, a lot of purification that would start quite immediately after I had that initial opening experience. It had a kind of honeymoon after that, amazing flow and amazing inspiration, and then when that started to cool down, then this terrifying nothingness started to shine in the experience and I would just turn away from it, that was the instinctual reaction, and then depression, a lot of depression started to surface really intensely and I would have low periods of depression that were again then followed by another flow of energy moving through the system, more inspiration, more bliss energy, and then it would drop and there would be again in a period of suddenly really intense voidness and resistance, tremendous resistance to feel the voidness because everything inside of me just wanted to go towards the energetic radiance, or whatever it was that kundalini energy, but it was kind of pulling me all the time to the void and I did everything I could not to go there. I mean looking back at it, at that time it didn’t feel like that, it was all just happening, I didn’t have that type of self-reflection. The attention was more on the surface level of experience, but now I can see what was happening underneath, something like that. It’s hard to explain.

Rick: Yeah, so what would be your explanation or your understanding of why you went through these cycles after your kundalini awakening? Why wasn’t it just smooth sailing? Why did you have to go through these dark periods?

Viivi: Well, there was all that 10 years of traumatic experiences that I had behind me in that organization that I was part of. And also the suffering from my childhood, that was still completely unprocessed because all the practice that I had done so far had only been repressing it and pushing it down and trying to get somewhere. So after the kundalini awakening happened it’s like the repression didn’t really work anymore, so all of that started to surface, but I didn’t really have tools, like somatic tools to be in the physical experience, to be present and to digest emotions, and I still didn’t really understand what awakening is. I think that’s what made it a little bit challenging that period of my life.

Rick: Yeah. My sense is that everybody has a lot of house cleaning that really needs to be done and a kundalini awakening like that can really kickstart it, where it just, the energy is flowing and it’s hitting all these blocks and it starts to clear the blocks and so you have all these emotions. I interviewed a guy a couple weeks ago who he had this profound beautiful awakening. It was like being kissed by God. It was just a wonderful experience. But the next thing he knew he was swearing like a sailor and getting angry at people and just all this stuff, that was coming up. And so, there does need to be a housecleaning, don’t you think? And an energetic opening like that can really get it started. And I guess one good question is, how can we make it as smooth as possible and as efficient as possible so we don’t get stuck in that cycle for a long time?

Viivi: I think what helps a lot for someone who’s going through that phase of the journey is to have access to a really good teacher who could clarify what awakening is about. Because that can clarify a lot of things. Because if you’re still searching for the experience and associating awakening with experiential qualities that the kundalini can bring, because it has that experiential quality to it, then that can help a lot. Because it’s like a blessing and a curse when we have these powerful experiences. It’s a blessing because it opens inside of us possibilities that we didn’t know that exist, but at the same time there can be attachment to those experiences and wanting to get back to them, wanting to make them permanent and not understanding that awakening is actually something completely different. It’s about looking into the nature of experience itself. So, there needs to be genuine curiosity about reality as it is, instead of going for those peak experiences.

Rick: What would you advise, let’s say you had a friend who had a kundalini awakening like this and they were going through what you had gone through, what would you say to them or what would you recommend to enable them to do what you just said, which is not be hung up on the experiences, not be chasing experiences, but to shift to a more kind of fundamental understanding of what’s going on?

Viivi: Well, this kind of natural meditation, which is sometimes called the methodless method, which is the practice that is not progressive, which doesn’t have a goal, where you’re just being with the reality of the experience as it is, as it is arising moment by moment. And there are many different teachers within non-duality that are teaching this practice and it can be called in different ways, but that’s like really great basic practice that I think supports this type of kundalini awakening. If you can take daily time like that, you just relax into the experience, either eyes closed or eyes open, you relax to the direct experience, and you learn the difference between the direct experience and interpretation of the experience, like mental representation of it, the meaning and conceptualization, and you all the time bring yourself back to the direct experience and rest in that. I think that gives a really great support for this whole process of liberation.

Rick: Yeah. I think Adyashanti teaches meditation kind of that way.

Viivi: Yes. He’s really good at it.

Rick: Yeah, he is. And I have a friend actually, who has been studying various meditation traditions, and there are a bunch of them. There’s a kind of Catholic centering prayer, or the Christian centering prayer, and then there’s something taught by a Catholic priest, I believe he is, named Lawrence Freeman, who I’ve interviewed, that is mantra-based, but kind of the way you described where you’re not trying to make a particular experience happen, you’re just sort of settling back in and letting what happens happen, and not clinging, not holding on to any experience, not being upset if you’re having thoughts, just being really natural about it. So there are a number of traditions that teach meditation in that way.

Viivi: Yeah, and I like myself a lot the dzogchen type of approach to it. They call it recognition of the ground of being and then you’re just abiding as that. And it’s like, the idea is that the goal and the ground and the path, they are three names for the same thing, and that’s what’s happening moment by moment, and that’s your true nature.

Rick: Do you think that a person has to have a certain degree of clarity or a certain degree of advancement before something like that’s going to work for them?

Viivi: After you have a genuine opening like that, it’s going to be so natural, at least for me, it’s going to be so natural to just meditate. There’s something about it that just opens up in a completely different way that wasn’t available for me prior to this opening. So no, it doesn’t require like any kind of level of anything. It’s so natural to who we are just to relax into the experience, to relax into the presence. It can be difficult prior having this type of awakening experience because then we are so tight inside of the mind and it’s just the mind trying to meditate and that can be a little bit hard then to try to create that initial, to penetrate that conceptualization. But when that is penetrated even a tiny little bit, it’s so powerful, the reality, it just starts to move through.

Rick: Yeah. So, you had had a pretty profound opening and so it was natural for you, but I’m just thinking of people who haven’t had any kind of opening that they know about, you know, maybe they need some kind of instruction that will enable them to meditate effortlessly in the way you’ve described. Like I said, that mantra meditation or there are various other kinds of meditation like that where you have a tool that enables it to be effortless so you’re not just sitting there with your mind wandering and it’s not just some imaginary thing where you’re contemplating about some state that you’re not actually experiencing.

Viivi: Yeah, I love mantra. I’ve worked a lot with mantra because it’s part of the traditions that I’ve been studying throughout the years.

Rick: Yeah. I’m just saying that for the benefit of listeners, there could be different practices that would be useful at different stages. And so if you try something and you’re not getting anywhere with it, then maybe try something else. Find what works for you.

Viivi: Yeah, you should get results from the practice like within a few months, and if you don’t, then try something else. I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep pounding on something year after year if it doesn’t generate some sort of beneficial results.

Rick: I agree. and whatever that something that might work for somebody, but not for somebody else. So, you have to find what works for you.

Viivi: Yes, exactly.

Rick: In my case, I had results from day one. And so, I kept doing what I was doing, but other people don’t. So, you really have to experiment a little bit.

Viivi: What kind of meditation you do?

Rick: Oh, in 1968 I learned transcendental meditation and that worked for me very well from the start. I became a teacher of it and everything. I’m not a teacher of it now, but I was. And, but other people, learn it and didn’t feel like anything was happening and they stopped doing it. And so, maybe they’d find something else that worked for them. One size does not fit all necessarily.

Viivi: Yeah, I agree with that. Everyone’s path is so unique. And I think the right tools, they will come to us because the path is really magical like that. When we just orient ourselves, and we start to walk the path, we take one step, two steps, the teachers, they will appear in our life, the practices, they will appear, but maybe in an unexpected manner. It’s an amazing journey.

Rick: I love that point. Yeah. It’s like there’s some saying in India, they say, take one step toward God and he’ll take a thousand steps toward you? So, you start with, or Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else shall be added unto thee.” So, you just kind of start, and then all kinds of opportunities come along that would never have if you hadn’t taken the initial step.

Viivi: Yeah, it’s a leap of courage.

Rick: Yeah, good. Okay, so let’s define our terms a little bit. So, we’ve mentioned awakening, liberation, self, no self. Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page with those kinds of terms, like enlightenment, for instance. Do you like that term or do you feel like it’s too misused?

Viivi: I don’t like it, because it’s instantly gives this idea of some sort of superhuman achievement. But at the same time, there are all these non-dual traditions that talk about it, and it does refer to something that is actually a possibility for, I believe, for everyone, if you’re into that. But there are just so much misunderstandings about what it is that makes that term very heavy. Just like God, that also is a term that has such amount of baggage in it that I don’t like that one either, the G word or the E word.

Rick: Yeah, especially the E word for me. I mean, the G word is okay, but in either case, you have to define your terms, otherwise you’re just talking past people because they might have a completely different understanding of the word than you do, and so the word is not helpful.

Viivi: I think enlightenment, generally, at least the way these perennial traditions are talking about it, it refers to liberation, which again I don’t see it as some sort of state that someone achieves because that’s exactly how the self is hearing the teaching and it imagines the liberation or enlightenment, it’s gonna be something it will get to experience if it manages to get all the way there. And it’s always something other than what’s happening right now, from the perspective of self, from the perspective of the seeking mechanism, it’s always going to be something that is not quite this, not quite right now, something needs to be a little bit different, something is not fully complete here. And even there’s a truth in that, it’s just being misinterpreted, this whole impulse of seeking.

Rick: You know, there’s that saying you can get a donkey to walk by fixing up a pole so that a carrot dangles in front of him and he keeps following the dangling carrot but he never catches up with it.

Viivi: Yeah, something like that. It is kind of fun because the self is attracted to this whole game of enlightenment like that, that it thinks it’s going to get something out of it, so it has a purpose also like that. That’s what motivates it, so it gets, starts to pursue it. But at some point, it becomes obvious that it’s actually the other way around, that something starts to pursue the self and it’s like, “Oh my God, I’m the one being highlighted here. I’m actually threatened by whatever this thing is that is happening for me.” And that you could call liberation or enlightenment. It’s very threatening for self, actually, the real thing, because it’s going to be…

Rick: For a small self, you mean?

Viivi: For any kind of self.

Rick: How is it threatening?

Viivi: It’s the end of it. But the self is really nothing other than this kind of movement. It’s very hard to explain what it is. It’s kind of a distancing movement that’s creating distance somewhere where there is no distance at all. It’s like zero distance. It’s totally indivisible. And that’s the reality for everyone already, every moment, but superimposed on top of that there is this, what I call the experience of self, which creates this whole interior world of subjectivity and an exterior world of objectivity, and because that’s what the self is, it comes with something that is other than itself, so it’s like a whole paradigm, it’s not just self but it’s everything that it’s in relation with, that it’s not the self. But there’s all the time this primary reality which is what we are, what everything is, and it’s by its nature awake. It’s just, you could say it’s underneath it, but that’s just the figure of speech because it’s not really, it’s closer than close, it’s closer than your first, than your breath, it’s so intimately what you are and the self is a kind of intermediary that’s somehow in between. But the self is a very complicated phenomenon because it can take so many forms, right? It can take the form of a very egoic sense of self which is very contracted, very conceptualized, very fragmented, and then the self can also take more boundless form, more transparent form, which is more unified and which feels a lot more authentic than the constructed sense of self, but it’s still a kind of intermediary that it’s there. So, that’s the way I understand it, or at least one way of trying to put it in words. It’s hard to say what it is, but when it’s not there, then there is just this amazing immediacy. Amazing immediacy. It’s so unfiltered.

Rick: So, we’re defining terms here a little bit. And so, I’m sure you’re aware that a lot of times in the spiritual literature, they have self with a capital S and self with a lowercase s. And the lowercase s is supposed to be just the individuality that everybody feels they have. And then the capital S is supposed to be Brahman or Atman, universal awareness, which is not individual in its nature, but which is your true nature. So, if you have a self, that’s what it is. That’s what you essentially are. So, are you on…

Viivi: It has this universal quality to it.

Rick: Yeah. So are you comfortable with that terminology?

Viivi: It’s interesting. This thing that I call no self, I never had any intention for something like this, I remember I heard Adyashanti once talk about it a long time ago, and I was super fascinated. I never heard anyone to say anything like that in my whole life. And I was just, that’s like the most interesting thing that I ever heard. But I never really thought about it after that. So I didn’t really have this concept of no-self because my tradition was non-dual shaiva tantra which is a Hindu-based tradition. That’s a tradition that I did mostly practice with. That tradition doesn’t really have this term of no-self at all, or this type of mode of perception or experience. It’s not part of that the view. When this thing happened for me, it took a lot of time to somehow be able to integrate that because I didn’t have any context for it. It took me at least a year to find teachers or people who would talk about it, and then I realized that it seems to be something quite different than that universal sense of self that they talk about in the Hindu based traditions.

Rick: Yeah, I did a whole interview with Adyashanti and Susanna Marie about the loss of a sense of personal self. And I don’t know if you’ve seen that one, but did you see that?

Viivi: Yes, and that was one of the first videos that I saw that was so helpful. That was about a year into this thing. It was so helpful because they were talking about it in a very practical manner and I got a lot of practical pointers from it.

Rick: Great, okay. You know, frankly, when I hear this, I try to square it with my personal experience and I was talking to our mutual friend about this yesterday and we were, he and I sort of agreed about the way we experience it and I wanted to bounce this off you and what we were saying is that there’s kind kind of a multi-dimensionality to life where on one level, nothing’s happening and it’s impersonal and it’s total silence and all that. And then on other levels, it’s more active. And then on a certain level, you kind of have a self. I mean, if you bang your shin into the coffee table, ow, it hurts. There seems to be some pain here. It’s not some guy in China experiencing it, it’s this here. It’s a sense of me, it doesn’t like this. And in your own life you’ve been going through things and dealing with psychological development issues and all kinds of stuff like that, which we’ll talk about more as we go along. And that to me seems like the personal dimension, which most people view as the entirety of their life, the entirety of their experience, like an iceberg, all they see is the tip of the iceberg above water, and someone like yourself has opened up to the rest of the iceberg that is not ordinarily seen, and their main orientation is the 90% of the iceberg that most people don’t see. But still there is the tip. You have a tip above water just like everybody else does. It’s just that you have the whole iceberg.

Viivi: Yeah, that’s a great metaphor. I love it and that’s a really good point. I actually don’t experience it like that but that’s how it can kind of feel when we first have that very personal experience of ourself, just this persona and individuality and then we open up to this infinite vastness, we could call this transcendental dimension or impersonal dimension, and it can feel that it’s this infinitely more vast and deep reality that is more fundamental to what we are. And then personality is still there, but it seems not so significant compared to this which is much more kind of foundational. But how I actually experience, and that’s not even the right word to use because it feels like there is not really even experience anymore, that the personal and the impersonal are literally not two, so I can kind of feel everything very personally but that very personal and intimate experiencing is by its nature totally impersonal and universal but at the same time it’s very personal. So they are in perfect balance and they cancel each other out and the reality is, you could say it’s neither impersonal nor personal, or both and neither, but these are just words, I’m trying to talk about something which is a non-conceptual moment by moment way of experiencing reality, and for me there is no distinction whatsoever between the personal and impersonal. It’s hard to explain because the mind cannot understand it. They seem to be like two contradictory perspectives, but they are not.

Rick: So, how about this? Could you say that there is the personal and there is the impersonal, but they’re both contained within a larger wholeness that is more than the sum of its parts?

Viivi: It’s just one indivisible whole.

Rick: Right.

Viivi: It’s just one seamless whole, and it has those two aspects, and it has many aspects that appear to be two, you could say complementary aspects, but they are not two, and that’s why I think they came up with this term non-duality because that’s what it means. It’s not two, but it’s not like oneness because I wouldn’t say that it’s one, it’s just this paradox. It’s this amazing paradox that there are all these apparent opposites that somehow are not opposites. I don’t know.

Rick: Well, that’s really good. There’s a saying in the Brahma Sutras, which is Brahman is the eater of everything and Brahman meaning the totality. So all the apparent diversities are subsumed within the totality. And you know, when they describe Vedanta in, when they describe Brahman and Advaita Vedanta, instance, they enumerate its attributes, existence, consciousness, bliss, some inherent quality of maya, all these different things that are supposedly contained within this wholeness, but they’re not like individual parts that are sort of all in a basket. It’s just like, it’s all the wholeness, but you can kind of, it’s like the blind man and the elephant, you can sort of feel different qualities of it, so to speak, depending on where you’re coming from.

Viivi: I think it’s kind of misunderstanding, when we have these powerful openings to the impersonal dimension of being, which is again, so infinitely vast, if we then take that to be more true or more real than the type of relative human experience, which is personal in a way, even there’s not a person there, I don’t experience myself as a person, but there is that, you could call dimension of being. In my experience, they need to come to a perfect balance, the relative and the absolute, the human experience and the infinite, the personal and the impersonal, the individual and the universal. And when they do that, then they collapse into each other. And that’s the dance.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really nice. There was a couple of essays you sent me and I highlighted some of the things. One was you said, this relates to what you were just saying, one of the classical pitfalls on the path is premature transcendence. The immaculate nature of pure awareness transcends the body-mind condition and it may feel at times, may at times feel like most of our psychological issues have been, have magically evaporated or they simply no longer feel problematic. This type of liberating disintegration could be called waking up from life and it can feel quite peaceful. I think what you’re saying there is that there’s a kind of a hiding out in the transcendence that’s taking place where you haven’t included the totality of the personal, like you were just saying, it’s personal and impersonal, one big totality with both aspects And it’s like people are trying to sort of hang out in the transcendent and avoid the personal qualities. Is that kind of related to what you were just saying? The paragraph I read?

Viivi: It becomes a position, yeah. And whenever we have a position, if we are attached to that position, if we are deriving our identity from that position, then we have a fixation. And awakening, in the way I understand it, its quality is exactly that it doesn’t fixate, it doesn’t have any view or perspective or position that is the one and only and true, it just doesn’t have that, it can accommodate a position or view for a moment if it’s necessary, but it can also drop it instantly when it’s not necessary, so it’s very free like that. That’s what non-fixating quality is, that’s the quality of freedom. There’s no need to be forever transcendent and forever unborn and undying, if there’s another moment when it requires that you embody various experiences in a very particular and specific way so that it can fully assimilate, for example, and then you have to let go of that position of vastness. But you don’t really let it go because the vastness, you can find it also right at the core of any particular sensation. It’s made of the vastness, so that’s the magic of it.

Rick: It’s good. It’s amazing that English is not your first language because you express these concepts very well in English. I imagine Finnish is your first language, right?

Viivi: I’m glad to hear that. Yeah, it’s easier to me in English than in Finnish because Finnish tends to be a very concrete language. It’s not made for …

Rick: … These kinds of ideas.

Viivi: Yeah, subtle stuff.

Rick: So, what you were just saying, do you actually find that even with things like political disagreements or Gaza and Israel, or the political parties in Finland or whatever, if you talk to friends about these things, your orientation that you’ve just described to us enables you to kind of see both sides more easily? To have a broader perspective that includes all these more polarized perspectives?

Viivi: Kind of, I’m not really a political person myself so I haven’t been in that type of situation where I would be discussing political views. But I’ve had other type of situations in my life where there are conflicting perspectives in human interactions and that’s the interesting part that I can kind of feel all of it simultaneously and it’s sometimes very hard for me to hold my position because the empathy can be so strong sometimes and I can’t control it. I can kind of sense how each perspective arises, but it’s just, it’s always limited because it’s just one way of seeing things. A perspective, it’s always going to be some sort of conceptualization. And if there’s any tendency to try to understand or try to hold on to anything, try to know anything, then that can be frustrating. But if you just relax into that baseless nature of reality, that nothing can be known, and you can never really know what anything is. That’s just the essence of it, but it’s actually amazing kind of freedom in that because it’s, we want to know things because we want to feel safe. That’s basically the mechanism.

Rick: Certainty, yeah.

Viivi: Yeah, it creates a false sense of safety. It doesn’t really fulfill us, but that’s what we are trying to do when we try to find an explanation for something that can make us feel safe. Now we understand what’s happening here. We understand what reality is. It can feel very insecure to feel that groundless, baseless nature of reality, that we can’t know. We can’t know what anything is. We can only feel how everything is spontaneously happening.

Rick: Yeah, no that’s good. I mean it has very practical implications because these days there’s so many conflicts around the world where people are dug in to a particular position and they can’t communicate with each other anymore. It’s gotten worse with all the social media and everything. And I think that if the kind of orientation that you’re expressing became more common, it would just neutralize a lot of this polarity. It would dissolve a lot these conflicts. It’s really probably ultimately the key to world peace is people being able to appreciate differences from a perspective of wholeness and not just feel like their particular viewpoint is the only one and everybody else is wrong.

Viivi: Exactly, and I would say that’s maturity. That’s maturity to experientially be able to appreciate other person’s perspective, even if it’s different from you, and even if it challenges yours.

Rick: Yeah. And you can see, that Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s like, I found another way of interpreting that is, your neighbor is yourself on some deep level. And if you could love your neighbor in that sense that we are actually one person, fundamentally, one being, then, the differences are irrelevant. You could, they get harmonized in the unity of the ground of being.

Viivi: Right, yeah. It’s so interconnected, it’s this one fluid and empty and dynamic co-arising, what’s happening all the time. When we step into the situation from that undivided place, yeah, I believe so, there’s a possibility for genuine meeting. Of course, it’s going to be challenging if the other person is coming from a place of division.

Rick: At least it helps if at least one person.

Viivi: It helps. Rick; Yeah. Alright, let’s do an overview now of what we’ve covered and what we have, what we want to cover in our meeting today. So, we’ve talked about your personal journey up to a certain point, the 10 years in the yoga school and then the kundalini awakening and some of the developments after that, and we’ve defined some terms, and there’s more to tell about your personal journey, and there’s a whole issue about ethics and the appropriate behavior of a spiritual teacher and things like that that we want to cover. So, what’s your feeling of what we should cover next? I guess it would be good to talk a little bit about awakening, because we did talk about those awakening experiences and powerful openings that radically shift your sense of self and sense of reality and penetrate the veil of conceptualization. But there’s a difference between these kind of openings and experiences and then something which is a permanent shift at the identity level, a permanent shift in the way of perceiving reality moment by moment, for the lack of a better word, because it’s going to be more and more difficult to put in words the further we go but we will try. But that would be one point that I think it’s important to make that awakening, at least in the way that I use it, it’s a permanent shift at the identity level. And the glimpses and openings, they prepare us for it and they kind of show us what is possible and they also orient us at the very deep level of our being towards this fundamental shift. But there’s a difference between an experience and an abiding awakeness. Rick; So we’ve heard people talk about the “I got it, I lost it” syndrome. You feel like you got it and it’s beautiful and blissful and then it’s gone. Do you feel that when you’re going through that cycle of “I got it, I lost it” and I guess you went through that yourself for a while, is the “I got it” phase similar to the permanent abiding awakening phase, or is it just like a continuum in genuine awakening? Is it a continuum of what you experienced temporarily when you had a flash of “I got it,” or is it altogether different than that?

Viivi: It’s different because the continuum is exactly, or the idea of continuum is exactly that it’s an experience that would just last indefinitely and all we would need to do is to somehow get there, when the actual shift in orientation is looking like how are we dividing the experience, how are we creating the experience of separation moment by moment. Because it’s not some kind of mode that we are trapped in, the self is not something that we are trapped in, it’s something that we are actually doing and we can become aware how are we doing that, how are we dividing the experience. And then that mechanism can naturally come to cessation. And it doesn’t necessarily permanently just cease, but it can cease enough that we recognize that, ah, that’s what’s actually here underneath. So it’s not like a step forward towards some state which lasts forever, but it’s more like a step backwards into something which becomes available when the selfing thing stops doing itself. The selfing thing is kind of self-referencing way of experiencing reality and it’s constantly active when we experience life from the point of view of self. It’s constantly active except for very short moments usually for people prior to awakening, when we watch the sunset or something, it just dissolves and it’s not happening and there’s just a sunset, something like that, but then it comes back. So it can actually stop stop doing that and we can live in a mode where it doesn’t constantly happen that we interpret everything that oh it means something about me, everything that i’m seeing, everything that i’m hearing, other people, how they are acting, what they are saying, it’s this constant reference that oh it means, how does that relate to me. So when the me at the center of it is seen to be actually just a mental construct, then we can experientially see, and it’s a very non-conceptual seeing, that the self-reference actually refers to nothing. There’s nothing here. It’s just a kind of function. And then it’s a very different experience. I mean, it can still happen. The selfing can still happen, but now we know, it’s not a knowing in any normal sense of knowing, but we know that it doesn’t have any inherent reality to it. It doesn’t have any substance. There’s not some sort of substantial entity called “me” here that it’s referring to. It’s literally referring to nothing, so that’s the clear seeing that’s possible with the awakening, or what I call the first awakening, because there’s actually many, many awakenings.

Rick: Okay, so is what you just said a description or a prescription? In other words, did you just describe what you went through or can someone extract from what you just said instructions in order for them to have the same shift?

Viivi: Yeah, you could extract instruction from this. Instead of trying to get to an awakened state, instead of look how you are creating the divided state, how does that happen in the direct experience, be more interested about that than getting somewhere. That would be an instruction, sure. But it’s also based on my direct experience, how it happened for me, the first awakening.

Rick: So, did you figure this out on your own, or did you have a teacher at the time that gave you these kinds of pointers?

Viivi: I went through this heavy dark night, and the whole spirituality fell away for me. I went through four years of dark night at one point, prior to the first awakening. And when the first awakening happened, I had pretty much given up everything. I was so exhausted. And then it happened just total randomly. It was super weird. I wasn’t trying to make anything like that happen. I was actually just doing a trauma type of inquiry, like somatic inquiry, something like that, but there was this exhaustion that I was finally looking to the experience genuinely like, “Hey, what’s actually happening here? I’m not going to try to make anything happen. I’m just generally interested in, what is this?” And then the awakening happened. I can talk more about it.

Rick: Yeah, so please do talk more about it. And there’s these different stages that you outlined in one of your papers, experience of separation, initial awakening, dark night, first awakening, expansion of the primary awakening, transcending the dream, and true no self, all those different stages. And so, maybe go through that. But at the same time, keep in mind the average listener who’s trying to figure out how this can happen for them. What should I do? What should I read? What should I practice? You know, sounds good. I’m happy for her, but what should I do? V, Yeah, it’s very tricky with the awakening because if we are trying to make it happen then it’s very likely it won’t happen. That’s just the way it works. So we have to stop trying to make it happen. So that’s the first thing. Stop trying to do anything. Stop trying to manage the experience in a certain way that the awakening would happen. You have to give it up. Instead it’s a lot more fruitful for the cultivation of awakening, which is, it’s just grace when it happens, but if we want to orient towards it, what’s really beneficial is curiosity, genuine curiosity. And they call it beginner’s mind in many non-dual traditions. And it’s a surprisingly simple thing and it’s surprisingly easy to lost and it never, ever stops being relevant on this path. And that’s what the natural state basically is, continuous fully immersive beginner’s mind where we are continuously approaching, we are not even doing that, but there is this constant sense of I don’t know what anything is and I’m genuinely curious, I’m open, I don’t come with assumptions, I don’t come with knowledge to this experience. Instead it’s a kind of childlike curiosity but not in a naive way but in a pragmatic way because that’s how children are playing, right? They just, they don’t have any, they don’t come with an agenda to the play. It’s a very simple thing and it’s super essential.

Rick: That’s good. All right, keep going. So, we have these different stages you outlined, you know, separation, initial awakening, dark night, blah, blah. You want to kind of go through those a little bit? And I presume that you’re…

Viivi: Yeah, I don’t know how much we have time, but sure, we can go through some of it.

Rick: Okay, well, we have about an hour or so, and we want to cover that, but we also want to cover this whole thing about the ethics on the spiritual path and that whole story. So, kind of like budget our time.

Viivi: I’ll just say a few things. So the first awakening, which is the fundamental shift at the identity level, is the primary awakening. What’s really surprising about it that it’s tends to be, it not just tends to be, it has this amazing neutral quality to it so that’s why we miss it. It’s all the time here but the mind is looking for something complex and it’s looking also for those powerful experiences if we we’ve been having those and that’s why we miss something that is so immediately available but it’s just completely featureless. It doesn’t have any experiential qualities. It can take any form of experience but in itself it’s completely transparent. It’s pure neutrality like that. So that’s just good to be, that’s just something interesting to bring up that I think why they call it natural state because it really is super natural, it’s always been there and it’s nothing new, it’s very familiar in that sense, but somehow what needs to happen is this type of recognition that, “Ah, that’s actually what I am.” It’s like this simple sense of being, which is just the being in itself or presence in itself without any kind of sense of that comes after that. It’s just the I am, just a pure sense of I am, but not the words. And without anything that usually comes after the I am, because that’s the constructed identity. So that’s just that, that’s it. And it’s so simple and so ridiculous that when it’s realized, it’s like, how could I not see it? It’s been like staring, not staring, because you cannot, it’s not objectifiable, I mean it’s not an object and you can’t perceive it, but at the same time it’s been right here, so it’s not far away, it’s closer than close.

Rick: And so back to the description-prescription conundrum, you described it very beautifully, is there a prescription? Would you recommend people like meditate X amount of time every day or something to, you know, kind of like get away from the usual distractions and tune into this? V, It really depends on the person. It’s so unique. If you feel called to meditate, sure. But if you’re that type of personality that likes to perform, maybe it’s not so good then to do that type of meditation because you really want to more attune with this with the whole of your being. And you could also do it by taking a walk in the nature. So it doesn’t have to be that type of meditation where you close your eyes and sit in stillness, but some sort of orientation, I think it’s very beneficial that we orient towards this, in an experiential manner. Inquiry could be also really great way, somehow inquiring, something that’s genuinely interesting for us, about the nature of reality, whether it’s peace or silence or truth or freedom or something like that, that we start to inquire into that in a deep and non-conceptual manner.

Rick: So maybe it’s like what we said earlier, which is, you know, have the motivation and opportunities and possibilities will present themselves and you experiment, you see what works.

Viivi: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Okay, I guess that’s a good general prescription. Because this is a general audience, there could be 100 different things that people could, do at different times. Okay, you want to say anything more about all of that? Or should we shift into this whole thing about ethics on the path and so on.

Viivi: Maybe what I feel to emphasize is that there is this thing what I call first awakening and then there is this thing that I call sometimes full awakening, which is very hard to talk about because it instantly sounds like it’s some sort of higher achievement, or that there’s a hierarchy, and it’s not really that at all. But there’s a fundamental difference between these two and I think most of the confusion within spirituality comes from mistaking these two things to be one and the same. Or there’s just one spectrum of awakening and then everyone who has an awakening is just put there into the spectrum and it’s just not like that because if you have this second awakening that I call no self or full awakening, there’s many names for it but nothing really manages to explain it because it’s going in such a paradoxical and non-conceptual dimension. I don’t see that’s necessarily something different than from the first awakening but it’s kind of like the first awakening, if you think of a flower, a bud, and then the bud opens just a little bit and then the opening it’s always there, it’s open, and people often experience it that they can access the awakening, it’s always there, when they sink into they can attune with it but they usually use this type of language that I can access it, it’s always there, sometimes more, sometimes it’s a little bit more, seem to be a little bit more closed, sometimes it’s a little bit more open but it’s an opening that is always there to a certain extent if you have a shift at the identity level. So then the second awakening is a full blossoming. It’s a blossoming 360 degrees, to all the directions, okay? So it’s a very different type of experience of senses, for example, because, and some people describe it that it’s completely headless because you don’t anymore experience that the perception happens somehow inside the head or that you are inside the body or anything like that, all of that completely collapses. All these fundamental structures of reality like time and space and dimensionality, it collapses when the self-structure or the identity structure in itself collapses. And then this thing just opens up and it’s just this type of zero distance sense experience or immersion into the senses, which is so immediate and so vivid and so complete.

Rick: One way I’ve heard it described, and this might, I think this might derive from Kashmir Shaivism is that the first awakening might be that one, there’s realization of one’s essential nature, but everything else is somehow separate from that. and then maybe what you’re calling the full awakening is you realize that that essential nature you realize is actually the essential nature of everything and so it’s all just one unified wholeness instead of a kind of a duality between inner self and outer relative world. Does that fit or is that not what you’re saying?

Viivi: That’s actually more what I would call the universal experience of self. So, that would still be the first awakening, but it then starts to expand, so it expands that you realize that, oh, it’s actually not just my awakening, and you can recognize it in everything. But then the full awakening is more that the self in itself drops away, and then it’s not really even unity, it’s something more primary. It’s not absence of unity, but unity only makes sense if there is separation, and unity only makes sense if there is something to unify, but when you drop into this, all the way through with it, you land in this, it’s not a place, but it’s so primary, again, and it’s always been there. It’s not one, it’s not two, it’s not many, it’s very hard to say what it is, but it’s completely uncompounded, it’s completely seamless, and for sure it’s unified. It’s not like the absence of unity, but it’s something even more primary, if that makes sense. Because there is this void also that becomes very salient, but not as something other than the sense immersion.

Rick: Ah, that’s very well put. I won’t try to embellish it. I’m not capable of embellishing it. That’s good. Okay, now some people have a big issue with this no-self business. I’ve interviewed a woman named Jessica Nathanson or Jessica Eve, and there’s another woman in Germany that’s been talking a lot with Tim Freak about this, and they’ve run into a lot of people who are sort of into neo-advaita, and who had been having it drilled into their heads that you don’t exist, and there’s no self and no person and all that stuff and it’s kind of messed them up. It’s caused people to lose incentive or to become disinterested in their family and their job and things like that and even to become depressed and suicidal. So maybe you could distinguish that from what you’re talking about here.

Viivi: I’m not so familiar with neo-advaita, but I did go to this type of a radical non-duality meeting not too long ago. I was just curious what it is and then there was this teacher, and first I was super excited because he was talking about the “no I Am”, and he was using the same language as me, and I was just excited and then he was describing this type of death and it was like “Oh, it felt like going to deep sleep with eyes open.” And I was, “Yes, that’s exactly it.” And I was crying. It was touching me so deeply because I could… Yeah, I don’t often get to talk with someone who has experienced that type of death. But then he was just like… The response was this total emotionless ghost-like, “Yeah, no one cares. There’s no one here.” And everyone would look at me, why is this person crying? So apparently emotions were not part of this non-radical non-duality, or whatever. And the further this teacher was speaking, it’s something about it, I don’t understand what’s happened there. First of all, it’s a very rigid position, it feels like, and it doesn’t feel like it’s very fluid because there’s not actual dialogue that happened, they always say the same things, when you’re trying to speak with them, it doesn’t feel quite right to me, it doesn’t feel very embodied that no self, maybe there is a genuine death there, I don’t know, who am I to tell, but if that death is not followed by a rebirth, it’s kind of like you climb to the mountaintop and then you just stay there, but that’s not really enlightenment. You need to come all the way down back to the humanness and that’s the downwards movement of liberation and that needs to happen and that’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s going to be a lifelong journey of embodiment. That’s the way I see it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. Let’s talk a little bit more about embodiment because that neo-advaita perspective has become kind of popular and it does seem to be a life-negating kind of philosophy. And I mean, I had a friend who went and visited a neo-advaita teacher in England for a while and then he went to see another friend and the other friend said, what’s going on with you? You seem kind of nihilistic, you know, there’s some kind of disinterest in life that has crept into you. And what you’re just saying here is, you come down off the mountaintop, which reminds me of the 10 Zen ox herding pictures where in the last one the guy is coming into town laughing, riding the ox and coming in to be with the people and share what he’s found. So, what do you, this whole idea of lifelong integration, that fascinates me because I often say and think that there is no end. It’s not like, everybody is continually, we’re all works in progress. St. Teresa of Avila said it appears that God himself is on the journey. So, the whole universe is continuing to evolve, including all beings regardless of their level of spiritual development. And so, maybe elaborate on that a little bit. And I mean, and the fact that rather than in some way causing this, causing one to lose interest in life or lose interest in family or whatever, has it been your experience that this has made life more sumptuous, more enjoyable?

Viivi: Yeah, those are really good questions. I think it’s a pitfall, to get stuck in the transcendent position, or stuck in the void, something like that. And I’ve had my moments of that as well. After I had the big release, there was this whole, the first one year, I would say it was very transcendental. But for me there was a lot of this energetic intimacy also, because the kundalini was so salient for me throughout this whole journey. But I also had this type of, it’s very hard to talk about because there’s no time, but you could say periods when there would be just this devastating void and it was so stark, just stark nothingness and almost no thoughts at all, all the sensations, they felt very transparent and like everything was almost like paper thin and the nothingness was just shining through and there was almost no emotion. But for me those moments, they didn’t really last usually long, so it kind of like balanced itself. But there was a kind of terror that came with it, and it was exactly that, it felt like the humanness was completely gone. I couldn’t feel anything. But it was only terrifying because the mind started to react to that. I don’t know. I don’t know what would make one fixate there, what would make someone stay there and fixate there years and years and years because I think it has a natural momentum and at least for me it just kind of pulled me into itself naturally, this whole embodied experience, and it has an amazing way of doing it, it’s very intelligent the way it happens, it’s not like the mind, rational kind of intelligence, but life just orchestrates everything in a way that, life is really inseparable from the realization. And…

Rick: Well, let me ask you this, do you feel like as the days, weeks, months, years go by now, your life keeps getting richer, your emotions, your love, your perception of the world seems to become more refined or beautiful, or, you know, there’s just kind of a continual enhancement of your life by virtue of the integration of this true nature into your relative expression.

Viivi: For me, this is so fulfilling. It’s everything I could have ever wanted, but it’s not really wantable because there is this death, and there is this dissolution of soul and all of that and dissolution of reality, extinction of reality. So it comes with a price, but for me it’s just so worth it. And life is not what I once thought it was, relationships are not what I once thought they were, like nothing is what I once thought it was, but it’s much, I don’t want to say better, it’s not better but this is real, this is reality, this is actual reality, and for me it’s been a tremendous relief. It’s such a deep homecoming, but I don’t want to advertise it like this is the fulfillment of everyone’s dreams because it may not be that. I don’t think this is necessarily something that everyone wants and there’s no specialness about this. It’s really nothing special and I don’t see it like that. I know it’s available if you want that but it’s good to be aware like what you actually want. So it comes with the price, that’s all I’m saying.

Rick: I mean it may not be what everyone wants on the near horizon but it might be ultimately what everyone wants.

Viivi: Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah.

Rick: And it does sound better in the sense that you wouldn’t trade your current life for your life 20 years ago. It’s better now.

Viivi: Yeah, it has these challenges, like functionality has been maybe one of the main challenges, and also going through a lot of healing, having this background with the trauma. There’s a lot of healing that becomes only possible after the realization because it’s, all of that, it just surfaces, and that’s the nature of realization that it’s, nothing can be hidden, it so it has that type of illuminating quality which is also intensity, that’s why I like the word radiance because it’s it has that quality of illumination but also radiance, it’s warmth, it’s kind of like redemptive love almost I want to say, what it makes possible for me, at least, this type of healing, it’s like healing beyond healing when you are able to meet all the trauma and all these places, residues of suffering and pain that the body is carrying, if that’s even the word for it. So when that is released in this space which is so amazing because it’s so intimate and it’s so unconditional and it has the capacity to assimilate anything without leaving a trace and it’s so intact. It’s like wholeness beyond wholeness, it’s intactness beyond intactness, and no matter how amount of shattering you’ve been through, how broken the psyche has been, it all melts into this wholeness which is indestructible. It’s like indestructible foundation. I mean, what else would anyone really want?

Rick: Yeah, sounds like the ultimate healing mechanism.

Rick: A question came in from my friend Chitra Polanski in California who is one of our volunteers that proofreads transcripts. She said that Ramana Maharshi said, “When you realize the Supreme Self, the world vanishes.” Did the world vanish when you realized that?

Viivi: I love that quote and the way that I remember it is that the world and the I and God all arise together. So, when the I-sense is gone, also God and world are gone. And then, I don’t know, you could call this Godhead, I guess, like Meister Eckhart was creating this term, which I think it is this experience that there’s, when even the God disappears.

Rick: Yeah, which means it’s just resolved back into such an unmanifest level that there’s no relative expression, right? Is that correct?

Viivi: It’s not unmanifest or manifest, it’s just something, there’s no relationship. That’s the thing with the God, how people usually experience it, even if it’s from the point of view of unity, that there is a relationship. But when the self falls away, that’s why it feels, how it actually feels like is that God falls away if you’ve been having that type of relationship, if you are that type of person who has a relationship with God. So, it actually doesn’t feel like that self falls away, the way it feels like, God disappeared, because there’s not any more, any kind of relationship possible. And in the tantric tradition that I’ve been practicing, it’s not God, but Goddess, so you can have that type of very beautiful relationship with the deity like that, which is based on identification. You know it’s not something other than you, but yet you can have that relationship, and that’s just not going to be possible at some point, but its own beauty in it then becomes then available.

Rick: Sri Ramakrishna said, “Would you rather be sugar or taste sugar?” You can have a choice, maybe. And maybe you can even go back and forth. Actually, I think he’s describing his own experience that sometimes there’s, in fact, Shankara said, “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion. So there could be the tasting sugar periods and then the being sugar periods.

Viivi: Yeah, there is devotion, but it’s different because there’s not that type of, it’s something that arises from the depths of being, it’s kind of like a deep orientation in life, but it’s not really devotion towards anything because there is not relationship.

Rick: No separation, yeah. So, there was this guy named Adi Da, he was a spiritual teacher, he’s dead now, and I had a conversation with an old friend of mine who’s a student of someone who had been a student of Adi Da, and he had a profound awakening, no doubt about it. And he had all this, he glowed in the dark, he was just brilliant and charismatic and eloquent and radiated a lot of Shakti and so on. But then he developed this really abnormal obsession with sex and drugs and all kinds of problems. He had multiple wives and he was sleeping with other guys’ wives and all this stuff. And there’s a lady I interviewed named oan Shivarpita Harrigan who has written some books about Kundalini Vidya and she describes something known as a deflected rising where the kundalini rises but then doesn’t rise all the way up to Makara point, to its home where it can rest but gets deflected off on some channel and this can result in what I just described. You can even develop Siddhis, when you’re kind of with one of these, but then you’re heading for a fall because it’s not a full awakening and it’s unstable and it can sort of magnify certain unhealthy aspects of your personality. You can become a megalomaniac, or a sex addict or things like that.

Viivi: Yeah, that’s fascinating, the relationship with kundalini and it makes sense that that’s what’s maybe what has happened there. Kundalini, it’s the most powerful energy in the universe and it’s a very explosive energy and it’s very unpredictable like that, and no one can control her.

Rick: Right, and so somehow it has to be, there are teachings and practices, Joan’s tradition offers them, where it can be directed properly, so it doesn’t go off on side channels or if it has gone off on a side channel, it can sort of be re-guided back into the proper channel and reach its culmination without, causing all these problems.

Viivi: When I had the the final awakening, there was just this upsurge, from the heart, it just exploded, all the way like that. And after that, it was so slow, it was almost like a deadly slow, it just descended all the way down to the earth, and then it was complete. I mean, that was non-conceptually how it felt like. It just came to my mind now when you were describing that.

Rick: Yeah, sounds good. So that just might be one explanation of why so many teachers get into trouble. And I also think this is a quote I’ve used a million times, that Padmasambhava, you know, the Buddhist sage said something like, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” In other words, he’s really kind of an enlightened dude, but he has to be still very careful about his behavior. There has to be some…

Viivi: Yeah, because Kundalini amplifies everything. Whatever we haven’t looked in ourself, in our psychology, it’s going to amplify that. That’s why doing all this psychological and trauma work is really beneficial in case something like this would happen because it prepares the ground. The more unified the psyche is, the more prepared it is to contain this type of experience. But again, my experience was that the psyche shattered, it was very rude awakening like that.

Rick: Well, that’s an interesting point.

Viivi: But still, everything has to be faced. I had to face everything, all these psychological issues that I hadn’t fully looked at. It’s so merciless like that, and it’s a grace that it does that. But I don’t know. In some cases, it can just amplify them and maybe a person can get even possessed by these unresolved samskaras or psychic tendencies, maybe.

Rick: Yeah, I think you’re really right. I mean, that’s what happened to this guy, Adi Da, he was just like, became a sex maniac and like that. Although his his followers don’t see it that way. They had some whole interpretation about his divine status and higher than Jesus and Buddha and all this stuff. And therefore everything he did was cosmic. But anyway, I’m going, I shouldn’t pick on him so much. In your own case, have you gotten any help with all this psychological processing or have you done it on your own pretty much?

Viivi: I’ve done on my own, but I feel the kind of trauma that my system is processing is a relational trauma, attachment trauma, so that can really only come to resolution in interaction.

Rick: So, relations, relations with people or what?

Viivi: Yeah, friendships are really good. Any kind of genuine connection, authentic connection, sharing, all of that has been very helpful. I have quite a few good friends. So, I’m lucky with that. And then I’ve done some therapeutic sessions also, more focused on this stuff, and that’s been beneficial as well.

Rick: Yeah, well good. Okay, so let me see. We’ve kind of covered this. There’s a whole spiritual bypassing concept which relates to all this, and you’ve mentioned you explaining, excusing abusive behavior by using non-dual language. And this is interesting, and using an absolute perspective to dismiss the dynamics of the relative. That’s a useful phrase right there.

Viivi: Yeah, and I think it’s part of that misunderstanding that when we awaken to the absolute or to the immensity or to the vastness, to the transcendence, then it can feel like it’s so much more real and the relative is like a tiny little thing there. It’s almost like the absolute has the 98% of emphasis of realness and the relative is just 2% and it’s natural to go through that kind of phase but it’s very partial view if you then stay there. If it feels like, oh the relative is just nothing, it’s just play of colors or light, it doesn’t really happen, it just appears to be happening and it’s already gone, so who cares. This kind of dismissiveness, it’s not part of genuine realization where this thing really comes into this amazing balance, the relative and the absolute they meet each other and they collapse into each other. So there’s no need ever to dismiss the relative experience or its flavor, its qualities, there’s never no need to dismiss pain because realization doesn’t mean the end of pain. You can totally experience pain after realization. It’s not going to be suffering in that type of sense that we are used to think about suffering. But there can even be some forms of suffering after the realization, kind of universal forms of suffering. But there’s no need to dismiss that just because you have awakened to the absolute. it’s not some sort of escape away from here. It’s not meant to be used like that. It’s the identity that is trying to use it like that when that is happening, use it as a position, use it as a safe way to keep yourself apart from this human experience.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting what you just said. These people who sort of feel like, “Whoa, the absolute is 98% of my experience and the 2% relative is like, it’s my play toy, you know, it hardly exists. And I had a spiritual teacher who was very disdainful of human laws that governments would establish. He felt like the ends justify the means and, if I want to, ship money from this country to that country and the government is interfering, they’re stupid, they make these dumb laws, and so I’ll just have my disciples take it, take cash in suitcases. And some friends of mine ended up in jail in Spain for doing that. But there’s this sort of dismissal of the mores or laws or rules of human society, because he felt he was above all that. And I imagine he’s not the only example of that.

Viivi: Right and there can also be this, if you haven’t really fully encountered the suffering in yourself fully and the root of the suffering and all of that, you can’t really have compassion and empathy in it in other people, so there can be this premature transcendence and then when people around you are suffering then there can be this dismissive attitude, like why are you suffering? Why don’t you just rest in your true being. And in my experience that just cannot arise if you genuinely know what suffering is, and at least it’s to me has been the biggest teacher. I can’t really separate the realization from it. It’s been an amazing teacher and it still is and I have a lot of respect for anyone who’s genuinely turning towards the pain and the suffering. I think that’s something that could be called the work of liberation, which is not a state, it’s that attitude of turning towards anything that doesn’t feel free, anything that is in pain. And there’s something really gone wrong if we use awakening to hold us apart from that, or look down upon that in some manner.

Rick: Yeah, what comes to mind as you say that is that compassion should be a symptom of spiritual attainment and, you know, if a teacher is compassionate toward his students and not sort of using them as play toys or as, means of gratifying his own desires, which denotes lack of compassion, terrible lack of compassion. So, and I think compassion would go along with a full development of the heart.

Viivi: Yeah, I agree with all of that. There’s something kind of scary about it when you meet this lack of empathy in another human being, especially if it’s a teacher who’s teaching these things and then in their private life, they don’t really embody the essence of the teachings. For me, there was just something kind of shocking about it.

Rick: Some development yet to undergo. And I don’t think either of us is just trying to say that we are better than these people that we’re talking about. Because we used to have this comedy troupe in the US called the Firesign Theater and one of their albums was “We’re all bozos on this bus.” And for the grace of God, go I. But I think it would perhaps a good kind of teaching point here is that everybody should be on their toes and be introspective with regard to their own behavior and never rationalize inappropriate behavior with some kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo because it seems like so many people have screwed up and it could happen to anybody.

Viivi: Yeah, it could happen to anybody.

Rick: Now here’s a good point you made. The contradictory nature of the experience… I’m sorry, you were about to say something.

Viivi: No, I lost track of my thoughts. Go ahead.

Rick: Oh, okay. The contradictory nature of the experience when there are many authentic elements with practices and teachings, which mixed with disturbing aspects in the teacher’s behavior when having these types of abusive experiences. It’s not black and white. It makes it challenging to process. And so I could say that too. I mean, I derive so much from that teacher that I alluded to. Totally saved my life, changed my life, still benefits my life. But then there were these disturbing elements, which didn’t quite fit. And so you have to kind of… It isn’t black and white. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, as the saying goes. But you have to kind of discriminate and say, know this good aspect over here doesn’t justify this bad aspect over here.

Viivi: Yeah. It’s challenging to process because, the ambivalence is always challenging for the mind who wants to understand and wants to have an explanation and it can’t understand that many kind of dimensions can simultaneously be happening and real. So that’s why the mind always just let’s go in the end. It can’t be understood, reality is just what it is and there is this inherent completeness to everything even in challenging situations and difficult situations to process and part of that healing is letting go of that need to understand in my experience, you have to let it go completely, the hope for an answer, the hope for that type of resolution, and then something much more real can start to blossom.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good advice. I don’t completely take it myself, unfortunately. I keep rehashing certain lines of thought, thinking, this doesn’t make sense. How could somebody who is so bright and so inspiring and all be behaving like that. What does he think?

Viivi: No, I do that also, of course.

Rick: It’s like, what does he think when he goes to his room at night and it’s quiet and he thinks, what am I doing? Is there any self-reflection there? Anyway, it is perplexing. But it’s a good thing with all things, I think, to try to have a broad perspective and not polarize yourself. Not say, “Oh, all the Republicans are bad and all the Democrats are good,” or whatever. You can still vote one way or the other, but there’s so much polarization these days. And I think what you were saying earlier about the vast container that harmonizes differences is an important lesson for us all.

Viivi: Yeah, I think that’s, again, also maturity to be able to sense these nuances in situations and to not to resort this type of polarizing because it’s very dividing.

Rick: There’s another good point you made here. The way tantric teachings talk about reverence of the feminine, but how it usually always turns out to be just lip service and how that has been adapted as part of the self-image by many male teachers. They give lip service to, the divine feminine, and yet they don’t embody it in their relationship to the feminine. It’s more of a philosophical ideal than a lived quality in their lives. So, I think the divine feminine thing is, we didn’t really get into this, but it’s probably a very important point. We could have a whole interview about it, and it’s so much needed in the world today to counterbalance the mess that masculine dominance has made. But a lot of people are kind of just using it as an idea and then violating it.

Viivi: I mean, in that organization that I was part when I was younger, that was the central ideal because it was a kind of tantric organization, it was all about the reverence of the feminine, but women were heavily abused there. And definitely we could have like a bigger discussion about it and it’s such an important topic and such a fascinating thing to discuss and I don’t want to simplify it but in a very kind of concrete way feminine is not something to do with the gender but it’s this intimacy with our embodied experience. It’s intimacy with our physicality, intimacy with our emotions, intimacy with our thoughts also, intimacy with sensations and kind of respecting that non-rational instinctual intelligence that is inherent to our physicality. So if we don’t have that relationship first and foremost with ourselves, that type of intimacy, that type of radical intimacy that really includes the whole spectrum of emotion for example, in a very personal manner that you know what is shame. You know it, you are very intimate with that emotion, you know what is hatred, you know what is aggression, there’s not that type of repression in yourself, then it’s a lot more easier to respect that in another person, their embodied experience, their emotions, their intuition, their thinking, the way they are organizing reality, their judgment, all of it, if you have that with yourself. So that’s something that I’ve been just feeling into lately.

Rick: Good. Okay, so we’re just about out of time, and there’s so many more questions I could ask you, and I hope the questions I have asked you have been useful and that I haven’t just taken us off on tangents that you didn’t find that interesting or something.

Viivi: No, I’ve been loving this conversation.

Rick: Okay, good. So, How about the people listening and watching this? Do you teach in some way? Do you have Zoom meetings with people? Is there, you don’t have a book and you’re just getting a website as you’re starting to put it up. But if people want to be interacting with you more, what can they do?

Viivi: I have a website, it’s called sensingradiance.com. And right now there’s just a one pager but I will get the proper website done probably until the end of summer and then there’s going to be material about embodied non-duality and awakening and liberation work and all of that. I’ve started to do this type of one-on-one work within the last year and I love it and I’m open for it if someone feels called to have that type of support. It’s a type of intuitive inquiry. It’s actually very similar to what I was doing when the first awakening happened. I was just realizing it today. I don’t have anything like step one, two, three, four, do this, this, this, this. But what I am interested in is exploring that quality of effortlessness and spontaneity which is so inherent to our true nature and seeing where it goes from there. That can be very beautiful when we are processing trauma or doing that type of emotional digestion or if we are interested about non-dual inquiry, inquiring into the nature of sensations. I think effortlessness and spontaneity, they are essential qualities in that type of exploration and I don’t separate these two from each other at all, like the type of trauma work or emotional work and then the non-dual inquiry, they are all part of the awakening for me.

Rick: Do you have a contact form on your website or email sign up thing or anything like that?

Viivi: Yeah, there’s an email address. You can drop me a message after watching this if you feel like and I will probably create some sort of a letter to everyone who writes me after seeing this video.

Rick: You know what you could do? You could set up a MailChimp account and have a form on your website so people could just actually get on your email address list if they wanted to, and then when you’re ready to start announcing things, you could just send it out to that list. And also, I guess there’s also a contact form, so if somebody just wants to contact you and say, “Hey, I want to have a Zoom session,” they can do that, right?

Viivi: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Okay, good. And so I’ll be linking to your website on your Bath Gap page, and people know how to click on a link. Great. Okay, thanks, Viivi. It’s good getting to know you and we’ll be in touch.

Viivi: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: I’ll follow up with some emails about this and that. All right. Okay. Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. My next interview will be with a fellow named John Audette, who had all kinds of interesting friendships in his life, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, and just all kinds of people. And he’s all about the divine influence guiding our lives and life after death and stuff like that. Anyway, so we’ll be talking to him next, and stay tuned. Thank you.