Wayne Wirs Transcript

Wayne Wirs 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 interviews or conversations with spiritually awake, or I’d rather say awakening people. There are nearly 300 of them now, so if you’re new to this, go to batgap.com and you’ll see them all archived. I’d also like to mention that the existence and perpetuation and expansion of this show depends on the support of appreciative viewers and listeners, so there’s a donate button there. And speaking of listeners, we’ve been having some trouble with the audio podcast lately, and if you’ve noticed this, please bear with us. We’re working on getting it fixed, emailing back and forth with Apple and all, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon if you’ve been having problems. So, my guest today is Wayne Wirs, and I’ll just read a very short bio and then we’ll get into our usual extended conversation. Wayne considers himself more of a spiritual explorer than teacher, so his “teachings” tend toward first-hand, real-world experiences, open-ended, integral, mystical and evidence-based, rather than academic, hard-and-fast truths, which I really like the sound of, and I sort of feel like any teacher should be doing the same, not just speaking from concepts, but speaking from their personal experience. Unlike many non-dual teachers who focus on an all-or-nothing approach to awakening, Wayne advocates a simple yet integral fading of the ego based on key qualities – eternal (soul, practical), radiance (love, emotional), emptiness (awareness, rational), and intimate (mystical, experience). He calls this dynamic, flowing, magical way of living “mystical oneness.” Wayne has two key sayings which best describe his message – “The less there is of you, the more there is of the Divine,” and “The smart have their books, the wise have their scars.” And even though he’s smart, Wayne has written a few books, which we’ll probably be mentioning towards the end, and I think I’ve read all of them this week. They’re not long or difficult to read, they’re very enjoyable. So welcome, Wayne, thanks.

Wayne: Thank you, well I appreciate you having me here. I never expected to be on here because I never queried you about coming on, and I never asked any of my readers, you know, I have a blog, I blog about this, my day-to-day life. And I never asked any of them to put me on, so it’s very synchronistic that I came on at about the time I was ready to come on too, so it’s all working out well.

Rick: Yeah, well a few people had sent in votes over the years, and Irene keeps track of that, and was kind of working down the list and noticed that you were there and looked interesting and had quite a few votes, so she invited you.

Wayne: Well thank you, I appreciate it.

Rick: Yeah, by votes I just mean, you know, people inquired and said, “Hey, what about Wayne Wirs?” And so we kept track of that.

Wayne: Right.

Rick: Of course we don’t solely go by the numbers, and sometimes there are very interesting people who no one has heard of, and we invite them on the show, but you know, it’s one indicator. So, as may be evident to people who are watching this, you live in a van.

Wayne: I do, yeah. I’ve been living full-time pretty much on the road for about 6 years, 7 years, well, it’s about 7 years now. I do it mainly for a number of reasons. One is I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere anymore, but also everywhere feels like home too, if that makes sense.

Rick: Yeah.

Wayne: And I love my freedom, I just love being able to go out there. Another thing is spiritual seekers often require solitude to integrate what we’re learning. You know, you kind of have to get away from all the noise of society and stuff. So, living this way allows me to get away from people when I want to, and yet when I need to be around them I just go hang out in the city for a while too. So it really works out very well for my …

Rick: There’s kind of one of the rules that certain orders of sadhus have to live by in India, is that they’re not supposed to stay in any one place more than 3 days, and they have to keep moving.

Wayne: Well, a couple of my readers have called me an American sadhu, because I do kind of wander around and I don’t really stay in any one place for very long. I like living that way, you know. I lived out of a suitcase myself for 15 years, during that entire time I didn’t have any kind of a rental or apartment or anything, I was just traveling, so it can be fun. And it’s an interesting phase of one’s life if one goes through that phase, because it really does culture a certain detachment from many of the things that people ordinarily get attached to.

Wayne: That, and you have to become very comfortable with yourself. You can’t have a lot of inner conflict, because it will drive you crazy. So, you have to … it promotes a sense of inner peace too, naturally.

Rick: Where are you now?

Wayne: Right now I’m outside Alpine, Arizona, which is on the eastern side up in the White Mountains. So it’s a little cool up here, and the air is thin, so you might catch me having to catch my breath a little bit. It’s a beautiful, beautiful area, I don’t know if you can see it, mind if I turn it? There’s an outside view, I don’t know if you can see out there or not.

Rick: Yeah, I see, we can see the trees and the woods a little bit.

Wayne: You see all that?

Rick: Yeah. Nice.

Wayne: So yeah, and that’s my backyard today.

Rick: That’s great. Yeah, I’ve been up there, I once taught a meditation course up in that area.

Wayne: Oh, okay, good.

Rick: And incidentally you’re on a 4G network, so occasionally people watching this might wonder, “How come his image is freezing up?” That’s why, he’s on a 4G network. So, we’re getting pretty good quality of bandwidth. Okay, so let’s get into your personal story a little bit. I know a lot of people like to say, “Oh, I don’t have a personal story because I’m not a person,” and all that stuff, but people love the personal story. And I would counter that, yeah, you are a person, you’re not just only a person. There’s much more to you than your personal story, obviously, but people’s personal stories are interesting, and people can relate to them.

Wayne: I would agree with you 100%, yes, I am a person, but I am also much more in that sense. And I’m going to divert a little bit here, I’m sorry, but this is a discussion, right? On that subject, I think a lot of spiritual teachers, they almost are detached from their personal story, whereas if you spend enough time there you end up reintegrating it, and it just becomes an aspect of you, just like your body is an aspect of you, and your thoughts are an aspect of you, and your love is an aspect of you, right? And that’s kind of where I go with this mystical oneness, these are different qualities. But I don’t want to jump ahead of myself, here’s my story.

Rick: Let me tell you a funny little story before you proceed. My friend Francis Bennett was just over in England, touring around, giving some talks. And in England there’s a certain kind of mentality over there, because certain spiritual teachers have hammered on the point that you’re not a person, there’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, that kind of emptiness thing. And so there were some people coming to his talks who were kind of arguing with him on that point. And so there’s this one guy, and the guy was going on and on, and finally Francis kind of took a very stern countenance, and he said, “Andrew, you big fat slob, you lazy slob, why don’t you just go home?” And the guy was like, “Whoa!” And then Francis paused a minute and he said, “Andrew, did anybody feel that?” And the guy got the point, he said, “Oh yeah, wow!” And so then they had a whole different conversation about the fact that you are a person, you do have feelings and so on, regardless of how impersonal you may be on some other level.

Wayne: Absolutely, and that’s what I call … you have to integrate that … it’s not like they’re lying or anything when they’re talking from that … that I am this absolute and this is my manifest body or this is my relative body. It’s not like they’re lying about that, it’s just that they haven’t quite brought it together yet. And by blogging, since I’ve been blogging about this stuff before, during, and after the awakening, I had to kind of come to terms with that because I couldn’t hide it. You know, a blog is a diary, right? I had to keep talking, you know, I had to come to terms with it. Whereas other people, they can almost like, “Eh, I’ll just not talk about that stuff.” So anyway, the story, what you want to know is the story of how I got here.

Rick: Go for it.

Wayne: All right, sorry about that.

Rick: No, I’m the one who interrupted, you go ahead.

Wayne: Well, I wrote a book called Fading Toward Enlightenment.

Rick: Which I read last night and was very … really enjoyed it, yeah.

Wayne: Thank you. But basically I was an expert at being a spiritual seeker, so I wrote a book about being an expert about being a seeker, not being enlightened. I wasn’t enlightened then. I had an unexpected past life memory. I would have never done anything like this, it was through breathwork, it’s called holotropic breathing. I only did this because I was paying … I did a website for someone, I created a website, and she wanted to pay me back, and I said, “Don’t give me money,” so she offered me this course. And during this breathwork session I had a past life memory. Coming from a non-dual background, though, I knew not to be attached to past lives. That’s just your story, that’s just your story. We’ve all heard that a thousand times before. But what it did is implied I have future lives, and that was very important. All of a sudden, all of a sudden, I live forever, I realize I live forever. So my ego went from this to this. It really weakened dramatically by realizing I don’t have to live in fear anymore, I don’t have to worry about making decisions based on what might happen, right? It really freed me up, it really weakened my ego. This is after fading toward enlightenment, though. So here I was, living as a soul, and I got an RV and I was making money doing computer consulting work. I was up on Mount Hood and the consulting work had fallen through, and I only had about … at the time events really started to happen, about four months of money left. And I said, “I am going to find enlightenment or die trying. When my money runs out, I’m killing myself.” That’s the danger of living as a soul, you know, you don’t take life too seriously. Because I know I come back, future past lives imply future lives.

Rick: You don’t still feel that way, do you? Like if your money runs out, you’re going to kill yourself?

Wayne: Honestly, I don’t care. I do, actually, I do, but I don’t expect it to run out. That’s part of being the mystic, you know, things are going to happen. I won’t compromise my life, I won’t just get a job just to survive, but I’ll just … somehow things will work out, they have been working out for the last six years, it’s the weirdest thing. So it’s nothing to worry about in that sense. But I just say, “Well, I’ll just take it a day at a time,” kind of thing. So I was up on Mount Hood, and I knew I only had about four months left of savings, therefore about four months were left to live. And I realized I’ve been searching for probably about 20, 30 years now, and I wasn’t really getting much farther. So I said, “All right, I give up on enlightenment, I’m not going to try to find enlightenment anymore, I’m just going to try to find the next step, what is the next thing I can do in preparation for my next life?” So I started reading a couple books that Ken Wilber had talked about, “Changes of Mind,” I don’t know if you can see that, by Jenny Wade, and “Ego and the Dynamic Ground” by Michael Washburn. Real tough stuff to read, hard is all …

Rick: Dense.

Wayne: Yeah, very psychological stuff. But they had levels of consciousness, kind of a hierarchy. And I said, “Well,” I tried to find out where I was in that hierarchy, and I said, “Well, now what would be my next step? Forget about enlightenment, what would be my next step?” And from this, what I would call “radiance practice” was born. Basically I found that people at that level would look at something and they would kind of join with it in the way they would look at it. And the best way I can describe this is if you take your finger and you touch a table and you close your eyes, and as you’re doing that it almost feels like you and the table are joined, you’ve almost become one with each other. So I … [sound cuts out] And that went on and a couple magical things started to happen.

Rick: Hey Wayne, your voice broke up from the time when you said you touched the table and you become one with each other. After that we didn’t hear you for a few seconds.

Wayne: Okay, I was doing that then, whatever I would look at it would almost like join me. I would feel that sort of almost like I was touching anything I would look at. So that was almost like … I think she was calling it, I think Jenny Wade was calling that a form of unity consciousness. You kind of become one with everything. Then a magical thing happened as I sat down on a rock to meditate next to a little brook and a frog climbed up onto a rock in front of me. And I said to myself, “Well, I know that it’s a cold-blooded creature, it’s going to warm up and about 15 minutes later it’s going to hop away.” I have that in the back of my mind. So I said, “I’ll sit here until that frog leaves the rock.” Two hours later I’m going nuts, I am going crazy. This frog is not in the mood, he’s sitting there like a Zen master, right? And I gave up, I gave up on it. Long story short, what that did is, I think every spiritual teacher, every spiritual student knows what they need to wake up. It’s just it hasn’t gone from the head into a felt sense, it hasn’t gone into us yet. And that frog experience did it. It said, “Why is that frog better at meditating than I am? I’m much better than a frog, why is he so much better at this?” And it just hit me, because he has no thoughts, right? And that separated me from my thoughts. At that moment, that was the thing. And it took like three weeks for this to stabilize. Thoughts are almost like magnets, they’ll pull you in. And I think that’s what a satori experience is, is you separate from it, and the ego is such a strong thought it sucks you back in, almost like a magnet. And there you had a glimpse of enlightenment, but you didn’t. So it took about three weeks for the ego to start to dissolve, and it wasn’t so powerful anymore, but I stayed that way for quite a while. But the integration, the mystical part, started happening. Over the years I started realizing that when I would try to do something, things would go wrong, and when I would just relax and surrender, everything would work out. It’s very mystical. And me being a rational person, I said, “The only explanation I have for this is that there’s got to be a divine intelligence operating in my life.” And I have a saying, “The less there is of me, the more there is of the Divine.” So that’s kind of my story, long story short. There’s a lot of other stuff in there, but that’s basically how I got to where I am.

Rick: Well that’s the first part of your story, there must be more. It’s … you know, I mean, because that was quite a while ago, the frog on the rock and all that.

Wayne: Well yeah, the frog on the rock was, and the time between becoming that awakening state … I went right into teacher mode, as so many people do. And you can see it on my blog, I started talking about all these things about, “You’re not your thoughts,” and I thought I could talk anybody into awakening, I was so sure of this. I’ve since changed my mind on that, and that’s kind of the cool thing about the blog, is that it’s not a book, it’s a diary. It’s WayneWirs.com for anyone who wants to see all these experiences. But what I was realizing though, is I was having a very hard time integrating this … the boundless state of emptiness, what I would call “emptiness,” with the manifest world. And I would almost be making excuses, I’d be saying, “Well that’s just conditioning, that’s why I’m acting this way,” because I’m blogging about it, I have to talk about it, right? I can’t ignore it, I can’t be just hiding it and sweeping it under the rug, I’m very, very transparent about my life. And after a while, I don’t even know when it exactly happened, but there came a point to where instead of feeling like this – I hope I’m doing this on the screen all right – me as a formless awareness, as an unbounded observer of the manifest – my body, my me, the outside world – it went from that to a harmony of these two. And now my state of consciousness isn’t me seeing Wayne Wirs, it’s I flow between, contracted down into my thoughts sometimes, to the soul, to the love radiance, to the vastness and emptiness. My life is like this now. And that’s what I mean by “integrated,” it’s an integrated sense of, “I don’t know what I am, I couldn’t tell you what I am,” right? But it’s a flowing state, you know, and those are what I call the “awakened state,” or I guess you’d call them the qualities of self. The mortal, how we apply all this to the world. The soul, living forever, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s like, this is my mortal burka, my soul is another burka, another layer of me. Love, unconditional love flowing out, that is another layer, that’s another quality I call “radiant quality.” And the eternal, or I’m sorry, the emptiness, which is when all boundaries, when thoughts are seen through and all the boundaries fade. That’s what most non-dual teachers talk about, that vastness, this beautiful state of being one with everything. And then the last quality, it’s not a quality of density, but that’s when the divine intelligence starts waking up in your life.

Rick: Yeah, well there’s a lot of good material in what you’re saying there. First of all, you’re kind of clearly indicating that it’s not a static thing, well you use the word “liquid,” where it’s not a static thing where either you’re in this state or you’re in this state or you’re in this state, to the exclusion of all the others. It’s more like an ebb and flow according to the need of the moment, I would say, you seem to be indicating. I mean, if you’re in heavy traffic, you’re focused in on, “We’ll get through this traffic safely,” but that doesn’t totally obliterate the silent background that has been cultured, I would imagine, that is sort of there, but it’s not your primary dwelling place in the heavy traffic.

Wayne: Absolutely, absolutely. As an analogy, you always have your hand with you, right? Your hand is always with you, but you don’t think about your hand all the time. Maybe sometimes you need to use your hand, and so you’re using your hand, but right now we’re talking, you’re not thinking about where your hands are or what they’re doing, but it’s always a part of you. So sometimes you can drag down into your hand or into the mortal realm, and sometimes you expand into the love realm or to the soul realm. When I’m trying to make a decision, if I’m taking the decision too seriously, I’ll think, “Well, as a soul, I live a hundred thousand years, is this really going to make that much difference?” So it eases things, you know what I’m saying? The sense of self is constantly flowing, is what it is now. It used to be this way, it used to be separate, and it was probably like that for two or three years afterwards, but I couldn’t keep making excuses for, “Okay, well here’s why I did that,” because I have to talk about myself on the blog. I’m always very, very transparent, because when I was a spiritual seeker, I would have given my left testicle to see the diary, the personal diary of Jesus Christ or the personal diary of Buddha, right? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you want to know, “Oh, dear diary, today I got pissed off at the money changers in the temple when I kicked their tables,” and I feel kind of bad about that, you know? Wouldn’t you like to know that?

Rick: So, now you refer to yourself as enlightened, how would you … and people throw that word around a lot, of course, and some people are reluctant to even use it anymore.

Wayne: I don’t like to use it.

Rick: Yeah, because of so many connotations and different interpretations and all. So let’s define our terms a little bit. How would you define awakening? How would you define enlightenment? Are they synonymous or are they sort of different degrees of something?

Wayne: I would say enlightenment is when you detach from your personal story, detach from your thoughts. Just like when people die, they detach from their body, there’s a lot of evidence for that. I don’t want people to think that I’m this woo-woo mystic, there’s evidence for pretty much everything I talk about.

Rick: Oh yeah, there’s tons of evidence, all the NDE experiences and all.

Wayne: Right, and they’re verified by third parties, that’s the key thing, that’s what I consider evidence. When you detach from your thoughts, just like the frog … I call him my frog master, just as my frog master taught me. When I detach from the thoughts you no longer identify, your thoughts are no longer me, exclusively you. Before there I was the author of Fading Toward Enlightenment, I had a role, that was my thing, and I blogged very seriously about these teachings and stuff. Now I look at it and I think, “Oh gosh,” but I was identified with being an author of a book. When I detached, now it was just something that is part of my thread of existence, my thread of experience. It’s not me though, it’s just something that happened in this thread of experience. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, so you’re in a separate thread over there, but it isn’t me either. So that’s what happens when, I call enlightenment, when you detach from those thoughts and you don’t get sucked back into identifying with being your thoughts. That’s what I call enlightenment, but I don’t feel that that’s the end. Honestly, I don’t think it ever ends. I think it goes like this, you separate, you integrate, and then you separate, and you integrate, and it just keeps going and going and going.

Rick: That’s very interesting that you should say that. There’s this talk that I once heard about the cognitions of Bhrigu. Bhrigu was a Vedic sage and he kept using the word “nivartatoam,” which means “retire,” and it was like, “Retire from there, and then retire from there, and then retire from there, and retire from there,” back and forth. It’s sort of what you were just saying, that there’s this, it’s almost like you keep taking mouthfuls of food and you chew it and swallow it, and then you take another mouthful and chew it and swallow it. So we kind of keep, to throw in another metaphor, keep taking new territory and then integrating it, and taking another piece of territory and then integrating it. There’s just this constant expansion and integration cycle.

Wayne: And each time you integrate, you grow a little bit. And I got that, I never heard of those things you were talking about, but I got them from spiral dynamics, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, where you see a new idea, such as a lot of people think in black and white terms. They’re pretty much fundamentalist religious people, usually. Black or white, you’re good or bad, you know. Heaven or hell. Right, exactly, exactly, but there’s no in-between almost. So what happens is people separate from this black and white, and they look at it for a second and they say, “Whoa, is that really true, or are there shades of gray?” So there’s the black and white, they see it, and then they integrate it, and now they say there’s black and there’s white and there’s the shades of gray. So that’s the integration. Some people, they see black and white and they say, “No, that’s right,” and they go right back to being black and white, you know what I’m saying? But you separate and then you integrate and then you separate and integrate, and that’s the way of life, that is the way of growth.

Rick: Yeah, Nisargadatta once said that in his estimation the characteristics of spiritual maturity are the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity.

Wayne: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I have another saying, I’ve got a lot of sayings. All my readers are saying, “Oh no, he’s going to talk about this.” I say “the mystic Lives in paradox,” because I had to figure out how do I integrate this, how do I live in this world from this new perspective? And it’s very, very tricky, there aren’t many books on how to do this. I say that, imagine one lily pad, I keep referring to frogs, imagine this one lily pad on a lake, and on that lily pad there’s a bunch of frogs saying, “Separation, separation, separation,” or the relative truth, right? And then on another lily pad there’s a couple of frogs there, they’re saying, “Unity, unity, unity,” right? They’re the ones saying absolute truth. Well the mystic, he lives in the lake, he doesn’t live on either one of these truths. And the reason I say it’s a mystic is because of the mystical experience, it’s the Tao. The Tao is the lake, and these are just concepts that arise from the Tao. But to integrate it, you can’t live on either one of the lily pads. You can’t say, “You guys over there are wrong,” and they can’t say, “You guys over there are wrong.” You have to live between these truths if you want to integrate it and bring it into the world, in my opinion.

Rick: We might say the mystic is the lake.

Wayne: Yeah, you could, you could in a way, but I don’t like to say that because again, that’s almost like saying, “Well, I’m God,” but like I said, I have no clue what’s going on in your head. If I were God I’d have a clue of that, you know. From an abstract, conceptual point, yes, there are no boundaries, but evidence-wise I don’t know what’s going on in your head, so I can’t say I’m God.

Rick: No, but think about this. Let’s define God. You define God first and I’ll see what you say.

Wayne: When I say God, I’m not talking about the God of the Bible, of the Torah, or the Koran. I’m talking about my experience of I call her “her” or sometimes I just, officially I call her “Tao God her,” but I just call her “her” because she feels like a lover. She’s interacting with my life all the time, and people who follow my blog see this all the time. I tag events either under, on the one blog I tag them as “miracle loves,” and another one I tag them under “synchronicity,” because “synchronicity” implies God, all right? Almost all spiritual seekers will say that as they become less dense, okay, more expanded, more open, life kind of lines up. Everybody seems to talk about this, even people who aren’t awake. Before I woke up I still had these experiences, is that the less dense I felt the more life would line up. It was great, you know, it was a wonderful thing. So that, the only way I could explain this is that there’s an all-powerful, all-knowing being who will interact with your life if you allow her, if you open up to her, all right? That’s what I mean by God, this intelligence, this all-powerful, all-knowing intelligence that almost, you can almost say wants to be involved in your life if you’ll just let her, all right? So that’s what I mean by God, it’s almost like your better half. It’s called the duplex personality, Richard Bucke in “Cosmic Consciousness”, I first came across it there. He says that pretty much everyone who’s awake has this sort of two personalities, an individual personality, but then this almost divine personality that co-mingles. But the way I try to explain it to my readers, how it feels, it’s almost like you’re married and you might be in the store and you’re thinking about, “Well, what would my wife think about this?” or “Should I get this?” and “What would be her opinion on that?” It’s like she’s always there even though she’s not physically present. That’s the closest thing I can explain of how the duplex personality, how God incarnate within us feels. It’s not like I’m a messiah or anything, I don’t feel like that at all. It’s like she’s a separate but co-mingled part of me.

Rick: Yeah, it does. So let me throw something out and we’ll bat this back and forth. So, show me any cubic centimeter in the entire creation that is not utterly brimming with intelligence. I mean, go out to intergalactic space and there’s nothing there, and yet look closely, so to speak, and there are gamma rays and photons and gravitational forces and all sorts of things that are operating in a perfectly orchestrated way, in total orderliness in their own way as laws of nature, as phenomena of nature. There’s an intelligence orchestrating that. Now take the whole galaxy, or one of them, and again, there’s perfect orchestration in terms of gravitational forces and then fusion within the stars and all the stuff going on on that level that is flawless and absolutely orderly in its functioning. Now zoom it down to the level of a single human cell. We have 10,000 trillion of them, and each one is more complex than the city of Tokyo. Within the nucleus of one cell we have actually six feet worth of DNA if you unraveled it and stretched it all out, and it’s self-replicating and self-repairing and there’s all this other stuff going on in the cell that completely boggles the mind and is far beyond human understanding, and we have 10,000 trillion of them. And then take it down to the atomic level. In a gram of hydrogen there are so many atoms that if they were the size of unpopped popcorn kernels they would cover the continental United States nine miles deep. And so there’s that. And so from the tiniest to the most vast, the Vedas say, “Anoriniyam Mahato Mahiyan,” which means “smaller than the smallest, larger than the largest, the Atman is that.” And so the Atman meaning cosmic intelligence or pure intelligence, it completely contains and is contained within all of creation and orchestrates it all flawlessly at every conceivable level. And therefore, if we analyze what we are, since it completely permeates us and we are completely contained within it, there’s no place that you could examine within whatever we are that that would not be found. We are that, you know, that we are nothing other than that. And yet, as you say, you don’t know what’s going on in my head and I don’t know what’s going on in your head, because as individual sense organs of the infinite we have our limitations, just as sense organs do. You know, my sense of touch can’t feel what’s happening over in the neighbor’s garden or something, my sense of sight can’t see what’s going on three miles from here. We have our individual limitations, but at a deeper level we don’t. We are that intelligence which is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. So, individually we don’t know everything, we can’t do everything, but most fundamentally we are that intelligence which does all those things. So that’s my concept of God. And your whole talk of the Divine really interests me.

Wayne: May I interrupt you just a second?

Rick: Please, yeah.

Wayne: You said that is your concept of God, is that your experience of God?

Rick: In a growing way, sure.

Wayne: Is that the way you experience … I mean, I agree with everything you said, I totally agree, I’m not in an argument with you. But again, I am a reporter more than an explorer, more than I am a teacher or a theoretician, you know. I like to say, “Well this is my experience, and I feel the vastness, I feel that connection, I know … I once looked at this fly and I said … and I know, I felt it, that that which is seeing out of my eyes is the same thing that is seeing out the fly’s eyes.” You know, that … it was a profound … I can slip into that experience any second I want, right now I’m in that experience. But I still don’t know what you’re thinking, you know what I’m saying? So there’s a limitation to it, so I say, “Okay, well that’s all wonderful, I agree with what you’re saying, I totally agree with what you’re saying, but since I don’t experience it, how is that applicable to reality? How is that applicable to bringing it down to earth, I guess you could say. You could almost say that I’m more about down to earth enlightenment, where many people are more about the more abstract concepts of enlightenment, you know what I’m saying? So I totally agree with you, but it’s not my lived experience, it’s more of a concept, you know what I’m saying?

Rick: Well, I think I would say that for both of us, and I don’t know to what degree it is a lived experience, it’s just a … we’re, you know, babes in the woods. It’s a fledgling experience compared to what it conceivably ultimately could be. And there are and have been beings in this world, and perhaps on other worlds for whom all that I just said is far more viscerally experienced than conceptually. And admittedly for me it’s to a great degree conceptual, but somehow there’s a felt sense of what I’ve just described, which is why it enthralls me so much, and it’s something that is almost a constant fascination, you know?

Wayne: No, absolutely, and honestly when you dive into it that deeply it feels very mystical, it feels like every little atom is alive, every little atom is an aspect of God. I think it’s called holonomic theory, where one piece is included within all pieces, that sort of thing. It feels that way, you can feel it moving up through you, but again, I live this so much that I hear it, you know, it’s almost like I feel it, but it’s not necessarily that I can do anything with it, you know? I can’t really apply much with it.

Rick: Yeah, but you …

Wayne: I guess that’s fine.

Rick: No, but you do talk a lot about the Divine, and about what you refer to as “Her,” and about the synchronicities in your life, and so on. So it’s kind of like that intelligence that has this vast cosmic jurisdiction or scope is showing itself to you in so many ways, large and small, in your life. There are constant hints of it, indications of it.

Wayne: And I love it, I’m so grateful, I tear up all the time when this happens, you know? So it’s not like, “Wow, that’s fascinating,” you know, no, I’m not like Spock, however he does that, I’m more like Kirk, it’s like, “Oh man, let’s really get involved with this, this is really cool,” you know, that sort of thing. I love it, I love it, I love that this happens, and I love to tell people that it can happen to you, just …

Rick: Your voice is breaking up.

Wayne: Unless there is a “you.”

Rick: Your voice broke up a little bit because of the bandwidth thing. Repeat what you just said so we get it.

Wayne: Anyway, what I was saying is I just love it, and I just tell people it’s nothing special with me. It’s just the less there is of you, the more this happens, and we can all see this in our own lives.

Rick: Yeah, and so what I see a lot with people who’ve had an awakening is that initially there’s this self-realization phase, which might kind of, almost in a way, seems a little dry and detached. And there’s an emphasis on “I am not a person,” and there can be an emphasis on “the world is illusory,” and stuff like that. But it seems that with most people living in that for some time, they begin to enter a new phase, which I see evidence of in the things that you write, where there’s more of an appreciation of the divine intelligence in everything, and kind of a devotional quality almost that begins to arise. Like you said, tears in the eyes very often, and it seems to correlate with more of a blossoming of the heart. So anyway, comment on that in terms of your own experience.

Wayne: Well it is, when I first detached, it’s almost a dry … it’s impersonal, it’s very much impersonal in that sense. But as you bring it down into your heart, as you try to live it, that’s when the blossoming, as you say, starts to happen. That’s when I realized I was a mystic, is I started seeing this intelligence and she started affecting my life, and I couldn’t deny her anymore. And that’s when I surrendered to this beauty, and you feel this beauty. It’s so not like the way Wayne Wirs was, you know, he was so very rational and analytical, and I still suffer from a brain that’s too smart for my own good. But yeah, I think a lot of people get stuck in that separation, I think they start teaching too early, I do. I wasn’t ready to teach, I mean it’s been almost six years, and I’m just now starting to feel like I’m ready to write the book on it, you know, and I’m not going to teach until the book’s written. But before then, there was just too much going on, I was too confused, and because I was blogging about it, I couldn’t hide from it either. I had to, you know, I’m dealing with this, and people would see me getting sidetracked on there, and they’d see me getting attached to this over here, you know, but I’d always come back, you know, that’s part of the growing process, and I don’t think we should be … if we start teaching too early, we almost have to put on a teacher’s persona and glow all the time and stuff, and I don’t think that’s healthy, I really don’t. I think you need to integrate it, and I think that takes time, and that’s the blossoming aspect.

Rick: Yeah, well I think it’s kind of cool, the public way that you’re going about it, because it keeps you real, and you probably have people that’ll call you on your stuff if you start getting a little unreal.

Wayne: Oh, absolutely.

Rick: And I think that could be a healthy thing for a lot of teachers, and perhaps might have saved a lot of teachers from going off into some kind of …

Wayne: Too analytical.

Rick: Yeah, too analytical or too self-aggrandizing, you know, get off on some ego trip and considering themselves perfect and spotless and beyond reproach.

Wayne: Well, I think that’s why I say the wise have their scars, right? The smart, you know, you’re smart, you suddenly realize this, but you’ve got to get those scars, you’ve got to make those mistakes, you’ve got to be called out on your mistakes, you’ve got to be … Someone pointed out, you know, “Wayne, you’re taking this too seriously,” you know, and by seeing that, that’s when you start to … those scars add up after a while and you become wise, you realize that, “All right, this is a … there’s more going on here than I thought,” you know, there’s a lot more as it all comes together, there’s a lot more to … personalizing it, I don’t know if that’s the right word, because it’s not a personal self, but it is somehow bringing it into the world, you know, that’s the hard part. That’s that last … the image on the Zen ox-herding pictures, right?

Rick: Right.

Wayne: And then he has to come back into the world, you know, he has to somehow come out of that vastness, that emptiness, and come back into the world, and not just teach it, but to live it, you’ve got to live it.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a line from The Incredible String Band, “Whatever you think, it’s more than that.” And I like this theme that we’re kind of touching on, and I touch on it a lot in my interviews, that, you know, this is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a long haul, which is not to say that you’re not going to get rewards all along the way, but there is no end to it, as far as I can tell. And as far as many teachers whom I greatly respect, like Adyashanti, tend to say …

Wayne: He’s talking about the no-self state. He was teaching from what he calls the transcendent self for years and years, and now he’s starting to say, “Wait a minute, I’m starting to just … this is just starting to become an experience,” rather than the observer, he’s starting to … you know, he’s even evolving, and I don’t think it ever ends.

Rick: Oh yeah, I know, he readily acknowledges that.

Wayne: So, which is why people, yourself included, are reluctant to use the word “enlightenment,” because it has too much of a static, terminal kind of connotation, you know? “Oh, enlightened, there couldn’t be anything more than that,” you know?

Wayne: Yeah, and it is, and some people might be discouraged by that, but I look at it as, look at life. Life is constantly growing, and then it dies, and it grows again, and it’s a constant cycle. And rather than being attached to an end point, just look at it as you’re living, it’s growing, it’s your awakening, it always gets better, right? It always gets better, so don’t be hung up on, “This is enlightenment,” you know?

Rick: Yeah, well you know, there’s been the whole theme of enlightenment as being your ticket out of here. You get enlightened, you don’t have to be reborn anymore, you’re out of here, life sucks, and then you die, and you’re out. But I think that there’s a guy named Matthew Wright, who is a young minister, and he talks about the second axial age that we’re entering into, in which he describes these older cultures in which you could suffer horribly and die from a toothache, as having perhaps justifiably wanted to check out once and for all. But there seems to be more of an emphasis now on being conduits for divine intelligence for God knows how long, and having realized it, you don’t want to just leave, it’s more like the bodhisattva thing, where you want to be an instrument. You know, as Saint Francis said, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” You want to serve and be an instrument for as long as you are of use.

Wayne: No, absolutely, and it’s a wonderful feeling when you feel that. I don’t know if you’ve personally had this experience of when she starts pushing you along, and you have the option of just, “No, I’m going to go do this,” but it feels so good, you just kind of go along with it. This one time I was in a casino, and my readers are going to recognize this. I had walked into a casino that I was camped out outside of, and I just opened. I just stood and leaned against the wall, and I just opened. All these people are gambling and stuff, and I just opened up into the vastness. And in minutes a woman comes up to me and starts flirting with me. And she wasn’t reacting the way I was normally about.

Rick: Your voice broke up a little bit there, so a woman comes up to you and?

Wayne: She kind of starts flirting with me. And then she saw there was something different about me, and she started opening up about her life, how she just made all this money and stuff. And I called Tao God, and her kind of came through, and we spoke to her, and she said, “Use this money for that dream you’ve been dreaming about.” And she was so grateful, and she gave me a hug, and she walks away. Two minutes later, this big giant guy, probably 6’7″, walks up to me. Scary-looking guy, you know? And once he started talking, he was obviously mentally slow. And he was so proud of his–he asked me first, “Was I a preacher or something?” He said he saw this later, or whatever. Because here I’m sitting now, I’m being very open, and you get this look from people when you’re in that state. And he was very proud of his St. Christopher’s medal, but he also had a peace symbol on. But instead of it in a circle, it was in a heart shape. It was enclosed in a heart shape. And again, I allowed her–she just started coming through. And I could have gotten out of the way and said something I wanted from the mind, but she kind of talked and she said, “All these people here, they are all caught up in their mind, but you and I know that peace comes from the heart. That’s why you have that symbol.” And he was really–like I say, he was slow, mentally slow. And he stopped for a second, and he just gave me this big bear hug and lifted me up, and I would–there were just tears coming out of my eyes, because I would have never thought to have said that. Wayne Wirs would have never thought to say that. But she kind of came through. And like I say, it’s almost like it’s a beautiful thing. You can stop it, but you never want to. And it’s a wonderful thing. I have a student, Michelle, she’s my only student, but she started having these experiences. And it’s a little weird when it starts–

Rick: Your voice broke up. You said it’s a little weird when–

Wayne: It’s a little weird when this starts to happen to you, but it always feels very good. It feels flowing, loving, divinely inspired, and it’s a wonderful thing.

Rick: Yeah. No, I know what you mean. I taught meditation for 25 years, and when you put yourself in the position of being an evolutionary instrument for other people, it’s like the powers that be or whatever say, “Okay, boys, we’ve got a live one here, let’s give him some juice,” you know? Or you could say, “Her.” I like to think of it that there’s this–well, again, it’s intelligent, but there’s this evolutionary force in the universe which has as its direction the evolution of everything, the greater and greater infusion of the Divine into the relative. And if you can be an instrument for that, then it’s very profound for you as well as useful for the world. So that’s what you experienced in the casino there. You were blessing the lives of a couple of people, probably really having an influence on them that might last the rest of their lives. At the same time, it was a beautiful experience for you.

Wayne: Absolutely. And I wasn’t trying to. That’s another thing. It wasn’t me trying, it was an opening and her kind of coming through, and that’s really the experience of this duplex personality. It’s like you kind of get out of the way, and it’s not like possession, and you do have control, but it’s like it feels so good, it feels so right, and I don’t know where it’s going, but it usually ends up in a wonderful, beautiful way, an unexpected way.

Rick: Yeah. I think it’s not possession because it’s not some isolated entity that’s using you, so to speak. It’s more like the Divine, the universal divine consciousness is flowing through you, the way electricity flows through a light bulb. I mean, the electrical field is everywhere, and a light bulb sort of channels it, so to speak, by being the right sort of instrument to convert electricity into photons.

Wayne: Right, no, that’s a good analogy. It’s not you, but it is you, you know, again, it’s this, it’s no longer the absolute Self and the relative Self, it’s all combined in it, it flows, it’s this flowing state. That’s the experience, and I will bet you almost all authentically awake people, that’s the only way they can interact with the world, is they have to be a flowing self, rather than this standoff observer self, you know.

Rick: Yeah, I think standoff observer is just a phase, and it’s a phase I think that you theoretically could get stuck in for a long time, but you know, most people seem to move through it.

Wayne: Good, good. Yeah, I don’t follow many people anymore, like I said, I’d rather just do it. You know, I’d rather just throw myself in and see what happens, and that’s what I do, but like I said, I’m more of an explorer, I’m more of a reporter than I am …

Rick: Yeah, your voice just broke up, so I’ll just say something for a minute until it comes in. You were saying, “I’m more of a reporter than I am.”

Wayne: Yeah. What I’m saying is, I don’t follow many spiritual teachers anymore.

Rick: Right.

Wayne: I would rather not be influenced by their ideas. I would rather find out for myself, and so I make mistakes all the time, you know, and I don’t mind.

Rick: Yeah, that’s cool. I mean, I obviously expose myself to a lot of spiritual teachers because I interview one every week, not always teachers, but spiritual people. But I don’t know, I just find it kind of enriching and nourishing to expose myself to different people’s viewpoints and expressions. It’s not like I’m sort of hanging on their every word and converting my worldview to theirs every week or something, but each one sort of adds a new perspective.

Wayne: Where I see an advantage to what you’re doing is you’ll start to see the patterns.

Rick: Yeah.

Wayne: You’ll see this, a lot of people are saying the same thing, maybe in different ways, but they’re all saying the same thing, and I consider that evidence, I consider that evidence of truth. But when you see one person saying one thing and no one else is saying that, I would say, you know, maybe there’s a little more ego involved there or too much thought involved there.

Rick: Yeah. Another tendency that it tends to culture in me is just to sort of appreciate the validity of everybody’s perspective, not the exclusivity. I mean, if anybody tries to tell me that their truth is the only one or the best one or something like that, then I’m very wary, but everybody has a piece of the puzzle, and many of those pieces correspond or correlate or agree with one another, but each one has its own flavor. Everybody has their own nervous system, their own makeup, their own background, and each one has their own flavor. Just like many, many, many different reflectors would all reflect the sunlight slightly differently, even though it’s the very same sunlight.

Wayne: I agree, we all have our different backgrounds, so we’re going to interpret what we see differently. I might say, “I call her, ‘her,'” or I personify the Divine, where some people would call it the Universe. Eckhart Tolle once said, “You access the intelligence of the totality.” So, he’s kind of seeing it as kind of abstract, but he’s saying what? Intelligence of the totality. He’s saying the Divine, he’s saying there’s a brain there. So, each person is going to see it differently, absolutely, I totally agree with you. And I agree with you in the sense that anyone who says, “No, it’s my way or the highway,” well, obviously they need a little growing, I think.

Rick: Yeah. In fact, I’ve been corresponding periodically with this fundamentalist Christian guy who got in touch, and I started distinguishing for him that there is a difference between belief and experience, and I kind of emphasized that in various ways. After a while, he said, “Boy, you know, I never thought about that,” because there’s this sense of just, “You should believe what’s in this book, and if you don’t believe it, you’re in trouble.” And there’s no question about, “Gee, there might be an experience that this is actually pointing to,” and it’s much more important. It’s like, I use the example of, you might be told that a restaurant is really good, and you believe your friend, and so you go on, stand on the sidewalk and read the menu, and you starve to death reading the menu, because you don’t go in and have the experience.

Wayne: The wise have their scars, I’m telling you, it’s a wonderful saying, the wise have their scars. Get those scars, get in there, fail, and you’ll become wiser because of it. And I do this, I tell people all the time, “You’ve got to live this stuff, you’ve got to live it. You can’t just think about it. If you just think about it, yeah, it’s attractive to just think about it.” And it’s hard, it’s very hard to live as a soul, it’s very hard to live as unconditional love. It’s very hard to expand in this emptiness and function in the world, but you’ve got to do it, because that’s the only way to learn. That’s the only way you’re going to become whole, you know?

Rick: Yeah, so you write a blog and people read your blog, and people reading your blog are … it’s pretty much an intellectual exercise, reading a blog, but you yourself did, and perhaps still do, a lot of spiritual practice over many years in order for it to be experiential for you, and not just intellectual. You did some kind of meditation practice many hours a day, and you’ve done other things. So what do you generally recommend to people in order for this to be a living experience for them, rather than just an intellectual fascination?

Wayne: Well, first of all, I like to break it down into qualities, alright? You have your mortal quality, we all know about that, that’s how we interact with the world. The soul quality is understanding your soul, and the way to do that is just to read the evidence. And on my blog, WayneWirs.com, there’s a link in there about soul resources, and I have links to a bunch of books. These aren’t just books on, “Oh, I saw the light,” and stuff. No, they’re books which have evidence about other people confirming it. One of my favorites is a woman who died, she separated, she went all the way above the hospital, while she’s dead, obviously, and she saw a pair of shoes on the roof of the hospital, … where the shoes were, up on the roof in the corner, and she described what kind of shoes they were. And then, of course, the orderly went up there and found them, so that’s third-party evidence. That’s the kind of evidence I say. So read this evidence and then try to live it, try to really feel it, get it down into your being, and when you’re faced with a career decision, you can look at your life as a soul, “I live forever, is this really so important? Maybe I should live true to my nature rather than fearful of, ‘This is a stable job and this might be something I really want to do.'” So that’s bringing the soul into the world, you separate from the soul, and then you integrate, you bring it back together, you integrate it. The other quality I call radiance, this is unconditional love, this is that touching the tree type of thing with your eyes. Unconditional love flows out, but most of us experience love as this mortal, “I want something out of this relationship, I want something.” So you separate from that mortal love, you become this unconditional love, and then you integrate, you bring it together as unconditional love moving through you as a divine being or as a manifest being.

Rick: But hang on, so first of all, I think it is really good to get an intellectual understanding of the fact that this 80-year life that we live is not the end of it, it’s just one episode in a long string of episodes, and there are a lot of great books and things that you can read to give you a deeper and deeper sense of that. Another good one, there’s Michael Newton’s, Michael Newton, I think that’s his book.

Wayne: Past Lives.

Rick: Yeah, Life Between Lives, and there’s so many of them, Betty Eadie and Dannion Brinkley and James Van Praagh, and all these people have written great NDE books. So that’s good, intellectual understanding. But then you were saying, the thing you were just saying, though, now I’ve talked too much.

Wayne: You want to bring it into the world. You want to, as you, what happens when you lose the fear of death, that’s what living as a soul is all about, is you lose the fear of death. Death holds, you may not completely lose it, but at least you’ll not be as influenced. Fear won’t be such a big factor in your life. So you go from this fearful thing to living as a soul, you’re much softer. I don’t believe in going from being a mortal to being enlightened, that big old jump, that’s too big of a jump. So weaken yourself, so you live as a soul, and as fear falls away you’ll realize that you’ll be confronted in life always with these options. Do I make a choice that’s safe, or do I make a choice that I really want to do? A lot of times we make the safe choice, but when you live as a soul you start doing the thing you really want to do. And that’s the practice. Sometimes you’ll make the safe choice, you’ll get your scars, right? Other times, it may be hard, but at least you’re feeling like you’re living true. That’s the practice of bringing it into the world, for the eternal level.

Rick: And one thing that comes into it is that there are karmic implications. I mean, this thing about doing what you really want to do might sound, or could be interpreted as, just a selfish self-serving kind of thing, where, you know, “To heck with my family, I want to be a ski bum,” or something like that.

Wayne: But you know that’s wrong, but you know that’s wrong, right? You know that’s selfish, so there’s your karmic … that’s not living as a soul, that’s living as a selfish person, just using it as an excuse.

Rick: Yeah, you can’t say … go ahead.

Wayne: That’s almost like the spiritual teacher who comes from this separate sense, and he says, “Well, I can abuse all these pretty girls that come to me because I’m this manifest thing, and that’s just my body doing it.” No, that’s an excuse, that’s BS.

Rick: There are teachers who have said just that, exactly.

Wayne: I know, exactly, and that’s not a healthy way of living. They didn’t integrate it, they didn’t integrate it back into their lives. And the same with the soul, when you integrate it back into your life, you’re not going to hurt people because of the karmic implications, right?

Rick: Right.

Wayne: You’re going to have to account for that in the review process, right? When you’re lying on your deathbed, are you going to want to look back and say, “Oh, I have all these regrets,” or are you going to want to say, “I lived true”?

Rick: Yeah, no, that’s great. For those who think that karma is a lot of bunk, keep thinking, keep reading. I mean, again, if the universe is orchestrated by infinite intelligence, then it can certainly calculate the destiny of each individual soul, each individual entity. And in the interest of our growth and evolution, it’s not going to let us just do stuff capriciously and self-servingly. There are going to be consequences because we need to learn lessons, right?

Wayne: Right, absolutely. You’re going to regret these things, whether it’s in this life or the in-between stage, wherever that is. Or you’re going to say, “I’m trying to get closer to God.” That’s ultimately, I think, what the spiritual quest is. It’s definitely for the mystic. The mystic wants to get as close as possible to the Divine, to Her. That’s all I want. I want to get as close as possible to Her. So every time I feel like I’m shortchanging myself or I’m selling out because I want something for myself, I have to question that. I have to look. This is going to take me away from Her, right? Because I’m going to regret that, so I need to be honest. I need to be true. That’s why I can be transparent on my blog, because it’s all part of my spiritual growth, right? This confession, it’s like a constant confession on my blog. It’s like a diary, it’s a dear diary. “Today I screwed up,” you know, it really is.

Rick: Well, you know, there’s also Christ saying, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto Me.” So in terms of karma, you know, you’re hurting somebody by acting a certain way, you’re doing it to God, but you’re also doing it to yourself.

Wayne: Absolutely.

Rick: And you’re going to feel it. If you don’t feel it immediately, you’re going to feel it. Here’s a question that just came in. Dan from London asks, “Wayne described an experience where the Divine, or She, was flowing through him in the casino, and he ‘allowed’ it to flow, giving rise to the interactions he described. Does Wayne think that some people are at a stage where they are functioning from a place where the Divine is always flowing through them at all times, in the same way as it was for him for that period of time that he described in the casino?”

Wayne: You know, that’s a very good question. And not because …

Rick: Now, hang on, Wayne, your voice broke up. You just said, “That’s a very good question,” and then we didn’t hear anything else.

Wayne: OK. I would love to believe that. I don’t see any reason for it not to happen. I just have not seen anybody doing this yet. Again, I’m a mystic, but I’m a rational mystic. I like evidence. So, if there is someone out there like that, what I would ask them to do, if they know of someone like this, ask that person to start blogging about their life, right? So that we can see how they deal with this in the real world, you know, how they … when they get a flat tire in 105 degree weather and they step on a cactus at the same time, how they keep from swearing and stuff, you know, I don’t know. I would love to see it. I think it has the potential for it, but since it’s not here, I don’t concern myself for it. I am trying to get as close as possible, but I can’t see that in this lifetime for sure, you know, for myself.

Rick: Never say never.

Wayne: Yeah, never.

Rick: See that lady over my shoulder there?

Wayne: Yeah. Is she the hugger?

Rick: Right, right. Have you ever seen her?

Wayne: Not in person. I’ve seen videos of her and beautiful. I often feel that way, yeah. I would love to do that, but I’m a guy and I’m still a little leery of the whole interacting yet with people. I’m still, like I said, it’s just starting to come together for me.

Rick: Yeah, I’m not going to get into a big trip about Amma right now, but I would encourage you to go see her. If you want to see an example of somebody who is just, boy, immersed in the Divine 24/7 and just inexhaustibly expressing it. I mean, she literally has sat and hugged 50,000 people without getting off the couch for 18, 20 hours without even going to the bathroom, and never running out of steam, and greeting each person as if they were her long-lost dearest friend.

Wayne: Well, see, I’m glad you said that because when I feel this experience of her moving through, it’s like you’re almost the observer of this happening. It’s like there is an endless amount of energy, an endless amount of love and stuff. To me it doesn’t last that long, unfortunately. To me it’s much more of an exception to the rule. So I’m glad you mentioned that because, yeah, who doesn’t want to live like that, right? Who doesn’t want to have that, right?

Rick: Well, she’ll be coming to Seattle in a couple of weeks, then Bay Area, LA, Santa Fe, Dallas, and around the country. The schedule is on Amma.org if you want to check her out.

Wayne: I will, thank you.

Rick: So, anyway, this is going well. I’m enjoying this conversation.

Wayne: Well, if you want me to continue with these qualities?

Rick: Yeah, please, anytime, yes.

Wayne: All right, well, these other qualities, that was the eternal quality we were talking about, right? You live as a soul and you try to embody it. That weakens your ego tremendously by not having all that fear. The next quality, again, I’m taking this from experience, from I was living as a soul, and I kind of got this in touch with things, right, just before my frog master. That I call the radiant quality. That is basically unconditional love flowing through you, a lot like what you were just talking about with, I forget her name, Amma?

Rick: Amma. Amma. Just means mother.

Wayne: You start to feel that, and so you want to practice that too. You detach from your “me, me, me” love, the immortal love. You get a handle on what unconditional love feels like, and then you bring it back in, and you project this, and you allow yourself. I call that radiance. That takes your ego, goes from this, to the soul, to radiance. And now going to emptiness is a lot, lot easier because your ego is so weaker. It’s a lot easier to drop this, the softness, than it is this hard rock, you know, thing. So I guess what I’m advocating is a step-by-step approach to weakening the ego, weakening being attached to your thoughts. And of course the final stage is you try to see the ego, try to see these thoughts, try to detach from them, see how they’re causing you nothing but misery, right? I mean, this constant “me, me, me, me, me, me” thing. And as you detach from your thoughts, then hopefully you’ll be able to let that go too, and then integrate it. So it’s more of a fading approach. Ironically, I wrote Fading Into Enlightenment before the waking event, and yet that is exactly how I still advocate, you know, so there’s something of that.

Rick: Yeah, and the way you describe it makes it sound like a person is doing a lot. Well, they’re doing this, and they’re detaching from their thoughts, and then they’re, you know, da-da-da. But I think there’s also a lot of … I mean, you also did a lot, and still maybe do, meditation where you’re not really doing so much as you’re just kind of relaxing out of doing, and making that a habit, and letting the Divine sort of rearrange things in your makeup for you.

Wayne: Not really, I hate to disagree with you, but no, not really. I don’t meditate at all anymore, I commune, I commune, and that might be a form of meditation. I commune with God, I commune with nature, I consciously expand and open, go into that vastness. And it’s such a wonderful feeling in that vast area where there’s no you, and there’s just Her and nature, and it’s all one. I do that. I would say that’s a daily practice, but not for very long. A lot of times when I go for walks in the woods I do that. But I use these, I actually use each of these qualities as kind of a tool. When I’m caught up in my mind too much, I go into the vastness, because that’s what the emptiness is, it’s detaching from your thoughts. When I’m sad or kind of down for whatever reason, I go into the radiance, I get in touch with the love, and I feel this love flowing out. So it’s a way of soothing it. When I need to make a decision, I’m taking it very seriously, I go into the eternal. I use that as a, kind of puts everything in perspective, knowing I live forever. Is it really that big a deal whether I go to Santa Fe or I go to Dallas? I mean, is it really that big a deal? You know, it’s not. So I put things in perspective, it’s a way of helping me put things in perspective, and I guess you could call that a form of meditation. But by bringing it alive, by bringing it as a part of your life, you don’t really need to do a formal thing anymore. As it’s integrated, you don’t need to do a formal thing anymore, to find it.

Rick: So I get the impression that in a way your attention is very fruitful, it’s sort of … It’s an indicator. Yeah, it kind of shifts your experience significantly. You know, you can easily shift into the heart or into the eternal or into the vastness or whatever, just by mere kind of intention.

Wayne: Just like, you know, you can intentionally touch your finger to the table, you know, and all of a sudden now your focus is on your finger, right? It’s just you shift your focus. And the felt sense of self, and I don’t know what I am anymore, I can’t say I’m the observer, I can’t say I’m formless awareness. I just feel like I flow in between these states, it’s a constant. It does it by itself sometimes, sometimes I get caught up in my mind, I get sucked down into that. And then when the problem, whatever it is my mind is trying to solve, is done, I expand back out. I tend to hang out in the radiance and the upper soul level, you could say. I tend to hang out up there because that’s actually a very useful area to live from. Emptiness isn’t very useful, it’s beautiful, blissful, but you can’t really do much. I mean, I look at Eckhart Tolle, I think he probably couldn’t survive without a caregiver, right? He’s got his girlfriend/wife now, but I think, could he survive without this caregiver, you know? This woman arranging everything for him? Because I think he’s well out into that emptiness, and I love him, I’m not dissing him at all, I’m just not sure it’s balanced, his perspective.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know. I did hear that Kim Eng had a lot to do with his integration, that he was pretty much good for sitting on park benches for quite a while, and then she has helped him a lot, sort of, integrate in the world.

Wayne: Well, accidental, I think that’s the difference. Most people who are watching this, they’re trying to find it, so they’ve got an idea of what to expect when they separate. His, it was like a shock to his system, so I think it was too much of a shock to his system for him to easily integrate it. So I think that’s why his is so powerful, but it’s also a little … I think it’s not very practical, his experience of it. At least it was. I don’t know how he is, if he is that way anymore. I ran into him when he first wrote Power of Now, I really didn’t follow up much after that.

Rick: He’s probably a lot more integrated now. Alright, so let’s reiterate these four or five qualities that you enumerated. Let’s just run through them again and describe the experience and the significance of each one, just because I think it’s important and we want to leave people with a memory of that. Not that we’re finished with the interview, but let’s just go through them again.

Wayne: Okay, well the mortal, we’re all familiar with the mortal, the me, me, me, me thing, right? It’s required to function in this world, it’s very practical, this is how you integrate the world. I often think of this as my mortal burka, it’s something I have to wear, you know? The eternal, which is the soul, you realize you’re a soul, you do the research on it, you find out that, yeah, okay, I live forever. Therefore, I get another life after this and another, and that in the grand scheme of things, decisions don’t need to be based on fear as much, right? Obviously, you don’t want to take it too far, but you don’t need to take fear as a major player in your decisions. So, it helps ease your fears and it helps weaken your ego. Then the radiance, which is love, you start to realize every action you’ve ever done was based on love. You really do, right? I hit that guy because he was hitting on my wife because I love my wife, right? Everything is done from love, you start getting in touch with this love and that helps you get connected with everything you see because love is a relationship. You can’t just love without any object of love, it brings you a connection to things. And finally, there’s the emptiness, which is what most non-dual teachers focus on, is the emptiness quality, which is when you separate from your thoughts and you realize all boundaries are concepts, are thoughts, and they fall away and there’s this vast experience of oneness. And then, of course, you want to bring it all together so you can bring it into the world, you bring it back into this mortal coil, so you can bring it into the world. Okay, you know, but one sense I get when you go through that is that many people are going to hear that as a description rather than a prescription. In other words, yeah, sounds good, I understand the stages you’re talking about, but can you give me a prescription to actually experience those stages and live them myself, rather than just hear your description of how you went through them?

Wayne: Okay, well, like I say, you first, you mean how you apply it to the world?

Rick: Well, in a way it’s like easier said than done. Sure, we can read some books on NDEs and reincarnation and all that, we can get a sense of that, but then this sort of radiance and awakening of the heart and awakening to the eternal nature of unbounded consciousness and all that stuff, many people might consider that more easily said than done. They would like to have that awakening, but they don’t find it happening, and how do they make it happen?

Wayne: Right, okay, one, I don’t think you can make someone step through the gateless gate. I don’t think you can consciously make yourself step through the gateless gate. If that was possible, everybody would be awake, right? That’s the evidence. The evidence says it’s not possible because if it was, someone would say how to do it and everybody would be awake. So I think it has to kind of happen. But you can get yourself close to the gate by weakening your ego. And so, like I say, you want to live as a soul and the way you apply it to the real world is when you have a decision to make, you say, “All right, I’m feeling fear about this career direction I should take. I really want to go this way, but I’m kind of afraid to ask to go that way.” All right? If you live, when you live as a soul you’ll say, “There’s no reason to be afraid. What difference does this make in a hundred years from now? What difference does it make ten years from now?” A buddy of mine, an RVer of all things, he says, “Well, what would 88-year-old Glenn think about making that decision?” So it kind of puts it in perspective, right? It’s like, “Well, I wish I would have made that decision,” you know? So this is how you can apply it, right? You see yourself as a soul and you apply it by just bringing it into making decisions. You usually see a soul as good for decisions. With love you see, with radiance, you see how I can look at you and I can feel love for you because, again, there’s that touching, right? I know there’s this light inside you and I know it’s inside me, and so when I’m communicating with you, I can communicate with you as a friend like I’ve known for years. And yet this is our first communication, this is the first time we’ve talked, right? If I’m not feeling that, I can see what is it that’s blocking that? What is it that’s blocking that? And you can look at that and you can let that go. So this way you can apply it. I think this is what you mean by a prescription, right? I’m giving you a way of applying it to the world, right? You can look at your own actions. It’s all about monitoring your own actions, right? And emptiness is the hardest one. That’s why there’s so much focus on it, is that you see your thoughts and you see how seriously they’re affecting you. They are making you miserable most of the time, right? And you say, “Okay, am I my thoughts?” And you try to separate, that’s that neti-neti-neti, not this, not this, not this. “I’m not that thought, I’m not that thought.” That’s the hardest one, to be honest with you, and no one’s really gotten that one down yet, I’m afraid. I mean, a way of teaching it to legitimately, like, “Boom, you’re awake.”

Rick: Yeah, okay. I would say that there’s all kinds of possibilities that people can do in terms of practices, teachings, teachers, all sorts of stuff. And I would just say to people, if you feel drawn to a particular thing, check it out, try it, do it, seek and you shall find. Because, I mean, you live in a van and life is relatively easy for you. You mentioned a period where you had to earn money and it was hell sitting in a cubicle for eight hours doing software programming. And it wasn’t as conducive to the kinds of experiences you’re talking about now as the life you are now living. But, you know, some people have to have that job in the cubicle, they’ve got kids to support or whatever. But I don’t think that excludes them from the possibility of awakening or spiritual evolution. So I would say to such people, don’t feel discouraged that you can’t go live in a van, check out what’s possible for you.

Wayne: No, absolutely.

Rick: Do something, do some yoga, do some meditation, whatever seems to appeal to you.

Wayne: Yes, but I would caution that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So if it’s not working for you, definitely shift to something else. Keep trying. Don’t get attached to any one teaching. And again, find those patterns. Like I say, you see all these patterns and stuff, go with what feels right. Yeah, I live in a van, but you can still apply these same teachings to working in a cubicle too. I’m attached to this or I’m attached to that, that sort of thing too. But yes, it’s definitely easier when you’re single. When you’re single you don’t have responsibilities and honestly you just don’t care about what happens. It’s definitely easier.

Rick: Which is why the whole tradition of monastic life came into being. Yes, absolutely. There’s definite benefits to it.

Rick: Yeah, and there have been some people who’ve adhered to the monastic life, who have taught that it’s very difficult for non-monastics to have this kind of experience. But there are so many exceptions to the contrary, especially in this day and age. I know plenty of people who are living so-called worldly lives with jobs and kids and all the rest, who are enjoying exalted levels of consciousness or levels of enlightenment, really profound stuff that would make any monk green with envy.

Wayne: Absolutely, the whole goal is to reintegrate, the whole goal is to integrate it with your real life too. That’s why I say, I spend time in solitude, but then I spend time around people too. I would have had a very hard time myself because of my nature, the way I am, doing this around all the confusion that comes along with the mortal social life. But it’s just my nature, everyone’s got to find their own path, like you said, I totally agree with that.

Rick: Yeah, so I’m looking at your notes here, there’s a note that says, “My current focus,” what’s your current focus?

Wayne: Oh, merging with her, to get as close as possible with her, to see. It’s almost like when you get to this softness level, you start to see what I call archetypes. You start to see the very subtle aspects of the mind, you start to see very subtle pieces of, almost like the collective consciousness’s nature, you know. And I’m trying to see those and let go of those so I can merge with her a little more, merge with her more. Self-concern comes up, it’s a very subtle, tricky thing. Like, I’ll be driving along and I’ll think, “Where am I going to stay tonight?” That’s a sense of self-concern, “Where am I going to make camp tonight?” You know, because you don’t want to be aroused by the cops, I’ll tell you, it’s miserable. So you want to find, that’s a sense of self-concern. You see that contraction and ideally I’d just be able to let it go and say, “Let go and let God,” but I don’t always do that yet. So that’s my current focus, is to bring myself in harmony with her will, which you don’t always know, but to have that kind of faith, like the great mystics, to have that kind of faith. That’s what I’m working on now.

Rick: Yeah, and you know, God helps those who help themselves. So if God were speaking to you, he might say, “Where are you going to camp tonight? Look in your campground index, dummy, you know, there’s something 50 miles down the road, that’s where you’re probably going to camp tonight.”

Wayne: Maybe, maybe, I don’t know, I go back and forth on that. If I feel like it’s out of fear, I don’t feel that’s me surrendering to her. If I can let go of that fear, that’s when it usually works out. It’s the weirdest thing, it’s like when you let go of that fear, you let go of this stuff, this stuff magically happens, it’s so wonderful. And I’m trying to establish that faith, it’s almost like a belief goes from here down into here, and when it comes down to here, everything starts to work out. And so that’s really what I’m working with, it’s very subtle levels.

Rick: Yeah, so give us a bit more elaboration and examples, if you can, of … you mentioned archetypes and how you kind of cognize or experience archetypes and somehow derive some wisdom from that experience, make that a little bit more clear for us.

Wayne: It is hard because you’re talking about such subtle things, but whenever I’m going about my life and I’m thinking about self-concern or self-consciousness, all right, I’ll go into a restaurant or something, I’ll eat by myself, you know, people are looking at you like, “Who’s that guy?” You know, I use that as practice, I use that to let go, to let go, you know, to talk to strangers. I’m not one to … I’m an introvert, so talking to strangers was very difficult, so sometimes I’ll say, “Okay, I’m just going to go talk to that person,” you know, I’ll just open up, and I’m not going to talk small talk, I’m going to … we’re going to get in deep pretty quick, you know, and I’ll watch that fear, and it comes up, you know, it’s part of … a lot of people call it conditioning, but I call it these archetypes, they’re in there, they’re in our being.

Rick: In you or in them, the fear?

Wayne: In everybody, in everybody, they’re in within us, they’re our human archetypes, you know, they’re part of our nature. So, I’ll be dealing with those because I see these as keeping me separate from her, from the Divine, right? So, that’s kind of … if that makes any sense of what I’m trying to say, is I see these very subtle levels of self, right? Self that are separate from her.

Rick: I see, I think I understand. So, by archetypes … Go ahead.

Wayne: Go ahead, no, please.

Rick: So, as I understand what you’re saying now, by archetypes you mean subtle blocks or knots, we could say, within your makeup, within your being, which are occluding the clear appreciation and flow of her, of the Divine.

Wayne: Yes.

Rick: And you see that these kind of come to your attention, perhaps either in a kind of inner-directed sort of meditative phase, where you’re just staring at the trees, or maybe when you’re in a restaurant and you’re sort of getting the habit of noticing these things and giving them whatever attention they need in order to unwind.

Wayne: Right, you’ll see yourself kind of contracting a little bit, out of some … almost like an unconscious reaction. The other night, all right, the other night I had to take a leak, excuse me, you know, and I open up the door and I hear this big noise out there in the dark, you know, and there’s this little contraction, “Oh, is that a bear or is it a person out there?” You know, you feel this contraction.

Rick: Sure.

Wayne: So, you face that and you say, “Okay, I see this contraction,” and it’s almost like I’m worried more about this contraction than whatever the hell was making that noise out there, you know, and I’m focusing on this and I step out there and of course, I don’t know what it was, it turned out to be nothing, no danger or anything like that, but you see this contraction happening out of the vastness, out of this harmony with her, you see this self-contraction. And I don’t care how much you say you’re one with the Divine, these things are going to come up in the real world, so I use the real world as my practice, if that makes sense.

Rick: It does, yeah, sure. I mean, especially if, as we were saying earlier, divine intelligence is omnipresent and orchestrating everything, then the real world isn’t just dumb objects bumbling around.

Wayne: No.

Rick: Everything is an expression of intelligence and is all is well and wisely put, and the world is my guru, you know, everything happens for a reason, not an intellectual reason, but an evolutionary reason.

Wayne: Right, and from a physical point of view, you’re trying to become in harmony with that too, so it’s not just, like you say, it’s not just an intellectual thing, you feel this at an emotional level, you feel this contraction at an emotional level, and you use that as a reminder, a bell or something, to say, “Hey, wait a minute, here it is, here it is, and this is a great time to play with it, this is a great time to experiment with this now.” And so you can use that to open up and to see these subtle archetypes, how much they affect our lives. And this is way deeper than most people probably need to, but you asked me what I’m working on currently, and that’s kind of what I’m working on.

Rick: I think a lot of people will be able to relate to this.

Wayne: Okay, good, good.

Rick: And the thing about contractions, I mean, if a wave of fear is the reaction to a noise in the dark, it might be a good idea to be cautious. I mean, it might be a bear, you know, you don’t want to go bumbling into it.

Wayne: But rather than reacting to it from fear, you can at least now look at it and see that fear arising. Yeah, definitely, if it’s a bear, get the hell out of there, you know. But what I’m saying is, it’s better to see that fear and then react to it, because if you react to it, you’re not really learning much from it. But when you start to see it, now you can say, “All right, now I can see this contraction coming out. I can see the self contracting out of the vastness into this fearful entity.” And you can find harmony, you can start saying, “Okay, I can see how that’s working. That’s keeping me from the Divine, that fear.” And I’m not saying you go up and pet a bear, I’m not saying that at all. Don’t go petting bears. You know, you do … it’s all about a learning experience of yourself, it’s all about growing, it’s all about … it never ends, I don’t think it ever ends. You’re just constantly using life as a teacher.

Rick: Yeah, no, that’s good. Yeah, I mean, there are people who sort of do stupid things like climb into the lion’s pit in a zoo or something because they think they’re one with the lions and they end up getting mauled. So obviously there needs to be some kind of boundaries.

Wayne: Or worse, they have such faith in God that they don’t give their children medicine or something like that.

Rick: Yeah, that kind of stuff.

Wayne: It’s terrible, especially when you’re affecting someone else.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a joke that Irene and I were reminding ourselves of the other day, I’m sure you’ve heard this one, where … it’s not so much a joke, but there’s a flood, right, it’s raining and it’s flooding and there’s some guy who … the National Guard says, “Get out of there, you’re going to drown if you don’t leave your house.” And he says, “No, no, no, don’t worry about it, God will take care of me.” So he stays. And then after a while a boat comes along and says, “You better get in, this flood’s getting worse.” And he says, “No, no, no, don’t worry about it, God will take care of me.” So eventually the flood’s getting worse, he’s up on the roof and a helicopter hovers overhead and says, “Come on, climb onto the rope, we’ve got to save you.” And he says, “No, don’t worry about it, God will take care of me.” And then the waters rise and he drowns. So he goes to heaven and he says, “God, I thought you were going to take care of me.” And God says, “What do you want? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

Wayne: Absolutely, and you know, the funny thing is, a reader of mine commented on that when … this is such a synchronicity, here it is, here it is, you know, commented on that when Irene got in touch with me to be on this interview, and I blogged about it, and I said, “Wow, I’ve got this interview thing,” and then I explained to Irene about how I’m on this internet connection, I’m a little worried, you know, I’m not sure if that works. She says, “Oh, well, okay, we’ll do something, you can’t do this then, basically.” And then I said, “Well,” and I told that on the blog and someone related that episode, and I said, “Well, I was thinking about doing Skype interviews anyway for students and stuff, let me just try the Skyping out,” and I tried it with my brothers and stuff, it worked out, it worked out just like it is doing now. And I told Irene about that, so I kind of said, “Okay, well, I’ll let what happens,” and then I said, “Well, here’s this Skype thing I’m wanting to do,” and it kind of worked out with Irene, and here we are, you know, it’s kind of the exact same thing. I was like, “Well, whatever, God’s going to take care of it,” and yet I still did have to get involved, you know, that’s the point, I still did have to be proactive. But it’s more of a flowing type thing, rather than, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?” You know?

Rick: Yeah, I mean …

Wayne: That’s a perfect analogy, yeah.

Rick: I guess one way of explaining it is, don’t expect God to always be working through miracles, because the whole world is a miracle, and so everything that happens is God doing it in apparently mundane ways that are nonetheless miraculous when you get right down to it.

Wayne: Well, the way I experience this in life, because it is a tricky area, is it has to flow, I tend to flow with things, but I will have to sometimes do proactive stuff, obviously, we all do, you know, but I only do the proactive stuff in the direction I’m being led. I don’t try to … if my mind says I need to go over there, I don’t try to go over there if the flow is going to the right, and my mind is saying, “Go to the left,” I’ll go to the right but I’ll still work with it, you know what I’m saying? So it’s a relationship, it really is a relationship with the Divine, you could say, or with the world.

Rick: That brings up an interesting theme, which is that it seems to me, in my experience, that there’s a balance between flowing with the Divine and individual intention. And one could just have this attitude of, “Oh, I’m just flowing with the Divine,” and become kind of aimless or weak-willed, and on the other extreme one could sort of be adamant about, “I want it this way,” you know, and “Divine be damned, I’m going in this direction.” Neither of those works, but there’s a sort of a balance that one learns to strike, in which I guess we could say the Divine is primarily in the driver’s seat, but there’s still some individual intention through which the Divine needs in order to do its thing. Would you care to comment on that?

Wayne: Yeah, I would like to think of it, she’s more of a guide, think of her as like Sacagawea, guiding you along. You don’t have to go that way, but she knows the easiest path, so to speak, you know, and so you kind of go with her, but you still want to explore areas, you still want to do these things. But she’s a guide, and she’ll make it easier if you flow that way, but she’s not expecting you not to row the boat too. You’ve got to get involved also, you’ve got to be part of rowing that canoe. You can’t just, if you go right down wherever life flows, then you’re almost getting into too much of a, almost a New Age, “Everything will work out,” you know.

Rick: Yeah, wishy-washy.

Wayne: That’s gullible, that’s gullible, and you don’t want to be that either. Because it is, it’s a shared experience, it’s me and her, it’s not just her, and it’s not just me. The me, me, me thing is saying, “I’m going to go that way,” right? It’s a shared experience and you have to get the feel for that, it’s kind of a tricky thing to get a feel for that. But it’s not just going with the flow and it’s not going your own way, it’s a harmony, it’s a bringing it together kind of thing. It’s like rowing the canoe to avoid rocks that might come up along the current. You’re still going with the current, but you’re avoiding the obvious dangers.

Rick: Yeah, and if we are sense-organs of the infinite or instruments of the Divine, however you want to put it.

Wayne: And we are.

Rick: Then it’s not like our individual intention is somehow different from or necessarily to any degree in opposition to the Divine Will, if we want to use that phrase, but it’s actually a faculty of it. So you might just feel like, “I feel like driving to Montana now,” and it seems like my feeling, my desire, my decision, but it could very well be that that decision is entirely prompted by some higher order of intelligence, by some divine intention, and it just kind of is experienced subjectively as an individual desire.

Wayne: No, absolutely, and it’s not just internally, you’ll see it externally. For example, it just happened today, I was deciding where I’m going to go from here, whether I go to Colorado or whether I go to Flagstaff and maybe up to Utah. It was kind of like I have to decide one way or the other. And then I was leaning toward Colorado, but then I just got an email from a friend of mine, another full-time RVer, who’s in Flagstaff, so I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll head over to Flagstaff.” So I wasn’t sure which way to go, I could go either way, I was kind of drawing my mind and desires were drawn one way, but then I hear this little bell sound, “Go over this way,” and I want to see the guy and hang out with him for a while, so I’ll go over there. And then maybe from there, maybe I’ll go to Colorado from there. But again, you kind of flow with this, you don’t get too attached to what I want, me, me, me, me wants. You kind of open yourself up to these experiences and it’ll feel right when you’re flowing along with it, and it’ll always work out, it’s an amazing thing.

Rick: Yeah, I have a really good friend, by the way, who has an apartment in Flagstaff. He also lives up in the Tuba City area, but if you feel like getting together with him, I think you’d enjoy meeting him.

Wayne: I love Flagstaff, yeah, Flagstaff is a beautiful area, it’s beautiful.

Rick: Yeah, okay, what have we got here, let’s see. This is a funny thing here in your notes, “Short hair equals 5 years ago and right after the awakening event, so I come across as a bit overconfident and pompous. Long hair equals never, more mystical leanings.” What’s that all about?

Wayne: Oh, you know, you can see it takes a long time for you to grow your hair out, so you can kind of see the difference between the way I was when I first woke up, again there’s that separation, I think I paused there, but there’s that separation right after I woke up, that’s when the short hair was, and I speak very much like many non-dual teachers, it’s all about the emptiness quality. Whereas as I was adapting to this, I didn’t cut my hair the whole time, that was happening. And as I was adapting to this, and then the mystical aspect, the more integrated aspect came upon it, and those videos are more toward the way I believe now, even though those are like 2 years old too. Now I just cut my hair every month because it’s such a pain in the butt to have long hair.

Rick: That’s why I have a beard, because it’s a pain in the butt to shave. We’ve touched upon this, I’m looking at your notes and I want to come back to it because this is such a sweet point. “I recognize that synchronicity, ongoing odds-defying good luck, implies a divine intelligence. Practically all authentic non-dual teachers acknowledge this intelligence, Tolle, the intelligence of the totality, Adyashanti, God in drag, but few seem to focus on the implications, that is, a singular divine intelligence, Tao, God, Her, is real.” So let’s just, before we’re finished, let’s talk a little bit more about this divine intelligence thing because I think that’s the direction in which your experience is evolving more and more and more. And if I talk to you 5 years from now, you’ll probably say, “Whoa, yeah, it’s grown so much that the appreciation of that has grown so much since I last spoke to you.” And I think that is also true of the spiritual community at large. Many people who are all about this kind of impersonal non-duality 10 years ago are now thinking and experiencing in terms of divine intelligence and more of a heart-oriented thing. So let’s just play with that a bit more.

Wayne: Yeah, you could almost say that this is evidence of God, couldn’t you? And all these people, especially a lot of these advanced enlightened people are talking about this, you could almost say that this is evidence of God, the synchronicities that constantly happen, the life lining up, the less there is of you, the more there is of this magical world opening up. And like you say, it’s like the intelligence of every little thing kind of works for you, you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Wayne: It’s almost evidence of God. I mean, I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s just like, you know, there’s evidence of the soul, people say, “Oh, there’s no such thing as the soul,” or, “There’s no such thing as God,” it’s like they’re almost in denial of the evidence, right? It’s hard for me to imagine an atheist being awake, I just can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine an atheist being awake and enlightened.

Rick: Yeah, that puzzles me because they say Buddhism is atheistic, you know, that they don’t really take God into account, and that’s always been a head-scratcher for me and maybe I need to learn more about Buddhism. By the same token, it’s hard for me to imagine a … I know there are millions of them, but it’s hard for me to imagine a scientist or a doctor being an atheist, because they’re looking at something so closely that is so evidently an expression of infinite intelligence, how can they not see it? You know, it’s staring them in the face.

Wayne: Well, you know, I think what it is, you get caught up in the details and these little facts and you don’t go looking at the source of the fact.

Rick: Yeah, good point.

Wayne: And they say, “Well, there was this event, but we don’t know what happened, so we just won’t even think about it.” It’s like gravity, why do masses attract? Well we call it gravity and now we stop thinking about it. Once we get a name, we stop thinking about it.

Rick: Yeah, we see all these laws of nature and all the scientists study the laws of nature, but what’s behind those laws? I mean, I seem to recall that Francis Crick was an atheist, you know, one of the discoverers of DNA, and so he’s studying this marvelous thing, and the way it replicates and repairs itself and all that is so incredible. That’s not little billiard balls banging into each other, there’s an orderliness there and intelligence that is just mind-boggling. How could he be an atheist?

Wayne: No, I used to be an atheist, you know, because I was very rational, you know, and then this stuff started happening over and over again, and the atheism started weakening even pre-awakening, but after, you know, because my first vision of her was through LSD, I hate to say it, I don’t know if we’re allowed to talk about that.

Rick: Oh yeah, sure. Mine too.

Wayne: But yeah, but here’s, let me, I’m going to digress a second here. The way you tell the difference between a vision and a memory is a vision you don’t know what’s going to happen, but a memory it hits you all at once, bang, your first kiss, you know what happened, right? You don’t have to think about it, you’re not thinking, “Is she going to kiss me or not da-da-da,” right? You know what happened, that’s a memory. That’s the way that vision, that LSD vision was for me, bang, it happened all at once, and all those experiences that I had during it. So that softened my atheism, but the constant synchronicities, the constant things lining up and I could say I’m a mystic, but I’m a rational mystic, I couldn’t deny it any longer. There’s no other explanation for life working out for you as you weaken than that she’s coming awake, right, and that they’re coming together. And that’s when I stopped being an atheist, that’s when I officially became a mystic.

Rick: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And of course, you know, when people say they’re atheists, very often they’re, you know, I would say to many atheists, “Hey, I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in,” you know, because they’re talking about some, you know, dude in the sky, you know, who’s just sort of like …

Wayne: Thou shalt not, right?

Rick: Yeah, a mythical character who likes to smite people, and it’s easy not to believe in that, but what we’re talking about is entirely different. Another problem people have is that, you know, they look at the Holocaust or child slavery or something like that and they say, “How could there be a God who would allow such things to happen?”

Wayne: I hope you’re not asking me that, because I don’t know. I do know that what ego does, it seems, the mind does, is it bends … this is a theory, I don’t have proof on this, so I like to stress that. I have proof on almost all evidence for almost everything else I say, but my theory, so it’s a belief, is that the mind bends this flow of God through us and it bends it to our will, you know what I’m saying? And so we corrupt that loving nature to “me, me, me,” and we’ll do terrible things when it’s all about “me, me, me,” we will say, “I don’t care if you live or die as long as I get some money from it, you know, I don’t care, me, me, me, me, me, I’m more important than you, you, you,” you know, and that’s the mind bending this love of Her flowing through us. And so that’s why I say, the less there is of us, the more there is of that pure aspect of Her.

Rick: Yeah, I think that’s a good answer to the question.

Wayne: But that’s a theory, I don’t have any evidence on that, that’s just a theory. So I like to stress that on my blog, this is something I’m thinking of, but I don’t really have any evidence of it yet.

Rick: Yeah, well that’s the way science works, and I would say you’re a scientific guy in the way you operate, and you form, you know, science forms theories, and they’re not meant to be beliefs, or etched in stone, they’re meant to be avenues for investigation. And then they …

Wayne: Right, and you test them out.

Rick: Yeah, you test them out, you see if you can experience something which is going to either refute or substantiate the theory.

Wayne: Yes, that’s my whole belief, that’s my whole way of living. Like I say, the wise have their scars, you’ve got to test it out.

Rick: Yeah, and you take it step by step. So personally I don’t see that science and spirituality are contradictory in any way, I think that true spirituality is a scientific endeavor.

Wayne: Yeah, and I got that from Ken Wilber when I was reading him way back when. He said, you know, “Listen to these theories and then test them out for yourself, find out if they work for you, but do the experiment,” that he was so stressing on, “Do the experiment, and I’m all for that, find out for yourself.”

Rick: The Buddha said something like that, you’ve probably heard the quote, he just said, “Don’t believe something just because I said it, test it out,” basically he said, “Test it out through your own experience, through your own inquiry and understanding, don’t take anything on faith.”

Wayne: Right, right.

Rick: And regarding this whole thing, you know, how could the Holocaust happen and all that and yet there be a God, this again is theoretical, but it seems to me that if you’re going to have a relative creation, you’ve got to have opposites and polarities, you know, if there’s going to be hot there’s got to be cold, if there’s going to be fast there’s got to be slow, and if there’s going to be good there’s got to be bad. There’s a whole spectrum of possibilities across a very wide range in every way you look at it, and also people evolve through various, various stages.

Wayne: Can I interrupt?

Rick: Yes, please.

Wayne: On that, this opposite end, there’s the good and the bad and everything, I was saying it’s the opposite ends of the same thread is the way I look at that. It is one thing, but you can’t have a thread without two ends. If you cut that thread right in the middle, suddenly this is the good side and this is the bad side. You cut that in the middle, you know what I’m saying, it keeps getting smaller, but it’s still the same concept. So the mind is saying good and bad, but really the archetype is good-bad together, good and bad together, it’s one concept, it’s whatever you want to call it. We don’t even have a word for what good and bad is, you know, maybe we do but I can’t think of it. But yeah, so it’s just the mind breaking these concepts, these archetypes out so it can explain it, but it’s really one thing, and that’s the Tao Te Ching, right? The yin and the yang, one can’t exist without the other.

Rick: But I think it’s good to ponder this stuff because just like you say, by reading a bit about near-death experiences and reincarnation and all, it can really broaden your perspective. A lot of people get tripped up by this question of, “How can there be some kind of divine intelligence when such horrible things happen?” And you need to think about that and ponder how there could be, and how it would be possible within a kind of vastly diverse universe. I mean, if we think of, there have been times when most of the life on earth has been wiped out by an asteroid strike and it’ll happen again. And there will be a time when the sun will expand and completely engulf the earth, and right about that time I think the earth will start becoming molten, the climate change deniers will admit we’ve got a problem.

Wayne: And the universe will contract back into the pre-Big Bang state again, and then it will come back out again. It’s always cyclical, it’s always going around. And I guess you could say that she doesn’t take this stuff too seriously, even though we as … we being affected by a child dying or a loved one being hurt badly, of course it affects us. And it’s part of our learning experience, it’s part of being human. I don’t think we should deny it, we should understand it and we should feel it and we should learn to say, “This is the cost of living,” so to speak. This is how I grow, the scars, the wise have their scars.

Rick: And all that we just referred to implies a lot of death and destruction and suffering, but it’s part of the whole cosmic process. But as Tennyson said, “Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.” So there’s a sort of eternality to what we really are that is just not going to be destroyed or touched by these changes, either at the end of this lifetime or at the end of the lifetime of the universe.

Wayne: Right, no absolutely. There’s no such thing as death, you know, it just keeps going and going and going. It changes, there is such a thing as change and that is what life is, you know, life is change. But there’s no such thing as death, you know, there’s no opposite to it, to life.

Rick: Yeah, in the Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna says, “There was never a time when I was not, nor you, nor these rulers of men, nor will there ever be a time when all of us shall cease to be.”

Wayne: Yeah, it’s beautiful. And I wish we could … it’s hard to keep that in mind when we’re suffering, you know, obviously.

Rick: It is, it is. It sounds kind of glib, you know, to say this, but it really helps. I mean, I really appreciated that aspect of your videos and your writings, that, you know, to culture that kind of perspective, I mean, it makes a big difference in your life. I remember, you know the guy who played Perry Mason, who was that, Raymond Burr? I heard that when he was on his deathbed he was utterly terrified and he actually tried to sit for days on end so as not to die because he was afraid of going out of existence. And probably many people die like that.

Wayne: Yeah, it’s a shame, isn’t it? A lot of people, though, you hear, once they accept it, there’s this sense of peace that comes over them, you hear that too. So yeah, there’s two different attitudes toward it, you know. I like the Dalai Lama’s attitude myself, he says, “I kind of look forward to dying, I kind of want to see how well I do,” you know, I like that attitude so you lose the fear of it, you know, it’s a part of a growth process.

Rick: And that’s what a lot of these near-death experience authors say too, guys like James von Praagh and so on, they say, “I died and it was great, I’m not afraid of it at all, it’s going to be a marvelous adventure.”

Wayne: Right, you don’t need to hurry it along, I’m not saying you need to hurry it along, but you just think of it as part of the growth process, you know. And that’s what the near-death experience is, that’s what past lives, you know, these children who recall previous lives, that’s what it all points to. There’s nothing that points to “we blink out,” that’s the assumption that consciousness is part of the mind, and yet everybody who is separated from themselves in near-death experiences, they are able to think, even though they don’t have a mind, you know, they don’t have a brain, so to speak, they’re still able to perceive, so there’s still life in that sense. So, yeah, it’s sad that we are so fearful of death over here in the West, you know.

Rick: There’s an interesting implication to what you’re just saying too, which is that the certain faction of the non-dual crowd says that there is no reincarnation, because that would imply the existence of some sort of individuality, and there is no individuality. But the experience of NDE people and people who remember their past lives belies that assumption.

Wayne: It’s just a burka, just like this body is a burka that I need to function in this world, the soul is a burka that I need to function between lives, as I move between lives, right? And then love is a form of a burka, it’s another layer, it’s a form of a burka, it is how life lives, it is the life force you could think of it as, and then there’s the emptiness, which is another layer, you know? But like I say, I don’t know what goes on in your mind, so I’m not there at the end yet, you know what I’m saying? So I see these as all, I guess I see it as flowing between these states, rather than being a fixed point, you know, being this fixed thing, you know, I’m not, I don’t know what I am, but I think you feel that way too in many ways, you know, I think most people do, but they’re almost told it’s wrong or something, I don’t know.

Rick: Buckminster Fuller wrote a book called “I Seem to Be a Verb.”

Wayne: Ah, that’s a very good quote, I like that. Yeah, I like that.

Rick: Okay, so I’m trying to see if there’s anything else I can squeeze out of you that won’t be redundant, because we’ve covered a lot of good stuff, but is there anything that you feel that’s important that we haven’t touched upon?

Wayne: Just that rather than trying to jump from this mortal coil to enlightenment, I think that you can fade, I think the fading aspect is much healthier and much more practical. The other is, I changed my mind, I thought I could talk people into how to wake up, and you see it on my Wayne Wirs blog, “How to Wake Up,” or something like that, you know. I don’t think that can happen, I don’t think the mind can drop the mind, I don’t think, you know, because it’s so tightly bound, I think that almost has to be a mistake. So rather than focusing on enlightenment, just focus on weakening, just focus on opening and opening and opening, and allow yourself to flow back and forth. That’s what I would tell anyone who’s seeking these things, just get comfortable with this flow and the more often it happens, the more comfortable you’ll get with it. You won’t worry about, if you have a satori experience and it goes away, the more often that happens, the more you’ll flow, you’ll just stop worrying about it.

Rick: I think that’s a good point. I know many times in my life I’ve strained and struggled and gotten myself very out of balance by being too fanatical and too desperate, so it’s good to have enthusiasm and zeal and an earnest desire for this, but you’ve got to keep it real and keep it natural.

Wayne: Yeah, try and bring it from here down into here, try and bring it into the lived experience. That’s my advice for everybody I write to on my blog and stuff.

Rick: Also I interviewed a saint from India about a month ago named Sri Karunamayi, and she made a point about the importance of patience and tolerance, and I think those are really important qualities for a spiritual aspirant. You have to be patient because, as you say, you’re not going to jump from here to here, it’s going to take a while. So, you know, be earnest in your endeavor, but at the same time realize that everything, I’m sure there’s some beautiful poetic phrase, but everything happens in good time, you know, when it’s meant to happen.

Wayne: So, think about impatience as me, me, me, I want, I want, I want, right? You see that contraction? And patience is like, “I’ve got to breathe a little bit, I’ve got to relax. I can’t let go because otherwise you don’t do anything, but you’ve got to relax that, you’ve got to learn.” That’s that kind of flowing with God, so to speak, but still paddling, you know? That’s the way I see it. Patience is this, impatience is me trying too hard, you know, “I’m going to get this, I’m going to get this,” you know? That’s that contraction you feel. And that’s how I live, it’s this felt contractions, you know? And that’s what she’s saying, patience is opening but not letting go, you know? That’s really what love is, you know? Obsessive love is this, me, me, you know, grabbing hold of you, whereas pure love is more of a caress, it’s more of a gentle hand on your lover, you know? And that’s that felt difference, and that’s the way I like to live it. I like to feel this experience rather than just rational. I’m a very rational person, I wish I didn’t have such a stupid big brain, you know? But I find that bringing it down to the heart, bringing it into feeling it, and that’s where the growth comes.

Rick: About five years ago I interviewed a guy named Chuck Hillig, who’s an old friend now, and he did a beautiful analysis of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” you know? Think about the lines of that song, “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream …” you’re going with the stream, “merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” the whole thing is a joy, “life is but a dream,” you know, you’re not taking it too seriously. But you are rowing, you know, you’re not just sort of going wherever the stream takes you and running into the marshes.

Wayne: Well, you’re guiding it.

Rick: You’re guiding it, you’re giving it some direction, but the stream is doing the main job.

Wayne: Right, it’s telling you, “Go that way,” and you’re kind of figuring out how to get along there, but you’re not fighting it either. You’re not saying, “I’m going to go this way,” you know, that never works. Good, that’s a great analogy.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, great. So here you are in your van in the mountains of Arizona, and once I put this interview up, a lot of people are going to start reading your blog and getting in touch and this and that, the Batgap Bump, and it may be that people want to engage with you somehow. You mentioned you might start teaching at some point in a more personal or active way once your new book comes out, or what’s going on?

Wayne: Well, the book is just an outline, unfortunately, right now. I hadn’t felt ready to officially write the book. I think that’s what part of the delay was. Like I say, she guides you and she’ll push you when you need it. What I just did recently, if people really want to talk, I put up a … and I’m not selling this, I just felt I needed to give people an opportunity to have these sort of talks. I just put a thing on there so we can do one-on-one Skype or phone calls or something like that, just so if people really want to talk about this, I’m accessible. That’s what pretty much everybody who’s followed my blog has said to me, a lot of people say to me, “Wayne, you’re accessible. We can’t get a hold of these other people. Wayne, you respond to my emails.” I do. I read all the emails, and if I can, I will. Such are the advantages of being an unknown. But yeah, I think what I’ll do, my game plan is then now to write this book, and after that we’ll see what happens. You know, whether I write another book. I’ve got a couple of books in mind, but I’ve got to get this one done. That’s my main thing, is I’ve got to get this one done, because reading the blog, it’s a diary, so it’s all over the place, so it’s hard to get this. This interview will actually act as a very good introduction to what Mystical Oneness is.

Rick: Good.

Wayne: So thank you very much. Like I said, it all happened at a perfect time, as usual with my life. It all just lines up.

Rick: And I would say that you … I mean, I think people deserve to be compensated for their time. If a hundred people now want to have Skype conversations with you, I don’t think it would be unreasonable for you to charge something for that, or do you already?

Wayne: Well, I haven’t … I just put it up. I just started putting it up. I used to do something called “Wisdom for Alms,” you know, and I would just email people, and I’d take their email, and a lot of times I’d never get any money for them. It’s not that important, but it does take a lot of your time …

Rick: It does.

Wayne: … to compose these personalized things. So almost in a way to discourage dumb questions, or questions they could look up themselves, it’s almost like you charge to help free up some of your time, but to also get the serious inquiries, and that’s kind of the way I look at it.

Rick: So let’s say you do an hour Skype conversation with somebody, how much do you charge for that?

Wayne: I put up there, I think it’s $75 is what I put up there. I didn’t want to take the high end, and I didn’t want to take the low end. I figured something in between.

Rick: That’s pretty reasonable. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you have to buy gas, you have to buy food, and you can probably only do a couple of these a day if you were to do that many, and that’s $150 in a day isn’t that much money. So yeah, good. It’s good to put that out there and make people aware that that’s possible if they would like to have a conversation with you.

Wayne: Right, but my main priority is to get this book written. You know, I feel I have to get that because even though it’s all in the blog, and this interview is a good summation of it, it really needs to be put in a format that people can sit down and read and not have to jump all over the place in the blog. Because like I say, a blog is a diary, it’s not a book. You develop things and you change your mind and all this sort of stuff happens.

Rick: Sure. Yeah, so in terms of books, you have like three or four of them you’ve already written The Mystic’s Journal, Fading Toward Enlightenment, Seeing Clearly, A Simple Explanation for Everything, and I think these are all available for free on your website, aren’t they?

Wayne: Some of them are free, some of them there’s a charge. I don’t think any of them are over five bucks, they’re all e-books. Yeah, they’re very cheap. You know, I don’t expect to make money on them, but I want to put them out there, but some of them I put a lot of time into it. So you know, I balance, I try to find a balance.

Rick: And I’ll link to all these books on the page that I set up for you on BatGap, so people can get them. Great, thank you. I found them enjoyable to read. Plus, one thing we haven’t even mentioned is that you are quite an accomplished photographer, and so both your blog and your books have a lot of beautiful photos in them.

Wayne: Thank you, yeah, that’s a passion. I love, you know, it’s one of those things, you know, if you love something you’re going to put a lot of effort into it. I love the spiritual search, I love what happens afterwards, you know, I love this communion with her, that’s why I’m such a mystic and I talk about it. And I love photography and I like writing, you know. So it’s all … Yeah, it’s great.

Rick: Good, so let me wrap it up then. This has been a lot of fun, I knew it would be when I started reading your stuff.

Wayne: Thank you, I appreciate it, I love it.

Rick: Yeah, me too. I really appreciate spending the time with people like you every week, it’s a big boost of fulfillment for me. So let me make some summary points. I’ve been speaking with Wayne Wirs, and you know that by now if you’ve stayed with the interview this long. I’ll be linking to his website, his blog, his books and so on from his page on batgap.com. And Wayne’s life is a work in progress, so if you resonate with him, you can see how it can, you know, subscribe to his blog and so on, and see how it continues to evolve. This is an ongoing series, as I mentioned in the beginning, so if you go to batgap.com you’ll see all the past episodes archived in about four or five different ways under the past interviews menu. There is an audio podcast that you can sign up for, which as I mentioned we’re having some technical difficulties with, but I’ll be darned if we’re not going to fix them. And there’s the donate button, which I appreciate people clicking if they feel so inclined and they’re appreciating getting something out of these interviews. There is a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, and that’ll be obvious to you on the menus. So that’s pretty much it. There’s a few other things if you pull down the various menus and see what’s there. So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you, Wayne.

Wayne: Thank you very much, perfect timing for me. And I would like one other thing, if any of this stuff benefited anyone that’s listening or watching this, rather than donate to me, donate to Rick and Buddha, because there’s a lot of people working behind the scenes that you probably aren’t aware of, and there’s I’m sure a lot of expenses. So anything you give to me because of this, give it to these guys, all right? Thank you, seriously.

Rick: Thank you very much for that, but also of course if you end up taking up considerable amounts of Wayne’s time with Skype conversations, then I’ll donate it to him.

Wayne: All right, we’ll just keep passing the money back and forth.

Rick: Yeah, we could just send checks to each other every day.

Wayne: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Thanks a lot, talk to you later.

Wayne: Bye.

Rick: Bye.