Yogacharya Ellen Grace O’Brian Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how spiritual awakening can include work, money, family, and practical responsibilities rather than rejecting material life. It examines dharma, nonattachment, ethical prosperity, and finding a meaningful way to contribute in the world.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can material prosperity and spiritual growth support each other?
• How can I discover and live my unique dharma?
• Is spiritual awakening possible while raising a family and working in the world?
• How can I relate to wealth without becoming attached to it?
• Why should ethics guide the pursuit of money and success?

Key takeaways

• Spiritual life should not be separated from material responsibilities.
• Wealth can serve awakening when it is guided by dharma and used wisely.
• Awakening means contributing positively while remaining engaged with the world.
• Your dharma is a unique expression of your deeper qualities and purpose.
• Attachment, not wealth itself, is what turns prosperity into a spiritual distraction.
• Ordinary work and family life can be part of a genuine path of awakening.
• Ethical action is essential when pursuing prosperity.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to the Past Interviews menu on batgap.com, where you’ll see them all organized in several different ways.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. Considering the number of people who watch it, even a small donation, if enough people do that, becomes significant. But we never want people to feel obligated or to strain in any way, so that’s our attitude.

My guest today is Yogacharya Ellen Grace O’Brien. Yogacharya means teacher of yoga, right?

Ellen: Yes, that’s exactly what it means.

Rick: And acharya is a teacher. Ellen is a teacher of meditation, an award-winning poet, writer, and the spiritual director of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, a Kriya Yoga meditation center with headquarters in San Jose, California.

She has taught Kriya Yoga nationally and internationally for more than three decades and has received many service awards, including the Mahatma Gandhi Award for the Promotion of Religious Pluralism. Ordained to teach in 1982 by Roy Eugene Davis, a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, her message is “Engaged Enlightenment: An invitation to live an awakened, creatively inspired, and fulfilled life now.”

Along with her service as a meditation teacher and esteemed Yogacharya, Ellen is the founder of Carry the Vision, a community nonviolence education project bringing meditation instruction to staff and children in schools, the prison population, and other segments of society.

She is the founder and president of Meru Institute, providing healthy lifestyle education and leadership training in yoga studies, Ayurveda, and community service, and she is the host of The Yoga Hour, a weekly podcast with listeners in over 130 countries. I listened to quite a few episodes of that over the past week.

Her latest book is The Jewel of Abundance: Finding Prosperity Through the Ancient Wisdom of Yoga. We’ll be talking about that quite a bit today, but that’s not the only thing we’re going to be talking about, because that’s not all of what Ellen is about. Maybe we could start with that and then branch off into other things.

🕊️ Spirituality and material life

I read most of your book and listened to you do some interviews about it, and prosperity—or the lack of it—is very much in the news these days, since we’re in the midst of a government shutdown and a lot of people aren’t getting paychecks.

We’re always hearing statistics like, “The three richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom half,” many people are in debt and believe they always will be, and 78 percent of full-time workers say they live paycheck to paycheck.

In light of those statistics, I was reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which probably many people have heard about. He basically built this pyramid, which I’m showing on the screen now, in which we initially have physiological needs, then safety, then social needs—love and belonging—then esteem, and finally self-actualization.

Maslow makes it sound as though you don’t think about self-actualization until all these other needs are met, and I think there’s some truth to that. If people are starving and scraping out a meager existence, they probably aren’t going to be thinking much about spiritual enlightenment.

Anyway, with that as a starting point, Ellen, why don’t you jump right in and tell us what you think, and then we’ll take it from there?

Ellen: Thanks, Rick, and thanks for the invitation to be with you today. I think that’s really a good place to begin in terms of looking at Maslow. One of the things that inspired the book for me is that I work with many people who are on a spiritual journey, and learning how to pay the bills seems to be an integral part of that.

Integrating Spiritual Life with Material Existence

While it’s true that when situations are dire, a person is less inclined to think about meditating and more inclined to think about how they’re going to live or survive, there are many people today who are on a spiritual path. The idea we’ve had for a long time, and that many of the traditions promote—that somehow the spiritual life is “separate” from our material existence—I believe is a fundamental error we have to get over, because it contributes to that dualistic mindset that sets us up for so many problems.

The spiritual life is not separate from our material existence.

Rick: Obviously, some traditions have emphasized things like poverty as being conducive to spirituality. Jesus said it’s more difficult for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. So, in a way, in some traditions there’s this prejudice against any kind of material affluence or comfort.

Ellen: As far as I can see—I mean, I’m not a scholar of world religions—you can find it in all of the traditions. From my perspective, you have to look deeper into what these awakened beings, whether it’s Jesus or Buddha, are really talking about. They’re putting up a flashing red light—a good red light—saying, “Hey, if you get attached to things, to name and fame and all of that, then it’s very difficult to develop the consciousness to enter that kingdom, that higher state of consciousness, however you want to say it.”

If you’re attached to wealth and things, name and fame, it’s very difficult. So there’s truth in that, but people have interpreted it as meaning that money in itself is bad, riches themselves are bad, fame is bad, or any of that. But it’s not the thing itself, of course; it’s what we do with it and whether it’s a distraction rather than something that can be integral to our path.

Rick: Obviously, some have swung it in the other direction. Some criticize the Catholic Church for being too opulent, and then there have been people like Reverend Ike, for instance, who seemed to equate the number of Cadillacs you own with how spiritual you are. There’s the whole thing of The Secret—using spirituality in some way, shape, or form to fulfill whatever desires you may have—and some of those things have left a bad taste in people’s mouths.

How do we find a happy medium? You actually used the word “attached” a minute ago, and that seems to me to be the awkward word, because you can be attached to poverty and that’s not going to help you. You can be attached to great wealth and that can be a problem. But whatever your circumstances, if you could not be attached to them—and let’s have you elaborate on what “attached” means—then perhaps the circumstances aren’t such a problem.

Ellen: I think that if our goal in life is to be awake—and I know you probably want to talk about what I mean when I say that; we need to flesh out these terms—if that’s the goal, to be awake, then from my perspective, being awake includes making a positive contribution in this world that we’re living in.

For me, it’s not necessarily the idea of going away somewhere and separating yourself from the world, but being awake in the world and making a positive contribution. That’s the ideal for me: that we can learn to be in the world, and we can learn to create or draw to us what’s needed to fulfill our purpose, what we’re doing here.

Resources are a part of that, so it’s important that we learn how to do that, learn how to do it consciously, and not get caught up in it. I think it has to do with having a clear sense of what your purpose is. By that, I mean your higher purpose.

🕊️ Dharma and an engaged spiritual life

Rick: Speaking of higher purpose—well, before I say that, obviously we have different dharmas, right? We have different paths in life. Someone like Mahavatar Babaji, who is part of your lineage, didn’t do a whole lot in the world—or isn’t doing a whole lot in the world—in terms of any overt thing. He’s not running a business, but such beings are said to be critical to the well-being of the world. So it could be that someone’s dharma is to be rather reclusive, and yet one can still be making a great contribution if that is one’s dharma, right?

Ellen: I would totally agree with that. I’m just trying to make the point that many people I’ve talked to, when they first come to the spiritual path—and that includes me—thought it was all about, “How do I get away from the world? It just seems so messy. If I can just move myself into a higher state of consciousness and go live at an ashram, everybody will be kind and loving and meditative, and it just won’t be so messy.”

Well, that’s just a false idea. It’s just as messy inside an ashram as it is outside, as far as I know.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve lived in them. It can be. Sometimes the metaphor is used of rough stones in a tumbler: they tumble around in the ashram until they all get smooth. There can be personality clashes in a space like that, or something like that metaphor.

Ellen: Yes, it is. It’s a crucible, and it’s a good space to be in in terms of that. But I think we can recognize that this awakening needs to happen right where we are, not by trying to get away from where we are.

This awakening needs to happen right where we are.

Rick: Which is not to say that stretches of time in a circumstance like that might not be useful, but most people aren’t cut out for a lifetime of it.

Ellen: Exactly. That’s a good way to put it. For some, it is their dharma; it is their path, and it’s exactly right. But when we look at how many people there are, there aren’t that many ashrams. Many people are just in the world, having families and jobs and doing that.

So, is awakening possible in that context? Is your job, your life, your vocation part of your spiritual journey? From my point of view, absolutely yes. Even in the ashram, people have jobs, and it’s part of their journey too.

Rick: I want to talk about the four goals of life in a second, but based on what you just said, that Gita verse comes to mind: “One’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the dharma of another.” What is it? Something about the dharma of another bringing danger. So we shouldn’t be envious of people who seem to be able to live in ashrams, and if we have kids and a family, we shouldn’t feel like we’ve failed in our spiritual mission or any such thing, because if that’s our dharma, it’s actually going to be more evolutionary for us than trying to do somebody else’s dharma.

Ellen: Absolutely. I think the verse says, “Even if you take up the dharma of another and succeed, it is not useful. It’s better to fail than to succeed in the work of another.”

Rick: Right. It even says, “Better is death in one’s own dharma than trying to take up the dharma of another.” So we’re throwing around this word dharma a lot, and we haven’t defined that one.

Why don’t you talk about the four universal goals of life that are drawn from the teachings of the ancient Vedas? In the process, that will define dharma.

The Four Purusharthas and Higher Purpose

Ellen: Yeah, I loved coming upon those goals in my study, in my journey, and they’re called the Purusharthas. That’s literally defined—we can say it means for the sake of the soul, for the sake of the higher self, however you want to think of that. There are four interrelated goals, and the first, as you mentioned, is dharma, which I would define as living with higher purpose. It has, of course, lots of meaning to it.

When we think of dharma, we think of the cosmic order, the way, the sense of order in the universe out of which all ethics, the spiritual path, and everything else comes. That basic, fundamental law of the universe, the supportive reality of the universe itself—that is dharma.

As a life goal, I see dharma as really first and foremost—and I see this as universal for everyone—to wake up to that reality, know what it is, and know how we can cooperate with it. Then, secondarily, dharma is to discover what our unique path is, which we were just talking about. This is often called svadharma, one’s unique expression that brings one into harmony with that larger reality.

The second goal, which is what my book is about, is artha, which is defined as wealth.

Rick: Before we go to artha, I think a lot of people struggle with what their unique path is. What is my purpose in life? What should I be doing? I’m doing this job that I don’t like; isn’t there something more important that I should be doing? How does one find one’s path? Does everyone have a unique path, or are some people just meant to do regular, mundane jobs? Maybe they don’t seem mundane if that’s your dharma; maybe you enjoy them.

Ellen: I think everyone does have a unique path of expression because we’re all unique. That seems obvious to me. We look around, and we’re not duplicates, so we have a unique expression.

People are exploring dharma much more today. It’s becoming a more popular term, like yoga. People are asking, “What’s your dharma?” or thinking, “It’s my dharma.” But I find that, like many things in the West, dharma has become a thing, so people are quick to equate dharma with vocation.

Rick: I just did, actually, in my question. Of course, in the Gita verse, we could kind of go there with it, but my sense of dharma is that it has to do with the fundamental expression of our being, which includes our essential nature, our karma, our dharma, our responsibilities in life—all of that is there.

I always advise people to look at, even to look back in time, their childhood and those qualities that have always been there, that have always been evident. You look at children, and they’re so different. Usually, at a very young age, they have some kind of fundamental qualities that are evident. Some of them may be very compassionate. My older daughter was always interested in animals and had this compassionate nature. Other children are theatrical; they’re in the school play. Others are artistic, inventing things, athletic, and so on.

I say, look back at what those interests and qualities represented. When we think about that, when we look at—and I call them divine qualities—what are those soul qualities, qualities of the soul? Whether it’s wisdom, compassion, creativity, peace, or all those things, when you begin to think about that trajectory of your life and expressing those qualities, you look at it that way first: that it’s about being and becoming. What you’re going to do as a dharma is a natural reflection of that, as far as I can see.

Rick: Maybe, in light of that explanation, your dharma can shift, or you can discover a dharma that was more subtle, that you hadn’t realized. In my case, I loved drumming from the time I saw my first parade at the age of four. I was pounding on tables, and finally, ten years later, I got a drum set and played in rock bands until I was twenty. I loved that, but then I decided to become a meditation teacher, and I just dropped the drumming thing like a hot potato and plunged into teaching meditation, which I liked a lot more. That has been my direction ever since.

I wouldn’t have foreseen that when I was four, five, six, or ten years old. I didn’t really get it. I didn’t conceive of spirituality until I was about seventeen, and then everything shifted.

Ellen: Interesting. That’s very interesting. So, going from drumming and music, in a sense, into some silence, I would guess.

Rick: It was a more subtle form of creativity. I felt like I was operating from a deeper level and also doing something much more meaningful for me, ultimately, than spending my life playing in smoky nightclubs or whatever.

Ellen: Exactly, but still connecting with people.

Rick: Yeah, definitely. Let’s see. Okay, one more thing about dharma. You mentioned using a metaphor of a stream, kind of this evolutionary stream of the universe, and there’s this verse in the Gita that came to mind when you said that. Lord Krishna said:

When dharma is in decay and adharma flourishes, meaning anti-dharma flourishes, I take birth age after age.

Basically, that’s to restore dharma. It almost seems like not only individuals, but the whole society and the whole of humanity can be out of tune with dharma. There’s some higher purpose that we collectively, as well as individually, could be living, and we’ve kind of lost our way with that. So then there needs to be some kind of restoration of our alignment with that higher purpose. Would you care to comment on that?

Ellen: Sure. I really like that verse in the Gita, and many traditions have similar prophecies, in a sense: “When things get really bad, I’ll show up”—the avatar.

Rick: Here I come to save the day.

Ellen: Exactly. I think that’s been true. When we look at history, there have been these awakened beings who have come on the scene and shined a light: “Hey, this is what we are. This is how we can live in harmony with this cosmic order, with dharma, this way of righteousness, however you want to call it. This is how we can express our highest nature and not our lowest nature.”

We’ve seen that in history. We can see those shining ones. But I think we have the blessing of living in a time when it’s not about a single avatar showing up, but about what I call in the book the avatar influence. Many people are awakening today, and that’s what is needed.

We now have the dissemination of enlightenment teachings all over the planet in a way that’s never happened before. There’s an opportunity for this global awakening, and for that which brings us back to dharma to come from people everywhere. That’s really what we need, and I think it’s fabulous to live in such a time.

Rick: Yeah. You probably know that quote by Thich Nhat Hanh where he says, “The next Buddha may be the Sangha,” the collection of people. It’s kind of a many-to-many dynamic rather than a one-to-many kind of thing.

Ellen: Yes. I even quoted him in my book in that section, where he said, “What we need today”—I think he said, “What we have is homo sapien, and what we need is homo conscious.”

🎵 Artha, wealth, and ethical prosperity

Rick: Incidentally, I want to mention for those watching live that if you want to submit a question during this interview, go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. There is a form at the bottom where you can submit a question. I think the Upcoming Interviews page is under the Future Interviews menu.

Okay, let’s get on to artha. Let me pose a question to you. I live in a community which is—I was in the TM movement for many years, and I still live in a community that is one of the main hubs of that organization, even though I’m not involved in it anymore.

I have friends who became multimillionaires, and I have friends who are basically pushing seventy, in poor health, living on Social Security, and don’t know how they’re going to cope. I think, in large part, it’s been because different people have different aptitudes and so on, but a lot of people sort of just kept putting all their hopes and dreams in spiritual enlightenment and attending courses, without really taking advantage of certain educational and professional opportunities.

Maybe they’ve made a lot of spiritual progress. Not too many would say they’re enlightened, but in a way it’s kind of sad. There’s still a lot of poverty and all. This loops us back to something we were talking about: whether poverty should be associated with spirituality. We’ve concluded that it shouldn’t, but let’s talk about artha. If anything I just said triggers some thoughts that you might like to share with people, please speak them.

Ellen: Yeah, thank you for that particular reflection. As I hear you talk about that, of course artha means wealth. For me, it was like a breath of fresh air to discover in this ancient Vedic tradition, from which my path has come, that wealth was actually considered an aim of life. Of course, it’s constrained by dharma and the fourth goal, moksha, which we’ll get to—hopefully we’ll get to it in this lifetime.

Rick: Who knows? Maybe in this interview we’ll just—

Ellen: So that was really a breath of fresh air for me. My guru, Roy Eugene Davis, was a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, so I learned about Yogananda from him, and then, of course, by reading Yogananda’s works.

Yogananda was very practical. Besides being focused on people being Self- and God-realized, he was also very practical about people learning to use what he called their wisdom-guided will to live life in an abundant way and to do what they had come here to do.

For me, I think it’s really important that people understand that it’s not just about learning to meditate. I also see that this goal of artha, this goal of wealth, gets us into grappling with the world and with our situation, which can help us expand our consciousness and learn about ourselves.

We bump into situations where we learn some of those karmic imprints. One of the questions my teacher asked early on, which was a big question for me, was:

What would you do if you knew that you had all of the resources available to you to do what you felt you wanted to do, and if you knew you could not possibly fail?

He wasn’t saying that you can be anyone—that you can be a rock star, a movie star, or the head of a company. He was just asking the question as a way, I think, to help us. It did help me at that time to think, “Oh, wow, there are certain ideas I have in my mind about who I am, what’s possible for me, and what’s not possible for me.” It just kind of blew that open for me.

I see the goal of artha in the same way: it has the potential to help us uncover old ideas and old beliefs about ourselves and about life itself that are not useful to our spiritual awakening. It can work in that way as well. It can be a transformational path, and I think it’s meant to be.

Rick: Yeah, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi also had a similar attitude to Yogananda’s. He used to talk about enjoying spiritual and one hundred percent outer material success, and he said that not only are the two not inimical to one another, but they’re complementary to one another.

Ellen: Yes, and I think that’s why we have the four goals. I mean, I think, of course, if we just had artha as our number one goal and we didn’t have dharma, then we would be too distracted to have a strong enough inner life. We would also have no scruples about how we earned money.

Exactly. And, of course, that’s a lot of what we see in our world. That’s what’s in the headlines. So I think there’s an educational element to artha as one of the purusharthas—not only how we cultivate a mind that can help us do the right thing in the right way, but how we begin to teach ethics in a way that has to do with our evolutionary potential.

Ethics, non-stealing, and conscious action

Rick: Yeah, that’s an important point. Maybe we should try to dwell on that a little bit more before we go on to some other points. The ethics thing is very important to me. I’ve helped to found an organization of professional spiritual teachers because there’s been so much unethical behavior in the broader spiritual community. We felt that we needed to articulate a kind of code of ethics that students and teachers could aspire to, so that students, in particular, don’t look at teachers and say, “Well, he’s doing some screwy stuff, but he seems to be enlightened and I’m not, so I’ll just go along with it.”

In any case, a lot of those scenes end up crashing and burning and ending in disillusionment, with a lot of people hurt. This is a little bit tangential to our conversation, but do you have any thoughts on all of that?

Ellen: I think it’s critically important, and I do think it’s part of the evolution of consciousness that we’ve seen in our lifetime, because we have seen a lot of that unethical behavior by spiritual teachers and in spiritual communities. Just like any other part of human life, the very idea that in some spiritual community those things are not going to happen is a dangerous idea, because you’re dealing with human beings wherever you are.

So I think raising consciousness and having questions about what kind of ethical insight we bring into our spiritual communities, and what kind of ethical commitments we have, is incredibly important. We’ve been around—if I can say that collectively, Rick—we’ve been around long enough to see some really positive transformation in that way.

Like you say, at one point in time those things weren’t really talked about. It was like, “Okay, well, that’s the guru, and if that’s how the guru is behaving, then it must be something I don’t get.” We’ve seen a lot of destruction come out of that, and also a lack of faith in the whole spiritual process itself, which has not been helpful.

But today there have been a lot of communities and a lot of groups, perhaps like the one that you’re a part of, that are helping to raise consciousness and make it a safer place for people to be practicing and exploring.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s part of the zeitgeist, with the Me Too movement and the exposure of what’s been going on in the Catholic Church. People are fed up with that kind of stuff being associated with spirituality. They don’t want anything to do with spirituality, or they want spirituality to become what it ought to be and what the highest examples of it were.

Ellen: Exactly. From my perspective, part of that is an educational process: to know that you’re always going to be dealing with human beings. People need to be awake, whatever context they’re in, and not check their intellect and their own ethics at the door.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s jump to the Yoga Sutras for a minute, because the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali have the yamas and niyamas, which were considered by him to be essential to the spiritual path. I’ll have you tell us what those are in a second. Other traditions, Buddhist and others, also have codes of ethics that are considered essential to imbibe if you aspire to higher consciousness or higher spirituality.

Ellen: Yeah. The beauty—and perhaps the difficulty, although I don’t think it’s a difficulty—of the conversation we’re having is that in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the higher spiritual law is given. For example, in the restraints, the yamas, the first one is ahimsa, or nonviolence or nonharming.

But Patanjali doesn’t say you shouldn’t have an affair with your students. He doesn’t get into the specifics, although he talks about brahmacharya in that regard, perhaps.

Rick: Yes, exactly.

Ellen: But that’s why people study with a teacher as far as these yamas and niyamas are concerned. There’s commentary that says, “Okay, in these situations, this is how it would be applied.”

When we look at harmlessness, for example, if you start at the physical level, you don’t physically injure someone. You don’t kill. You don’t punch out your neighbor—those kinds of things. But then it’s looked at, as you know, at the mental level, and we’re looking at our speech and our thoughts. Those can be harmful as well.

So each one requires us to explore how it is to be applied, and that’s the way it should be. It is the journey. There isn’t a list of specific dos and don’ts saying, “This is how you apply it.” That’s your path of learning as you go.

Rick: Well, I think the whole Yoga Sutras is only 192 sutras or something, so obviously he meant to lay out some main points and let us work out the details.

Ellen: Yeah, because it’s about consciousness, right? You can’t have a prescription that, in a sense, is going to decide what’s happening in a living system. You have to learn how to apply these fundamental principles, which are principles of mind and consciousness—how to use them and how to apply them. That’s the way we would want it to be, but left open to interpretation.

Leaving it open to interpretation also leaves some gaps in terms of how people look at it. What is harmful? What is not harmful? That sometimes is open to interpretation.

Rick: One thing I think is interesting with all those points—the yamas and niyamas, and perhaps with many other points we could consider—is that there are levels of subtlety at which they can be considered. For instance, we’ve just kind of done that with a couple of them.

Another one you talk about a lot with reference to prosperity is non-stealing. What is that, asteya or something it’s called?

Ellen: Yes.

Rick: Obviously, we know what stealing is, and we should know what non-stealing is. Well, elaborate on that, and then I’ll make a point about it that might be a subtler level of it, perhaps. Go ahead.

Ellen: Well, it’s interesting to consider that right there in the Yoga Sutra, there is a verse that points to wealth and the nature of it. This one on non-stealing says that one who is established in non-stealing experiences the jewel of abundance, or all jewels come to that yogi. It’s translated variously.

When we look at the levels of it, at the physical level, of course, as you mentioned, most of us are pretty clear about stealing: not taking stuff that doesn’t belong to us.

But I think, as with all of the yamas and niyamas, they’re meant to be a journey in the sense of subtilization—a deeper and deeper understanding of what that’s about. It comes down to not even envying, not taking somebody else’s idea and claiming it as your own. There are all those little subtle permutations of it.

But it comes down to changing our mind from lack to abundance, because it has us look at the fact that, if we’re engaged in some kind of form of stealing—which might get us into lying or acting unethically—we won’t necessarily be walking away with something from somebody’s house, but perhaps we’re lying.

Rick: Truthfulness is another one of the things.

Ellen: Truthfulness is in there, too.

Rick: Perhaps we’re lying about our income on our taxes or something like that, because we’re of the mindset that we need to do that in order to get the money that we need. So how I see it is that these spiritual teachings are fundamentally about teaching us how to change our mind from the idea that we have to act unethically in order to get what we need.

To me, that’s the deep piece of it, because that’s about being disconnected from our own essence of being, from the source of abundance within us. We’re somehow thinking we have to manipulate others, lie, cheat, or steal in order to get our needs met.

I think what’s going on with the Yoga Sutra is: Look at these patterns in your own mind that need to be cleared up if you really want to live an abundant life. It has to happen within you first, at the level of your own mind and consciousness.

It has to happen within you first, at the level of your own mind and consciousness.

Rick: Yeah. I just can’t find it at my fingertips, but I saw this great quote from Dostoevsky the other day about truthfulness. I can’t find the quote right now, but it was about how getting into the habit of lying kind of erodes you, so that you become more base in every respect. You indulge in baser pleasures, and it’s sort of a slippery slope where things just get worse and worse.

There are some cool stories in the Mahabharata and elsewhere about people who were so true to their word that, if they said a thing, they just stuck to it—even their entire life. There was a story about Yudhishthira, one of the Pandavas, who told a white lie, and as soon as he did, his chariot wheels sank into the mud, whereas previously they had sort of hovered above it, if that’s a true story.

That whole tradition places a great deal of emphasis on truthfulness.

Ellen: Yeah, and the power of the word is really what Patanjali is pointing to with truthfulness. When one is established in truthfulness, one’s words will materialize.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Ellen: Here again, we’re talking about a very subtle metaphysical law, if you will, that has to do with our own belief systems and how we’re manifesting what we believe. It’s such a powerful teaching, and it’s about how we live with a higher awareness.

Rick: In fact, there are a lot of stories in the Vedic literature about some sage who would say something—sometimes it was a sort of curse—and because he said it, it had to come true. He couldn’t even take it back because he was so established.

That’s how the Srimad Bhagavatam came about, I think. Some young sage cursed someone and said, “You’re going to die of a snakebite,” and that was it. The guy had to die of a snakebite, but he wanted to get enlightened before he did, so they spent the week narrating the Srimad Bhagavatam.

Anyway, it’s a cool principle.

Ellen: They’re great stories because we can start looking at what we’re saying. Are we using our speech to contribute to life? Are we actually cursing others, or ourselves, with our speech and our thoughts, causing life to wither around us? Or are we contributing to its prospering with our thoughts and our speech?

There’s a lot of power in our speech, and there’s more power in it when we become conscious of it.

Rick: Yes, that reminded me of that Jesus saying, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” They’re not conscious of what they’re doing, but if we are conscious, then we’re more responsible.

Ellen: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rick: Ideally, the judge would get punished more than the person who doesn’t know right from wrong if the judge commits the same crime. But on the point of stealing, to take that one to perhaps a subtler level, I think there’s a verse in the Gita which says that he who appropriates the authorship of action unto himself, rather than realizing that it’s the Divine that’s performing the action, is said to be a thief. So that might take it to the subtlest level.

Ellen: Totally, and that gets us, in a sense, back to non-attachment that we were talking about in the beginning, which is the idea of ascribing to the small self, the ego-based self, “I am the doer,” and “I am the owner of experience,” and “I am the owner of the outcomes of that experience.” Yeah, that’s a slippery slope of identifying with that ego-based self as the doer and the owner of experience, which just a little bit of investigation will tell us. In the Gita—I can’t quote the verse to you now—but there is a teaching about the different factors of action, right? And one of them, which is called the fifth factor, is always the mysterious, the unknown element.

We have control over certain things: over how we prepare, where we’re going to do what we do. We have this Skype call, and we set it up. We set up the lighting, and we do our testing, and you read my book, and I tried to put purple on so I look nice, and all of that. But we really have no control over whether the power goes out or not.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve had that happen.

Ellen: Sure. It’s just a simple example that there’s always something that is out of our control, and so to imagine that somehow we control all outcomes is just kind of ridiculous to begin with.

🕊️ Grace, receptivity, and spiritual experience

Rick: Yeah, and that gets us into an interesting area, which—I don’t know, I bet you in your tradition you have a phrase for it. Maharishi used to call it “support of nature,” but what he meant by that was—you know that saying, like, “You got up on the wrong side of the bed,” or something? Nothing goes right for you: you hit the red lights, you don’t find the parking place, all kinds of things. You’re just kind of born under a bad sign; that was a song. Whereas for others, things seem to go quite smoothly. It’s like unseen forces, as it were, are helping to orchestrate their life, and things just are conducive to their success. That’s kind of a whole interesting mechanism that we can get into, I think.

Ellen: Yeah, in my tradition we talk about that as divine grace. There are the forces of nature, which we can learn about. We study the gunas and the different qualities in nature and how to learn how to cooperate with nature. But beyond that is this kripa, we call it grace, this element of divine grace that you also can open yourself to.

In the traditional way, we don’t create grace; we don’t cause it. But we can certainly—there seems to be some way that we can open ourselves to it. There’s a connection in my tradition—I have heard the teaching that there’s a connection between self-effort and grace, although self-effort doesn’t cause grace. So it’s sort of a mysterious connection, and I’ve seen that in my life. I think it’s just a matter of becoming receptive to that, maybe more harmonized inside of ourselves or something.

Rick: There’s that saying, “God helps those who help themselves,” and some gurus say, “Take one step toward me, and I’ll take a thousand steps toward you,” things like that. So we have to make the initial effort, perhaps, but then there do seem to be—I mean, just to get explicit—I know people who say that they have subtle perception and that they actually can see guiding spirit guides, or whatever they are, kind of hovering around and orchestrating and attending to people, even in ordinary circumstances.

So if that’s true, then there is this subtler realm in which reside subtler beings who are kind of involved in human affairs. There’s that Vedic saying, “Satyameva Jayate”—truth alone, or purity alone, is victorious. So the assumption here is that if you amass more of that, then you will attract the support of the subtler impulses of intelligence that operate in nature, and it will make your life more successful or smooth.

Ellen: Yeah, and Patanjali talks about one of the ways to raise consciousness and help clear the mind: to contemplate the consciousness of awakened beings, and so sort of tune in to a higher consciousness, a higher vibration, if you will.

For me, my ordinary experience of that is, if I allow myself to get too wrapped up with the thinking mind and its swirling nature, versus when I can cultivate a clearer mind and a quieter, more open heart, then there seems to be that resonance and that connection. It’s really not about outer circumstances, but life itself seems more supportive. I suspect it’s because I’m in a more receptive place.

Rick: Yeah, receptive is a good word there, because I think sometimes opportunities are subtle, and it takes receptivity and a sort of subtle discrimination or discernment to pick up on the correct course of action to take. It’s not necessarily announced with a bullhorn. You just have to sort of have a feeling of which way to go, an intuitive feeling, and then that kind of works out.

Ellen: Yeah, I wrote a poem about my experience of kind of shifting from just running around in the mind to being open to grace.

Rick: Do you have that at your fingertips to read, or would it take you a while to find?

Ellen: I think I can find it. Let me look. Okay. Yeah, it’s called “Fire in My Heart.”

Some days I sit near your fire, feeding it the kindling of desire. Live in the way the Buddha said and the light will grow in you. Live in the way the Buddha said and the light will grow in you. Sorrow and joy come in, sit down together as friends. Everything that is needed appears. Other days I forget about the light, set out alone in the dark, ambitious prodigal with damp wood determined to start my own fire. When the invitation to the heavenly feast arrives from the universe, I politely decline. “I have prepared a feast for you. Will you come?” “No, I am too busy with matters of life and death.” I insist on my own way, saying no to love until no becomes sand in my mouth. “Why all this suffering?” I ask. “Come, sit by the fire. Forget about life and death, being and doing, coming and going.” Soon the sitar will begin. Its notes will make you weep for everything lost and gained, for the extravagant mercy of the One.

Rick: Great, that’s nice. Is that from your book, The Moon Reminded Me?

Ellen: Yeah, that’s in The Moon Reminded Me.

Rick: Why don’t you hold that up for a second? There it is. Nice. Thank you. I’ll list the link to that on your page.

Ellen: Thank you.

Rick: A question came in. We might as well ask it. It’s a little bit out of context with what we’re talking about, but this would be a good point to ask it. I think you know this fellow; he knows you, because he said, “Thank you for your Sunday talks at the center. The energy you exude is unfailingly cheerful and tranquil.” This is Mark Peters from Santa Clara, California.

He said, “Yogananda speaks of many visions and mystical encounters in his autobiography. Has this type of extraordinary experience played a role in your own unfoldment? If so, would you be willing to share an anecdote or two?”

Ellen: Well, yes and no. So yes, there have been experiences that I’ve had along the way, just experiences in meditation—breakthroughs in meditation—which allowed me to experience a shift in consciousness. That allowed me, from time to time, to have experiences of inner phenomena that I’d read about: inner light, inner sound, and phenomena that are discussed in those teachings.

Those experiences are potentially faith-building. If you have some experience when you’re meditating, it can help you think, “Okay, this is something that the sages wrote about. Wow, I’m having that experience.” So that’s a yes in terms of phenomena.

My no is that my teacher always said, “Whatever you experience, forget about it. Just continue to go beyond that. Don’t get stuck in phenomena or feel that you’re enlightened because you saw a light in your meditation.” So the yes is that having those ecstatic experiences can be faith-building, but my no is from the tradition that I come from: keep on keeping on. That was the teaching of Lahiri Mahasaya. Don’t get stuck at any of those places of phenomena.

My no is that my teacher always said, “Whatever you experience, forget about it. Just continue to go beyond that. Don’t get stuck in phenomena or feel that you’re enlightened because you saw a light in your meditation.” So the yes is that having those ecstatic experiences can be faith-building, but my no is from the tradition that I come from: keep on keeping on. That was the teaching of Lahiri Mahasaya. Don’t get stuck at any of those places of phenomena.

So there are those experiences in meditation, and then, for me, there are the eyes-wide-open experiences in the world of seeing the nature of reality in expression. For me, those experiences are the most meaningful, whether it’s some apprehension of this divine grace, divine order, or the nature of the mind, to where I feel my heart—I would describe it as my heart opening—and it’s an awesome experience of the beauty of life, the tenderness of it, the vulnerability of it, the deep, shining core of it.

That’s why I write poetry, because I cannot put it into words. So I don’t know if that answered the question, and I’m really grateful that you’re listening and that you sent your question. I hope that was helpful.

Rick: It was helpful to me. I thought it was a good answer. People have probably heard this before: flashy experiences, while they may be interesting and nice, are not it ultimately. What we’re really aspiring to is kind of a twenty-four-seven state of realization, which is not at all flashy; it’s just extremely natural.

But it bears reminding sometimes, because when people do have some kind of flashy experience, they jump to conclusions in terms of how enlightened they are or whatever. It can be a bit of a pitfall.

Ellen: Yeah, and that’s why it’s been a blessing that my teacher has continually reminded us that those experiences do not mean that we’ve experienced the ultimate and that we should just keep going.

I do want to say that, as inspiring as the life of Paramahansa Yogananda is—and of course he’s inspired people all over the world—it is possible then, of course, to compare ourselves and our meditations to his meditation and how he describes his meditation. That’s not so helpful, I don’t think.

I think it’s useful to know that meditation, even as he taught it, is not about having ecstatic experiences; it’s about waking up.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point, and I think it bears repeating that it’s not a good habit to compare oneself to others in terms of what we think we’re experiencing versus what we think they’re experiencing.

Ellen: People are so different, aren’t they? I always say that it usually turns out that your spouse or your best friend is somebody who has very different experiences than you. So you think, “Geez, that’s not happening to me. How come?” I’ve seen that so often with couples or people who are close. Even their inclinations may be different. Maybe one is a bhakta, and they’re off to kirtan, and the other is a jnana yogi.

Rick: Sticking on the book.

Ellen: Really, exactly.

Rick: Yeah, so I mean, you just said it. I was just going to say people are wired differently, and they have different aptitudes, different inclinations, and different nervous systems. So it’s only going to create confusion if you compare yourself with them.

Even if somebody’s having all kinds of extraordinary experiences, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re more enlightened or something. It’s absurd to even ponder whether they are. It doesn’t really help, I think. Although I’ve been guilty of it myself. You get kind of impressed.

Ellen: Yeah, and then it’s really problematic if we impress ourselves—our own self.

Rick: Yeah, that’s even worse. I always say I prefer to err on the side of considering myself less evolved than I may actually be.

Kama, pleasure, and lasting happiness

Okay, so far we’ve discussed, in terms of the four—what do you call those four things again? Purusharthas?

Ellen: Yeah, purusharthas.

Rick: Okay, so we’ve discussed dharma and artha, and we’ll probably come back to artha a bit more. But the next one is kama, which means pleasure, I guess. Probably when most people hear kama, they think of the Kama Sutras, but probably there’s more to it than that, right?

Ellen: Yeah, although sexuality is certainly part of pleasure—we hope it is—and again, like wealth, for people who come onto the path of yoga, philosophy, and practice as a meditative path of self-realization and God-realization, this idea that wealth and pleasure are somehow included as life aims is, you know, there’s a break. Usually, when I introduce the purusharthas and I get to wealth and then pleasure, people just—there’s nervous laughter that breaks out in the room. Here we are in a meditation center, and now we’re going to talk about money and sex and how they are actually part of holistically living a spiritually conscious life.

It makes sense, really, when we think about it. If you were a person who was an excellent meditator and you were “spiritually awake,” but you were miserable and didn’t enjoy life, then what’s the point? To me, it’s sort of obvious that enjoyment of life is critical to even following a path.

Rick: Yeah, and like the other things we talked about, there are different flavors and levels of enjoyment. I mean, you can experience a lot of bliss both in meditation and perpetually as a result of meditation. That’s a form of pleasure.

There’s a friend of mine who wrote a book called Happy for No Reason. It’s not like you’re indulging in anything external that’s causing this happiness; it just is there in your heart, in your experience, as a kind of baseline.

Ellen: And as a life goal, it’s tremendously instructive, because in order to actually enjoy life, we have to study the nature of our own mind and learn about the nature of happiness and the nature of the soul.

As you were pointing out, there’s a beautiful book title, by the way: Being Happy for No Reason. We have that capacity, and ultimately yoga points us in that direction—to learn how to distinguish between the happiness that we experience from a pleasure that we experience from the senses; the pleasure that we experience from meeting a goal, for example, in life, when we feel happy because we accomplish something; the happiness that we experience when we serve, when we do something to care for others; and the happiness that we experience that’s inherent to our being, which is the bliss of the soul.

Learning about those distinctions and where they lead is actually essential to our really enjoying life. We know—and that was part of my pre-getting-onto-the-path journey—that I was just disappointed. I was just like, “Disappointed? Wait a minute. I have this, I got that, I did this, I achieved that, but there’s something missing.”

I didn’t really know at the time that what was missing was myself. Of course, myself wasn’t missing; the Self is never missing. But my ability to connect to myself was not there, and I didn’t know who I was. So I was seeking that enjoyment of life completely externally.

As a life goal, it is really essential to learn about where we find happiness and where we ultimately find bliss. It changes everything.

Rick: Yeah. Would you say—I’ve heard it said that anything that we—well, there’s that great Upanishad. You can probably quote it: that it’s not for the sake of the wife that the wife is dear, but for the sake of the Self; and not for the sake of the friends, or whatever, but for the sake of the Self. It ticks off a whole bunch of different things, and it says in every case that whatever fulfillment we derive from the outer experience is actually a reflection of the inner fulfillment.

Ellen: Yeah, exactly. And what we love in life—even in that quote in the Upanishads, wealth is included in that one.

Rick: Right. Not for the sake of wealth is wealth dear, but for the sake of the Self.

Ellen: Exactly. It’s such a beautiful quote. What we really love is the Self. We love the bliss of the soul, and we love beingness. When we love another, we’re loving that essence of being. That’s the truth of it.

Rick: Yeah, I think a good example that might illustrate that point is, you know, if we consider someone who’s very wealthy and has a very attractive spouse, a beautiful home, and everything that they could want materially, and yet they have severe insomnia or they’re really ill or something like that, then they can’t enjoy any of those things.

Whereas if a person is feeling wonderful inside, just full of happiness and bliss intrinsically and naturally, then even living in very simple circumstances, that person tends to be happy and tends to enjoy the things that they have.

Ellen: Yeah, and really, as a practice, as I was mentioning, it’s learning about different levels, if you were—different levels of happiness, what brings us what, and what’s temporary and what’s not.

Once we get that distinction, we can—and this is a basic teaching in the Vedic system—begin to unhook from conditions as the source of our happiness or our security. That’s a point at which we really enter more deeply into the path.

I was talking about my own journey of disappointment: “What’s going on here?” That’s a place where a lot of people come. It’s an entry, a trailhead, an entry onto the path, where we feel we’re suffering because we don’t know how to find happiness. So we have an understanding that what we’ve gathered, what we’ve been able to bring to ourselves, has not brought the quality of lasting happiness that we’re looking for. It ultimately disappoints because it changes and is subject to change.

That awakening doesn’t mean that we don’t enjoy the things in our life anymore, which I think is an important distinction. It’s not that we have to shun our favorite flavor of ice cream, or the things that we enjoy, or the things that we have and appreciate. It’s that we just become aware of the distinction between the quality of happiness that we’re looking for—which is unconditional and can only be found within us—and those temporary pleasures.

Rick: Yeah, so just because something is transitory doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy it. But there have been notorious examples of people who tried to make transitory things perpetual. The Romans would have orgies and they would—well, it’s kind of too graphic to describe—but they would do certain things so that they could continue eating and stuff like that.

So enjoy your meal, but then that’s fine. It came and went, but still there’s this baseline of fulfillment that doesn’t depend on whether you get this meal or that meal or whatever.

Ellen: Exactly. We don’t ascribe our well-being, happiness, or security to those things, because that’s the mistake that keeps people tethered to them, looking for the next thing, the next lover, or the next job that’s ultimately going to do it.

It’s just unhooking from that, because the teachings tell us—and most of us know from our own experience—that it’s simply a source of sorrow and suffering to make that mistake. It’s a fundamental error.

✨ Abundance, responsibility, and the collective awakening

Rick: Yeah. I read those statistics in the beginning about how people are living paycheck to paycheck and they’re in debt and everything else. At Christmastime every year, they always show on the news these mob scenes in malls and stores. They talk about how much people are shopping, and you see these people fighting over the latest bauble.

Sometimes, when I see that kind of thing, I think, well, that’s probably why a lot of them are in debt. They’re craving this stuff, which they probably don’t need. Then there’s the new iPhone you’ve got to get, and so on. If you’re looking for all your fulfillment in these outer circumstances, chances are you may compromise your financial health.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s really a good point, and there are two things I want to say about that, and hopefully I don’t lose them.

One is that it’s compensation. We all do it in some way. You’re describing it in a big way, right? Compensation—people trying to make up for how they haven’t been with somebody, or trying to show somebody that they love them by getting more and giving more gifts, or whatever.

That points to this life aim of enjoying life and appreciating it in ways that are about the soul, for the sake of the soul.

Then there’s also the other piece I wanted to mention when you talk about living beyond our means, also as a way of compensation, right? For not being connected to ourselves and doing what brings us joy, what has heart and meaning, we get into these behaviors that I would call stealing.

Living beyond our means is actually stealing from ourselves, and in a big way. In the way that our country is so in debt, we’re stealing from future generations, and we’re stealing from the environment itself—the way that we plunder the Earth.

So this article, in my mind, has tremendous ramifications in terms of how we live.

Rick: Very good point. It may sound harsh, but I sometimes think of those who are obfuscating the whole environmental crisis and climate change, and all this, as being guilty of intergenerational genocide, because there are going to be very severe consequences to this whole thing.

If we’re so living for the moment, or for the next quarter—in terms of the quarter of a year—or for the next election that we want to win, that we ignore and lose the big picture, then we’re stealing big time.

Ellen: Exactly. And there is no real wealth in that, because you’re always chasing the next thing. So to find out about what real wealth is, in my mind, is critically important to awakening on our planet.

Rick: And those short-sighted ways of being that we just described are also stifling possibilities. They’re stifling potential solutions that could be much more wholesome.

Also, talk about truthfulness. There was a book called Merchants of Doubt, and it talks all about how the cigarette industry hired all these PR firms and everything to sow doubt about whether cigarettes cause cancer. They knew that cigarettes caused cancer, but they wanted to make their money and sell their cigarettes.

Some of the very same PR firms are working for the anti-climate-change interests and the oil companies now, telling lies in order to fuel greed.

Ellen: Yeah, and greed is really at the core of it. If we look all the way down, it’s greed that’s at the core. But below greed is the insatiable ego-self, always trying to satisfy itself and its longings. It cannot be satisfied from that level of reality.

That is why it’s critically important that people wake up. It’s the most important thing that’s needed on our planet at this time, because from that level, the problems won’t be solved.

It is critically important that people wake up. It’s the most important thing that’s needed on our planet at this time.

Rick: Yeah, I’m glad we’re coming around to this point. It’s worth just dwelling on it for a moment. What we’re saying here is that, ultimately, all the world’s problems are symptomatic of undeveloped consciousness.

If consciousness, individually and collectively, were sufficiently developed, most of these problems—or, if not all, then solutions to them—would just kind of be found. Either they would disappear because we wouldn’t be intentionally creating them, or we’d find means of ameliorating them.

Ellen: I believe that, and I think it ties into the fourth goal, if I can say that.

Rick: Yes. I’m thinking we should get to that on a brighter note.

Ellen: As Moksha, we’re here to awaken, to experience liberation of consciousness from this identification with the small self, with the ego self. We’re here to find freedom from that in this lifetime, and to move out of this framework of spirituality that enlightenment is for some special people in another time or some future time, or that this avatar, this person, is going to come and save the world.

Moksha and Awakening to Interconnectedness

These four goals that we’re talking about are universal goals, and they’re for everybody. And guess what? Besides Dharma and Artha and Kama, we have Moksha. It’s like, okay, we’re here to wake up. As you were just saying, we can see that this is the critical factor: How do we not plunder the earth? How do we stop going to war over our differences? We wake up, and we wake up to the fundamental connectedness of everyone and everything.

These four goals that we’re talking about are universal goals, and they’re for everybody. And guess what? Besides Dharma and Artha and Kama, we have Moksha. It’s like, okay, we’re here to wake up. As you were just saying, we can see that this is the critical factor: How do we not plunder the earth? How do we stop going to war over our differences? We wake up, and we wake up to the fundamental connectedness of everyone and everything.

Rick: Yeah. Do you think that the Purusharthas—that’s the word, right? Purusharthas?

Ellen: Yes.

Rick: The four things: Are they in any way sequential, or did they sort of arise simultaneously, just the way the limbs of our body kind of grow simultaneously?

Ellen: I think that’s a yes-and. So, yes, in my mind, they’re sequential, and yes, they’re simultaneous. I don’t think that it’s useful to hold them like, okay, first we do Dharma, then we do Artha, then we do Kama, and then, if we’re lucky, we have time in our life when we’re retired and we start focusing on Moksha.

My teacher often tells the story that people would say to him, “Well, I figure that when I’m getting ready to leave this body—because everyone is already enlightened at the core of their being, that’s our essential truth—then I’ll just wake up to that on my way out.” His response to that was always, “Well, that’s just cutting it too close.”

Also, if you’ve ever been with someone making their transition, that’s not the time when you want to try to be accomplishing that goal. You want to do it before, and of course that’s what all the traditions say.

Phil Goldberg, who wrote the foreword to my book, likened the Purusharthas to the four legs of a table, so that they can bring a balanced approach to our everyday life and our spiritual pursuits.

Given all that, yes, they are intertwined and interdependent. We could have talked the whole show about how they’re intertwined and interdependent. But there also is something to be said about the sequential nature of how the Hindu tradition, the Vedic tradition, has looked at stages of life.

There’s Dharma as a young person, when you’re getting your ethical education and your moral and spiritual values that are inculcated at a young age. Then you become a householder in the world, and you’re learning about wealth.

I always think it’s interesting if we look at that sequentially. That means that what would be called the forest-dweller stage, or retirement stage, is when you start looking at pleasure, which is interesting to me, because perhaps it’s that we have a greater capacity to see the actual nature of beauty in life. I don’t know. I haven’t completely thought that one through, but I’m thinking about it.

Then Moksha is when you can focus more attention on it. So that is there, but they’re all at once, and some of those periods of life perhaps have a greater orientation. Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, it does. I was thinking that if we’re, let’s say, doing a regular meditation practice, then Moksha is growing. The samskaras are being worked out, consciousness is becoming clearer, and the mind is becoming more clear. Liberation is being cultured, or it’s growing. It may not be complete or final, but there’s something in that direction.

As you do that, naturally you’re going to be more aligned with Dharma. You’re going to perhaps have more energy and creativity, which will help with Artha, and you’re going to feel better and enjoy yourself. Your senses are going to be clearer, so there’s more capacity for Kama. They’re all growing simultaneously.

Ellen: Absolutely. That was a beautiful way to describe it. That is how I see it. If you’re moving along on this spiritual path, you can’t really help but lift all the legs of the table up.

Rick: Yeah, if you pull one leg of a table, the others are going to come along.

Ellen: That’s right, that’s right. And if you don’t have one in there, you’re going to be off-kilter. That’s a beautiful way of looking at it, and that’s been my experience anyway.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I thought, well, okay, I’m going to just meditate and sort of get out of this whole thing. But no, yoga brings you back into the world to live a spiritually conscious life, and has you engaging in life in a purposeful way and in an enjoyable way.

Ideally, that light of Moksha is there. You’re making progress toward it, but it’s also a goal that I think we need to keep in front of us. Otherwise, we get all about accomplishing something—even on the spiritual path, we’re going to accomplish something spiritual.

Rick: Perhaps we could talk about service a little bit. I used to—I don’t know, when I wasn’t as happy a person as I am now—very much be inspired by the idea of not getting incarnated anymore, just getting out of here, being done with it.

Over the years I’ve felt that we’re all instruments of the Divine to one degree or another. Obviously, if God is omnipresent, if God is really the essence of everything, then we are like a sense organ of that. If we can serve, if we can be an instrument of some sort of divine plan, then what’s the rush?

I saw this YouTube video of some old yogi, and someone asked him about reincarnation. He said, “I don’t care. Whatever God wants, I’m happy to just serve.” Do you have any comments on that?

Ellen: That’s a beautiful way to put it. To me, that’s like serving without attachment to results and serving for the joy of it. Tagore has a beautiful poem where he said, “I awoke and discovered that service was joy.”

It’s the opportunity that is given to love and to serve, to participate—that is it. But when we get attached to what we’re doing, looking for the results in it, trying to liberate ourselves as a side benefit, or whatever the idea is about it, ultimately that gets in the way of the joy of it.

Creativity, joy, and the flow of grace

Rick: Yeah. Another thought that’s been kicking around my head as I was reading your book and listening to your various talks is that I’ve heard from physicists that at the level of the vacuum state, or the most fundamental level of creation, there’s more latent energy in each cubic centimeter than there is in the entire manifest universe at an expressed level.

If there’s a correlation between consciousness in its ultimate sense and what physics understands to be the ultimate reality, then our own being, our own consciousness, ultimately is a tremendous repository of energy. We might also throw in creativity.

If we can have access to that, and if we can get the pipeline connected between that and our active life, then that obviously has tremendous relevance to affluence, because it gives us the wherewithal to accomplish more.

Ellen: It does, and I would say to accomplish with joy. There’s a different quality to it. I don’t mean that it’s never hard, that it’s never difficult, or that it’s never challenging. But my experience is that when I feel connected to that creative energy of the universe, and I want to call it that, somehow connected into this stream that is bringing forth the divine idea or divine insights, I feel somehow that I’m connected, that I’m in the right place at the right time, and just in the stream of it.

There’s a sweetness to that. There’s a joy to that that’s different from striving after a result, even though there’s the inspiration to do something, to offer something. There’s a way of being in it that is finding some delight in the way.

Sometimes I’ll put it this way: Sometimes I feel like in my life I’m just doing the best that I can to keep up with grace.

Sometimes I feel like in my life I’m just doing the best that I can to keep up with grace.

Rick: That’s great. Kicking and screaming.

Ellen: Well, sometimes it’s like that. One time I described my spiritual life like a breech birth, which wasn’t really a great metaphor for me. But it was sort of like going into my life butt-first and then seeing so much in hindsight about this life force that was active in my life and moving into experiences and awakening.

I was looking at it in hindsight, sort of my life in my rearview mirror. At some point I said, no, let me just open my eyes to what is here right now and not be looking so much in hindsight and figuring it out. Let me just be awake where it is.

Rick: Yeah. That thing you said about joy kind of reminded me of a verse. I think it might be from the Brahma Sutras, but it’s, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.”

A nice metaphor for that is if you’re lying in a bathtub and you’ve been lying still for a while, you may not feel the warmth of the water. But if you start sloshing around, it starts to feel really warm.

Somehow, to take that verse from the Gita, “Yogastha kuru karmani”—established in Being, perform action—when action is performed while established in Being, it kind of stirs up the bliss.

Ellen: Yeah, it does. Yogananda, I think probably paraphrasing that verse, said, “This side of the transcendental field is ever-new joy.”

Rick: This side of it, he said?

Ellen: Yeah, this side, meaning here we are in this expressive field, and in that expressive field is ever-new joy. You know, the expansive nature of Brahman—it’s ever-new.

Rick: Yeah. Maharishi used to say that the purpose of creation is the expansion of happiness. If we take the word Lila, which means play, why do you play? Because it’s fun. It makes you happy.

If that’s true, then we’re kind of fulfilling the very purpose of creation by living in such a way as to be more joyful.

Ellen: Yeah. For me, there’s a quality of greater aliveness in that. And I don’t mean that as, again, we talked about earlier, like happiness that comes from externals. I mean just the experience of the beauty of life, the tenderness of life, and the love that is present. It brings such joy to my heart and my being, and even in the midst of sorrow, it is there.

In the deepest sorrow, when you experience someone passing from this realm whom you love, the way the heart breaks, the tenderness, and the sense of presence that is there—to me, that is part of the beauty and, in a deep way, part of the bliss even.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s not symptomatic of being a schlep in terms of your level of consciousness. I mean, there are all sorts of beautiful stories of great saints and sages who experienced appropriate grief and so on when someone dear to them died.

Ellen: Yeah, exactly. Even in the midst of sorrow, there’s a quality of Being that can remain. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Rick: Yeah, it doesn’t get perturbed.

Ellen: And it’s big enough to allow the sorrow to be. I think it’s a mistake people often make on the path, that they’re not supposed to feel grief, they’re not supposed to feel anger, they’re not supposed to feel sorrow.

Well, I don’t get that. It seems to me you would be sort of ossified, you’d be mummified. Why would we want to not have emotion? I think that what those teachings are about is that you don’t want to be stuck in that, in the potentially reactive quality of an emotion.

But it’s not that you don’t—for goodness’ sake, it’s not that we don’t want to feel. At least that’s not true for me.

Rick: Yeah, when I was about 19 or so, I had been with a girlfriend who had previously had a problem with heroin. We kind of broke up because I was going for meditation and wanted to go on long courses and stuff, and she wasn’t interested. It looked like she was going to go back to her previous lifestyle, and I was kind of upset by that. I went to my TM teacher and told her what was going on, and she said, “Be an ocean.” Just that one phrase helped a lot.

Ellen: Beautiful. Yeah, it gave me chills when you said that.

Rick: There’s a verse from the Isha Upanishad which has always puzzled me a bit, and you deal with it very beautifully. I’ve heard you talk about it in some of your interviews. The verse is:

They enter into blinding darkness who worship avidya, that is, ignorance; into still greater darkness, as it were, do they enter who delight in vidya.

So I’d love to hear your commentary on that.

Ellen: The Isha Upanishad really says it all. It is kind of a surprising one, and I like it for that reason, because we’re familiar with many scriptures that say, “Okay, in the world you’re going to have trouble. Don’t put your hopes there. You’re going to have trials and tribulations, and you’re not going to find it there.” So we’re used to that, but here’s one that says, “Okay, you’re going to have trouble in the world, but in the inner life—vidya, this knowledge from within—if you’re only focused there, you’re going to have more trouble.”

So that’s one of those teachings where you say, “What? Really? I mean, I thought it was all about that.” For me, that Upanishad points to the middle way, which is that it’s neither in the world nor exclusively in the inner realm of meditation. We have to find this balance of really being awake in the world, so that’s what it means to me.

Rick: Yeah, and just another possible interpretation of it: I’ve seen people who have focused so exclusively on the inner that they became not only dysfunctional but kind of crazy with reference to the outer, and actually had to be brought down in some way or given sedatives or something, because they dove in without proper integration.

Ellen: Yeah, certainly the danger of spinning out, right, and not being able to ground the spiritual experience in the world.

Rick: I had a couple of friends who actually committed suicide, who just kind of went off the deep end, so it’s important to stay balanced.

Ellen: Totally. Again, both are necessary. We’ve heard that saying: It’s easy to be a saint on the mountaintop, right? For me, that’s about how it’s possible to think that we’re more enlightened than we really are just by isolating ourselves in our own inner world.

Relationships as a Mirror for Samskaras

But in the world of relationship, we get to learn about our edges, we get to learn about our foibles, and we get to unlock some of our samskaras, some of the patterns in our mind that, if we were not perturbed, if somebody wasn’t pointing them out to us or rubbing up against us to ignite that fire, we might not know about ourselves.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve lived in monastic settings for years, and you can get very idiosyncratic. You can get very hung up in your own mindset without proper checks and balances, as you might have in an actual relationship.

It was very good for me to get married—a little hard on my wife at first because I was such a nutcase—but she’s very practical and down-to-earth. She was in the corresponding program for women but somehow maintained greater practicality than I did.

In any case, the crucible of that close relationship, where you just can’t get away with your BS, can be very evolutionary if you don’t run away from it.

Ellen: Yeah, I have found it to be so. I feel very fortunate to be married to a man who’s also a yogi on a spiritual path. We have different gurus, and we’re in different traditions, but the intention is still the same. For us, our marriage has been a gift to our awakening path.

✨ Awakening as a gradual process

Rick: How are you doing on time? You okay?

Ellen: I’m good.

Rick: Okay, good. There are a few questions that you sent me as notes that I think would be good to ask, because they’re really good questions and I probably wouldn’t have come up with them myself, at least not all of them.

Do you feel we’ve sufficiently described what the awakening process is? You posed the question, “How would you describe the awakening process to someone who isn’t sure what you mean by that?”

Let me just add a little sub-note to that question. A lot of times people refer to “their awakening”—“I had my awakening”—and as much as I dwell on this topic, I often think, “What do they mean by that exactly?” It’s like using the word “liquid”: “I drank some liquid.” That could mean any number of things.

Right. For me, in the tradition of Kriya Yoga that I studied and practiced for many years, awakening is coming to know—not just know about, but know directly in your own experience—that what you are is a spiritual being. It’s being able to observe the nature of the mind and the nature of reality, to have insight into that, but also direct experience of it.

Ellen: Right. For me, in the tradition of Kriya Yoga that I studied and practiced for many years, awakening is coming to know—not just know about, but know directly in your own experience—that what you are is a spiritual being. It’s being able to observe the nature of the mind and the nature of reality, to have insight into that, but also direct experience of it.

For me, the awakening process is something that happens over time. I know that there are people who do have spontaneous experiences of waking up and are just awake, but in my experience, and that of many people I have met over time, it’s a gradual process of the mental field becoming clarified. The inner light of consciousness becomes perceptible; it is no longer obscured by the thinking mind or the sense mind.

Rick: If you don’t mind my asking, has that happened for you?

Ellen: Yeah, I mean, of course, over time. It’s sort of like a sunrise.

Rick: Right. When did it exactly rise?

Ellen: What I can say is that over the years, it’s become clearer to me. My reactive nature is much less, so that has settled down.

I think it’s possible for people to wake up and become self-realized—to know who they are because they know about it and experience it directly—but then, is that full-on enlightenment? No, I don’t see it that way. I see it as a process of awakening to who you are. Then there’s karma to work out, and there are samskaras in the mental field that are yet to be cleared.

In my experience, do I know what I am? Yes. Do I see the nature of life and reality? Yes. Is there more? Yes, I believe there’s more.

Rick: Yeah, I think sunrise is a good metaphor. I just checked my weather app, and the sunrise this morning was at 7:27. I know it was light before then, but it wasn’t as light as it was when the sun first peeked over the horizon, and that wasn’t as light as it is now. It’s like 1:40 in the afternoon here, so it’s probably a good metaphor.

Many people do say—and maybe you could comment—that there is a moment which is really the watershed moment, or the turning point, between not being awake and being awake, but that there’s still a great deal of refinement and evolution possible. I think Rupert Spira sent me an email recently in which he said, “There’s an end to the path to God, but there’s no end to the path in God.”

Ellen: Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. It makes me just stop and breathe and reflect on that.

I think one of the questions about liberation, about enlightenment, is whether there is a steady state of that. Certainly, the witness of the sages says yes, and the technical nature of the Yoga Sutra and other scriptures says yes.

There’s a point at which the mental field—not only the thinking mind, but the buddhi, the intellect—becomes so purified, so sattvic in its nature, that it is similar to the light of the Self, which can then shine through it completely. There’s also an awakening energetically of Kundalini, in which the person no longer falls back into forgetfulness or delusion.

Rick: Yeah, Joan Shivaputra Harrigan talks about reaching the Makara point—maybe that’s how it’s pronounced—at which point the energy can’t go down again. There’s that verse in the Gita that you just reminded me of: The sage of steady intellect—the intellect is said to be like a candle that does not flicker in a windless place—reaches a sort of silence or steadiness that isn’t perturbed by external circumstances.

Ellen: Yeah. In terms of my experience on the path, it’s again like the sunrise. There’s progress toward that steadiness, toward clarity.

I was having a conversation with Edwin Bryant, who has a beautiful commentary on the Yoga Sutra, and he was talking about how our spiritual journey is really about “sattva-sizing.” He made up that word: sattva-sizing our life and the mental field, so that we become more and more illumined, more and more clear. That’s how I see the journey.

Rick: Yeah. In terms of the gunas, they say that tamas has a hiding quality, an obscuring quality, whereas sattva is translucent, I guess you would say. It doesn’t obscure the Self.

That’s why the whole deal about ethical behavior, purification, yoga, and so on—not that you couldn’t possibly have a glimpse of the Self, or even a perpetual one, with more tamas and rajas in the system, but it’s just less likely.

Ellen: Yeah, and it makes sense to me. That’s one of the reasons why I fell in love with yoga, because I didn’t have to check my intellect at the door. These things made sense to me—the mechanics of it, how it works—and then, when you start to test it out in your own experience, you find, “Oh, yeah, I can see that. I can see how that works.”

My mental field is becoming brighter. I am able to experience the rising of a samskara, and there’s a little bit of a pause space in there now where there wasn’t before. There was just the “Woooam!”—the snake bite coming out, right?

Now it moves slower, so there’s a choice point in there. There are things that we can observe.

One of the things I’d like to say is that one of the things I found refreshing about yoga, of course, was the teaching that a spiritual practice is not about creating a spiritual condition. When I talk about sattva-sizing, which I like that word, it’s about making our life more peaceful and more luminous. But we’re not doing that because we want to become spiritual; we’re doing that because we want to be able to express more fully that which we already are.

We’re not doing that because we want to become spiritual; we’re doing that because we want to be able to express more fully that which we already are.

Rick: Yeah, well, that’s kind of what “spiritual” should mean anyway. That’s what I think. But there’s a lot of confusion about that, and it’s easy to fall into the trap that somehow I’m going to become spiritual when I meditate, or if I follow the yamas and niyamas, I’ll become a spiritual person. No, you just become a clinging person trying to be spiritual.

There’s a very funny guy named JP Sears who has been on BatGap, who has this whole spiel, a whole shtick, about being ultra-spiritual. He’s written something like “Twelve and a Half Steps to Becoming Ultra-Spiritual,” and he makes all these funny YouTube videos.

Ellen: I’m going to have to look for that. I think having a sense of humor about it is really helpful.

Rick: Yeah, you’ll see him on that. If you look in the BatGap index, you’ll see Sears. Remember Sears Roebuck? What do you think about people who were enlightened, or awakened to whatever degree, to a significant degree? I always avoid the “e-word,” because it has this sort of superlative, static connotation, and I always feel like there could be further refinement. But let’s just use it for the time being. What do you think about people who were enlightened and yet then begin to succumb, in older age, to Alzheimer’s, as Robert Adams did? Do you think that they lose their inner awakening as the physical instrument deteriorates, or is it somehow awake to itself regardless of what happens to the body at that stage?

Ellen: Yeah, that is what I think. My husband’s guru is Haridas Baba, or Babaji, as they called him, the founder of the Mount Madonna Community and Mount Madonna Center. At one time, he had a question for Babaji that was similar: Why do these things happen to people who are awake? Why do things happen to the body? Babaji said, “The body has its own karma.”

I thought, “Oh, that’s just such a brilliant way to express it.” The Self, that which we are, does not have karma. But the body and the mind—your mind, of course, is a reservoir of karma—have karma. When you think of cause and effect at the physical level, of course the body would have karma, and the mind too. But that doesn’t mean that the Self does.

Rick: Sure, but yoga aspires to purify the body and make it a more fit instrument for the realization of the Self. So the question is, once the Self has been realized, but then the body begins to deteriorate, or maybe you have a stroke, or Alzheimer’s, or you’re impaired in some way, it seems like you’re reversing the process of preparation that yoga undertook. Could you therefore lose the realization, or is one somehow, once one has realized, independent of whatever happens to the body?

Ellen: That’s what I think: The realization does not have to be subject to the body. Ideally, I think our spiritual practice does remove some of those karmic influences. That’s one of the goals, right? That’s why yogis are focused on a healthy body and a healthy mind, so that we can be awake, live a long time, and experience liberation in this lifetime.

I have seen many very healthy yogis who have adopted that lifestyle, my own teacher among them. He’s in his late eighties, and he has a very bright and healthy body and mind. Ideally, that’s what we want to see. But if there is karma left in the body or the mind, does that take away from the awakeness of the Self? I wouldn’t think so, and I don’t think that it’s necessary to superimpose the outer on the inner experience.

Rick: So it just impairs the ability to function in certain ways, but it’s not necessarily going to impair the Self’s record. It does say in the Gita, for instance, that the Self realizes itself by itself. It’s not like we realize it as if it were a thing separate from us that could realize it.

Ellen: Exactly. If you take that path—if somebody has something happen physically, then it takes away from their illumination—it also tweaks the goal, as if somehow we’re looking for a perfect body and a perfect mind, and that means enlightenment. But that’s not the standard.

Rick: Right. Obviously, there were all kinds of cases, like Ramana dying of cancer and experiencing a lot of pain, but apparently, from what he said, having it exert no influence on his realization.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s beautiful to read his story. People would say, “I’m dying.” He would respond, “Where would I go?”

Rick: I think that’s what he said. “Please don’t leave us.” “Where would I go?” And then, of course, there are the kinds of things that Yogananda talked about in his book, interacting with Sri Yukteswar after he had died, and Sri Yukteswar being very much alive, just in a different, or subtler, body. So there’s that whole consideration.

Ellen: Yeah, which is an interesting one in itself. Some people feel that there is ultimately no personal Self; therefore, when the body dies, there isn’t going to be anything left, and reincarnation is nonsense because that would imply that there’s something or someone to reincarnate.

Rick: I could explain that away, but would you like to give it a crack?

Ellen: Well, I don’t have a memory of another lifetime, so I don’t know. I will say that it makes sense to me that the mind carries the blueprint. I think it was the Dalai Lama who said that just because the body dies, we don’t have evidence that the mind does as well.

People confuse the mind with the brain. The brain dies with the body as a physical organ, but there’s no evidence at this point that the mind dies. Along with the mind is where the karmic storehouse is, which, according to the theories of reincarnation, would give rise to another birth to work out those impressions, those karmic impressions.

To me, it makes sense just observing nature, the cyclic nature of things. Why would we be any different? Why would we be separate and apart from nature, which is birth and death, and birth and death?

Rick: Plus, there’s tons of evidence in terms of little kids having detailed recollections of past lives. People look up all the evidence, and it’s kids talking about what kind of plane someone flew in World War II, who his buddies were, what his name was—all kinds of things.

Ellen: I know I’ve had some experiences, although you don’t know—at least I don’t know—whether you manufactured them in your mind or whether they’re really a spiritual insight. I saw my father after he left his body, and that’s a common experience for people, by the way.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Ellen: People don’t talk about it because it sounds too crazy, but it’s an interesting phenomenon. I wasn’t looking for him, and I wasn’t trying to have a séance or anything like that. It just showed up. I could see him. It wasn’t a physical appearance, but it was a subtle realization that that’s who it was. It was a really beautiful experience for me, actually, because my father was agnostic.

I was always—I don’t know about reincarnation—but I came in with spiritual yearnings. I was in a family without religious inclination or spiritual inclination, and so I often think, purely on the psychological level, that I was there to balance out the family.

He didn’t really oppose my journey, but he didn’t seem to have that for himself. When I saw him after he had left his body, the insight and communication that came was him just showing up and saying, “Well, it’s true.” It was like a blessing.

Whether that just came from some pattern in my mind, I don’t really know, except that I know how the experience felt for me. It was very faith-building to have that experience.

Rick: Yeah, I’m inclined to believe it. It’s one of those things that I think are getting more and more into popular culture these days. There are so many television shows about this kind of thing, and I think people are just beginning to get it under their belts—that this is the way the universe works.

Closing reflections

Whereas quite some time ago, one might have been burned at the stake for believing such things, now it seems like society as a whole is evolving toward more profound understandings. Is there anything you think you might have wanted to say that we didn’t get to? Some poem you’d like to read in closing, or anything that, I don’t know, half an hour from now, after we’ve hung up, you’re going to say, “Oh, I wish we had thought of that”?

Ellen: Well, probably that will be there. But yeah, poems are always a great way for me to say what I can’t say.

Rick: While you’re looking for the poem, let me make some closing remarks so that I don’t have to make mundane remarks after you read your beautiful poem.

Everyone listening or watching has been listening to an interview with Yogacharya Ellen Grace O’Brien. She’ll have a page on BatGap.com, on which I’ll link to her books and websites. One of her websites is on the screen right now, and that’s one of the sites I’ll be linking to.

And then another is—oh, that’s her book. Another is—there it is. There’s Ellen’s website. It’s EllenGraceOBrien.com, yes, and you have another one, csecenter.org, which is the center that you run in San Jose. Obviously, people can get in touch with you through those sites. You travel around and give courses, and you have regular weekly meetings there in San Jose for those who live in the area, so people can get in touch with you.

Ellen: Great. There are also things happening online, so all of that is on the website.

Rick: They have webinars and things like that.

Ellen: Yeah, at EllenGraceOBrien.com.

Rick: Great.

Ellen: This is a little poem about the awakening journey. It’s also from The Moon Reminded Me.

In the heart is a well Filled with the sound of silence. Drink from it. One taste changes everything. How do I know? The day I stopped sitting on the edge And fell in told me this.

Rick: Nice one.

Ellen: The day I stopped sitting on the edge and fell in told me this.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, well, thanks so much, Ellen. I’ve really enjoyed both preparing for this interview all week and spending this time with you.

Ellen: Thank you so much, Rick. It was really a pleasure for me and an honor to be on your program. I really want to thank you for all that you put into this website. It’s really an inspiration, and the work that you do—I mean, preparing—is not just the conversation that’s heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul, but also the time you spent learning about my work and the work of others you bring onto the program. Deep bows, and thank you for that.

Rick: I kind of multitask. This afternoon, I’ll be out cross-country skiing in the woods, listening to something or other. I do that while cutting the grass and doing whatever else. It’s a nice way to keep your attention on this stuff and prepare for these interviews.

Ellen: Well, it’s wonderful work, and I’m glad it’s prospering. I encourage people to keep supporting it.

Rick: Thank you very much. Okay, thank you to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we will see you next week.