695. Scott Hiegel

[Music]

Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We've done nearly 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you'll see them all organized in a number of different ways.

And there's also a menu called content search, which is a new one, which has, I'll just explain this briefly, has two different ways of interacting with the content. One is that you can search for any word or phrase, and it'll instantly show you a list of any interviews in which that word or phrase was mentioned. And you can click on that listing and you'll be taken right to that spot in video where it was mentioned.

And the other is the BatGap bot, which is a AI chat bot through which you can interact with all the content of all the interviews plus much, much more, which you'll see if you click on the link there, you'll see what's going on. And a lot of that has been made possible by the support of volunteers. So there's a number of ways in which you can volunteer, and if you'd like to do that, get in touch.

All of this is also made possible through the financial support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page describing alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Scott Heigl. Scott lives in La Quinta, California and runs a business consulting and investment banking business called SoulQuest. He has a BBA from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA from UCLA.

He's been a former CPA, CFA, he likes acronyms, vice president of corporate finance and entrepreneur. enjoys writing and talking about his experiences with Kundalini, which is why I'm talking to him today, and his lifelong rollercoaster and at times perilous search for inner peace, the divine, love and higher consciousness.

Through speaking, outreach, film, poetry and other creative expression, his goal is to entertain and inform people about the gifts and profound importance of Gopi Krishna's which we'll be talking about, Kundalini, Higher States of Consciousness, and Love. Scott has written two books, "Reaching Heaven on Earth, a Soul's Journey Home," in which he shares his personal story and mystical poetry, and "Love's Design,

Reaching Heaven on Earth," which he co-authored with Christopher Wrigley. In this book, they share their unique expressions of love, hope, and knowledge through an exchange of 12 poetic verses. Scott's interests, besides Kundalini, include He loves visiting museums and historical sites, traveling, listening to holiday music and oldies and watching movies. He enjoys sports, hiking and attending 12-step meetings.

He loves reading books about spirituality and the inspirational people who have helped make the world a better place. So I think that last paragraph is significant in that he's a normal guy who likes doing normal stuff, but he has had a profound spiritual awakening and it's really put him through the ringer as we'll describe in this interview. And another point I want to make by way of introduction is that I really resonate with Scott's perspective.

You may have heard me say before that a lot of times I feel that people dumb down awakening or enlightenment, and Scott holds it to a very high standard. Through his own experience and through his study of Gopi Krishna, he has high expectations for what a human being is capable of achieving spiritually and what the society at large is capable of achieving if enough individuals undergo the kind of development that we're going to be discussing today. So welcome, Scott.

Scott Cunningham Thank you, Rick. It's good to be here. Thank you for that introduction. Rick We can do two things. We can kind of start with your chronological biography a little bit and some of the developmental stages of of your life growing up in Madison, Wisconsin and so on? Or we could plunge right into the spiritual stuff and then backtrack to that. How would you like to do it? - Why don't we start a little bit with the history of myself? - Okay, good.

- But I did wanna say one thing in that introduction.

Actually, a couple of things came up. Can I do that? - Yeah, sure. - Okay, so the whole idea is I am a regular person and I never thought this would be the life that I would be thrown into, but I still live a regular life. and I have the "Reaching Heaven on Earth" in both of my books and their titles, because I have ended up in a place that I never dreamed was possible.

And it's somewhat hard for me to talk about and even sharing my experiences related to this, but I do think it's extremely important. And I think Gopi's Krishna theory is extremely important for humanity and the whole concept of kundalini and reaching a different state of consciousness. But I'm very grateful to be here too, Rick. I've listened to a lot of your podcasts and they're tremendous. Well, thanks. And I've got news for you. Everybody's a regular person.

All these enlightened people, you know, that we read about, and if you were married to one of them or, you know, got to know them really well, hung out with them personally, you'd find a lot of regularity about them.

And I think either they're followers or even in some cases these people themselves try to portray an aura of specialness and otherworldliness or extraordinariness and so on, which is justified to some extent, but not to the exclusion of the rest of us who are also capable of extraordinary levels of development and extraordinary just means they're not common, but they're natural and everyone is capable of them. I couldn't agree more.

I always say to friends like I'm sure Buddha and Christ and Saint Francis and all the other really well-known mystics and saints that they were regular people who went through really hard things too. Yeah. And their history is sanitized to make them look like gods, but then we don't realize that. But they're really coming to communicate to us as we all have this, at least is what I believe, this potential within ourselves to approach where they were at.

Yeah. Adi Shankara, you know, who wrote the great commentaries on some of the Upanishads and the Gita, he suffered from an anal fistula, which they had no medical treatment for in those days, and it caused him a great deal of pain and suffering. So, sorry, Strong Crow fans, but that's the fact, at least historically speaking. So, you know, and we all perform the same bodily functions.

I have a friend who wrote a book called, I think this was Craig Holliday, he was a good friend, he wrote a book called Fully Human, Fully Divine. And most people are confined to their humanness, which is a good thing, I mean, not the confinement, the humanness, but there's a whole other dimension, a vast spectrum of possibility that most people haven't realized, even though they potentially could realize it, and there's no reason why any of them couldn't.

Yeah, and I was going to say too, I remember reading a book back in the 90s, I think it was called "Spirituality of Imperfection", and I remember one of the last names was Kurtz, but that really struck a chord with me, and it's really been a theme of my life, imperfection, And working through my imperfections has led me to a better place, and not to hide them. Yeah. Now on this note, what do you think about this?

Some people say, "Well, yeah, you can be an enlightened guy or girl and yet be abusive behaviorally or an alcoholic or a sex addict or a drug addict. You know, well, that's alcoholism, all these human foibles." And personally, maybe I'm naive and idealistic, but I take exception to that.

I have a feeling like if a person has really achieved what enlightenment is supposed to be, they wouldn't be inclined to do these things, they wouldn't have cravings for them anymore because their inner fulfillment would be such that such things would be distasteful. And also a great deal of inner purification and refinement would have taken place, which would just disincline them to behave egregiously like that. I agree 100% with that.

I mean one of the things Bopi Krishnan talked about was that, you know, the rising of Kundalini. First of all, he said it was a biological process and that really interested me because I was somebody like, "Okay, prove it to me." And a lot of people have different experiences, but he tied it to a biology and the evolution of the brain.

And he said that at the early stage you can become more talented or you can get some new gifts and be more creative, he said, but going beyond that you can have psychic paranormal experiences and then going beyond that you can become a genius. But if you want to reach the highest levels, which he called cosmic consciousness, which is the same as enlightenment or same as Samadhi, somewhat, I mean, it's all to me the same experience. Different religion

had different names for it, but those people were pretty darn pure. In other words, I think we are evolving into some semblance of what we call God. We're very, very far away from but we have to develop the virtues of what we call God to get to the highest levels. That's my understanding of it and belief. Yeah, mine too. So let's scoot back a bit then. You grew up in Madison, Wisconsin in a large Catholic family and take it from there.

Actually, it was a village in Madison, Wisconsin called Maple Bluff, 1500 people, and Oscar Meyer grew up there and so did Chris Farley, the comedian who ended up having trouble with alcoholism. It was a very idyllic place to grow up. For me, it was like out of Mayberry from the Annie Griffiths show. We lived on a lake and there were eight kids in our family, six sisters and then a brother, one brother that's older. And so in the summers we would swim and

boat and we'd go up to the country club. And my dad was somebody who kind of the story of his life is he started in the mailroom in Oscar Mayer and worked his way up to CEO. And he was in some ways He was always a very scary person. He had this commanding presence. He could be moody and critical, but he was also very honest and generous and trustworthy. And he was the patriarch. He was God the father, the ruler in our family. Got the Tocqueville Charity Awards and the Catholic Charity Awards.

So I'm saying he was like almost like a God, but he had a lot of flaws too. My mom was almost the opposite. She was to me, was very kind, very loving, very understated. And my dad would always say she cooked meals for 30 years, not disparaging in that saying, wow, you know what, she did the basic work and she always played home sweet home on the piano and she loved children. So yeah, we grew up with a big ten of us.

It was a lot of craziness, a lot of dysfunction, and a lot of really great times. I kind of have both memories. And just about me really quickly, I was very shy and I would say a very nice person. I was kind of a people pleaser and I loved to play in my imagination.

I dreamed of one day of being a professional athlete, either in golf or basketball, or a sports radio announcer, and didn't really like school, but liked it for the social part of it, and also the sports, and rarely raised my hand in class because I was afraid of being called on, and then I would blank out.

So I was very, very shy, and just a little bit more in ninth grade was my first date, and actually my friend asked the girl out for me, and then he went with us on the date and waited outside and what the girl thought of that. But I love to play basketball and golf. And when I practiced those sports, they were early form of meditation for me. And basketball was a place where I could really create. But I had anxiety from an early age.

And it really informed a lot of my life 'cause when I was like seven or eight, I would go to bed at night and afraid I would stop breathing. Sometimes I would jump in bed with my brother 'cause I was very scared. I thought I had a disease oftentimes. And then about, you know, I was in high school, my mind started whirling out of control. So eventually I looked up the word anxiety in the dictionary, went and saw a psychologist finally at age 22.

And he tried to give me Valium and I took maybe one or two and then it was like, no, you know, I have to do this without drugs. And I just feel like I'm on a path of spiritual development and the ability to love.

For whatever reason, I even thought that at age 22, and that was going to be a long journey, there were going to be no quick fixes. So that's what really started me on a path, almost like this simultaneous path. I had this perfectionism where I wanted to really achieve, but on the other hand, I had a really strong spiritual thirst and I also wanted to get rid of the anxiety.

So on this parallel path, I was trying to climb up the ladder at the top, do more than my dad, and on the other side, on the spiritual side, I wanted to just keep growing and growing and growing. So I did these two things simultaneously. I read your whole book. You worked really hard and got higher degrees and got into the financial world where people work really hard and you were trying to do all kinds of big business deals and nature had other plans for you.

Well, it worked for a while. It worked until about age 34. And as you said, I think there was 12 initials behind my name and if you put in the VP to a corporate finance, I got up to 14 and I did count those things. They meant a lot to me. I also joked about how I I would count the higher you got up in a floor in a building that meant you were more successful. So I had gone from like floor 12 to 44 and then I actually worked for two weeks at the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.

I worked for Lehman Brothers in corporate finance for one summer and then it was the 27th, 36th, ended up at the 43rd floor, 101 California Street in the heart of the financial district working with a man named Howard Leach and he was actually chairman of the board of the University of California Regents at that time. the ambassador to France and he wanted to buy companies so we worked with him.

But my story was I was doing what I thought was the perfect life and I would be happy but I wasn't happy and I never could understand why and I finally went and saw a psychologist and they said, "Well, you don't have to do what you don't like and you don't have to public speak." And it's almost a joke to me but I always thought I had to be this certain kind of person and I didn't really know who I was. I'm very grateful for what I did. I learned a lot.

with some really smart, good people, but I'm also glad that I got stopped on that path at age 34 and I could go into what happened then. I was often reminded as I was reading your book of that John Lennon line that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. So you had all these grand plans, but you kept getting smacked down. The reason was because honestly I just felt like unless I accomplished a lot, I wasn't

good enough, you know, that sort of thing. Kind of a tenuous foundation to build your life on. And I know when I got to be the vice president of corporate finance, my parents came out and they were so proud and happy. There's a little blurb in the San Francisco Chronicle and with my picture, and they were all happy. And I was thinking to myself as we went out to dinner, doesn't mean a thing to me, but now I'm okay. I've made it there. Now I can really do what I want to do.

Yeah, you know, I live in a town where thousands of people meditate and have been doing so for decades and there's so much in the mentality here, and I've definitely been prone to it myself, of just wanting to somehow get the financial things sorted out so we can do what we want to do, which is spiritual stuff. I mean, I went through years like as a computer consultant, crawling around under people's desks, you know, messing around with wires and doing stuff like that.

And I eventually adjusted to it and realized that every moment is life and you don't have to lament the present in hopes of some glorious future. Things will continue to unfold in due course, and they did. Thoreau said, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." So, I think a lot of people frustrated with the mundane circumstances they find themselves in, but you can be in heaven while working as a janitor if you learn how to unfold that inner potential.

Well, it's funny because I always saw everything through the lens, even when I was doing the financial work, that it was also preparing me for something else. So when I worked with this, Howard Leach was a very good man. And there were five of us on the 44th, third floor, and we were right next to first boss of the investment bank. And I used to watch all the

senators come in and the CEOs. And I thought, wow, this is real power in how it works. So I I felt like I was getting an education on kind of how power works. And I learned not to judge anything. Everything happens for a reason. Could I quickly just say how my Dark Night of the Soul, would that be? Yeah, please. It was when about age 40, 1996 through 1998 time period. It's like when everything just went to hell and I felt like I descended into hell. I would always say I was exiled to the desert.

And as I said before, at that time, and this was in my own mind, let me emphasize, I thought I had climbed the ladder of achievement and I had all those credentials you were talking about and I climbed all those floors. But the joke was, okay, once I was on the 43rd floor, then the next stop was the 13th. And then I was quickly, I was in the elevator going quickly to the bottom and I knew it and I couldn't stop it. Years earlier, I had read a book by, what was his name? John Sanford.

called the Christ within or something like that and he talked about crucifixion. And five years earlier I thought I got a feeling that's what I'm gonna go through. I'm kind of dreading this but I kind of knew this was happening and so I was going to the basement quickly and... And by going to the basement you mean like business deals were falling through, your marriage was on the rocks, all kinds of stuff like that.

I was going down from the high floors quickly. I went to actually to the 13th floor and I thought well that may not be a good sign only in retrospect. Oh you mean literally you got put on. Literally, these are all literally, because I always like if you're at the 45th floor

you're doing even more than somebody else. I didn't really completely think like that, but I was like I said, I was going to the elevator into the basement very quickly and the life I had known and expected to live was just crumbling. So despite all these credentials and accomplishments, there was nothing I could do. There was like this downward rushing force of this tsunami, And one of the things I wrote at that time is, you know, the higher your eyes, not that I rose that high.

It's for me, it was high. The faster you fall when you're going in the right direction or not doing what you're meant to do. So it wasn't that I didn't know what I was meant to do. And I also think that's what happens to countries. If you look at every civilization in the past, everyone has always fallen because they never make the jump to the next thing that they're supposed to do. So in other words, I got blocked from what I was doing.

And it was devastating because, again, what I accomplished was who I was. So if I'm not accomplishing these things, you know, kind of like, who am I? But the benefit of that was it really took me deep inwardly. It made me surrender to what I call God, which I call the intelligence behind the universe. And it diminished my ego. But I went through like the end in like two years, the ending of my marriage. And I had to sell my house and move into an apartment.

I had three investments that we had put together and had all these investors, very high name people, and also friends and family friends. And I had to keep calling them, telling them it's all going to heck. And literally we lost almost all our money. I had invested a lot of money and you know, I had a falling out with my partner. He had some problems and I got shingles and it was just like everything. So it was like a dying star burning out and collapsing on my own weight.

And. You know, again, who was I, if I wasn't doing these things, but the The funny thing, Rick, was deep down inside, I knew this wasn't a bad thing. I would joke with my inner voice and I'd say, "Jesus, this is hell on earth," and the inner voice would say back, "No, no, no, you don't know, but you're being sent to heaven. This is the beginning."

So that was kind of a joke that I didn't find funny for my inner voice, but in a way I kind of knew it was true, like I was being taken off this path and I was being put on what I call an inner path. And what I wrote in the back of that book, Love's Design, Reaching Heaven on Earth, which I did with Christopher, this disabled young man who's never been able to really speak and he's almost blind and he just has this unbelievable mind and has these cosmic conscious type experiences.

But I said that really the treasure is inside of us. There's all these gifts. And so in a way I knew that. I knew the divinity was within, the glory and the splendor was inside of me. And instead of climbing up the ladder one step at a time, I was kind of like climbing into in my interior one step down at a time.

I knew eventually it would lead to a better place, but it wasn't what I say, I wasn't chasing the four Ps, the property, prestige, possessions, and power, but now I was going within to really find out who I am. And I just kind of knew that, and I knew that eventually it would lead to more healing and expansive life, but I had a lot of doubts all along the way. Would you say that it's necessary for someone's relative life to fall apart in the process

of undergoing a spiritual metamorphosis, or do you think that for some people, given their particular makeup, they could actually continue to flourish financially and in their relationships and everything else, while still going under profound spiritual transformation? But just in your case, it was necessary for everything to sort of fall apart. I've thought of that question a lot, and it's a really great question. In my case, it had

to fall apart. But what I also realized is I had to surrender to the deepest part of surrender like I had to almost give up everything. And that's very scary. If you say that to anybody, what do you know? I don't want to give up what I have. I got wealth, I got this or that. It was just the journey that I was put on, but I just knew I was being stripped

of everything. And what I think eventually is people are going to be born into higher consciousness, but I think right now, and working with really talented people, both on the spiritual side and on the financial business side, I work with Mike Murphy who started Esalen. I don't know if you know Esalen. Oh yeah, of course. I even tried to interview Mike Murphy years ago and he said, "I'm

busy writing a book, I'm getting too old." I almost got him into this golf company we were trying to do, but what a, I call him a leprechaun, what a beautiful man and he wrote a book called Future the Body. I don't know how to say this but it's almost like

you have to even give up any prestige. At least that's how I view it. Okay, now it doesn't mean somebody else has to I guess in the end because I would never say what anybody else but for me to get to the deepest part of this inner guidance I had to let go of everything and trust the unknown.

I literally did that for 25 years and it was very scary. I'm trying to think of exceptions. I can think of some very successful people whom I consider very spiritual, maybe the consideration is that if you're attached to something, then you might need to give it up and you might involuntarily be forced to give it up if there's this force of evolution governing your life. But if you're not attached to it, if it's not an issue for you, maybe you could sort of continue

with it while you still make spiritual progress. You know, when Jesus said the thing about It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. He said that just after interacting with some wealthy people who asked, "What can we do?" And he said, "Give up everything and follow me." And they said, "Sorry, can't do that." And he walked away. That's when he said that thing about the camel. And maybe he was just testing them, you know.

Maybe if they said, "All right, we'll do that." He would have said, "All right, obviously you're not attached. So you can keep your rich stuff and you'll use it to help people and I'll be your teacher." Well, if you look at Buddha and if you look at St. Francis and even Christ, none of them had anything. They really didn't. Buddha had a kingdom at first and then he kind of got brought to nothing. So did St. Francis.

The way Copey Christ talked about it was, he said, you know, in this continuum, you can be a genius and you can have a very deep spirituality. And I'm not saying he was saying this, but I kind of got this sense that on the highest rung, it was like you were meant to give kind of guidance to the race.

So like what Christ gave to the race and what Buddha was the highest teaching is how to get closer to God but I look at it more how to evolve to a higher level of consciousness so we can get higher to God. Gopi Krishna went through a hell on earth for 12 years. In other words I'm saying I want to say the people that gave the

highest guidance got brought to absolutely nothing but is that required? Maybe not and like you I think eventually people will just be born, so maybe it is true what you're saying. There's the story of King Janaka in the Vedic tradition, who, you know, was a great king. He was supposed to be totally enlightened, and he's depicted as sitting with a beautiful woman massaging one of his feet and his other foot in a pot of fire, meaning he had equanimity amidst pleasure and pain.

He's just sitting there, cool as a cucumber. I don't know whether this is just mythological or not, but there are stories of enlightened civilizations where they didn't have the wealth disparity we have today where some tiny fraction of people can possess more wealth than the rest of the population combined, but everyone was comfortable and their needs met. It wasn't a society of ascetics, in other words. You could live a rich life materially and yet at the same time spiritually.

Yeah. I know it's been my journey because I laughed because every time I started, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to get some money now," and I just vanished then. So it was always kind of hard, but I didn't also look like I've got to be aesthetic or this or that. I really believed in this idea that if I thought something was coming and I was disappointed, that meant something better was coming. But I didn't know what that better would mean.

At first, of course, it was like, "God, if I get a little money, I don't have to worry as much on this path." But then when I didn't get that, I just jump ahead a little bit. Like one financial deal I got done in 2011, I needed money desperately. I was due a six-figure fee and I didn't get paid. I won't go into why. And it was like, holy Christ. Well, then 10 years later, I made a fee that was six times that.

And during those next 10 years that I didn't have as much money, I even surrendered more deeply and worked spiritually harder. I found when I had a little cushion, I didn't work as hard spiritually. And literally, like I said, I worked really hard financially. Even when I was in my 20s and 30s, I worked spiritually. So when I was flying on a plane to a business meeting, I'd be reading Freud or Jung or the Christian mystics. So I always did that.

But when I got on this path of just almost like complete spiritually working hard on myself, it was a full-time job. And so when I didn't have the money, I had to learn, I can't do this. I might have to surrender more deeply to the intelligence within as I call it. And I would work even harder on the spiritual side. So what that meant for me, I did spiritual direction counseling for five years. I've done 12-step work for 25, 20 years of speaking circles program.

The whole emphasis for me was to purify and get better connected to source. And I did find over time, I got better connected to source, but in the end, and I'm getting ahead of myself, probably again, but it was like from 1998, that's when I made it, in 1998, I made a commitment.

I said, no matter what happens, I'm gonna just go inside and listen to my inner voice and wherever that takes me in my daily life and also in my work path, I'm gonna work hard, I'm gonna actually serve, I'm gonna give, and I'm gonna love, and I'm gonna trust God to give me back what I need to live. And the joke was, and I said it in my book, is like the first thing I really wanted back at that time was money, but of course I didn't get that.

I said God was a very hard taskmaster, but it just kept forcing me to go deeper and work harder and harder. But ultimately in 2020, I've got a deal done that I made more money in that deal than I had the previous 25 years. So in 1998, my inner voice had said, "If you trust me and let go completely, in the end, you will live an amazing inner life, but also your outer life will eventually blossom." And I always had this joke to myself, "Well, it's been 22 years and nothing."

And it is now, because I would say now, I'm not only doing some financial stuff now that's helping me earn some money, but I would never dreamed I would write two books. Are you gotta be kidding me? Never, never I would have told you that. And not only that about spirituality, and then actually speaking at conferences, even doing a podcast. This is actually only my second podcast. I'm gonna do more of them, but I'm now more outer. I even, I'll say one other thing.

I even planned my daughter's post wedding luncheon,

and I did it with my brother. And that might have been my most great achievement because I had no idea what I was doing. Like I said, my brother helped me a lot. But anyways, it's like, yeah, I can trust what this inner voice told me and it always has come true. And that's an interesting topic in itself because some people, their inner voice tells them to go shoot up a school or something. And so the whole notion of inner voice can be a little bit suspect.

But there is also such a thing, I firmly believe and experience myself, as an intuition that has our best interests and everyone's best interests in mind, and that often contradicts what we think we want, and then it turns out that we end up with something better, and we're grateful for not having gotten the other thing in the first place.

I know one of the things Gopi Krishna talked in relation to kundalini, that's generating It happened to me, just like all of a sudden this more powerful energy was flowing in my body. And one of the things I learned right away was he talked about that it feeds a center in the brain and you can develop new talents, you can develop all these other, maybe psychic paranormal gifts, maybe genius, all these things.

But he also warned, if you're not living right, and let's say there's defects in your physical body or in your physical organs or your lifestyle isn't conducive, that energy can act in a unpleasant way and can lead to mental illness, even psychosis. And he talked about people like Hitler and maybe Genghis Khan that they were geniuses but

in the end they always end up dying. And oftentimes what happens to the mystics as they realize this whole thing about be careful when you're listening to your inner voice, good it could be something not healthy either and especially as they got older because if you get older it couldn't maintain the purity of the energy that it needed to do to give it the gracious gifts, but they were already so pure that they wouldn't do anything like bad.

So I always checked everything, my inner voice, you know, and I know if I heard something well inner voice this or that, I'd be a little bit suspect, but that's why I work to me to always purify myself to see if I could hear that inner voice more clearly. I was talking to my brother the other day and we were talking about how in my extended family I was telling him that I have one cousin who was a polymath genius, now he's having I think some trouble mentally.

I had another cousin that turned out to have schizophrenia. We had drug addicts, we had alcoholics, but we also had CEOs and really talented. So there was a whole spectrum and Gopi Krishna would say it's just because the purity of the body in some people and not that one was better than the other might not have been been able to maintain that gracious flow of energy. So I don't know if that makes any sense to you. Rick It makes a lot of sense, and I think we should

talk about it more. So we might want to define what purity is. I don't think you're using the word, or Gopi Krishna used the word in a necessarily a moralistic sense, but the body is the temple of the soul, as Jesus put it. For any experience, I mean eating a sandwich, or watching a movie, or having a dream while you're sleeping, or anything, the neurophysiology is involved.

And we all know that if you ingest something that alters the functioning of the neurophysiology, like a six-pack or something like that, you better not drive. Your perception is going to be altered and your faculties are going to be diminished.

So by the same token, enlightenment, let's just use the word without fussing over the definition too much, but higher states of consciousness, if they are radically different from ordinary waking state of consciousness, which they are described to be by everyone, would necessitate a radically different style of physical functioning of the neurophysiology. And there has been some research along these lines.

I mean, they've found that people who've been meditating for decades have a much thicker prefrontal cortex, and there's different brainwave signatures than in control groups and so on. So I'm sure there are subtle mechanics to the neurophysiology of enlightenment that our modern instruments can't yet measure. But there are certain things they can measure and it's been seen that functioning changes quite profoundly.

It's like the neuroplasticity work of Richard Davidson in Wisconsin. Through meditation you can actually change your brain circuitry and develop more compassion and those sorts of things. Should I just give a quick summary of what Gopi Krishna put forward? Because I think it's a little bit different. It may not be, but he said, first of all, that human evolution is planned and that the brain is still in a state of... Who planned it? By a higher intelligence. God or whatever.

Yeah, that the human brain is still in a process of organic evolution and that we're predetermined to evolve to a more expanded and profound state of consciousness or a higher consciousness. And And he called the zenith of that the cosmic conscious mind.

And there was a book written by, I know you know this, Dr. Richard Maurice Buck in 1901 called "Cosmic Consciousness," something like studying of the human mind. And so his whole thing is that if this state of mind, if you reach higher consciousness, he says, you know, you lose your, I'm gonna read some of this. "It can result in expanded awareness "and magnificent state of being, "graced with new talents, "greater creativity and perception of truth,

inspiration, intuition, psychic gifts. I know I've said this before, but you lose your fear of death, certainty of your internal life becomes, you have greater longevity, greater health, all those things. So the treasures are enormous, but like we said, it's very rare now and it can go askew. But what he said is there is a law of evolution that we're predetermined to go to this state of mind. And it's also a biological law. So when he lived, this is why I liked him so

much. I felt he was so humble and he said, you know, I don't want a follower following of people because normally what happens if somebody says really new things, they get a following of, you know, like a Christ or a Buddha and a religion forms around them. He said, I just want to put this idea out to science that the brain's in an organic state of evolution and there's actually spiritual or mental loss too that we

were saying. So I think where it's going to lead eventually is the injunctions that you learn in have to conform with. So in other words, spirituality, religion, yoga, etc. to try to have virtues of like honesty and compassion and mercy and yet you also have concentration practices like meditation and that sort of thing. You have devotional practices that those are all meant to what I call there's like almost a mental

purification going on, if you follow me. And so like, if you don't do that, then there's actually toxins or poisons that can develop in the brain from not following the right spiritual. It's like if we're living opposite of that, you can not only physically have toxins but you can mentally. And he said, the biggest thing is this law of evolution.

And he wrote about this and so did Walter Russell. I don't know if you've ever heard that name, Rick, but people in the audience may have, but they talked about how a long time ago, maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago, they were saying that we're heading in a bad direction because we're off the path of healthy evolution. We've become too materialistic, not ethical enough, that sort of thing.

And so that there's going to be some bad things that are developing and there are some scary things happening in the world, but also some really good things. So I was so intrigued by him because of the biology and he said, "I think that this, if you run experiments on the brain, you could prove there is a process of Kundalini rising that is a biological process. The problem is it's driven by an intelligence that they can't measure yet or it's more subtle."

And I know in my own life, and this is why I believe it so deeply, I like the fact that it was biology and let's put it out to science, but in the end, ultimately, I think we have to prove it to each one of ourselves in the laboratory of our own experiences of whether we can reach a higher state of consciousness or just be a more decent person. Like it's all up to

individually an instrument can't tell you that. You have to go within yourself and do that. So that's why some of the scientists are now doing meditation and trying to prove these changes to themselves. But separate from that, the organic process of this evolution going on, he thought

could be proven by science. So amidst that dark night of the soul I was meditating one day and praying and all of a sudden I felt this popping and crackling at the base of my spine and it sounded like Rice Krispies when you put milk on a crackle crackle crackle and then all of a sudden I was like what is this? Am I really hearing this? And the next thing that happened is

I heard this snap. I don't think it's a material energy, I think it's an intelligent energy, but It's a subtle intelligent energy that went firing up my spine, into my head, lights were going off in my head. Simultaneously, I felt this from my reproductive area, this suction-like effect. And it was sucking something up from my reproductive area into my brain. It was a separate thing than the energy and the light.

And it was so powerful, for a while I would sit there and I'd stick my tongue between my teeth because I was afraid the suction, I was going to swallow my tongue. So I felt like this milk-like substance going through my body, the energy was burning me and this milk-like substance was cooling me down. And that's what happened to me. And what I say is I became a live wire. It's like I went from I never felt an energy to 50,000 watts. And it was completely new to me.

For whatever reason, it didn't really scare me. After it happened, though, I have to tell you that I was almost felt like I had been

burned up from the inside and I was tired a lot. I couldn't meditate anymore because it would burn me and I couldn't concentrate as well. This went on for some period of time after that. And here's what I wanted to say. I had these biological symptoms going on. So my metabolism speeded up, my process of elimination and digestion and respiration were all working

at this feverish pitch. So something was going on in my body. It was like I said, it was like a chemical laboratory working at a feverish pitch. And so that process has never stopped, that force has never stopped in my body. And as you know, reading my book, that was a biology that I've watched all these years.

And one of the things that's really important to say, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, and I don't know if you know what this thing, but it's called urdavirida, the reversal of the reproductive system. I can't improve upon the pronunciation, but I know what you're talking about. It's often associated with celibacy. It's that the energy is always flowing upwards.

Yeah, well, it was like there was an energy, but also this third avarita, what Gopi Krishna talked about, he said it becomes an evolutionary energy. So instead of the reason why at certain times in your life, and I think even like Buddha and the monks, when they went into the monastery and said, you know, celibacy was important, like in this process, some of that, you know, where the strongest energy that you have inside of you is probably concentrated in the reproductive area.

Well, some of that gets sent up to the brain as a more gross rather than a subtle energy, a more gross energy and it works like as a coolant on the brain because you have this other energy burning you up. I absolutely experienced that for 20 years, you know, so it was two, the energy and this thing and that's where I thought, "God, it's so obvious." And if I did things wrong sexually at a certain time and frittered away the energy, it was almost like my brain would burn up.

So it wasn't like I was sitting there trying to figure this out, it was just like learning to survive. So I know to most people, maybe hearing this, they're going to go, "Wow, this sounds really strange or whatever," and I agree, but I just felt like maybe the biology in this whole process. So in the end, what I concluded, I don't know if I had, I think I had it in my book, but I said, "There's a regular organic process that's gone on in my body since 1997."

And I think even before that I was having little awakenings, but I couldn't feel it. But 1997 was when that energy shot up and then I started having psychic paranormal experiences. But that's gone on in a regular process biologically, okay? Like the energy never stopped flowing. I felt like it was a purifying energy, like it was speeding up everything for me to purify myself and I also purified myself by working feverishly spiritual practices. So that kind of drove me to do that.

yet also it was a regular physiological, but when I look to it, all my, let's say mental experiences, I could go back to the early 1990s and there were like four or five things that happened to me. One is all of a sudden Gandhi and truth and humility, character development was just so important. I don't know why, but I had also with my grandmother. - Did you say Gandhi? You're reading about Gandhi? - Gandhi, yeah. It was more than just, I wanna be a good person.

It was like, there was something inside of me, Like, that's how I, Gandhi, that's how I read about him all the time. It was 1992. Oh, let me interject a really quick story about Gandhi that I just heard last week. I love this. So a mother came to Gandhi and she said, Gandhi G, my young son respects you so much and he eats so much sugar. Would you please tell him to stop eating sugar? And Gandhi said, bring him back in two weeks.

So two weeks later, she brought her son back and Gandhi said to the boy, stop

eating sugar. And the mother said, "Why didn't you say that two weeks ago?" And he said, "Because two weeks ago I was eating sugar." I get that. Love it. Anyway, continue. I just had to get that in there. Well, the funny thing was, so here's 1992, and I'm working at 101 California Street, 43rd floor, and I'm having these experiences. One was Gandhi, but another was I had this experience of this bright light and it was like, "Whoa, I don't know whatever this is,

but this isn't a normal bright light." It was up in the clouds. And so then all of a sudden nature itself had these radiant colors, much more different than I'd ever known. I also had, that's when I started communicating with this inner voice and that's also when I started writing these poetic verses. You mean with the radiant colors, you would just look out the window or something and you'd see all these beautiful colors?

I would look up at the clouds and there was this, you know how sometimes it's like you see a radiant sky maybe, there's this light or something, but it was ten times that or a hundred times that. It was like whatever this light is, it's something different. And then I felt this enormous peace inside of me and presence, and then I was starting to think in a different way intellectually because I was thinking differently politically, business, and so something was going on with that.

But that's when I wrote my first verse. Okay, so I wrote 48. When I was in college, I had to do something in poetry. I couldn't write one lick of poetry and got like just terrible. But I would just all of a sudden I heard this voice and I was writing. The first one occurred in 1991. I was on a 747 plane flying from Washington DC to San Francisco. I was in the top of a 747. I heard this voice write down what's coming through you. I said, okay, well, it was weird to me. And I did.

And that was my first verse and I was writing how terrified I was and how much fear I was in. And then in 2009, I'm talking about a higher state of consciousness. Over 18 years, I wrote 48 verses and you can see the change from fear to this amazing state of consciousness. Okay, what I was going to was, I had those experiences in early 1990. Then I started, they got revved up a little bit.

I haven't explained them yet, but I started having psychic and paranormal experiences and And they were different, they were even more powerful than these experiences. You tell us what some of those are as you go along? Yeah, I will. So almost right after that Kundalini awakening happened, which is at the end of 1996, early 1997, I started to have these psychic paranormal experiences.

So the first thing that would happen is I have a dream and then whatever I dreamt would happen in the outside world. And if that had happened once or twice or three times, I probably would have said, you know, and again, I looked at things very critically. It's like it kept happening. And I had one dream, even I wrote down in my journal, you know, I'm going to be in a certain place and the dream is about being in a certain place at a certain time with certain people.

And then a month later, that's where I was. And at that time, I had no idea I was going to do this. I had dreams. All the times I knew something was going to happen, it would happen. Then I started having out-of-body experiences where all of a sudden my awareness, I mean to some people this will sound weird, others not, but it was like somehow separated from my body and I would look down at my legs and I was like, I know that's part of me, but I don't feel like it.

And I one time looked at my friend and I said, now I better not tell him because he seems like he's right in the middle of my awareness right now, which was funny to me. You know, one time I was on a very small board of directors with Ram Dass, you know Ram Dass, right?

And that's when he was people that had strokes and a certain lady that was doing counseling related to that, but he was talking and I started seeing apparition, like a Casper the ghost, not an aura, but just the spirit go out of him. And then I would see that. So those were just changes. And again, I didn't, I'd say, "Oh, that's interesting." But it was like, "Okay, but stay grounded."

Then they went into, I had a lot of spiritual happenings where I was hiking in Maui and all of a sudden I saw Mother Mary's face on the cliff, fill this whole cliff.

And I looked at it like, "I don't think it's Mother Mary or anything like that, "but what symbolically does it mean to me "that I'm seeing that? "It feels like it's projected out from my insides." And she means to me the beginning of the divine or the birth of the divine or the merciful or pure. And it was more like, okay, maybe that's what you have to develop. That's how I looked at things. Jesus was in a flame, he jumped into my heart.

And then the third one I would say is after mother Teresa died, which was in 1996, I think. Anyways, I was walking in Muir Woods, California, which is just north of San Francisco, so this grove of redwoods and I was walking through there and she had just died. And all of a sudden, like a picture of her, this graven picture was just inside of me. And I heard this voice, she said, "I worked on helping, say, people. We need to change our human institutions and systems to help more people."

So in other words, she was saying, "We got to change our system." So I took all of this, again, with a grain of salt. And then the final, I'll just mention two other ones. Another one was, sometimes it was like I would be back in the past. past, you know, that's going to sound weird, but sometimes I was seeing into the future. So in other words, it was like the past, present and the future all coagulated into one.

And one time I saw this picture of the moon, I can see it right now as I'm talking to you and it was just, I was just above it. And it was like, how could that be?

And again, I know a lot of people it's going to sound weird or funny, but it was like, it was like seeing the moon and I see it now still just like I see mother Teresa in a graven image inside of me and all it meant to me was in the next state of consciousness time and space disappear so I was getting little indications of in a sense space that disappear or distance because how could I see that now somebody would say oh you saw a picture and but it wasn't that it was more than

that because then a movie in 2019 Apollo 11 came out and there was a picture in And then I go, "Oh my God, that's exactly what I saw and am seeing." And the other one was I was at a volleyball game in Richmond, Virginia, and I took a break. I walked to the James River. Suddenly it felt like I was back in Civil War time after Richmond was destroyed. I was walking to the James River and I could just feel the sorrow and the anguish of the people.

And I heard this voice, "We have a civil war going on between the South and the North. So there's a split in the United States and then the voice said, "And now we have a split today in the human psyche between the right and the left, if you follow me, Rick. And we're losing the fact that we're supposed to move eventually to a non-dual mind, but in a way we're going the opposite right now." Those are just interesting things, okay? So I didn't get carried away by them or anything.

I was like, "Interesting. All it's saying to me, they seem to be guiding me. I don't take them that seriously." Other than there's pointing to me, there's something beyond time and space I'm realizing. So it's almost like the way this higher consciousness brings in this change in consciousness very gradually, it gives you hints. And if you didn't come in gradually, you'd probably freak out.

So it started with the 1990 experiences early, then it went to these psychic and paranormal experiences, and then maybe we'll get into it later on, but what I would call more like, more like what are called cosmic conscious experiences, because they were much deeper and more profound than the psychic and paranormal experiences.

And what that led me to conclude is there's a regular change in one's consciousness and the intelligent brings it in slowly and eventually it leads to this maybe state that with Christ or Buddha we're in sort of thing. - Yeah, that's all very interesting. I have a few thoughts on it all and maybe you'll have some thoughts on those thoughts. One thing is sometimes in spiritual circles these days, people devalue various experiences.

And in a sense they're right, because people can get carried away with it. And I've been on spiritual retreats where it's like this one-upmanship game happens where people are getting up on the mic to see who can report the most flashy experience, and it becomes an ego trip. But on the other hand, inevitably, on the spiritual path, you're going to have experiences of the kinds you've described and other kinds, and I think that's perfectly normal.

Now, some people might say, "Well, Ramana said that any experience which comes and goes is not the reality because the reality doesn't come and go." You know, there's that verse in the Gita, "The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be." But, nonetheless, you're going to have experiences, and we don't just dismiss everything in life as worthless and unreal just because it comes and goes. we look forward to having a good dinner or whatever like that, or being with our friend, and

you know, friend's gonna die eventually. Does that mean we don't appreciate being with our friend? So, experiences come and go. And another point is, and I'm just giving an interpretation to everything you said, maybe a little bit of an elaboration, spiritual development does, by definition, mean the unfoldment of latent faculties. It's not just about self-realization.

There are all sorts of relative faculties that we possess that are locked up or suppressed by our lack of development, and as our development proceeds, those faculties are going to unfold and might take us by surprise sometimes. And if you think of the full range of creation as being like an ocean, ordinarily our perception is limited to the waves on the surface. There's a whole lot to to the ocean that we don't perceive.

But as your awareness expands, you begin to incorporate within your perceptual ability subtler realms, astral, celestial and so on, and you may perceive things there that the ordinary person doesn't perceive, celestial beings. Like you mentioned, the clouds look so beautiful.

Well, sometimes people describe being in states of higher consciousness, God consciousness, where it's as though you're wearing golden glasses and everything just looks incredibly beautiful, even ordinary mundane circumstances. And I think it's important that we don't obsess about all this stuff or cling to it or strive for it, but it'll just happen as a matter of course.

And on the point of striving, when you first had this Kundalini awakening, were you doing like a lot of intense spiritual practice? You certainly weren't trying to make this particular experience happen. I think it quite took you by surprise and you tried to figure out later on what it meant

by reading Gopi Krishnan, but what were you doing leading up to that that perhaps precipitated it? I had been working on myself feverishly from age 22 up to 40 was when this happened to me.

And probably the least things I did was meditation, but I did meditate, but I was doing all kinds of different practices, you know, counseling, you know, and they kind of got deeper and deeper, starting out with a lot of reading and a lot of then self-help work, self-help books, things like John Bradshaw had workshops and then it went into eventually into spiritual direction counseling I did at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and then eventually the Twelve Steps.

So I was doing a lot of these things and I would say, first of all, I want to go back a little bit and say, I didn't like sharing about these other worldly experiences because you know what, the people that I hung around with, I felt like it was distancing because they didn't have the experience and they might even think you're a little bit strange. And you know what, I can understand that, it's totally legitimate.

And so if anything, I understated things and put myself down and don't talk about them. When I got into the 12 steps, it's interesting because a lot of times you're talking about your frailties and everybody shares what they're having trouble with. Boy, did I get connected to people when I talked on that level.

So it was kind of strange, like on one level, that's when I felt really connected to people on this other level, because I couldn't find many people like me that were undergoing the experiences. Did you have a problem with alcohol or did you just get into 12-step as a spiritual practice? No, I actually as a spiritual, that's why it was very strange. I didn't get into AA, it was Al-Anon, which is a program for people that are affected by alcohol. So oftentimes the person...

Like children of alcoholics or something like that? Yeah. And I was working all kinds of program. And one day that guy said, "Let's go to this thing." I didn't even know what we were going to. And it was in Mill Valley, California, and there were about 80 people there. And I walked into the meeting with him. I was completely blown away. I was like, "This is home." I mean, I just feel like they're sharing so honestly. They're so kind. They're so loving. They're so real. And I thought, "Wow."

And then over the years, what I found as I was in it, and again, I worked it like to the bone. five to seven meetings a week and I worked the steps because I also knew I had this other thing going on and it was also helping with that. So I just kept working that harder and harder and harder but after I had those psychic and paranormal experiences I didn't even know it was a Kundalini awakening. Okay I didn't find that out till three years later and so that was on Christmas Eve.

Oftentimes, like when I was seeing Jesus or Mother Mary, I looked at it like my consciousness had this higher energy and what I believed spiritually, it just was kind of putting that energy

and so I was seeing that vision. Where I eventually went to was like, I didn't see those anymore, and if we have time to talk about, I'll get into what I call cosmic conscious experiences where there wasn't any forms like that, but it was just this radiant, beautiful, harmonious world that I landed into. So in other words, I saw those as almost seeing things like Christ and Mary was an intermediate step. Right. Well, you can talk about the cosmic consciousness thing right now if you want to.

But I found Gopi Krishna. It was Christmas Eve in 1999, and I was at my mother-in-law's house and we were going to have a dinner that night. Even though I was divorced, I remained very good friends with my ex-wife. So we're in Delray Beach, Florida. They said, yes, sometime and you can go do whatever you want to do. So I went to a bookstore, I went to Borders bookstore. It was in Boynton beach and I walked in and this happened to be for years.

It was like, okay, go over to that section and get that book. I mean, I literally read hundreds of books. One after, you know, I would be led and probably can relate to this one book after the other. And I pulled it out. It was living with Kundalini, the autobiography of Gopi Krishna. And I was like, Gopi, you know, I wasn't somebody Eastern. Like I said, I didn't do a lot of meditation.

I did some, but I also think, 'cause I was always concentrating through my work, that that's another way that you advance the brain. So anyways, it was "Living with Kundalini, "Autobiography of Gopi Krishna." I said, "Well, Kundalini, that's a weird sounding name. "I don't really relate, "and Gopi Krishna, I don't really relate." But I read it, and I was like, "Oh my God."

First of all, he's Indian, and I completely understood almost every sentence, and the whole thing was 380 pages, and it was published by Shambhala. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. But he explained everything that happened to me. You know, the biology I was going through, the things I was seeing. At times I felt like I had depression, a little bit of anxiety. It was never extreme, but also a little bit of paranoia. So he said that same energy is responsible for all those things.

If it's a little impure, then you might, instead of having this gracious flow of beauty and harmony, it might be a little bit distorted. but he talked about psychic and paranormal experience, and then he talked about cosmic consciousness, and he went through his whole life. He said things like, like weird things, like I thought if I ever said this to certain people, like when I see Christmas lights at that time, or any lights, I was like, it was like seeing heaven, they were so deep and rich.

And then how I saw things, it was like my mind was seeing things on a wider canvas. So it was almost like I felt like I was at a height. You know, let's say you're at a big height overlooking the ocean and you just see forever, right? That's kind of how I was seeing. And so I was living in DC at the time and I would drive around on the Capitol Beltway and I'd have to stay so far back of cars because I just was seeing so... And then people would get mad at me.

So all these little things that he talked about, it was like everything he talked about in there I got. And then I love the stuff on cosmic consciousness. It just hit me deeply, like the state of mind he was in and permanently in. But then what really intrigued me too was like the last 18 pages of the book, he said, why this is important for humanity because humanity right now, and he wrote this back in the late 70s, I think, or maybe even late 60s, but it's just as true today.

He said that we're evolving to a new faculty of the mind. So he's saying, if you believe in evolution, maybe we came from primates and they operate on instinct like most animals, you know, some animals have a little, but they don't really have much choice or just acting automatically. And then maybe 20,000 years ago, roughly, I mean this may don't hold me down, but the human intellect started to develop and it became more fully formed 10,000 years ago.

And at that time was the first time where we actually had some choice in things. We could create the world we wanted to by the way we thought and acted and lived. Okay, so what did we create? We create the world it is the way today, right? mathematics and art and literature and language and all these things with this faculty of the mind.

What he was saying is now we're developing a faculty of the mind beyond that and it's called illumination and it's happening through the biological process of Kundalini and it's preordained and so when he talked about in these 18 pages he said humanity doesn't understand where well they've had a Kundalini energy and they've had these experiences, but I think he's the

we're being led. A lot of people think first one that said it's the evolutionary energy in humankind and essentially he said there's a divine destination. Don't use the word divine if that turns people off, but there's this incredible new destination that's preordained and he identified the mechanism behind this evolution and that's something

Buck in 1901 in his groundbreaking book didn't have. So to me, Gopi was advancing that and he said, "If you're evolving to a new state of mind, then you have to realize that the way you're living may have to change too.

And if you don't realize that soon enough," so he said things like, "You can build space rockets and you can do all these things, but if you relegate mind," and when he meant mind, he didn't just mean an intellectual mind, he meant more broadly this whole inner mind, If you relegate that to a secondary position, then you're working against evolution. And so it can not only lead to individual distortion like depression and those kind of things.

So look at all the mental illness that's going on in people today by the way we're living our life. But it's a collective sense too. So the whole thing, race is not evolving correctly. And if that happens, the brain starts to degenerate and you start tumbling down the thing. And I think that's what's happening today, whether it's climate change or overpopulation or all the other things that are going on right now in the world, there's a common cause. It's distorted evolution.

And in a way, the way the politicians are trying to, they're screaming at each other, the right thinks they're right or the left thinks they're right, but in a way, they're both wrong. I don't mean it that way, but it's kind of like there's something deeper going on and the way you're treating each other is a symptom of what's wrong. In other words, you no longer can listen to somebody and say they have a different opinion.

And so anyway, so that's why, so the last 18 pages of this book really resonated to me. And he said, so this needs to run experiments on the brain. And he said, I think it'll be proven. And our friend Duncan Carroll is trying to get a film done, as you know, it's called "Super Meditate Me." He's just a great guy.

It's taken him longer than he thought, but as you know, on the spiritual path, everything takes, I always say three times longer, but it's about people that are having ordinary awakenings and like your show, and he wants to bring it through film to more people. And I think if this gets out in film, this idea, a lot of people will step forward and say, "Oh, that's what that experience means."

Or even more rarely, that biology that's going on in my body, like this Urdhava Rita, the reversal that I, you know, as crazy as that sound, I'm sure there'll be a lot of people that step forward and talk about these things. So that's kind of been my mission. But you can't think in the normal way, even as a scientist. You know, you have to think in a whole different way. You can't think that the answer is in the normal brain material. So it's more challenging. Oh, that's all good stuff.

You've used the word "predetermined" a number of times, and I interpret that to mean that Gopi Krishna had an understanding of how evolution works, individual and collective, and had the insight that large numbers of people were going to be undergoing the kind of processes he had undergone and that that will necessarily cause a huge shift in society. And I think he was right about that. I think that there is some kind of enlightenment epidemic or whatever, some mass shift in consciousness

taking place. And I think that, like you had that vision of Mother Teresa, I think it will necessitate a radical restructuring of all the institutions that govern us, business and technologies and economics and politics and all these different things. They're just structured, for the most part, from an ignorant state of consciousness. And they wouldn't be appropriate or functional if a more enlightened state of consciousness were to prevail in the world.

I think there's something inexorable about the upsurge in consciousness that's occurring in the world. In other words, it's a subtle force but a powerful force that can't really be stopped. And the more we can conform to its frequency individually, the smoother things will be for us. And the more we don't do that or can't do that, like you were saying, if that energy is rising and yet you're doing things which pollute your system, you could get into trouble.

And I think we may get into great trouble as a society for the same reason. Everything we're saying about the individual could also be said about society. I interviewed a guy about a month ago who feels that we're headed for a rather catastrophic societal collapse and he analyzed it system by system and described how each system is pretty much untenable or will become non-functional, it is at the point of collapse practically already.

And all the spiritual traditions actually, not only spiritual but sort of ancient traditions, prophesize something like this, that a time would come when a great sort of material intelligence would have predominated in the world and reached the end of its viability, and that that would end up collapsing and giving way to something much better, but only after great turmoil. So, what do you think about all that?

Yeah, I agree with everything you said again go be Krishna saw into the future and he said that he saw nuclear war happening and He also saw that there'd be a war on one side would be China and Russia and on the other side would be the United States in the Western countries It was never like he called it. I think a Prognostication as if we continue to act like we are not like this is gonna happen He was too humble. If we don't clean up our act. Yeah, this is where we're headed towards.

And then also someday Walter Russell, again, he's another titan like Gopi Krishna, because to me he had this science on a physical basis where he was putting the creator back into creation and he's describing this higher state of consciousness. Okay, so Gopi, yes, his revelation was, he said, this is a revelation. He says, "Why I was given to me," he basically said, "I failed my college exam.

I grew up in India, you know, in the backwaters, you know, we didn't have electricity or running water and how can I be given this thing? But he said, from watching my process, I've come to the conclusion that my revelation is the brain, and again, don't take it from me, but prove it, is that the brain's in a state of evolution and we are moving toward this state of consciousness. I just wanted to read you a couple of quotes I have and then, because they kind of speak to this.

So again, he said humans are biologically wired for an enlightened or cosmic conscious mind. It doesn't mean we're all gonna get there. One of the things that happened to me is into this seeing this new whatever, awareness, this new state of consciousness, is I just completely, I was terrified of dying before. Completely not afraid. And I know that, yes, my body will die, but that's not who I am.

Now I know those words are parroted a lot, but I absolutely see I'm a drop of this radiant consciousness. as you said, it's a drop in this ocean. And I didn't finish my thought about where to go back to the intellect that we created the world that we have today. It's like one drop from this ocean created that world. I would say a bucket from the illuminated mind is gonna create the new world.

And Gopi Krishna wrote with that, maybe I'll read that at the end, what he said as he sees the new world. But he said, that's out of an ocean. So we're just so at the beginning of everything. One of the quotes he had is he said, The real aim of yoga and religion, spirituality, is to open the door to the unused potential of the human brain. I mean, how often is it thought of that way?

And he said physical science deals with the body. The new science, he called it a kingly science, will deal with the mind and soul. And that's the new science that I think this, I'm throwing this name out there again, that Walter Russell has come up with.

And then he said, religion, spiritual yoga experience, and the disciplines advocated for it signify the operation of a budding faculty in the human brain over and above the intellect designed by nature to extend this experiential area of human perception to include what is beyond our knowledge at present, the province of the mind and soul."

And then he had one other one here, "Humankind is still evolving on its way towards an unthought of superior brain to explore the still mysterious world of thought." So one of the things I said, Rick, was when I began to understand that this consciousness is different than a regular intellectual mind. It's hard to explain that to somebody because you hear intellect and you hear ego and you hear mind and what is consciousness? You know, and maybe I'll give examples later on, but I kind of saw it.

Let me read something, if I may, something. Yeah, sure. Okay, this is how I describe this change in my own consciousness poetically. And I actually have a list, I don't know if we're going to have time today, but there's like six individual experiences that I had that were much deeper than psychic and paranormal experiences. And then I say, those eventually are coalescing together in a more permanent mind of this higher awareness.

Like, it's not just one experience, but in a very diluted fashion, I'm having some of those. And maybe if we have time, I'll get to that. But this is what I wrote. Not diluted, you said, not deluded. dilute it. Like homeopathic. 100 times what I see. But it's still the thing I'm seeing. In summary, I believe that with our arrival at the next destination, our evolutionary life,

our view of creation will be flipped on its head. The material universe will lose its size and substance and our mind and being will become a titanic giant, a monarch, a king and queen, an eternal drop of glory in this infinite ocean of consciousness. We will no longer see ourselves as as an inconsequential grain of sand in an unfathomably large material universe, but we will see the truth that we are a blazing eternal ray of a living, loving, conscious sun which shines forever.

And here's the ending to it.

So my story, which began as a young child, so excited about the future and the possibilities it offered, yet also filled with some anxiety and fear, which I talked about in the beginning when I was younger, I had all this anxiety and fear, now finds me arriving in a new world of light and delight, with the glee and wonder of a small child, knowing a new treasure hunt has begun, one that goes on forever, as I am now exploring the mystery behind the mystery of the universe consciousness.

And what I mean by that is it shifted where I began to see the material world more as like an image on this deep ocean of consciousness. And I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but that's a change that's gone, undergone in my mind very gradually.

And what I always write in my poetic verses is that we're on a path of evolution, just way beyond what we're even thinking the next step is that we evolve to higher and higher and more grandeur and grandeur levels of beauty and that goes on forever, that we never die. And that's the one realization you have as you begin to get into this new mind. And I'm not saying it's right, but that's what I have. I have no doubt in my mind that that's kind of where I'm going with this in my life.

That goes on forever, but often time people will say, "Well, what's the first cause of the universe? How did this universe come into existence? There had to be somebody that did it or some law, but okay, if it were laws or just a material thing, how did that get going?" So people ask that a lot. The way I see it is there's a big bang in the brain and the mind, then you begin to see how a picture of the world comes. Okay, so it's different than the big bang theory, the physical big bang theory.

Now you're exploring a whole different first cause, like where did this consciousness come from? Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know if this is clear or if I'm getting too out there, but I think to myself, well

ultimately it's going to lead to this new consciousness. Where did that come from? And the only way I can say it, and you were saying before, that there's a surface consciousness, which is how I, well, I'm going to back up. When I created the business SoulQuest in 1998, I had a quest for souls. I was calling on a business guy and I was doing business consulting. I said it's a quest for a solution. But what I really knew it meant was a quest for SOL, which is the divine within.

My goal was to find my soul, S-O-U-L, and that became my sole purpose in life. S-O-L-E. S-O-L-E. So I would always draw this circle with these concentric circles, and on the outside, that like the surface consciousness you were talking about, but we don't see deeper. In the concentric circles, that's there's deeper. And I say this in some of my verses, but there's probably a million levels of creation before we even get to God. But at the center was the white light,

which was the intelligence behind the universe. So basically I was saying, again, that if we understand what the material world is now, and I'll just say, you know, they estimate there's two trillion galaxies and 200 billion stars in each galaxy and some one scientist said there's a hundred times the number of stars in the universe and there are grains of sand in all the desert and all the beaches in the world and also that the universe some people estimate it to be a hundred and fifty

six billion light-years wide and the nearest star is 4.3 light-years away that's also Centauri and it would have taken the Apollo 11 spacecraft which went to the moon 43,000 years to go to that. That's four light years. Think of 156 billion. The point I'm making is we've come to understand we're absolutely nothing. Respect. Nothing. Okay. The next state of consciousness, you begin to see it melts away. And it's like, actually,

the universe is coming from you. But then that consciousness now is just really a thimble full of probably us being able to understand what the ocean is. And I probably just confused people with that, but hopefully that made some sense. Like in other words, consciousness itself is so deep and we're going to just be going on exploring this forever and ever sort of thing. Yeah. Firstly, my desktop pictures on my computer are NASA photos. I have like maybe a thousand

of them and they rotate all the time. And now with the web telescope, I've got some of those in the mix. And it just reminds me of the kind of things you were just saying

about the size of the universe. I think it's nice to keep that in perspective. As far as Because where the universe came from, we can think of it historically and also at the moment, I mean historically maybe 13.7 billion years ago there was a big bang and things have evolved since then, but at this very moment the universe is coming into existence from its foundation which is consciousness.

And that kind of perspective is the opposite of what materialist science says, which is that consciousness somehow is created by the brain and didn't even exist until there were brains that could create it. So that's upside down.

And to take it a step further to what Vedanta would say is, number one, it's all consciousness appearing as matter, and secondly, there isn't any matter because it's just consciousness and the sense that things are material and solid and all that is just the sense that a rope looks like a snake, but it's really just a rope and there never was any snake, to use the Vedanta analogy. And quantum physics is somewhat in line with this now.

I've read an article just the other day that said that they're really having to admit that when you get right down to it, there are no particles. I mean, there is no physicality to the universe. But what you said, like the universe shrinking or something, it's not that the universe shrinks, it's that we realize how vast we are by comparison with anything that can be measured in space and time. Yeah, what I was saying, Rick, was at a material level, like when I'm a normal human being

and I realized how little, nothing I am, right? - Yeah, just a little motion. - Copernicus and Galileo, we thought we were at the sun revolving around the earth and we were the center of the universe. Okay, now we're like, once we understand, we're nothing, I'm saying. But that's not depressing, but it's humbling, let's say.

I'm just saying, this is where I said, I see the physical universe now, and it's the lines with quantum physics, and also Walter Russell thought that I see it more as an image. I started to see that, I was going, "This is nuts!" It sounds nuts, but it's not like things are changing, it just more becomes soft and it's an image. It's a faint remains. There's a term in Vedanta, "leysa vidya", it means "faint remains of ignorance".

And the analogy is that, let's say you have a ball of butter in your hands and you throw it off, there's still a greasy surface on your palm from the butter. So there's always going to be some perception of the world, otherwise we couldn't live, we couldn't function, but it will become more and more diathanous, more and more just a sheen on the vast ocean of consciousness. That's exactly how I see it. And quantum physics says there's not a world until you view it.

In other words, it's not like we live in a world, it's just projected out from our brains. And Walter Russell's science is about how it's emotion, mind, and total universe, he And so it's consisted of compressed light waves. So there's no materiality. It's just made to look like it's material. Even classical physics would say if you took a carbon atom, most of its mass would be in the nucleus, but that would be like a grain of salt in a sports team. In a superdome or something.

Yeah, so at a physical science, it's already almost nothing. But he went and said it's really compressed light waves. One of my poetry things, I wrote that this world is a transport system to the next world of consciousness. But it's real when you're in it and if you're not seeing this, you know, it's like, it sounds like if somebody isn't experiencing it, it's a little arrogant to say, "Well, there's Maya and this isn't real." No, it's real. You're existing in it, but then...

The idea of Maya is basically that it's not that things don't exist at all, it's that they don't exist in the way they appear to. Did you see Oppenheimer, the movie? I'm waiting for that to come out on Prime. I haven't seen Barbie either. We're going to watch Barbie tonight, but we won't be able to do Barbenheimer. Can I say one thing about that movie without ruining it? Sure. When the atomic bomb goes off. He quotes the Gita. Yeah, he goes, "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds."

Well, you know what happens in this next state of consciousness? That world does disappear, so you are shattering. So there can be a good definition to it. You know, they start out by showing the mushroom cloud in this bright light. Well, if somebody has a kundalini awakening, what do they see? A bright light. It's almost like I'm saying, this next state of consciousness is the antidote to the nuclear bomb. It's more powerful, but it's so subtle and we're so far away from it still.

I don't know if that makes any sense to you. It makes total sense. I like that a lot. We're looking for solutions, right? And maybe this political system, maybe this economic tweak, maybe this technological discovery, we're trying to solve our problems with all these things. And we'll continue to do those things, they need to be done on their own level. But all those are just really on the surface of life.

And the more fundamentally we can work, the more power there is, which is why an atomic bomb is so powerful, because it's not on the molecular like a TNT bomb, it's on the atomic, which is more fundamental than the molecular, therefore more powerful. But what's more fundamental than that?

Consciousness. That's more fundamental than the atomic. And if we can harness that technology, then all these more manifest levels can realign themselves. What is that verse? It's a verse from the Gita which says, "For many branched and endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed." And I think of that like a bicycle wheel, with the hub and then all the spokes.

All the surface technologies that we try to meddle with are like out on the ends of the spokes. They can't really be so holistic and so fundamental as to transform everything in a uniform way. But consciousness is the hub, and if we can alter something there, we have the leverage to bring about vast changes. And that's what's happening in the world. And that's why these changes are afoot. I couldn't agree more.

And back to Oppenheimer, one of the things they said, well, then they wanted to build a hydrogen bomb, which would be more powerful than the atom bomb. And he was against that. And he was saying, and there was a whole tribe of scientists that said, we don't have, let's say, the consciousness development or the ethics, we're putting too much power in our hands. Okay, now he said that in the 40s. When I look at it, we've gone almost further away in some respects, like we've made it more at risk.

And one of my early, I call it not revelations, but one of the insights that came to me, and it's along the lines of what you're saying, was the idea is we're operating still by an old paradigm of materiality. Michael Bradford wrote a book called Consciousness, the New Paradigm. It's just, you ought to have him on sometime. It's just, yeah. Remind me later, send me an email. Him and a Walter Russell person, I will tell you about these two people, but he wrote Consciousness

the New Paradigm. He said the old model, he called it dead on arrival. With Newton, it was a deterministic and it was objective and absolute universe. Then he showed how between theory of relativity and quantum physics, that's no longer true. But yet we're still operating like the material world's the real thing. One of the early things that I got intuitively was you have to change the paradigm of what we're living by. People have to realize

there's a different paradigm. The different paradigm will be we're evolving, the brain's evolving, which Gopi has maybe the biological basis that scientists can prove. So it isn't just like you're given an idea, but can they prove it? And that will bring more belief. So he has that we're biologically evolving to this new state of consciousness and that Consciousness should be the new paradigm.

And I always said, then if you change the paradigms, the systems that are underlying those systems will automatically change. Out of a theory of materialism, you have hierarchical systems, right? And one of the things I said is we need stories. That's actually what I'm trying to do with my story. It's like we need thousands and millions of stories. You need a new story, not the old Horatio Alger, which is a beautiful one. You work your way to the top, you work hard.

still very valid within one, but we need a new story, because story is how people connect. So you need a new story that aligns with the new paradigm and that's what's going to change the

system. So all this unrest in our kids and terrorism to me is there's something people know is really deeply wrong with what's going on and there's wrongs on all sides. And I think that's what the kids do. They don't know that and so what they're doing, a lot of people act out in violent ways. And Gandhi told us, "Nonviolence is the eternal law and violence is the law of expediency."

Yeah, and you know the reason your paradigm shifted is that your experience shifted. It's not just because you read a bunch of books, it's because your consciousness shifted and then your thinking or way of understanding fell into line. And that's the way paradigms shift. If you read Thomas Kuhn, And they shift because new evidence contradicts the established view, and eventually that new evidence or those anomalies get strong enough that the established view can't stand anymore.

It has to topple and give way to a new way of understanding, which correlates with the new evidence, the new experience. And so, it's not just a matter of adopting a new philosophy or everybody reading Gopi Krishna books or anything else, it's a matter of people's consciousness actually being transformed, and then when that happens, all the other systems will fall into place, all our understandings, all our technologies, all our political systems, our economic systems.

And I'm not saying we shouldn't vote, or that we shouldn't try to change those systems, or we shouldn't keep working on new technologies, but if we just do that stuff without changing consciousness, it'll always be the cart before the horse. I would always say to friends, like when Einstein comes up with his theory of relativity, well somebody can try to prove the math out at the intellectual level. With this thing, you have to prove it through experiences.

Except for, Gopi said, the evolution of the brain, that that might be able to be proven scientifically, that there's this biological process going on. That would be one pillar that would help with. But also if you put out a movie that, and I guess that's what Duncan's trying to do, where people are having these different experiences and say, "Here's what it means." And then all of a sudden you show that Frank Capra, you know who he is?

It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and all those great movies. He was so far, I don't know if you've ever read his autobiography. No, I haven't. Just astounding, so brilliant, he's funny and humble, but he said that basically with film he could do what religion couldn't do because he could bring his ideas to millions and millions of people. Oh yeah.

This is one of my favorite little ideas, which is that people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and all that have had a huge impact on the culture by introducing ideas like the force in this very entertaining way. It's almost like they didn't do it, they were used as a means for it to be done.

In other words, that understanding had to infuse into the culture and so it's like the the higher intelligence that orchestrates everything said, okay, looks like this Spielberg guy would be a good one to make a movie. Let's have him do it or Lucas. - Totally, you know, you had prophets that came at a certain time. It's like the collective consciousness of the race knows when somebody to do something, it's not just spiritually.

It's funny because I actually read a lot about both those two because, and I thought these guys have had Kundalini experiences, Spielberg of the light and seeing the light. And I thought, how can I get to them? I wish they could do a documentary or Lucas is doing documentaries. Well, you know, it doesn't always have to be that explicit.

Stories can be a great way of teaching deep philosophical principles without sort of being pedantic about it, without being so explicit, and that's why you have these, these great things like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, all these great stories in other cultures. That's why you just share a story.

like you were saying, a direct point, like, you know, maybe you do a documentary on something, but I mean, the movie should be just about you're illustrating what this person went through and people can pick up from it. You're not trying to get them to believe something. And I think that's a little bit of what you're saying. I'm in agreement with that.

Yeah, there's so many great spiritual books like the Chronicles of Narnia or even the Lord of the Rings and all these different things that convey profound teachings that disseminate into collective consciousness. A documentary, if it's a good one, could do the same thing, but it's up against a greater challenge. It could be kind of boring by comparison. That's my least favorite. It was always a movie, it'd be like A Beautiful Mind 2, instead of ending up with schizophrenia like John Nash

did in that movie, that somebody can end up in cosmic consciousness. But you don't have to say that, you just demonstrate it. Or it could be like, I don't know if you saw the movie Contact. Jodie Foster? Yeah. Yeah, that was great. You could show this idea in a Contact 2 or Frank Capra's movie Lost Horizon. Have you ever seen that? I saw that. That's really about Shangri-La, but it would be something like Found Horizon or you could demonstrate something like that. Anyway.

Well, we've had that to a great extent. I mean, look at the Star Wars movie with Yoda performing cities and doing all this cool stuff and levitating Luke Skywalker's ship out of the swamp and that kind of thing. I agree. I agree. And that was inspired a lot by that Follow Your Bliss guy. You know who I'm talking about? My mind has gone so excited by this conversation that I can actually talk about all these things with somebody I normally can't.

You should start an interview show. You could do it every week with somebody. I don't know if this is overdoing it. I was going to share some of my experiences that were... Yeah, let's do that.

You know, the first thing I wrote was, as the year progressed, I said my Kundalini energy continued to flow very strongly and I worked feverishly on personal and spiritual development and I started having deeper experiences than what I call psychic and paranormal experiences, the eight that I told before earlier in the show.

Then I backed up and I said, I went back to 1992 when I was 14 and so this is one that was way back when that I was going on a cruise with my family and we were in New York City and we were going out into the Caribbean the night before. We were staying in a hotel and my dad was checking us in. And I was standing there and all of a sudden, every person that walked by, I was like totally felt love with them. And then as they passed, it was like, I was so sad 'cause I could never see them again.

And it was so like, that was my first time of almost like, we're all connected in love. And it was like Thomas Merton had a Louisville experience that was somewhat like that. But then, you know, 1997 is when I had all the psychic paranormal experience started happening. So in 2000, 2002, I was driving down 3rd Street in San Rafael.

I stopped at a stoplight and I looked out the window and I looked up and all of a sudden out of nowhere, it was like this bright light and these just fountain expanding waves of light and just joy, just joy. I kept seeing those things and then pretty soon what happened is I could feel it. It was like it was in my interior now, and I still have it today. It's like I have this fountain of joy inside of me that just bubbles up.

I can be going through hell on earth and I can always go into that place. So I said that, so the first experience was love. This was one more of ecstasy that always stays with me. One of the things where Kopi Krishna talked about, he said, "The closer you move to the core of creation, the greater the joy becomes." And I'm just tasting a little bit of that. Contact with Brahman is infinite joy. That's a line from the Gita. - Okay, yeah.

And then another experience I had with 2004 is walking out of the National Gallery of Art going down the steps and all of a sudden, I merged with everyone and there was no differentiation between any of us and we were all in this titanic presence that was alive. And that only had that one time and the only thing I could liken to is eventually it led to having a deeper connection my inner voice, which I call this intelligent presence, but that was way beyond it.

So now we went from love, ecstasy, and oneness. Okay, there was a oneness in that experience. And then the next one was, I was 2014, I was in Tyson corner standing at the metro station at nighttime, which is right outside Washington DC, Tyson's corner.

Anyways, I looked up at the sky and there was a shimmering, sparkling, bubbling, airiness, just otherworldly radiance and what came to mind immediately is this is life without material alloy, like it is consciousness and it lasted for pretty much a long time after that and there's some, so I called that life without materiality, that's consciousness and now you have all as one, consciousness,

ecstasy and love and then two other experiences. I was driving through the vast open spaces of New Mexico. And it often happened, these things happen often when I was driving for a long time 'cause I was concentrating so much, I would look at the distant sky and all of a sudden, there was this just titanic joy and light and love, and it kept expanding and it was just titanic. And I thought about it afterwards and Gopi Krishna talked about these things.

It was like saying like, I just realized my consciousness is like that of a firefly, you know, as little as flicking in and off, compared to the radiant sun. Somehow it was like it gives me a measurement of what consciousness is more than what my

normal consciousness is. Now to some people that's not going to make any sense, but all I remember thinking at that time, if any more of that consciousness came into my body, it would be like a bug hitting a mosquito zapper, which zaps you, or like a thread that's burned up. I just was like, there's no way I could handle the immensity of that. In my normal, I'm seeing this, and then this new consciousness, I'm seeing a little more, but whatever this is, is just so beyond.

And then I was with a teacher one time, and he was talking about cosmic consciousness, and he said that until at least cosmic consciousness has been gained, the question of God consciousness is just not possible. He said, "God couldn't even telephone from a distance, you'd be crushed."

- I, that's what, I don't know how to say this, but that's what I got a sense of, you know, like the difference, and I don't know how, you know, it's so hard to put into words, but I was talking with my brother and I was saying, "God, when I was little, I used to have this dream of like the world sitting on top of my head and it was crushing me." And then he said something like he had a dream like that too, but that was the feeling.

It's like consciousness, if it came in all in one, would just crush me. Well, this kind of brings us back to something we were talking about in the beginning about purity and strength and so on. It's sort of like one's priority should be not "give me the consciousness" but "allow me to purify and strengthen to the point where I can be a fit receptacle or a fit reflector for it." If it's consciousness first, without the capability to handle it, you will regret it.

Yeah, and that's why I said I was given drips of it in stronger doses starting in 1992 than the psychic paranormal, now these, you know. So yeah, it was like gradually and one thing I knew, Rick, was don't get carried away. With my daughter, we'd go to Chuck E. Cheese, you know, and they had this game where these alligator heads would pop up and you had this hammer and you'd chop them down but they'd keep popping up. And that was to me like Eagle with a thousand heads.

There was a part of me that don't ever get, you know, let's say when you're going through really hard things and you have a success, it's easy to get, whether it's spiritual or material, it's like, and you want to give yourself credit, don't get me wrong, but you can get puffed up easily and then it's like I always get beaten back down. In other words, stay grounded and just keep going. Don't get carried away. And safety first. That's a good motto on the spiritual path. Safety first.

And don't try to make this consciousness happen. It was like, I never even think about it now. Even when I go into my interior, I get these amazing, but it's like, don't even go there. Just keep doing the work. And it'll happen when it's supposed to happen. Which is, I think, a really important message to get out to people. Which is not to say that we can't have zeal and determination and motivation, but it needs to be applied properly. It's like, let's say you want to be a PhD in physics.

Well, you wouldn't want to just get into a PhD program at Harvard or something like that without having gone through all the requisite training ahead of time, because you'd flounder. You'd fail. We have to sort of take it a step at a time. And one of the things I said in my book was when I started as an accountant, I wasn't very good at it, I hated it. We'd go to Las Vegas a lot. I was in California at the time, we were on the beach. It's like, but I wasn't willing to do the work.

I wanted to just hit a home run in Las Vegas or something. I learned that on the material side. It's the same thing. You just be a good athlete, you do the work. And the spiritual side is the same thing. Even when I did spiritual exercise, I looked at it, they're just repetitions. And I would invent these different ways of, I call them repetitions to grow spiritually and it was like just keep doing the work.

One other thing on this was I had two experiences where I was, once I was driving into Flagstaff, Arizona and I was going west so it was ahead of me, I love the mountains and it just all of a sudden melted in this blaze of a flame and glory and it was just this bright flame

I saw and I saw the same thing when I went by Disney Animation Studio in Burbank. That was like to me the Bhagavad Gita's thing, you know, the world being burnt apart or whatever in the flame. And all it meant to me was, it was kind of giving me another clue, that gradual shift to seeing the world more as a thin layer of film on this other thing.

Would it be fair to say that each time you had one of these profound experiences, it's not like that was just a flash in the pan and it happened and then it was gone and then you got back to life, but somehow that was just a breakthrough moment in which the contrast is more evident, but then something gets integrated from it. And you go on and you're not having the same flashy thing every day, but something from that experience has gotten imbibed into your makeup.

And it's another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that you live with. Yeah, definitely. And I said that one of the things I wrote was that, you know, just summarizing, you know, the first one was love. And then the second one was ecstasy. And then the third one was this consciousness. And then the fourth one was this all is one sort of thing. And then this titanic consciousness and the world evaporating.

If you think of all those, they're all different characteristics, I think of what to some degree the cosmic conscious mind is permanently, I'm saying. And I'm saying each one of those, except for the ecstasy thing, I mean, that is powerful in me. The other ones I feel definitely, like I can go inside and see this radiant. I would imagine over time they get stronger, like Gopi Krishna, what he experienced was even more than that, and he saw different layers of creation.

So it's like, just keep going and doing the work. It's like gradually all of those things are becoming permanently ensconced in me, but it's like very, very gradual, and so just keep doing the work.

And then in the end, and I don't need to get into it, really there's only three other things I want to say really early, and I'll say them quickly, but one was like, I get a little bit into what permanently is in my mind and you know and one of them was I always live in this interior paradise and it feels like I awaken from a dream and I kind of feel like I live in two worlds at once. One is this intelligence

consciousness and the other is the material world. As weird as it sounds it's not weird at all and then I the other thing I said is I used to sit there Rick and one day all of a sudden my consciousness just started expanding out of my body. And the only thing I always looked at it was like the genie leaving the bottle. Like I dream of genie and beautiful Barbara Eden and the vapor would come out of that bottle. But, and when that happened, all I would say to my, God, the freedom, freedom.

And then I thought, you know, as a younger person and most of my life, I was afraid of dying and afraid of being buried alive and claustrophobic. And I came to realize our souls are really in a sense encased in a prison in our material body. You know, and that's what that told me. So that was another one. And I would say I lost my fear of death. I have this piece.

But the one other thing I wanted to say, and I think this is really important to me as I wrote, the good news of what I'm trying to explain with all this is that you don't have to die and go to heaven. You don't have to have a stroke. Don't have to have a brain hemorrhage. You don't have to have a miraculous healing. You don't have to have a near death experience. all of which are wonderful. But this is a potential where we can have-- - Not sure strokes are wonderful, but anyway, go on.

- But you know what Jill Bolt Taylor wrote the book-- - Yeah, yeah, I interviewed her a while back. - I'm saying, and then she had-- - But yeah, you don't have to do that kind of thing, or Anita Morgiani in "Almost Die" and that kind of thing. - Exactly, what I'm getting at is the message is, even Alexander, I remember asking, you know who he is? - I interviewed him. - I asked him afterwards, well, are you in that state of mind now?

this is at Tyson's Corner, Barno, and he said no. But it just gave me the idea that if we all do the really hard work, spiritual growth is not easy, and that we can get into these states, and to some degree, permanently. But that's the message, it takes a lot of hard work, you don't have to have these one-time experiences where it doesn't last, which are wonderful. So that's one of the things I wanted to say.

And then I just wanted to read a couple quotes about love. Can I end with that? - Yeah, sure. While you're finding them, I just want to say that it can be relatively easy. There's a verse in the Gita which says, "No effort is lost and no obstacle exists." And it's rewarding. So there's sort of a reward at every step of the way. So go ahead and read your quotes. I agree. And I think we're saying the same thing like the Tao. It's like, just keep living life and this will come to you.

You don't have to force anything. But I did have to say like... Christ said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." Right. I was going to read one of my poems. I'm not going to do that. If I ever come back, I'll do that. But I just wanted to end with love. Walter Russell wrote, "Love multiplies, civilization will survive and know everlasting peace. If hate and fear multiply, nothing can save it from perishing. No human or nation or world nation can work against the law of love and

survive." The second one is from Lois W., co-founded Al-Anon, which again is for people that were affected by drinking, but her vision was it's going to become a universal program for love. And my vision is that I can see that program helping people get through kundalini awakenings and bring them into higher consciousness too. But she wrote the more one gives of love, the more one has to give. I used to believe that thinking was the highest function of human beings. The AA experience changed me.

I now realize loving is our Supreme function. The heart precedes the mind. Now Gandhi, because I had to get in here somehow, he wrote, "Love is the subtlest force in the world." He said, "It's also the strongest force the world possesses, yet it is the humblest." And then just the final one I wanted to read and give a salute to Christopher, who wrote Knight's book, "Love's Design," "Reaching Heaven on Earth." Just an amazing human being.

And the way his helpers, the only way they could get down what he was thinking was through telepathy. He was writing poems even though he could have trouble speaking. He wrote, "I am a challenged individual, yet I have been afforded many gifts. I wish that these gifts could be used to better the lives of others, but I am grateful for what they have done to provide me with a fulfilling existence and a happy life. I am able to receive ideas from the far reaches of the glorious universe.

To unearth gems of unimaginable beauty, look into the eyes of the ones you love. shine the multifaceted crystals which will forever brighten your days, the blue teardrops of joy that will lighten your heart, and the beautiful black pearls which will enlighten your soul. It will hear that you will discover riches more valuable than gold. That's just about loving each other. Well, thanks, Scott. That was a good note to end on.

I really enjoyed getting to know you through your books over the last couple of weeks and also through this conversation, and we'll be in touch.

I'll have a page on BatGap, as I always do, that has links to your books. And you don't have a website. Do you have a Facebook page or anything like that? Yeah, I'm on Facebook. Okay, send me a link to that. I'm going to start doing all that stuff now. Alright, so as you do those things, send me links, I'll add them to your page, even three months from now or whatever, if you put up some new page.

Okay, so thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and my next interview will be with a woman named Mary Terhune, who had a profound spiritual awakening at a rather young age, which really opened things up for her, but then she had to do a whole lot of work after that. So we'll talk about that. Okay, thank you, Scott. Thank you, Rick. I really enjoyed it today. And hi to your wife, Irene. Alrighty. Have a good whatever, and we'll be in touch. Thanks again.

You're welcome. Bye. And thanks everyone for listening, who's ever listening. There are 204 people on at the moment. Okay, thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]