709. Philip Weber

thing that I can share. First of all, I'll tell you what it's not. It's not some finish line that you cross and then you're done. Because once the awakening happens, there's an embodiment that goes on forever. You become an ever clearer, more refined expression of the divine. And that doesn't eliminate our humanness and our personality quirks and our humanness.

I think the idea that all of a sudden, you know, nothing goes wrong and I'm done and now I can just sit back and cruise It's an unfortunate misconception and I think I probably had that early on myself the fundamental Attribute to awakening in my experience has been that the first thing is a separation Consciousness dissolves. So the idea that I'm separate from everything else you wonder how you ever saw it that way It's like an optical illusion of consciousness.

Before you entered that phase, did you go through a phase where you did feel separate in the sense that you began to appreciate the distinction between self and non-self or pure consciousness and the material world? Sort of a duality period before there was a merger in which the world is seen in terms of the self. I would call that witnessing consciousness.

you realize that you're not the content of the experience. That there's experience and there's me, which is dualistic, but at least you're not caught in the illusion that I am what I have or I am what I do. And of course, that's how I was for most of my life. Or I am this body, etc. Yeah, I'm separate, I'm a body, I'm how much I have in my bank, and I am my car, and I am a house and all, you know, I mean, all this stuff is whatever identity you think that you are, you're definitely not.

But the witnessing consciousness, it shares a cab ride about halfway there, I think, and

it's an important demarcation. I found that there was just a presence there that grew, and the witnessing consciousness presence as I ripened, eventually it was too much for the ego structure to hold up and it crumbled. And that's when the other half of the equation came in. The first realization and the first moments was I am nothing. I am no thing in particular. And then like a tidal wave came back on that. Well, if I am nothing, then I am everything. And that was the realization.

But then integrating and embodying that was quite a ride. And it took several years to really get comfortable with it. You mentioned an experience which you called the kiss, which you were playing solitaire on your laptop and all of a sudden you got zapped. Is that what you're alluding to right now?

I am. I was out at the Hidden Valley Ashram and it was a normal beautiful day. I'd come back from lunch and at that time I was really enjoying listening to, on Sounds True there are a couple beautiful tapes of James Finley, one talking about Meister Eckhart and the other talking about Thomas Merton, both who I love. Incidentally, I just want to say that I've interviewed just about everybody you mentioned in your books, including James.

So if you're reading Phil's books and you wanna know more about some of the people he mentions, look him up on Bat Cap. - James is a wonderful man. I've never met him, but I just love his work. And I was listening to his Meister Eckhart thing and just killing some time. I had some spider solitaire going on and listening to that. And it was just so beautiful. And I just kind of stopped and I sat back and it's just so beautiful, so beautiful. And I had just tears started.

And then there was just this descent of grace that apparently I was ripe and that's all it took. And for the next hour I was drunk on energy, the Kundalini had gone nuts and I was having fits of uncontrollable alternating laughing and crying and saying, you know, take me and this is I am one. The curtain came down and that was the awakening. But of course, there was a lot of work after that that needed to take place. But that was the kiss.

And incidentally, I mean, I've interviewed people who had an awakening like that while tying their shoes or while eating tomato soup or whatever. So you know, shouldn't all run out and get Spider Solitaire and a copy of James Finley and hope that it's happened a minute. You could be like, you know, breathing bus fumes in New York City and all of a sudden that could happen. And that's why I shared it just to point out that you cannot plan it. not going to be... It happens when you're ready.

Yeah, it happens when you're ready. But you can enhance your readiness. Yeah, well that's for sure. That's what sadhana does. But ultimately, I wrote that our sadhana sets the table, but it's God's grace that delivers the peace. And you had an experience of remembering, or in some way recognizing a past life with Yogananda in Boston or someplace. So your spiritual sadhana didn't start in 1999 or whenever. You picked up where you left off.

I think that's right. My sister and her husband moved to Waltham, which is just outside Boston. He was getting his PhD at Harvard in biochemistry. And so when I was first, I think I was 12 when I first went out there and there was an immediate familiarity with Boston and I couldn't explain. So I went back every summer and when I was 15, the third summer that I went out, by then I was bussing around the city by myself and going down to Cambridge Square and playing

chest with the locals and we had an experience or I had an experience. We went up to the top of the Prudential building which had a great view and they kind of went their way and I kind of went my way and I was looking off into the city and suddenly everything kind of fell away and I could hear like an Indian drone. I'm 15, I don't know what any of this stuff is and I immediately had the

remembrance that I had lived there. I'd lived there in the 20s and I didn't make it till my 30s and I was a white male and that was about all I remember. And it kind of went on the shelf for 20 some years. And when I first read the AY in early 1999. - Autobiography of a Yogi. - Yes. And when I was reading about his time in Boston, that came back immediately. And I realized that we had been together.

So when I was ripe in this lifetime, finding him was easy. I knew there was something that I needed to find And I went to Barnes and Noble not knowing what I was looking for. And I looked up and I saw his picture on the spine of the autobiography. And it was such a magnetic pull to it that if I hadn't have picked it up, I think it probably would have just flown off the shelf and hit me between the eyes. And I just knew that as soon as I got it, I knew this is it. That's cool.

Well, I don't doubt that in the least that kind of thing happens. Many of us who are listening to this interview today, if you've been really keen on spiritual development, this is not the first time around that you have had that interest. Clearly not. The verses in the Gita like that, which basically say like, Arjuna asked Krishna, "Well, you know, what happens if you don't make it? Do you not perish like a broken cloud?" And Krishna says, "No, you basically just pick up where you left off."

You do. You really do. So, you know, for people who were a little iffy about gurus, and there may be fewer and far between now than there used to be. I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like at least the emphasis on the Guru is at least momentarily kind of falling away. There have been a lot of Gurus that give Gurus a bad name, so people are a little squeamish about them. There are. Yeah, there are, but I wrote repeatedly in the two books that God, Guru, and Self are one.

So, it's not about a loyalty to an individual and a body or about some organization. really about truth in capital T that as long as you're, is that your pole star that you want to find the true nature of reality in yourself, which are one and the same, then I don't think you need

to worry about whether you have a guru or not. Yeah, I think that the ultimate ingredient or the most fundamental prerequisite to a spiritual path is just the desire, the earnestness, because when When you have that, then the means present themselves in whatever form. It'll be different for different people, but all kinds of opportunities.

There's a British mountain climber, I forget his name, but this is often attributed to Goethe, but some British mountain climber actually said it, which is that there's really a great power in just starting a thing if you have the impetus to start it. And once you start it, then all kinds of accessories and aids and support opportunities will come to you that wouldn't have come if you just had waited for something to happen. Absolutely.

You know, life is supportive and life is a contextual field that has always got our back. It's always got our long-term highest good, even though it may be hard to see that when you're going through a tough time. But you're right, when we make an effort, then things that wouldn't have presented themselves otherwise do. And it could be anything. It could be a book, it could be meeting someone, it could be watching a Batgap. It's infinite.

That's why I would encourage anyone listening to this to not try to put any preconceived notions on what it ought to look like. Don't superimpose that onto the infinite because you're just making it more difficult. It can happen anyway and in all ways, CWG material says, which I love that line. What's that CWG? Conversations with God. Oh, Conversations with God, yeah, you use these acronyms. Sorry, yeah.

You know, I read Conversations with God when I first started on the path, probably 2000, and I really loved Neal's, the message in the books, and I thought the early stuff in particular was beautifully expressed. And so, over the years, I've tended to just incorporate some of that into my own vernacular because it just resonates so well with me. I love the line that God is with with you always and in always.

Now, you sent me some notes of points we wanted to discuss from each book. Do you have those notes in front of you also or just me? I do. Okay, good. As we go along, I just want to make sure we cover as much as possible and we want to be both horizontal and vertical in our coverage of all your points.

Okay, so let's talk more at this point about your initial awakening while you were playing Spider Solitaire and listening to James Finley, and then the challenges you met after that, getting your feet back on the ground and integrating. My sadhana began when I was in my teens. And sadhana means spiritual practice, by the way, for those who don't know.

When I was in my teens, I was very interested in philosophy, and I read widely both Western and Eastern philosophers, and I really enjoyed a guy named Alan Watts, who was one of the main vehicles for I think presenting Zen and Zen Buddhism to the West back in the 60s. And I really resonated with his stuff early on. And then I turned 18 and all I wanted to do for a few years was party and chase girls and... Did you catch any? My share, yeah. Okay.

Never enough, but I did okay. And at about 23, an alarm bell went off and it was like, you need to do something with your life beyond this. And I was very fortunate to get a job at a hotel and I just loved it. It just was perfect. And within a year and a half, I was in management and within three more years, I was a GM and I went on to have a- General manager. You're really an acronym aficionado. Anyway, general manager.

Yeah, general manager and went on to have a 35-year career in the hospitality industry, which provided me all types of opportunities I wouldn't have had in the world. And I got to see a lot of the country and it was really fortunate that I had this. But about 15 years in, that started wearing off in terms of driving my satisfaction for it. I couldn't understand the sense of dissatisfaction, but I had seemingly everything.

I had a great house and beautiful convertible BMW, and I was making good money. And all these things you think are going to be fulfilling and ultimately they weren't. You know, fortunately I never had any addiction issues or I never really bottomed out in a bad way, but I was pretty unhappy internally and I was watching TV one night, just channel surfing and everything was just inane.

It was just nothing interested me and I was, you know, 30 seconds or a minute and I'd hit the button and hit something else. And I can remember this like it was a moment ago. I hit the button and it was a PBS channel and there was this bald guy talking about whatever he was talking about and that wouldn't have lasted maybe a minute either, except he mentioned Alan Watts. And it just suddenly I froze and I was just enthralled in what he was talking about and it was Wayne Dyer.

I immediately went out the next day and got a couple of Wayne books and that moment there was a shift and that was another descent of Grace. It wasn't the type that provided the awakening, but it was the type that provided the impetus for the reignition of my spiritual path. And within a couple of months, I got the Yogananda book and the rest just took care of itself.

So there was about an 18-year period of, you know, my primary techniques were Kriya Yoga, Seva, which is selfless service, introspection. I went to SRF services on Sundays and the community in Atlanta there was just phenomenal. I mean, when I first walked in there, they didn't have the temple yet, but it was in a little business park and it felt like being wrapped up in a warm blanket. I just knew I'd come home and the people that were there became my family.

Do you find Kriya Yoga easy to practice and effective, like gratifying? You had good experiences with it? Very. I think it's a very powerful technique, but it's not for everyone. I mean, there's no one technique that's right for everyone. So I make it a point in the book not to promote SRF or Kriya or anything as an ideology or methodology. I think you have to find that on your own. It worked for me. I also spent

a lot of time investigating other teachings. I loved Nesargadatta and Ramana and the more contemporary things like Wayne and Deepak, David Hawkins, a little Eckhart Tolle. I soaked up whatever I could from whatever resonated. And that went on about 18 years. And I found myself in 2016, I had started a new job and it turned out within just a few weeks, it

looked worse than worms on a waffle iron, Rick. I mean, I hated it. And then I started having health challenges and my heart was starting to go out and I ended up on disability in early 2017, I was sitting at home most of the time just sliding into depression, I would say. I wasn't clinically diagnosed, but I was in maybe the worst shape I'd been in. And suddenly, I thought about it. It's like, "Well, if this is the year I go down, I'm going

to go down swinging. I'm not going to go down like this." And I talked about downsizing for years and so that's what I did. When the lease on the house that I had ran out, I gave away probably 80% of everything I owned, all the furniture, to the homeless facility that I was working with. And that was another thing that I did. One of the things I think that's really a great way out of whatever challenges you're going through is to find someone who

has the same challenges, only worse, and help them. It's a great way to do it. So by the time I got rid of everything and I ended up back at the Hidden Valley Ashram in September of 2017, I felt better than I had maybe in my whole life. And within two weeks the awakening happened. So I had about an 18-year spiritual path that led up to the kiss and that's how I got there. And then after the kiss, after this blowout experience, you went through what we used

to call in the TM movement "unstressing." There was this kind of a collection of deep impressions and gunk in your nervous system, in your subtle body, that a profound spiritual

experience like that acts as a solvent to, and you know, this stuff starts to dissolve and come out, and then you have to deal with that. So talk a little about what that was like a little bit. First of all, I had intermittent bouts of bliss, and when I say bliss, I would describe that is like a fluid mix of peace and joy with a little dash of euphoria. And it was disorienting.

And I never really had much in the way of Kundalini issues. I think in large part because Kriya you're really channeling that. You mean you're helping it to kind of flow in an unimpeded way or something? You're clearing the blocks.

Yeah, and it's gradual. You know, up until that point, the only issues I'd had with Kriya and with Kundalini is occasionally I used to have what I call a Kriya or a bliss rush and I used to meditate in a chair and one day I had one of these rushes and the next thing I knew I face planted on the floor I'd fallen right off the chair and damn near broke my nose I mean it was bad. And you weren't just falling asleep you'd gone into some Samadhi state or something.

Yeah the energy was so great that I lost bodily consciousness for long enough to fall out so So from then on I got a little bench and meditated zen style because I figured, well, I can't fall too far from there. But other than that, kundalini had never been a real problem. You know, it's an intelligent thing, so my attitude toward it is you just kind of let it do its thing and not try to force anything.

I know people who've had trouble with it, and in some cases who have had trouble because they tried to force it. you know, they're doing like an hour of rapid pranayama or something or, you know, something to try to force the energy up and that can be dangerous. Well, you've probably read Gopi Krishna. Yeah, actually there's some guy we might interview who was his right-hand man. He like lived with him and it'd be interesting to get into that. Yeah, reading his book, I realized that I'm

not going to push it. It knows what it's doing and I have a guru and I have my Kriya Yoga and I'm just, I'm not going to try to force anything and I would really recommend not forcing that because it's a powerful force. You can get fried pretty quickly from it. Yeah, safety first. Safety first. Yeah, and that implies with all kinds of things on the spiritual path including psychedelics. In my position, I get a lot of feedback from different people and I'm aware of people getting

into trouble. Not implying that dictum of safety first. You bet. The spiritual path is not like any other thing in life. I mean, there are casualties along the way and whatever moderation means to the individual is probably what they ought to do and not go too crazy on any one thing. Which is the traditional approach, actually. The Buddha and the Bhagavad Gita and the middle way

and balanced life. You don't fast yourself to death. The Gita says, you know, don't sleep too much or too little, don't eat too much or too little, don't work too much or too little, you you know, just balance. - Having said all that, suddenly I was having crazy Kundalini going on and it was disorienting. And I found myself not through any cognitive analysis of, well, this is happening, so I should do this. It just, it was intuitive. I found myself outdoors walking.

- What do you mean by crazy Kundalini? I'm like, what actually was happening to you?

- I was in a euphoric bliss and it was hard to operate. where you're having kriyas, where you're shaking around and stuff? Not so much shaking, but it was hard to do anything normal, like drive a car. It was interesting though, when I did need to drive my car, like when I would go down to the homeless shelter, for some amazing reason it would subside when I needed it to. But when I was back at the ashram, it was just raging, and I found myself just walking outside for hours, very slowly,

slowly, like a meditation walk. And I would do that for hours trying to ground it. Not that I knew what I was doing at the time, but that's just what I found myself doing. Yeah. Some people say walking barefoot is very helpful. It is. And certainly, if that's happening, don't do anything that's going to stimulate it. I wasn't doing any kriyas, that's for sure. But I found myself doing that for hours,

but everything else was difficult. I couldn't read very well. I remember flying out to see my sister and you know when I was in the corporate world I was like an advantage platinum you know I flew like a quarter of a million miles a year for a couple years and had more air

miles than God. So I knew what I was doing and yet when I got to the airport the credit card that I used wasn't showing it up and I hadn't written the flight down and like I couldn't figure out how to get on the plane you know and I called my sister up and can you tell me what flight I'm on and she thought this guy's lost his mind you know. So everything

was challenging in that respect. And that went on for about nine months. And what really, really helped me, SRF and I think most teachings in general on the progressive path, they're really good about helping you get there, but they don't do a great job, if at all, of telling you what to do once you're there. Paul You mentioned you actually had a thing where this anger was bubbling up and you were swearing and stuff like that.

Scott That was a couple months later. I got back from my trip and it was just like all this gunk was being expelled and I was, you know, I would have made a sailor blush. Some of the stuff that I was doing and I felt horrible and I knew that this was just a cleansing process of some sort, whether probably at the subtle body level, I'm guessing. I don't know for sure. Yeah, I think so.

But what really helped me during that whole time was Adyashanti's talks. He had a, imagine and he still does, there's a large audio library and they're keyworded pretty good. So I could target what I wanted, specifically about "Wakening" to hear. And I downloaded a bunch of stuff. And even though I couldn't read, his stuff was just like a lifeline to me.

- You couldn't read because you were in the bliss in any phase and- - Yeah, I just, my mind, my memory, which is normally phenomenal, had always been phenomenal. My brain was mushy. So my memory was suboptimal. and I didn't have the concentration capabilities of reading, but I could listen. So that's why half the book is dedicated to SRF and Yogananda, but the other half is dedicated to Adya because his stuff was really helpful during those months. So Adya, if you're out there, you're the man.

- He's out there. They probably won't be watching this, but-- - Probably not, but I do sincerely appreciate his help during that. And then the other person at ground zero that really helped me probably the most of anything was the abbot, the minister in charge of the ashram. We'd been a long-time friend of mine. We'd known each other for close to 20 years at that point, and he had, in my estimation, was awake already.

So he understood what I was going through and was really helpful in some critical junctures. Can people go there to this place and do retreats and things? They do. They do some. So people listening, if they think, okay, this might work for me, they could look into it and signed up for retreats and learned kriya there or whatever. Yeah, the only caveat to that I think is that the ashram is only for SRF members. Which means you just have to get the right

instruction and everything to be an SRF member. Yeah, so if you're a lessons student, you know, you slightly mail away for the lessons and you're... Yeah, so if you're into Zen or TM or something it wouldn't be appropriate to go there, but if you're into SRF then... Or if you're into both or multiple things. I mean I mean, they're not excluding anybody on that, you know, because both the Abbot and I had wide-ranging interests, including Zen.

He was really into third Zen, patriarch, and some of this stuff. I recall that some SRF fundamentalists gave you a little bit hard time for being so eclectic. You know, that's true, but I would say it was the exception rather than the rule because Yogananda started SRF as a church of all religions, and I think most of the people that I dealt with or very understanding of my wide-ranging tastes. Truth is truth, and you get something said a little bit differently than somebody else and it clicks.

And so, if someone out there just wants one teacher and that's all they need are those teachings and that individual, that's great, but that wasn't my route through. Yeah. I think for some people that might be an important phase that should be respected, and they shouldn't feel any need to be a dilettante, a superficial dabbler.

You know, I get exposed to different stuff constantly and there might have been a point in my journey where that wouldn't have been a good idea, but now it does seem like a good idea. You know, it's enriching for me as it is for you.

There are times when, you know, in my experience where, you know, I was heavily into one thing or another and that just seemed to be right at the time, but then when the shift would come along and instead of diving deep into Dzogchen and diving deep into Kashmir Shaivism or whatever it might have been, just it was appropriate. And so I picked that up when the energy is there and I set it down when it shifts to something else. And one spiritual path can look like anything.

And I think in our spiritual adolescence until we really are firm in our own path, I think the idea of swapping around can be a little bit disturbing. know, with the monks that I knew, they were all well enough along on their journey to understand doing that, and there was never any problem with that at all, and a lot of them did that as well.

So, you kind of obviously have gotten through that initial phase, the dust settled eventually, and you got more integrated and you could actually get on airplanes. I actually got a job, that was a big one. You got a job, yeah. So, I could work, and that was important. Right, so just kind of like the transition phase just tapered off. It did. There was one key moment that really I think kind of bookended the kiss and I called it a karmaectomy.

If that's not been copyrighted yet, I think I might do that. But I was doing Creo one morning, this was about nine months after the kiss, and I was at the ashram at this point. I think I had already secured the job, but because of the length of their process, it took a couple of months to actually start working. And I had been doing Kriya again intuitively, and one morning, from the very first Kriya, there was a deep, deep focus, and the energy was just immense. And for anyone doing Kriya...

Let me just clarify one thing. So Kriya is the name of the practice in Yogananda's movement. do Kriya, but also Kriya is a word that sometimes means like involuntary movements that happen when you're having a Kundalini energy flowing. But in your usage of it here, you're talking about an actual practice you were doing. I'm actually talking about a practice, but during this particular practice, the latter happened.

Okay. Basically, for anyone not familiar, Kriya is mentally channeling the energy up and down the astral spine, the Sushumna, and focusing it eventually here. So it goes up all the chakras and then it just goes back and forth.

You know, when I was at the ashram in 2012 and 13, I got recruited out there and I was the operations manager. So I did a lot of what I did in the hotels. There were renovations going on and installation of big solar systems and wells for irrigation and renovating the the rooms in the front office and this is what I did and it was a way to serve the organization and have a lot of fun for a couple of years. During that time I was doing about eight hours

a day of meditation, about four in the morning and four at night. So I would get up about four o'clock in the morning and I would do 180 kriyas and then I would do the same thing at night. So I was doing about 360 a day which is an enormous amount. And each Kriya is a whole cycle of going through the various points on the subtle. Yep. So, after the awakening, I wasn't doing any because that's not what I needed. I needed to ground. I didn't need any more energy throwing through.

But it started to ground out and intuitively I picked it up again. Just that was the intuitive hit I got, so that's what I did. And in one morning, it was a Thursday morning in right about now, mid-June, there's 108 beads as you know on a mala bead and I had that so I tracked it that way and I went through 108 which is a lot and I just felt great and the energy was just incredible you know so

I did another 108 and then another 108 and then another 108. I ended up close to 600 that day and during the latter part of that my arms would raise up involuntarily and from the waist up, it was just like a white light of energy hitting me and I felt like it was just bliss beyond belief.

The greatest feeling I've ever had in my body and it felt like I was being purged of the karma and then at the third eye at one point, it opened up and I could see somebody's face and then another and another and another and they flashed through fast enough to where I could see them but not so long as I could get distracted or lost in it. And hundreds went by. And I knew intuitively that this had been past incarnations that were being

fried. It's like Nisargadatta talks, there's two types of Kriya, one that can be mitigated and one that has to be lived. Two types of karma. Yeah. Yeah. And this was the type that was being mitigated and this is what Cree ultimately is designed to do is to reduce that karma.

And at the end of it, I saw like a symbolic type of thing, but this is infinitely long train with, you know, all these cars behind it and it had decoupled and they all fell away and all that was left was the engine in one car. I knew that that was the active karma that was left for me to burn out post awakening and that all the rest had been severed. And the reason it can get severed, I'm sure you know, is that it's not active.

But what's active has to get mitigated through living it because that karma is what got you to the point where you are. So it's needed karma. Right, it's like Ramana, the electric fan keeps spinning even after you turn off the switch. That's right, you unplug, but it takes a while for the fan blades to slow down. And so how long it takes the fan blades to slow is unknown to me. I mean, it could take months, years, it could take lifetimes.

I don't know, but they will stop and even then that karma will be gone. And this experience was the bookend. And once that had taken place, even though my memory was still a little mushy, the bliss subsided and I was able to work, which was a very strange deal. Somehow I knew what to do and how to do it, but there just wasn't anybody there doing it. And then I was on my road back to embodying it in a way that was useful.

Well, it's funny you should say there wasn't anybody there doing it because Anthony Parchel, who asked that first question, sent in another one saying, "If you are not no one and not someone, who are you?" Well, you're both. If we are excitations of infinite consciousness, which I would posit that we are, then that is beyond duality.

And so you can't name it. You know, reality is both illusory and at the same time here. What I'm trying to say is the unity and the multiplicity are both there, and yet it's neither on its own.

Yeah, and also with relationship to Anthony's first question, let me take a quick crack at a definition and then see what you think about it, which is, like you, I avoid the word enlightenment because it has too static and superlative a connotation, but if we want to use it, I would say it's a state in which multidimensionality has been established in which there is a level of your life which is, you know, your fill, and there's a level of your life at which nothing ever happened.

is no fill. And so you're everywhere, you're nowhere, you're right here, and all of that has been incorporated into a living experience, which is perfectly normal and natural and functional and you can drive cars and do whatever you need to do. But those subtler dimensions, you know, sometimes might be more predominant if the situation allows it and other times more in the background, but it's all always there.

well put Rick. It does flow and it flows between those two like Nisargadatta said, "Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, love is knowing that I am everything and between the two my life flows." Yes, nice. So, ultimately you can't objectify existence as a thing. You have to just be it. It has to be lived because what would be there to separate and objectify it, it can't do that

to itself. It does that essentially through separation consciousness, but once you realize that there is no separation, that the unity takes over, it can't be objectified, it can only be lived. It also can't be intellectualized, it can only be lived. Yeah, it's a non-conceptual understanding. So if someone's asked, "Well, what is non-conceptual understanding?" It's simply an understanding you can't put words around. It's the Tao that

is the Tao is the Tao that can't be named. As much as you want to try, the intellect isn't capable of perceiving it. It's a non-conceptual perception. It's very self-evident when it happens. You can't miss it. But any sense of lack is gone. There's a fullness to the emptiness, if that makes sense. And for me, anyway, things like loneliness, they don't happen. Boredom doesn't happen. It's not an exotic state. They call it the natural

state even though it's not technically a state, but it's very ordinary. And yet, in that ordinariness, because you're not mentally superimposing dialogue onto what's happening, you're seeing

it as raw subjectivity, so to speak. And there's a beauty, a sacredness to that, that because the mental chatter isn't happening and the judgments and the evaluations and things aren't happening mentally, it's an extraordinary beauty to things that you see every day that are right in front of you, and it's a beautiful thing.

Yeah. You know, we kind of started in the beginning talking about enlightenment and whether it was extraordinary or, you know, ordinary, and you're expressing it very well here. It's the natural state, as you just said, and it's everyone's birthright, as we said earlier, and it's not some kind of superpower, but it's the most wonderful thing that could happen to you.

And everybody's looking for fulfillment, everybody's looking for happiness, and you were saying in the beginning, you were chasing it with BMWs and fancy homes and things like that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that stuff, but ultimately it's not going to give you what you're looking for. And you live in a nice home now, you're not sleeping on a bed of nails, but I don't think that you primarily derive your fulfillment from the room you're living in here.

No, but awakening doesn't preclude the enjoyment of anything either. I enjoy going out and having a nice dinner or a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir or whatever it may be.

I'm not sitting around in a loincloth doing some practices. Enlightenment if that's the term you wanted to use, can look like anything. Our personality still is mostly intact I would say. Some things have changed, but it is the most ordinary of things and yet the most beautiful.

Yeah. On the news at Christmas time, they always have these stories about how much people are shopping and they always have these scenes of people trampling each other when the doors open at 6 a.m. or whatever to get the latest big TV and having fistfights in the aisles. And it's like just such a demonstration of the desperation that is so common, trying to derive fulfillment from things.

But people, the mistake that they make, at least the mistake that I made, is that once you, you know, like I really wanted the BMW, it could be anything, and then you get it and then you feel peace for a while and you think, well, it was the BMW. But then the next thing and then the next thing and the next thing and, you know, the bigger house and the cuter girlfriend and, you know, whatever it may be, you just keep going and going.

And what's fulfilling that desire and that yearning, that feeling of lack for a while isn't the thing, it's that the desire went away. And ultimately, I don't have any desires. Now, that doesn't mean that I might not want a burrito for lunch and some ice cream afterwards, but there isn't anything I need. I don't have any sense of lack, and I live in a beautiful place, but I live very simply. There's nothing I feel I need to do or to have. It just, life takes care of me in the way that it does.

So, what is awakening to me is being okay with what is. Pete Yeah, well, you were talking about bliss a little while ago, and you weren't experiencing bliss because of something you were tasting or seeing or smelling or hearing or touching. It was just bliss, like this intrinsic happiness that was welling up inside of you regardless of the external circumstances. Pete It's the peace that passeth all understanding.

Pete Yeah, and that's kind of a vivid illustration of what all the scriptures say, which is the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, or Brahman is Ananda, Sat-Chen Ananda, you know, we all possess this inner reservoir of happiness, which we overlook for the most part, most of us, and, you know, desperately seek outwardly for that which we already possess inwardly. Pete That's right. And what I found, there was an interesting time in those first nine months where it felt like the inside was

larger than the outside. It felt like in unity, the unity that I was experiencing, it was like Douglas Harding, the head just isn't there and the outside was becoming my inside. And so what it felt like in terms of a reference point, it was larger than anything that I had experienced because the reference points were gone. And so, I was, that was part of the process where the separation was falling away. And one of the things too I would say to anyone is that if you're a seeker, don't let that

be an identity. And ultimately, the seeking doesn't end. The seeker dissolves.

Papaji said, "Give up the search." And I think that that can be a premature instruction in some cases. Absolutely. Because one could say, "Alright, whatever, I'll just kick back and have a beer and watch football and it'll happen if it's supposed to happen." That's not the message.

And maybe that's not what he meant, anyway. But in your case, let's put it in terms of you, wouldn't you say that in a sense, maybe you don't want to use the word "seeker" anymore because there's a santosh, there's contentment, but you're as, you know, as much of an enthusiast for all this stuff as you ever were. And you're like you're in a candy shop with all kinds of interesting things to explore and learn and all that.

You know, the real voyage of discovery begins after the awakening because then you're right back where you were, only now it's like you're seeing it for the first time. Like T.S. Eliot said we arrived back where we were but now we see it for the first time. You know Rumi had said I've been knocking on the door only to find myself knocking from the inside and it's an interesting thing when it happens to say the least. But now I still enjoy things you know basically all the things that I used to

enjoy I still do only I don't have any emotional investment in them. So if the Red Sox lose to the Yankees I'm not gonna be happy about it but it's not gonna to ruin my day either. Well, I prefer the Yankees win personally. I was a Yankees fan when I was a kid. I lived in... This interview is over! I lived outside New York City and I would lie there listening to my little crystal radio and Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and

Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford and the whole gang. I'll let you have that. Again, these things, you can enjoy them, but you'll also see it for what it is and it's just not that important. - Icing on the cake. - Yeah, but on the other side of that, I think it's really important not to deny your humanness. And, you know, things can still happen occasionally, you know, that are experienced, you know, as a cloud.

You know, I see some things in the world that happen that are, you know, some of the just, you know, the utter unnecessary cruelty and poverty and war and things. And I feel those more intensely now than ever before, for two reasons. One is I view it as happening to me in one sense and also when the sense of separation dissolves, there's no defense mechanisms around the heart and so I tend to feel much more keenly now than ever. And I can be profoundly sad or angry or I mean

these things still can come up. The difference is that they don't last as long and then they don't happen as often. But awakening is not some panacea that all of a sudden you don't feel things and things don't ever bother you and everything goes right and all that. That's not what it is. It's not for me. There's an analogy that's interesting here, which is, I didn't make this up, but let's say a very unenlightened state would be like stone and you can scratch a line in stone with

an iron bar or something like that. It's hard to scratch a line, but once you've scratched that the line stays there quite a while. It's not a deep line, but it's there and it lasts a long time. Or, let's say a little bit more evolved state would be more like sand. You can dig a deeper line in sand more easily, and it's erased more quickly. Then, you know, line in water, you can make a deeper line so you can put your whole arm through it,

but it disappears almost instantly. And then, line in air. You can just dive through the air and there's no trace. So like that in a nervous system, in a state of consciousness in which one is very bound and entrenched, you know, then you don't have the capacity for deep experience, but the

experiences you do have leave very lasting impressions. And I won't go through all the steps, but finally, you know, in a state, the state you're describing, you feel very, very deeply, but it doesn't create this lasting impression that takes forever to work out. That's right. And the reason it doesn't last is because it's processed fully. Processed fully, yes. Whereas in separation consciousness, the impressions happen and they don't get, you know, things happen, traumas and... They accumulate.

And they accumulate, yeah. And they don't get processed and, you know, you might get through some of it in a lifetime, but you're also creating more. And so that's the wheel you're trying to get off. things get processed fully because there's no fear there of feeling what you're capable of feeling. Right.

One of my motivations with all this is, you know, like you were just saying, all these horrible things that happen in the world and how terrible they are for the people who experience them and they're very sad to observe, is the realization that if the world were populated more by people like you, or entirely by people like you, not exactly like you, but you know Red Sox fans, one and all. Red Sox fundamentalists. Everybody would have to wear Red Sox shirts. Line with that.

You know what I'm saying. I do. Then, if that were the case, then we wouldn't have these wars and these inequities and the famine and the poverty and the fanaticism and all this horrible stuff. Because all that stuff is just the manifestation of the collective consciousness of billions of people who are like the rock, you know, that have all these deep grooves etched in it. That's right. However, on the other side of that, from a place of love, it breaks my heart, and that's what I'm feeling.

From a place of wisdom, I realize that the things that are happening in the world are happening because, you know, without suffering, there isn't really any grist for the mill. If I hadn't been gradually more and more dissatisfied with the corporate world and everything that I had, the shift wouldn't have happened. That was actually fueling the shift. And so I realized from a place of wisdom that everything is happening because it had to happen and the proof for that is that it is happening.

And that people are in their own way, in their own place, in the perfect contextual field for them to evolve. But I wouldn't want to live in that knowing alone because that would be a cold place. You'd just go, "Well, that's their karma, tough luck." And that's not where you want to be. That's not where I want to be living from.

So knowing that helps me not become overwhelmed by the suffering that I feel, but feeling it allows compassion and then you do whatever you can do from wherever you are to alleviate it and that's part of the perfection as well. Yeah, and I totally agree with what you're saying, and it's easy for people to see how getting bored with BMW might be an incentive to spiritual advancement, but what would you say to the person who says, "Yeah, but how about the Holocaust?

How about what's happening in Gaza to all those children and everything? How can you frame that in the context of some kind of a loving God that is trying to help all those people evolve?" It seems that you really have to step back and zoom out to make sense of that.

do and that's the age-old question is why do bad things happen to good people and how can a loving God permit the evil that we see and my response to that you know from a place of wisdom is that even those things even the Holocaust even Gaza there's always something that really gets you and for me child abuse and animal abuse is two that really make me you know want to just strangle somebody if I see him doing it. Even those things though in the grand perfection are necessary

because they're there. Life doesn't happen to look a particular way for me, but on the other hand, if there's something that I can do to help somebody, then I absolutely will. And that's part of the perfection of will. But I don't have an ego mind that is superimposing what it thinks life ought to look like onto life. Anthony DeMello said, "Awakening is

and absolute intimacy with the 10,000 things or something close to that, that you realize that it is the way it is because it needed to be that way. And the proof for that is that it is. You don't have to like it. - Sounds very Byron Katie-ish. - It is, yeah, yeah, it is. And I don't like it. I wish we had a world that got along as a species. We haven't even figured out how to stop killing each other. I mean, people think we're some advanced point in our evolution.

I would say, well, why are we still killing each other? And why did two billion people not have electricity and working plumbing and living in abject poverty? From a place in consciousness, we still have a long way to go, but you do what you do in the outer world because that's what you do. But then the main thing is that you work on yourself because that's the ultimate gift that you can give to the world. - I saw a touching thing the other day.

It was an article and it was about this professional bullfighter who had been doing that for quite some time. And one day he was there, he and the bull were facing each other and neither was attacking at that point. And they looked into each other's eyes and the bullfighter just tuned in to the bull. And he sat down

and started weeping. And he thought, "What am I doing?" He had this epiphany. Long story short, he left bullfighting, became a vegetarian, and became an activist for stopping bullfighting. It was just that moment of connection, you know, on a soul level that turned him around. And that's a great point. And what we were talking about earlier is these epiphanies, these satar eyes or these awakenings or shifts, whatever term you want to use, it can happen anywhere.

And when we're open enough, you know, he was open enough in that moment to where the look in the bull's eyes was enough to create the shift. That's the beauty of life. His life is the ultimate vehicle for its own evolution. Speaking of shifts, let me do a dramatic, abrupt segue here.

You recounted an experience in, I think it was possibly your second book, I'm not sure, where you went into this really deep state, you can elaborate, maybe it was an out-of-body experience and you encountered Mayor Bhabha, who you had had an affinity with, and he kind of did a number on you that was very interesting. You know what I'm alluding to. This was probably the most amazing mystical experience that I've had in this lifetime.

Mystical experiences, they're fine if you have them and if you're not having them. I mean, people are wired in different ways. If you're not having them, I would almost say you're better off because mystical experiences, I mean, they're a blessing in the sense that you have them, but then the ego mind can attach to that and then go, "Oh, when's the next one?" or why am I not having another one? Or somebody else can hear it and is like, well, why has he got one and I don't?

And that's just what ego minds do. In the experiences that I've had, I would use the term grateful indifference. So I'm always grateful for them happening, but I'm not going to, experiences come and go. And at the end of the day, has the experience changed where you're living from? And if it hasn't, then it's a blessing, but let it go and stay in the now and keep doing your work. So that's my spiel about this experience as a whole.

And if anybody's been in a spiritual movement, and there's always been people who have been Mike Hoggs who get up and talk about their flashy experiences, and often it's a kind of a one-upmanship, ego aggrandizement kind of a thing. And you got to sort of look at how these people actually walk their talk if they do to see what you know whether that really is meaningful or significant at all. I did not want to include this experience in the book from a personal standpoint because

of all that. But there was an energy that just said, "You need to write about this and you just really don't have much choice." So I trust that and I did. There's an energy that's making you talk about it now. There's an energy, yeah, it's called Rick Archer. Life isn't about me, so I'll do my best. It was an out-of-body. body.

Yogananda is my guru and my foremost master, but there have been other masters that have also radically assisted me over the years at different times, St. Francis early on, Mayor Baba early on, and afterwards as well. Because you were inspired by their books or because you actually established some kind of a subtle affinity or connection with the soul of St. Francis or something? It was through their works, but through their works, it felt like a transmission.

I never had any visions of St. Francis or anybody else, but there was a connection in the heart. Like it was a living thing and not just, you know, an intellectual. Yeah, but people really get that, I mean, with Jesus, with Ramana, they turn into these people that may have been dead for a couple thousand years, and it's very real and present. And during the time of the awakening, Maestro Eckhart was a big one, and Nisargadatta.

And afterward of late, I really, the last couple of years, really connected with Lama Chenpa in the Dzogchen tradition, with Abhinavagupta in Kashmir Shaivism, even with Plotinus in the Neoplatonism. I really enjoyed that whole thing for a while. But as Mahar Bhabha, Bhabha was really, and still is, really important. I mean, he and Yogananda, I think, are my two main guys, you know. There's a wonderful retreat center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

And the interesting thing about this was that this experience came during an SRF retreat, which just goes to show that these guys, you know, they're not fighting over devotees. It's whosoever consciousness is reaching out and needs it at that point, because ultimately they're just one aspect of ourselves. I don't really even look at it as personal so much. So I was at an SRF retreat and I had an out-of-body experience.

And to anyone wondering how you know, if you've had one, you know, there's just a difference between a dream or even a lucid dream. There's a qualitative difference. And I was with Baba and he put his hands on the top of my head and I felt and I could see both from within or without a white light coming up all the way through my body. And when it hit, it was like I was being electrocuted from the inside out. It was agony.

And I don't know how long that went on, but all of a sudden, it was like I was floating in the cosmos. And it wasn't that I was experiencing bliss, I was bliss. It was an ever-changing, ever-new bliss that the masters had written about. What the point of that was, I don't know. At least in my experience, when you're having these kinds of interactions, you're not thinking on a mental level, it just really wells up out of the soul.

And I said, "Why isn't my master doing this for me?" Meaning Yogananda. And verbatim, he smiled so sweetly and he said, "Because at this level, we are all one. And lately, your consciousness has been reaching out." And I always knew from then on that no matter what we need, whoever the seemingly outward vehicle is, we get what we need. So if that would have been all the experience was, that still would have registered about

a 9.5 on my mysticalometer, you know. But then I looked down for some reason and he followed my vision and there was just like a little freckle right here about halfway between my waist and my shoulder. And he reached out with his left hand with a little, like a carpet knife or something, just kind of wood with a kind of a slightly curved thing and he flicked it. And I fell back because it hurt. And when I came back up, there had been something attached

to my energy body, I guess, because the half that he'd ripped out was kind of flapping

around in the air and the other half was still hooked in. It looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, you know, and this is just my intuition, I really don't know, but it looked like some sort of an astral parasite, which I've heard some people posit that these can be the source or at least one source for addictions and things like this, and they're really, that's why they're incredibly difficult to get rid of addictions. You almost kind of have to just starve them to death.

Not the only reason, but one. And it was about three or four inches tall, and on the top, it had alternating yellow and red checks. And it was horrific. I'm like, what the... I started doing this, and I started saying, "Take this away." I freaked. I was like, "God dang, this thing's in me, and I want it out." And he sat there for a minute and then he flicked it again and I passed out. And then I woke up back in bed, obviously, I was back in the body.

And it took a couple hours before I could move. I was just frozen, staring up at the ceiling. It was a little after dawn. There was a pale light, so I knew about what time it was. And eventually I got one finger to move and then another and then things, I started rebooting. And that was the experience. And it was crazy. When you got up and took a shower and started your day, did you feel like something huge had happened?

Like you'd really been freed from something that had been plaguing you deeply for a long time? Two things happened. One is I woke up with a headache at the third eye, which I think was from some sort of overstimulation as he put that energy in me. And it got worse throughout the day. It was really bad. And then like an idiot, I threw gas on the fire. I tried to do Kriyas thinking that was going to help, but it only made it worse.

do that if you've got something happening here. The other thing that it took about a year, it felt like there was a hole, like a membrane that had been opened up and it felt like kind of an energetic breathing right here. And it took about a year for that to go away. Like something in the etheric body had to heal over and that there was that gap there. It was a very strange feeling. I didn't have it 24/7, but I had it quite a bit off and on.

I guess the reason I wanted you to tell that story is that I have a feeling that that is something fairly common that we're generally unaware of, and that, as you said, it could be the cause of addictions, of which there is a whole lot these days, addictions to all kinds of things, some sort of astral entities that are feeding off that kind of energy that are impelling us to behave in certain ways in order to be fed.

So I don't know what people can do about it other than maybe do spiritual practice and any kind of purificatory things. I had a thing one time where something seemed to be attacking me and I just started to do this Sanskrit puja in my mind that dispelled it. Or people talk about exorcisms and prayers that dispel negative entities. So there are probably things in all the ancient traditions that deal with this kind of thing.

So, I just wanted to touch upon it for whatever benefit it might provide people listening. Pete Well, sure. The human body, the physical body has all kinds of germs and parasites and things, so why wouldn't that be the case at the astral level? Rick Right, subtle body. There was another neat story you told about how there was a new Yogananda Center being opened in Atlanta and you felt this kind of compulsion to show up there at

midnight and do something. I'm not sure if you knew what. It was kind of like a strange thing for you to do, but you've just followed your impulses and it turned out to be very interesting. You want to tell that story? Sure. So, somewhere in 1999, I mentioned that when I first started with SRF at the Atlanta

Center Group that they were in like a business park. They had a rented place, but through some very generous individuals in the group, a temple was built. I won't go into all the details but it was pretty miraculous in how they found it and how it could be afforded and how the architect just happened to be there and then the construction company had a window when they could have done the work and everything fell together it was pretty incredible. I lived about a

mile from where they built the center. I started feeling the fall of 1999. Someone should be there at midnight when the property came theirs. I didn't know why and I thought well it's Atlanta in the winter, it's going to be wet, it's going to be cold. This really wasn't what I wanted to do, but it just nagged me for a couple of months. And then as I got closer to the date, it was warm, it was dry, there was no reason not to, and I got, all right, I'm going to take my blanket,

I'm going to go there, and I hope no one sees me. Police are out everywhere looking for drunk drivers, and there's this guy sitting out in the field, they think he's lost his mind. And I sat down and I tried to meditate, and there was traffic, and I felt like an idiot. I was restless. I'm sharing this because what happened wasn't because of me, it was in spite of me. Suddenly everything fell away and I couldn't hear any noise. I'm sitting there and

in my hands was a like a small bowling ball size glowing orb of energy, I guess. And I didn't know what to do. I had my eyes closed, so I was seeing it through the third eye and something just said, "Don't open your eyes." And then I kind of mentally said, "Well, what do I do?" And I heard the word prayer circle, which at the end of an SRF service, everybody raises their hands and they own three times sending out healing vibrations to the universe. And so that's what I did.

I raised my hand and I slowly went out like this and I could see the thing flying apart. They were kind of yellowish orange.

And when the little particles started floating down, kind of look like a Cheeto and I could see them permeating the ground and most of them went in the direction I was facing but all of them kind of went somewhere and then just as fast as I went out of it I came back in and I could hear the noise and was looking at the ground and I'm like well my intuition said that the ground had been consecrated it had been blessed and that a physical

intermediary had been needed for the energy to come through the higher planes into this plane. So I packed up my stuff and I went home, told a couple people about it and they were like, "Dang, that's really cool." And that was it. You know, clearly there were people in the Atlanta group that deserved it more than I did. They'd been working for 30 or 40 years to achieve all this and I was kind of a

Johnny-come-lately in the group at that point. So maybe they just felt like, "Well hell, he's... they being the masters felt like, you know, he only lives a mile away,

will use him. You know, I don't know how it happened, but I felt incredibly blessed to have been chosen for that. It wasn't anything I did. I mean, I just, I was the one that got picked and the land had been permeated. And what I found out later was the direction that I was facing was actually where the building was built. So the area that got the most of it was actually where the center, the temple was going to be sitting.

Nice. Celestial Cheetos. Okay, so now we got about 20 minutes left or so, and there are a few points that maybe we could cover in the remaining time. The gradual, direct, and pathless path controversy it would be one. Grace would be another. Free will determinism, non-doership is another. Gradual, direct, and pathless. Let's do that first. I think that whatever path is resonating with someone at the time is the best path.

So, a lot of people, when they hear short or direct path, and they think it's got to be better. And I would say that's not true. I mean, I woke up to the progressive path. So, McDonald's is not necessarily better than a fine restaurant where it takes a few hours to eat. No, no. If I have given up the techniques, the methods that I had chosen early on for something labeled short, I don't think I would be sitting here. I mean, it worked. The teachings

through Yogananda and the NSRF do work and I can say that because they work for me. I'm sure they work for other people as well. But that said, after awakening, the short path, know, Ramana and, you know, self-inquiry and he's like a dot was another, I think, you know, major proponent of just resting in the I am and these types of things. It's like, well, geez, that makes a lot of sense. Because are you really

purifying anything? Or is it just, it was like, when Rupert Spira talks about, you know, his journey, he was doing all kinds of progressive path for, you know, I don't know, 20, 30 years or something, he calls himself a late bloomer, but then it was more of a direct path encounter with his teacher, Francis Lucille, that brought the awakening. That wasn't the case for me, but I think it's whatever resonates and whatever you're right for.

And then the pathless path is ultimately just not doing anything. You know, there's a non-meditation, non-method of just simply being here now. And that's really tough to do, you know, unless it isn't. I couldn't have begun to conceive of anything like that, let alone do it. I mean, when I started, I needed a technique, I needed something to do, and I needed a practice. But maybe somebody who is riper than I was back in 1999 wouldn't.

I think when Ramana would meet people, he would always start at the default of the highest teaching, because you don't know if it's going to work or not. So he would bring that, and then if they couldn't conceive of a pathless path of just your head this is it, then maybe try the self-inquiry. And then if that wasn't going to work, then, okay, here's a progressive discipline that you could use. But I don't think there's a better

or worse path. As an old former photographer, there's an old saying that there's an internal debate among enthusiasts, gearheads, they used to call them, about what's the best camera. And ultimately, everybody agrees that the best camera is the one you have with you when you you need to take the picture. I would say it's the same true with the spiritual path. If it's resonating with you, it's working for you, go with it. And then if a shift is needed,

it'll present itself. And don't get hung up on one being better than another because it's solely dependent on the person.

You can be having direct dives into Samadhi, for instance, and at the same time, day by day you're progressing, and then you also recognize that you're not doing anything and it's all being done.

So all those three are just different components of a path. I moderated a panel discussion at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences on this debate of direct versus progressive, and what I've found is that in many cases, people who are advocating the direct path, like, "Boom, you're done. All this progressive stuff is a waste of time," ended up getting into trouble later on, behaviorally and different things, and obviously some need for progress was there. So I don't know.

I don't think it's an either/or. It's definitely not. They're not mutually exclusive. For instance, in Yogananda's teachings, you know, one of the central premises that I adopted very seriously early on is that not only can you achieve it in one lifetime, but you're already there. All you have to do is improve your knowing. And that is certainly a short or pathless path tenet. So, you know, these things ebb and flow according to whatever is appropriate at the time.

And they're certainly not mutually exclusive. Short path or pathless could even be a little bit of a trap in terms of spiritual bypassing and not owning up to the work you've got to do, whether it's psychological or purification or whatever it may be. It holds that caveat as well. It's been used that way, especially by neo-advaita people, like you're already enlightened, you don't need to do anything. It's a disservice to people to present them with that.

If Yogananda said you're already there, that's very true, but it might take you 40 years to actually fully embody that realization and just the initial concept when you first hear it is not the same as fully embodying that realization. I would say particularly in Grace Happens, but both books, I mean they're written for anybody that's called to them certainly.

They're not exclusive to one particular segment of the spiritual marketplace, but this one particular target group, so to speak, that I was trying to reach, it was the people that have been on the path for 20 or 30 or 40 years and seem to be able to get over the hump. And while you can't make it happen, I think having the attitudinal stance of there and then surrendering, you know, sometimes the step forward is the backward step. Your audio broke up a little bit.

Having the attitudinal stance of what? Of surrender and knowing that we can't make it happen and that the methods aren't the goal. Don't mistake the map for the territories sort of thing. So even an attachment like the third Zen patriarch said, even an attachment to enlightenment is an attachment. After 30 or 40 years, if you haven't found yourself in LA yet, using the SRF analogy or metaphor, then I would say you've got to work on surrender because that's what I did at the end.

Surrender to the point where I didn't even realize I was surrendering. You just give up. And I'm not saying you to give up your practice, but you give up trying to control it. And I think that vulnerability, that openness allows the grace to descend in a way that it finds it more difficult to do when you think you're controlling it and that you're gonna punch through. You're not. You do all you can, but then you just give it to God and let it happen the way it will.

God helps those who help themselves. How about the free will and determinism thing? This is an age-old debate. That's one reason I wrote, it's like, I see another YouTube article or video about free will and determinism, I think I'm just going to throw up on my computer, you know, and it's just, it's not that difficult. There's always free will, but not in the way that people think. The ego has no free will, because it's just a mental construct, but we're not our ego, fortunately.

So there is a connection, I think, to universal will, which does give us free will. So for me, the idea of surrendering and all the things we do in our sadhana is like opening a camera aperture. And the more we're out of the way, the more that free will can flow.

Even without that, you know, relatively speaking, there are some pretty impressive results by people in the world who are operating under the premise that they're the ones doing it, you know, 20 gold medals in the Olympics or, you know, achieve some major, what most people in the world would call, you know, desirable goals. I mean, it's not like you can't achieve anything in separation consciousness.

But even then, you know, some of the great achievers, Michael Jordan and other people talk about being in the zone, Arthur Ashe, others, where you just feel like you're not doing anything and it's just being done through you somehow. And that's when you're at your best. And that can happen all the time. Because once the ego mind is, has been transcended, and

unity is a... I mean, there's always unity, but now you know it. Then that's the feeling you have all the time, that life just flows in a perfect way, and if action needs to take place, it does, and if it doesn't, it doesn't. So, free will and determinism, you could say both are true from a different perspective. Yeah, I think one thing that helps to resolve the debate is not to try to make absolutes out of it. At least in the ordinary state of conscience, we don't have

absolute free will, nor are we absolutely determined. We have a certain amount of leeway, a certain amount of wiggle room, and according to how we exercise the free will we seem to have, we either move in the direction of less conditioning, greater freedom, or more conditioning, greater bondage. So, you know, you just kind of move up on the scale or down on the scale, as the case may be. But if you think about it, if we could do anything we wanted to do, what

would we want to do? Well, the way you and I think about things, we would want to sort to be in complete attunement with the will of God. And in a sense, that would be the ultimate free will, and yet also that's the ultimate not having any free will whatsoever because it's God's will now, it's not yours. That's right. And I think Ibn Arabi said, I love Sufism and Sufi teachings, especially Ibn Arabi, and he said something to that effect where, "When I realized my greatest freedom

when I became God's servant. Paraphrasing, but that's what you said, is that it's in surrender that we gain our ultimate freedom. We're using the word God here as if we assume that everyone agrees there is one or knows what we mean by the word. What's your understanding? I realize this is a big question. Well, I'm certainly not an old guy and a white beard. I get how you could maybe want to conceptualize at that at a certain point, but I don't see God as personal. I see it as infinite existence,

infinite conscious existence, and that everything is happening in and as the divine mind. So there isn't anything that isn't God, and there isn't anything outside God. It is literally the light of awareness, you could say, or conscious awareness. There's all kinds of terms that point to it, but of course, you're never going to be able to objectify God. You can only live it.

I'd like to say that God is hiding in plain sight. Just from what we know about what science has taught us, if you look closely at anything and understand the laws of nature that are functioning in the universe, whoa, that's just like this amazing display of intelligence

at every level. A single cell, what's going on, is mind-boggling, or you know, clusters of galaxies, and at every scale, wherever you look, large or small, there's this orderliness and non-random, non-accidentalness of the way things are functioning that just makes you feel like it's just one great big ocean of intelligence, and we're just little fish which are actually made of the same stuff but often consider ourselves separate from it and often suffer thirst despite

the fact that we're swimming in this ocean of infinite satiation. You've heard the old metaphor, it's like the fish don't see the water. It's hidden, so hidden in plain sight that you just you don't see it until you do. And so I think what's really exciting is science is starting to see that in its own way, the quantum mechanics certainly, but when I look at you know somebody

like Bernardo Kastrup who's in his analytical idealism. I mean he's a guy who's like, "I'm not awakened, I'm a hardhead that way, you know, but through rigorous analysis I have determined that this is how things are." And the conclusions that he comes to beautifully

elucidate my awareness experience now. But he's come about it from a completely, it's not a lived experience for him and he admits that, but yet there's a way of coming through from that angle that you can at least cognitively understand the mystical experience. I think that's really good for people who need that.

He's a Giani, really. He's like a genius with this brilliant intellect and he's able to parse the subtle understanding of reality so finely that I think it's more of a lived experience for him than he might realize. Well, I agree, you know, it'll happen for him what I really appreciate about Bernardo and Rupert's as well who they're and their friends is I think part of the Obstacles that we have in understanding these things is everybody's got their own terminology and they don't necessarily

Jive, you know, and so it's confusing. I think they both do a wonderful job of stripping religious jargon and spiritual jargon and being very, very easily approachable. And I've tried to do that as best I can. I don't write as well as Bernardo does, and I'm not as articulate verbally certainly as Rupert is, but I find myself trying to emulate their technical expression as much as I can because I think it's helpful.

Yeah. I think you're a really good writer. You know, I'm not just saying that. You disincentivized me from writing a book because I think I... Oh, no! write a book that well. I'm telling you, I've got a great editor. That's why. Yeah, well, if I ever

write one, I'll get in touch with him. And your books are interesting. I found them just full of all kinds of interesting points and thought-provoking, but they're nice reference manuals too, because you refer to all these teachers and footnote them in many cases where one can explore other angles, and you just give them a taste that might inspire them to explore those angles.

Hopefully the second book which will be out in a couple weeks. It's early July I think is when it's gonna hit Amazon and somebody wants an autographed copy with a bookmark They can contact my editor as you mentioned at the beginning I don't have a website or any social media presence and I don't think I ever will But if you go to I guess you'll have the link Yeah, I'll put the links on your back that page then they go there and they can shoot a message to Ellie and

and he'll forward it to me and I can send him one. Or if somebody is in the northern San Diego County area, SoulScape, in Ensigny, this is the exclusive bookseller for, well, they've got Awakening Now, and then they'll have Reflections in a couple of weeks, well, maybe about three weeks. - Awakening Now or Grace Happens? - Well, it's Grace Happens, sorry. Grace Happens, they have now. I meant Awakening Now, Grace Happens and Awakening of Consciousness, they have that now.

Oh, I see what you mean. And then the reflections, reflections of consciousness and then the subtitle is Essays on the Journey of Awakening and the Nature of Reality. I'll have that soon. I like promoting the local bookstores because they're getting fewer and far between. So anybody in this area that wants one can get in there. So you have no intention to do Zoom meetings or any kind of interactive things like that? All right, no problem. I don't.

you'd be good at it if you did, but it's no big deal. I'm not saying it couldn't happen. I mean, I never know, but that's certainly not my intention. But the books are, again, they're not promoting an ideology or methodology. They're just here's a description of what happened to me. And then here are the things that went into the particular stew that got me to where I am. And if you find them interesting, you can explore them. And it's across the board. I mean, I will

forever be grateful to SRF and Yogananda as my guru. It bothered some people, I think, when I said that after awakening, you know, the guru isn't necessarily needed anymore. And it's not that there isn't still a relationship going on there, but the relationship changes. And the ultimate tip of the cap is you don't need him anymore because it worked. You know, if you had a great calculus teacher and you graduated, you don't need to go back and take

the chorus singing, you got it, you know. So I'm forever grateful for that, but there was so much more that went into my process. And that isn't just spiritual teachings, but it's all the people that I've known in this life, my family, my friends, the Upa gurus, you

know, that aren't necessarily the teacher, but teach you things about life. I'm grateful to everyone I've ever known and everything I've ever had to experience, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant, because it all got me to where I am. Yeah, that's very well put. I think we'll end it there. We can't top that little point. So, thanks, Phil. It's been really fun talking to you for a couple hours and it was really great reading

your book and I hope we get to meet in person one of these days. That'd be great, Rick. Both you and Irene have been wonderful from the beginning and I really appreciate the opportunity to come on. And even if we don't do another one of these, I hope we stay in touch because I've heard some emails about some of the things we're concerned about in terms of spiritual ethics and and your involvement with ASI, which I think is commendable. Association for Spiritual Integrity, Mr. Acronym Man.

I had to throw one last acronym at you there, just to drive people crazy. But there's enough out there that isn't necessarily what it purports to be, or what is healthy for people, that I think the group that you're involved with is really helpful for people. So I thank you for doing that. Yeah, that's part of what I'm inclined to do. Okay, so thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

Most of you are probably familiar with BatGap and if you're not and you just stumbled upon this, don't just look at the YouTube channel. Check out the website because we have some things there that you won't find on the YouTube channel. And also there's some ways we've categorized and organized the interviews on the website that are hard to do on YouTube.

You can sign up to be notified by email whenever there's a new interview And there's the BatGapBot, which is this big project I've been working on. It's an AI chatbot that has a vast wealth of spiritual wisdom loaded into it, and you can ask it questions and interact with it and all. So anyway, it rolls along. So thanks, Phil, and we'll be in touch, as you say. Thanks Rick. God bless to everyone out there, and I appreciate your time here today. I hope it helps. I think it will. All right.

Take care.