710. Viivi Jokela

spiritual teacher and things like that that we want to cover. What's your feeling of what we should cover next? Well, I guess it would be good to talk a little bit about awakening because we did talk about those awakening experiences and powerful openings that radically shift your sense of self and sense of reality and penetrate the veil of conceptualization.

But there's a difference between these kind of openings and experiences and then something which is a permanent shift at the identity level, a permanent shift in the way of perceiving reality moment by moment, for the lack of a better word, because it's going to be more and more difficult to put in words the further we go, but we'll try. But that would be one point that I think it's important to make that awakening, at least in the way that I use it,

it's a permanent shift at the identity level. And the glimpses and openings, they prepare us for it, and they kind of show us what is possible, and they also orient us at the very deep level of our being to watch this fundamental shift. But there's a difference between an experience and an abiding weakness. We've heard people talk about the "I got it, I lost it" syndrome.

You feel like you got it and it's beautiful and blissful and then, "Ugh!" and it's gone. Do you feel that when you're going through that cycle of "I got it, I lost it," and I guess you went through that yourself for a while, is the "I got it" phase similar to the permanent abiding awakening phase, or is it just like a continuum in genuine awakening? Is it a continuum of what you experienced temporarily when you had a flash of "I got it," or is it altogether different than that?

It's different because the continuum is exactly, or the idea of continuum is exactly that it's an experience that could just last indefinitely and all we would need to do is to somehow get there. When the actual shift in orientation is actually looking like how are we dividing the experience, how are we creating the experience of separation moment by moment because it's not like some

side of some kind of mode that we are trapped in. Like the self is not something that we are trapped in, it's something that we're actually doing and we can become aware how are we doing that, how are we dividing the experience and then that mechanism can naturally come to cessation and it doesn't necessarily permanently just cease but it can cease enough that we recognize that

"ah that's what's actually here underneath". So it's not like a step forward towards some state which lasts forever but it's more like a step backwards into something which becomes available when the self thing it stops doing it. And the selfing thing is kind of like a self-referencing way of experiencing reality and it's constantly active when we experience life from the point

of yourself. It's constantly active except for very short moments usually for people prior to awakening when it's you know when we watch the sunset or something it just dissolves and you know it's not happening and there's like oh there's just a sunset something like that but then it comes back so it can actually stop doing that. We can actually live in a mode where it doesn't constantly happen that that we interpret everything that oh it means

something about me, it means something about me. Everything that I'm seeing, everything that I'm hearing, other people, how they are acting, what they are saying, it's this constant reference that "oh it means, how does that relate to me?" So when the "me" at the center of it, it seems to be actually just a mental construct, then we can kind of experientially see, and it's a very non-conceptual seeing, that the self-reference actually refers to nothing. There's nothing here,

it's just a kind of function. And then it's a very different experience. I mean, it can still happen, the selfing can still happen, but now we know, and again, it's not a knowing in any normal sense of

knowing, but we know that it doesn't have any inherent reality to it. Like, it doesn't have any substance. There's not like some sort of substantial entity called "me" here that it's referring to. It's actually literally referring to nothing. So that's the clear seeing that's possible with that awakening or what I call the first awakening because there's actually many

many awakenings. Okay, so is what you just said a description or a prescription? In other words, did you just describe what you went through or could someone extract from what you just said instructions in order for them to have the same shift? Yeah, you could extract instructions from this. Instead of trying to get to an awakened state, instead of look how you are creating the divided state, how does that actually happen in the direct experience, be more interested about that

than getting somewhere. That would be an instruction, sure. But it's also based on my direct experience, like how it happened for me, the first awakening. So, did you figure this out on your own or did you have a teacher at the time that gave you these kinds of pointers? I went through this really heavy dark night and I kind of like the whole spirituality fell away for me. I went through four years of dark nights at one point prior to the first awakening and

when the first awakening happened I had pretty much given up everything. I was so exhausted and then it happened just totally randomly. It was super weird. I wasn't trying to make anything like that happen. I was actually just doing a trauma type of inquiry, like somatic inquiry. something like that. But there was just this exhaustion that I was finally looking to the experience like genuinely like, "Hey, what's actually happening here? I'm not going to try

to make anything happen. I'm just generally interested in like, what is this?" And then the awakening happened. I can talk more about it. Yeah, so please do talk more about it. And there's these different stages that you outlined in one of your papers, experience of separation, initial awakening, dark night, first awakening, expansion of the primary awakening, transcending

the dream and true no self, all those different stages. So maybe go through that, but at the same time, keep in mind the average listener who's trying to figure out how this could happen for them. What should I do? What should I read? What should I practice? Sounds good. I'm happy for her, but what should I do? Right. It's very tricky with the awakening because if we are trying to make it happen, then it's very likely it won't happen. That's just like

the way it works. So we have to stop trying to make it happen. So that's the first thing. Stop, stop, stop. Stop trying to do anything. Stop trying to manage the experience in a certain way, you know, that the awakening would happen. Like you have to give it up. And instead, it's a lot

more fruitful for the cultivation of awakening, which is, it's just grace when it happens. But if we want to orient towards it, what's really beneficial is a kind of curiosity, but genuine curiosity and they call it beginner's mind in many non-dual traditions and it's a surprisingly simple thing and it's surprisingly easy to lust and it never ever ever stops being relevant on this path

ever and that's what the natural state basically is. It's just continuous fully immersive beginner's mind where we are continuously approaching, we are not even doing that but there is this constant sense of "I don't know what anything is and I'm genuinely curious, you know, I'm open, I don't

come with assumptions, I don't come with knowledge to this experience." It's a kind of childlike curiosity, but not in a naive way, but in a kind of pragmatic way, because that's how children are playing, right? They don't come with an agenda to the play. So it's a very simple thing and it's super essential. That's good. All right, keep going. So we have these different stages you outlined separation, initial awakening, dark night. So the first awakening, which is the fundamental

shift at the identity level, is the primary awakening. What's really surprising about it, that it's tends to be where it is, it not just tends to be, it has these amazing neutral qualities. So that's why we miss it. It's all the time here, but the mind is looking for something complex, you know, and it's looking also for those powerful experiences if we've been having those. and that's why we miss something that is so immediately available but it's just completely

like featureless. It doesn't have any experience or qualities. It can take any form of experience but in itself it's completely transparent. It's just pure neutrality like that. So that's just good to be, that's just something interesting to bring up that that's I think why they call it natural state because it really is supernatural. It's always been there, it's nothing new, it's very familiar in that sense, but somehow what needs to happen is this type of

recognition that, "Ah, that's actually what I am." It is like this simple sense of being, which is just the being in itself or presence in itself without any kind of sense of that comes after that, right? It's like just the I am, just a pure sense of I am, but not the words. And without anything that usually comes after the I am, because that's the constructed identity. So just that, that's it. And it's kind of so simple and so ridiculous that when it's realized, it's like,

how could I not see it? It's been staring, not staring, because you cannot, it's not objectifiable. I mean, it's not an object and you can't like perceive it. But at the same time, it's been right here so it's not far away. It's close and I'm close. Back to the description/prescription conundrum, you described it very beautifully. Is there a prescription? Would you recommend people meditate X amount of time every day or something to get away from the usual distractions and tune

in to this? It really depends on the person. Yeah, it's so unique. If you feel called to meditate, yeah sure but if you're that type of personality that really likes to perform maybe it's not so good then to do that type of meditation because you really want to more attune with this with the whole of your being and you could also do it by taking a walk in nature so it doesn't have to be that type of meditation where you close your eyes and sit in stillness but some sort of orientation

I think it's very beneficial that we orient towards this in an experiential manner. Inquiry could be also a really great way, somehow inquiring, something that's genuinely interesting for us about the nature of reality, whether it's peace or silence or truth or freedom or something like

that, that we start to really inquire into that in a deep and non-conceptual manner. Maybe it's like what we said earlier, which is have the motivation and opportunities and possibilities will present themselves and you experiment and you see what works. Yeah, exactly. I guess that's a good general prescription, because this is a general audience. I mean, there could be a hundred different things that people could do at different times. Okay, you want to say anything more about all of that?

Or should we shift into this whole thing about ethics? just what I feel to emphasize is that there is this thing what I call first awakening and then there is this thing that I call sometimes full awakening which is very hard to talk about because it instantly sounds like it's like some sort of higher achievement or that there's some like a hierarchy and it's not really that at all but there's a fundamental difference between these

two. I think most of the confusion within spirituality comes from mistaking these two things to be one and the same or there's just one spectrum of awakening and then everyone who has an awakening there is just put there into the spectrum and it's just not like that because if you have this second awakening that I call well no self or full awakening there's many names for it but nothing really manages to explain it because it's going in such a paradoxical and non-conceptual

dimension. I don't see there's necessarily something different than from the first awakening but it's kind of like the first awakening if you think of a flower like a bud and then the bud opens just a little bit and then the opening it's it's always there it's like open and people often experience it that oh they can access the awakening it's always there you know when they sink into they can kind of attune with it but they usually use this type of language that I can access it.

It's always there, sometimes more, sometimes it's a little bit more closed, sometimes it's a little bit more open but it's an opening that is always there to a certain extent if you have a shift at the identity level. Okay so the second awakening is kind of like a full blossoming, it's like a

blossoming 300 degrees to all the directions, okay? So it's a very different type of experience of senses for example and some people describe it that it's completely headless because you don't anymore experience like that the perception happens somehow inside the head or that you are inside the body or anything like that. All of that completely collapses like all these fundamental structures of reality like time and space and dimensionality it collapses when the self-structure

or the identity structure in itself collapses, and then this thing just opens up. And it's like this type of zero-distance sense experience or immersion into the senses, which is so immediate and so vivid, so complete. Pete: One way I've heard it described, and this might, I think this might derive from Kashmir Shaivism, is that the first awakening might be that there's There's realization of one's essential nature, but everything else is somehow separate from that.

And then maybe what you're calling the full awakening is you realize that that essential nature you realize is actually the essential nature of everything, and so it's all just one unified wholeness instead of a kind of a duality between inner self and outer relative world. Does that fit or is that not what you're saying? That's actually more what I would call the universal experience of self. So, that would still be like the first awakening, but it kind of then starts to expand.

So, yeah, it expands that you kind of realize that, "Oh, it's actually not just my awakening," and it's like you can recognize it in everything. But then the full awakening is more that the self in itself drops away, and then it's not really even unity, it's something more primary. I mean, it's not absence of unity, but unity only makes sense if there is separation, and

unity only makes sense if there is something to unify. But when you kind of drop into this all the way through with it, you kind of land in this, it's not a place, but it's so primary again, and it's always been there. It's not one, it's not two, it's not many. It's very hard to say what it is, but it's completely uncompounded, it's completely seamless. For sure, it's unified.

It's not like the absence of unity, but it's something even more primary. Because there is this void also that becomes very salient but not as something other than sense immersion. That's very well put. I won't try to embellish it. I'm not capable of embellishing it.

That's good. Now some people take issue with this no-self business. I've interviewed a woman named Jessica Nathanson or Jessica Eve and there's another woman in Germany that's been talking a lot with Tim Freak about this and they've run into a lot of people who are sort of into neo-advaita and who had been having it drilled into their heads that you don't exist and there's no self and no person and yeah all that stuff and it's kind of messed them up.

It's caused people to lose incentive or you know to become disinterested in their family and their job and things like that and even to become depressed and suicidal. So maybe you could distinguish that from what you're talking about here. Yeah, I'm not so familiar with Neo-Advaitam, but I did go to this type of radical non-duality

meeting not too long ago. I was just curious what it is. And then there was this teacher and first I was super excited because he was talking about the "No, I am" and he was using the same language as me and I was just excited and then he was describing this type of death and it was like, oh, it felt like going to deep sleep with eyes open, you know, And I was like, "Yes, that's exactly it!" And you know, I was crying, it was just touching me so deeply.

I don't often get to talk with someone who has experienced that type of death, you know? But then he was just like, the response was this total emotionless ghost, like, "No one cares. There's no one here." And everyone would look at me like, "Why is this person crying?" So apparently emotions were not part of this radical non-duality or whatever. And the further this teacher was speaking, yeah, it's just something about it.

I don't understand what's happened there, but first of all, it's a very rigid position it feels like. And it doesn't feel like it's very fluid because there's not like actual dialogue that happened. They always say the same things when you're trying to speak with them. about it doesn't feel quite right to me. It doesn't feel very embodied, that no self, maybe there is a genuine death there, you know, I don't know, who am I to tell, but if that death

is not followed by a rebirth, it's kind of like you climb to the mountaintop and then you just stay there, but that's not really enlightenment. You need to, you know, come all the way down, back to the human, and that's the downwards movement of liberation, and that needs to happen, and that's not something that's going to happen overnight. It's going to be a lifelong journey

of embodiment. That's the way I see it. That's good. Let's talk a little bit more about embodiment because that neo-Advaita perspective has become popular and it does seem to be a life-negating kind of philosophy. I had a friend who went and visited a neo-Advaita teacher in England for a while and then he went to see another friend and the other friend said, "What's going on with you? you seem kind of nihilistic. There's some kind of disinterest in life that has crept into you.

And what you're just saying here is, you know, you come down off the mountaintop, which reminds me of the 10 Zen ox herding pictures, where in the last one, the guy is coming into town laughing, riding the ox and coming in to be with the people and share what he's found. This whole idea of lifelong integration, that fascinates me, because I often say and think that there is no end. It's not like everybody is continually,

we're all works in progress. St. Teresa of Avila said it appears that God himself is on the journey. So, the whole universe is continuing to evolve, including all beings, regardless of their level of spiritual development. So, maybe elaborate on that a little bit. And the fact that rather than in some way causing one to lose interest in life or lose interest in family or whatever, Has it been your experience that this has made life more sumptuous, more enjoyable?

Yeah, those are really good questions. I think it's a pitfall, you know, to get kind of stuck in the transcendent position or stuck in the void, something like that. And I've had my moments of that as well after I had the big release. The first one year, I would say it was very transcendental, but for me there was a lot of this energetic intimacy also because the Kundalini was so

salient for me throughout this whole journey. But I also had this, it's very hard to talk about because there's no time, but you could say periods when there would be just this devastating void and it was so stark, just stark nothingness and almost no thoughts at all, almost all the sensations they felt very transparent. Everything was almost like paper thin and the nothingness was just shining true and there was almost no emotion. But for me those moments, they didn't really last usually

long so it kind of like balanced itself. But there was a kind of terror that came with it and it was exactly that. It felt like the humanness was completely gone. It was completely like I

couldn't feel anything. But it was only terrifying because the mind started to react to that. So I don't know what would make one kind of fixate there, like what would make someone stay there and fixate there like years and years and years because I think it has a natural momentum and at least for me it just pulled me into itself kind of naturally like this whole embodied experience

and it has an amazing way of doing it. It's very intelligent, the way it happens is not like the the mind rational kind of intelligence, but life just orchestrates everything in a way. Life is really inseparable from the realization, like inseparable. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. Do you feel like as the days, weeks, months, years go by now, your life keeps getting richer?

Your emotions, your love, your perception of the world seems to become more refined or beautiful or, you know, there's just a continual enhancement of your life by virtue of the integration of this true nature into your relative expression. For me this is so fulfilling. It's everything I could have ever wanted. But it's not really wantable because there is this death, you know, and there is this dissolution of kind

of soul and all of that and dissolution of reality, kind of extinction of reality. So it comes with a price. But for me, it's just so worth it. It's so worth it. Yeah, life is not what I once thought it was. Relationships are not what I once thought they were. Nothing is what I once thought it was. But it's much, I don't want to say better, it's not better, but this is real. This is reality. This is actual reality. And for me, it's been a tremendous

relief. It's such a deep homecoming. It's such a deep homecoming. But I don't want to advertise it like, oh, this is like the fulfillment of everyone's dreams, because it may not be that I don't think this is necessarily something that everyone wants and there's no specialness about this. It's really nothing special and I don't see it like that. I know it's available if you want that, but it's good to be aware what you actually want. So it comes with a

price. That's all I'm saying. I mean, it may not be what everyone wants on the near horizon, but it might be ultimately what everyone wants. Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah. And it It does sound better in the sense that you wouldn't trade your current life for your life 20 years ago. It's better now. Yeah, it has these challenges like functionality has been maybe one of the main challenges and also going through a lot of healing, like having this background with the trauma.

So there's a lot of healing that actually becomes only possible after the realization because all of that just so, it just surfaces and that's the nature of realization that nothing can be hidden. it has that type of illuminating quality which is also intensity. That's why I like the word radiance because it has that quality of illumination but also radiance. It's warm, it's kind of like redemptive love almost I want to say. What it makes possible for me at least this type of

healing. It's like healing beyond healing when you are able to meet all the trauma and all these places, residues of suffering and pain that the body is carrying, if that's even the word for it. So when that is released in this space, which is so amazing because it's so intimate and it's so unconditional and it has the capacity to just assimilate anything without leaving a trace,

and it's so intact. It's like wholeness beyond wholeness. It's intactness beyond intactness. And no matter how amount of shattering you've been through, like how broken the psyche has been, it all just melts into this wholeness which is indestructible. It's like indestructible foundation. What else would anyone really want? It sounds like the ultimate healing mechanism.

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

Petra - I love that quote and the way that I remember it is that the world and the I and God all arise together. So, when the I sense is gone, also God and world are gone. And then, I don't know, you could call this Godhead, I guess, like Meister Eckhart was creating this term, which I think it is this experience that there's, when even the God disappears. Which means it's just resolved back into such an unmanifest level that there's no relative expression, right? Is that correct?

type of relationship, if you are that type of person who has a relationship with God. So, it actually doesn't feel like that self falls away, it feels like God disappeared, you know, because there's not any more, any kind of relationship possible. In the tantric tradition that I've been practicing, it's not God, but Goddess. So you can have that type of very

beautiful relationship with the deity like that, which is based on identification. So, you know, it's not something other than you, but yet you can have that relationship and that's just not going to be possible at some point. But it's its own beauty in it that becomes then available. Sri Ramakrishna said, "Would you rather be sugar or taste sugar?" You can have a choice, maybe. Maybe you can even go back and forth. I think he's describing his own experience.

In fact Shankara said, "The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion." So, there could be the tasting sugar periods and then the being sugar periods. Yeah, there is devotion, but it's different because there's not that type of a...

It's just that something that kind of arises from the depth of being or something like that, then it's kind of like a deep orientation in life, but it's not really a devotion towards anything because there is, you know, no that type of, well, like I said, relationship, yeah. No separation, yeah.

There was this guy named Adi Da, he was a spiritual teacher, he's dead now, and I had a conversation with an old friend of mine who's a student of someone who had been a student of Adi Da, And he had a profound awakening, no doubt about it, and he had all this, he glowed in the dark, you know, I mean, he was just brilliant and charismatic and eloquent and radiated a lot of Shakti and so on.

But then he developed this really abnormal obsession with sex and drugs and he had multiple wives and he was sleeping with other guys' wives and all this stuff.

And there's a lady I interviewed named Joan Shiverpita Harrigan who has written some books about Kundalini Vidya and she describes something known as a deflected rising where the Kundalini rises but then doesn't rise all the way up to Makara point, you know, to its home where it can rest but gets deflected off on some channel and this can result in what I just described.

You can even develop Siddhis when you're with one of these but then you're heading for a fall because it's not a full awakening and it's unstable and it can sort of magnify certain unhealthy aspects of your personality. You can become megalomaniac, you know, or a sex addict or things like that. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, that, yeah, the relationship with Kundalini

and yeah, it makes sense that that's what's maybe what has happened there. Yeah, Kundalini, it's a very, very, I mean it's the most powerful energy in the universe and it's a very explosive

energy and it's very unpredictable like that and no one can control her. Right, there are teachings and practices, Jones tradition offers them, where it can be directed properly so it doesn't go off on side channels or if it has gone off on a side channel it can sort of be re-guided back into the proper channel and reach its culmination without causing all these problems. Yeah, when I had the final awakening, it was like there was just this upsurge, like it was like from

the heart, this upsurge, it just exploded, you know, all the way like that. And after that, it's just like, it was so slow, it was almost like a deadly slow, but it was just like, descend, descend, descend all the way down to the earth. And then it was just complete. I mean, that was kind of non-conceptually how it felt like. It just came to my mind now when you were describing that. Yeah. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, so that just might be one explanation of why so

many teachers get into trouble. And I also think this is a quote I've used a million times, that Padma Sambhava, you know, the Buddhist sage, said something like, "Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour." In other words, he's really kind of an enlightened dude, but, you know, he's still very careful about his behavior. >> Ksitigarbha: Yeah, because Kundalini amplifies everything. So, whatever we haven't looked in

ourselves, in our psychology, it's going to amplify that. So, that's why doing all this psychological and trauma work is really beneficial in case something like this would happen because it kind of prepares the crown. The more unified the psyche is, the more prepared it is to contain this type of experience. But again, my experience was that the psyche shattered, you know, was very

rude, rude awakening like that. - Well that's an interesting point. - But still, like everything has to be faced, like I had to face everything, all these psychological issues that I hadn't fully look that it's so merciless like that. And it's a grace that it does that. But did you get some cases it can just amplify them and maybe a person can get even possessed by this unresolved some scars or psychic tendencies? Maybe? Yeah, I think you're really right. I mean,

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

>> I've done it on my own, but I feel the kind of trauma that my system is processing is a

relational trauma, like attachment trauma, so that can really only come to resolution in interaction. in relations with people or what? Yeah, just like friendships are really good, any kind of genuine connection, authentic connection, sharing, all of that has been very helpful. I have quite a few good friends, so I'm lucky with that. And then I've done some therapeutic sessions also, more focused on this stuff, and that's been really beneficial as well.

Oh, good. Okay, so let me see. Well, there's a whole spiritual bypassing concept which relates to all this. You're excusing abusive behavior by using non-dual language. And this is interesting, and using an absolute perspective to dismiss the dynamics of the relative. That's a useful

phrase right there. Yeah, and I think it's part of that misunderstanding that when we awaken to the absolute or to the immensity or to the vastness, to the transcendence, then it can kind of feel like it's so much more real and the relative is just like a tiny little thing there. It's almost like the absolute has the 98% of emphasis of realness and the relative is just 2%. And it's kind of natural to go through that kind of phase, but it's very partial of you if you then

stay there. If it kind of feels like, oh, the relative is just nothing. It's just play of colors and light or something like that. It doesn't really happen. It just appears to be happening and it's already gone so who cares? This kind of dismissiveness, right? And it's not part of genuine realization where this thing really come into this amazing balance like the relative and the absolute. They just meet each other and they kind of collapse into each other. So there's no

need ever to dismiss the relative experience or its flavor, its qualities. There's no need to dismiss pain because realization doesn't mean the end of pain. You can totally experience pain after realization. It's not going to be suffering in that type of sense that we are used to think about suffering but there can even be some forms of suffering after the realization, kind of universal forms of suffering but there's no need to dismiss that just because you have awakened to

the absolute. It's not some sort of escape away from here. It's not meant to be used like that. it's the identity that is trying to use it like that when that is happening. You know, use it as a position, use it as a safe way to keep yourself apart from this human experience. Pete Yeah, interesting what you just said, that these people who sort of feel like, "Whoa, the absolute is 98% of my experience and the 2%

relative is like, it's my play toy, you know, it hardly exists." I had a spiritual teacher who was was very disdainful of human laws that governments would establish. He felt like the ends justify the means, and if I want to ship money from this country to that country and the government is interfering, they're stupid, they make these dumb laws, and so I'll just have my disciples

take cash in suitcases. Some friends of mine ended up in jail in Spain for doing that, but there's a sort of dismissal of the mores or laws or rules of human society because he felt he was above all that. And I imagine he's not the only example of that. Right, and if you haven't really fully encountered the suffering in yourself, like really, really fully, and the root of the suffering

and all of that, you can't really have compassion and empathy in it in other people. So there can be this premature transcendence and then when people around you are suffering then there can be this dismissive attitude. It's like, "Why are you suffering? Why don't you just rest in your

true being?" or something like that. In my experience that just cannot arise if you genuinely know what suffering is. To me it has been the biggest teacher. I can't really separate the realization from it. It's been an amazing teacher and it still is. I have a lot

lot of respect for anyone who's genuinely turning towards the pain and the suffering. I think that's something that could be called the work of liberation, which is not a state, it's that attitude of turning towards anything that doesn't feel free, anything that is in pain. And there's something really gone wrong if we use awakening to hold us apart from that or look down upon that in some manner.

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

Yeah, there's something kind of like scary about it when you meet this lack of empathy in another human being, especially if it's a teacher who's teaching these things and then in their private life, they don't really embody the essence of the teachings. For me, there was just something like kind of shocking about it. Yeah, well, some development yet to undergo. I don't think either of us is just trying

to say that we are better than these people that we're talking about. We used to have comedy troupe in the US called the Firesign Theatre and one of their albums was "We're all bozos on this bus."

You know, "For the grace of God, go I." But perhaps a good teaching point here is that everybody should be on their toes and be introspective with regard to their own behavior and never rationalize inappropriate behavior with some kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, you know, because it seems like it's so many people have screwed up and it could happen to anybody. >> Yeah, it could happen to anybody. And yeah.

>> Yeah. Now, here's a good point you made, the contradictory nature of the experience, I'm sorry, you were about to say something. >> No, I lost the track of my thought. Go ahead. >> Okay. The contradictory nature of the experience when there are many authentic elements with practices and teachings, which mixed with disturbing aspects in the teacher's behavior when having these types of abusive experiences. It's not black and white. It makes it challenging

to process. And so, I could say that, too. I mean, I derive so much from that teacher that I alluded to, totally saved my life, changed my life, still benefits my life, but then there were these disturbing elements, you know, which didn't quite fit. And so, you have to kind of, it isn't black and white, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes, but you have to kind of discriminate and say, "No, this good aspect over here doesn't

justify this bad aspect over here." Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's challenging to process because, yeah, the ambivalence is always challenging for the mind who wants to understand and wants to have an explanation and it can't understand that many kind of dimensions can kind of simultaneously be happening and real. So that's why the mind kind of always just lets go in the end. Like, it can't be understood, reality is just what it is and there is this inherent completeness to

everything, even in challenging situations and difficult situations to process. And part of that healing is letting go of that need to understand. In my experience, you have to let it go completely, the hope for an answer, the hope for that type of, you know, resolution. And then something much more real can start to blossom. Yeah. Yeah. That's good advice. I don't completely take it myself. Unfortunately, I keep like rehashing certain lines of thought thinking, you know,

this doesn't make sense. You know, how could somebody who is so bright and so inspiring and all be behaving like that? You know, what does he think? No, I do that also, of course. Yeah. It's like, you know, what does he think when he goes to his room at night and it's quiet and he thinks, "What am I doing?" You know? Is there any self-reflection there? Anyway, it is perplexing. But it's a good thing with all things, I think, to try to have a broad perspective and not polarize

yourself, you know? Not say, "Oh, all the Republicans are bad and all the Democrats are good," or whatever. You can still vote one way or the other, but there's so much polarization these days, and I think what you were saying earlier about the vast container that harmonizes differences is an important lesson for us all. >> Yeah, I think that's, again, also maturity, to be able to sense these nuances in situations and then to not to resort to this type of polarizing

because it's very dividing. >> There's another good point you made here. The way Tantric teachings talk about reverence of the feminine, about how it usually always turns out to be just lip service, and how that has been adapted as part of the self-image by many male teachers. They give lip service to the divine feminine, and yet they don't embody it in their relationship to the feminine. It's more of a philosophical ideal than a lived quality in

their lives. I think the divine feminine thing is, we didn't really get into this, but it's probably a very important point. We could have a whole interview about it. It's so much needed in the world today to counterbalance the mess that the masculine dominance has made, but a lot of

people are using it as an idea and then violating it. In that organization that I was part when I was younger, that was the central ideal, of course, of that because it was a kind of tantric organization that it was all about the reverence of the feminine but women were heavily abused there.

Yeah, it's definitely we could have a bigger discussion about it and it's such an important topic and that's a fascinating thing to discuss and I don't want to simplify it but in a very kind of concrete way the feminine is not really of course something to do with the gender but it's

this intimacy with our embodied experience. Like it's intimacy with our physicality, intimacy with our emotions, intimacy with our thoughts also, intimacy with sensations and respecting that non-rational instinctual intelligence that is inherent to our physicality, something like that.

So if we don't have that relationship first and foremost with ourselves, that type of intimacy, that type of radical intimacy that really includes the whole spectrum of emotion, for example, in a very personal manner, that you really know what is shame, you know it, you really, really are very intimate with that emotion, you know what is hatred, you know what is aggression, you know, you know, there's not that type of repression in yourself, then it's a lot easier

to respect that in another person, like their embodied experience, their emotions, their intuition, their thinking, the way they are thinking, the way they are organizing reality, their intuition, their judgment, all of it, if you have that with yourself. So, that's something that I've been just feeling into lately. Pete: Good. Okay, so we're just about out of time.

There's so many more questions I could ask you, and I hope the questions I have asked you have been useful and that I haven't just taken us off on tangents that you didn't find that interesting. No, I've been loving this conversation. Okay, good. How about the people listening and watching this? Do you teach in some way? Do you

have Zoom meetings with people? You don't have a book and you're just getting a website as you're starting to put it up, but if people want to be interacting with you more, what can they do? So I have a website, it's called sensingradiance.com and right now there's just a one pager but I will get the proper website done probably until the end of summer and then there's going to be material

about embodied non-duality and awakening and liberation work and all of that. I've started to do this type of one-on-one work within the last year and yeah I love it and I'm open for it if someone feels called to have that type of support. It's a type of intuitive inquiry. It's actually very similar to what I was doing when the first awakening happened. I was just realizing it today. I don't have anything like step one, two, three, four,

like do this, this, this, this. But what I am interested in is exploring that quality of effortlessness and spontaneity which is so inherent to our true nature and kind of seeing where it goes from there. So that can be very beautiful when we are processing trauma or doing that type of emotional digestion or if we are interested about non-dual inquiry like really inquiring into the nature of sensations. So effortlessness and spontaneity they are essential qualities in

that type of exploration. And I don't separate these two from each other at all, like the type of trauma work or emotional work and then the non-dual inquiry. They are all part of the awakening

for me. Do you have a contact form on your website or email sign up thing or anything like that? Yeah, there's an email address. You can drop me a message after watching this if you feel like, and I will probably create some sort of letter to everyone who writes me after seeing this video. You know what you could do? You could set up a MailChimp account and have a form on your website so people could just actually get on your email address list if they wanted to. And then when

you're ready to start announcing things, you could just send it out to that list. I guess there's also a contact form. So if somebody just wants to contact you and say, "Hey, I want to have a Zoom session," they can do that, right? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, good. So I'll be linking to your website on your Bath Gap page, and people know how to click on a link. Great. Okay, well, thanks, Vivi. It's good, you know, getting to know you and we'll be in touch.

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