726. Dr. Neil Schuitevoerder

From an ego level, I'm moving the hand. From a soul level, I'm telling the ego to move the hand. From a cosmic level, the hand's moving itself. From a divine level, it's coming out of nothing and going back into nothing. I mean, could you even say there's a level on which there is no hand? I mean, there's nothing, right? Yeah. There just appears to be a hand. In the level, it's all empty. Yeah. So I experienced the body as being empty, thoughts as being empty, and there's nobody in the home.

Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Before we start today's interview, I just want to mention that a number of people have have reported that they either had some kind of malware warning when they tried to visit our website or their IP address was blocked or something like that. We're trying to debug those kind of problems. The site has been thoroughly checked for malware and doesn't have any.

But if you're listening to this, I'd appreciate it if you just try to visit batgap.com. And if you get any kind of error like that, just send me a screenshot of it to rick@batgap.com And we will figure out the problem. If you're getting an IP number error, like this, the firewall is blocking your IP number, go to Google and type in what's my IP and send me that number. And I'll make sure that that number is white listed. Okay. My guest today is Neil. How do you pronounce your last name?

Say it again. Schuitevoerder Very good. I've known him for maybe 20 years. He used to be a participant in a weekly satsang or meeting that we would have here in Fairfield, Iowa for years before I started BatGap. And it was in that meeting that the idea to do BatGap arose. And actually, I invited Neil to be interviewed as one of my very first people, but he was working as a clinical psychologist, and I think he didn't want to come out of the closet, you know, about his spiritual experiences

at that point, but now he's retired. He's been doing spiritual practices for 50 years, and as he said in the bio he sent me, he's no longer interested in his ego's story. So here's the story of his soul's evolution. I'll just read this to get us started and then we'll elaborate. He had early introduction in how to use a pendulum, which led to the opening

of his intuitive knowing, which has continued to expand into higher stages. His intense meditation practices in his twenties led to illness and he was guided to return to a householder life as a husband and father, which the illness went away. He continued practices in mystical Judaism, then turned to Vedanta, Kundalini and other Hindu practices. With the Kundalini Master and with the Diamond Approach, A.H.

Almas's teaching, technique of inquiry, he opened the higher chakras and began to experience states of unity and non-duality. with a near object, such as a tree, and then with a far object, such as the galaxy. Slowly, the dualities of self/other, near/far, past/future, dissolved, and his knowing expanded to include the distant past, his past lives, his rebirth in this lifetime, and his ability to travel in subtle bodies to the subtle planes, including conversing with the deceased.

His mind emptied out, then his body became empty, containing the whole galaxy, a non-dual then his astral body emptied out and he no longer traveled but was united with the subtle mental and causal planes all within him. The state of bliss is always accessible. The local identity of Neil remains when he functions in the world

as he lives in dual and non-dual levels of awareness simultaneously. If you enjoy this interview, Neil and his wife Connie Zweig, who's been a guest on BatGap, have a podcast with about 30 something episodes now, which will be an elaboration of everything that we talk about today. And we'll have a link to his podcast on his BatGap page. I was thinking, Neil, as I read your bio and as I listened to every episode of your podcast in

the last week or so, that people have a certain understanding of what awakening is. Okay, you realize your true nature or maybe you experience oneness or non-duality. But like the infomercial says, "But wait, there's more." You know, hearing what I just read, a lot of people are thinking, "Whoa, that's not what I conceive of as awakening. It seems like so much more." And some people would actually be critical of that stuff. You hear people say, "Oh, you don't want to experience

all those things because they're just mind stuff. They're distractions. They are maya. and you just want to stay with the essence, you don't want to be visiting other realms and things like that. So what would you say to that? I guess I’d like to share my first awakening, which was my last lifetime. I was a brahmin priest in a Shiva temple in India, married, a couple of kids. I woke up in that lifetime and Went to Brahmaloka. - When you died. - When I died. I loved it there.

It was pure bliss, ecstatic, one continuous stream. But I found that I got eventually bored because bliss, you become accustomed to it. And there was no way to go except back into your body. So I took the long journey back in body with the intention of expanding my consciousness and waking up more of myself. - Okay, so I'll play kind of a skeptic or devil's advocate a little bit. Don't take it the wrong way because I give you the benefit of the doubt.

I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but I also take everybody with a grain of salt and proportions vary, but in your case, there's not much salt. You know, I know you pretty well. I've heard a lot from you and discussed things with you over the years. First of all, then, my question is, how clearly did you remember this life? And many of the things you're gonna tell us today,

for instance, you say you can sort of move outside the galaxy and experience it from an external vantage point. Now, people might say, well, you know, I can imagine that. I can picture a galaxy in my mind's eye. Maybe he has good visualizing capabilities and he has a vivid imagination. What can you say to give us some, not evidence, I don't wanna say, because how could you, but to distinguish what you're saying from having a vivid imagination?

Well, how would I describe this? I am one with the galaxy. There's a oneness, both looking at it and perceiving from it and being joined. So the experience happened to me out of emptiness. I found myself empty of all thoughts, empty of all forms, in a state of non-duality. When was this? This was about five years ago. Oh, okay. But you had had previous awakenings, but you're saying at a particular stage you found yourself having that.

Yeah. - Well, I found my body was empty and my emotions were still, and my mind was empty, and my ego was empty, and that led me to move the emptiness to a more expanded state, where I found that I was able to perceive anywhere, any place.

- And you had some of that even before, 'cause I remember one time in our satsang, you were in Los Angeles, and you and Connie were on a speakerphone, And our friend George Foster held out a few fingers and said, "How many fingers am I holding out?" And you said, "Three." And he was. And then he closed them up, he clenched his fists, and he said, "How many am I holding out now?" And you said, "It's closed." So you already had some of this. - I have a good memory.

- It was kind of a vivid experience. - Yeah, so the capacity to move consciousness to any place in time-space, because I'm out of time space as well as in time space. It's not testable, but it is a way I am aware of that. - Oh, it could be testable. I could do the finger trick with you right now if you want to be put on the spot. - No, I think I trust you. - Okay. What are the mechanics of that?

I've interviewed a lot of people who, for instance, have had near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. There was a woman who was in a car accident and she was having surgery and she was under anesthesia and she perceived her uncle or somebody buying a particular kind of candy bar in the vending machine in the waiting room of the hospital. And it puzzled her because she knew that he didn't like candy bars. But afterwards she said, "Hey, you bought a Snickers bar."

And he said, "Wow, how did you know that?" So she was perceiving that even though she was under anesthesia. What are the mechanics of that and of your own experience when you say you could experience something that's 100,000 light years from our planet. - Right, so this began when I was sick and I went to see Dr. Neath, who was a weight healer. He used the pendulum to look and see what was in the body and what was in mind. And I began to explore that and using a pendulum too.

What I thought was opening myself up to intuition, psychic ability of moving my consciousness to a place where I could explore and experience different things. As a psychologist, I would use a pendulum before my clients arrived and diagnose them and find out what the best method of treatment was. And they came into the room and it was true. was true. So I could verify my psychic ability to the truth of reality on a mental, physical

level. But then with time, Harry, who I think you interviewed, pushed me to accept the fact that it was not a psychic ability. It was actually the source of all knowledge. Harry Aalto you're talking about? I saw the whole knowledge and that I was the knower, knowing, and that knowing is universal. And so, you know, he pushed me into accepting that. Pushed you, meaning you guys discussed it and you began to see what he was saying, what he was getting at.

It was kind of like the Wednesday night group was like, confronting, yeah, are you awake? I didn't believe it at the time I was awake, but the confrontation was accepting it, and then accepting the fact that omniscience was part of being awake. Okay. Yeah, I once heard a spiritual teacher say that human nervous systems are not capable of omniscience. You have to have a celestial nervous system for that. And this kind of gets at the question I just asked.

Is there some level of our makeup as a human being which is the celestial level, and is Is it through that that we could, let's say, see the galaxy from an external vantage point? At some point, one joins all reality, or I did, or I am, and that also allows me to separate myself from it and experience it as an object. But being one with it and being an observer, and that's the knowing.

From the emptiness, there is emptiness being out of time-space, there is a manifestation of the thought of reality in the mind of this creator, but not manifest. And then there's the manifestation of the cosmos. So I can watch the process and I'm aware of that. The process of what? Manifestation of the cosmos. The cosmos, right. Okay, let me just push on this just a little bit more.

Right now, you're able to see your computer monitor and I'm able to see mine and we understand the mechanics of that. The eyes are here and the monitor is there and there's some kind of consciousness that enables the whole thing to happen. But with my friend under surgery seeing her uncle buy a candy bar, or in your case, being able to actually observe the galaxy from an external perspective, what are the eyes that could see that because the actual physical eyes aren't going outside the galaxy.

The physical eyes see the screen, but behind the screen is a wall. I'm able to see inside the wall the studs and beams and then there's a part of me that's outside of the wall and I can see the harbor and I can see people in the city and I can see people across the other side of the planet. If you put your attention there, you're not just seeing this stuff all the time, are you? No, it's all about attention. And the same thing extended to the galaxy.

And the same thing with different planes of where people go when they pass on. And is that because the subtle body or some level of the subtle body is omnipresent or is

everywhere and therefore that's the mechanism through which we have these perceptions? Well, there's both. There's physical eyes, there's astral eyes, there's mental eyes, there's buddhic eyes, there's atrik eyes, there's celestial eyes, there's divine eyes. So all these different levels have wakened up in me and I'm able to perceive from the different bodies, different levels of awareness. In essence though, they all come back down to the one. There's only one real essence.

These eyes are not true eyes. These are just empty eyes. The grossest form of the faculty of vision, you could say. Right. There have been cases of blind people who could actually ride a bicycle through an obstacle course or something, around traffic cones, or else people who are completely blindfolded with something wrapped around them, around there's no way physically they can see but there are people who have had that kind of ability.

And of course we've talked about the out of body experience people but there must be some subtler aspect to the sense of vision and some mechanics for that that perhaps we all possess and you know you just happen to have it opened up. Well you know there's a saying that God sees everything, God is on a mission. And consciousness moves to that level as you build it and grow it.

So do you think that this is, I wouldn't say common, but even in the traditional literature you get little snippets of stuff like this from like autobiography of a yogi and so on, but generally as I said in my introduction, when people describe the enlightened state, they don't describe all these abilities. Do you think that they're just being cagey about it, not mentioning them?

Or do you think it's kind of an individual consideration where some people develop this and other people could be at a very high level of consciousness but not have this particular kind of development. My wife is asking me about this today, so I can answer the question. One of my spiritual guides, teachers, had an understanding of the energy systems of the body and the etheric body and he actually moved my consciousness.

He said I had a rising, a certain rising of consciousness that enabled me to have siddhis four hours away. And once I was awake, those siddhis expanded even more. So that was Swamiji, John Harrigan's teacher. Correct. Yeah. Okay, so the point made there is that one can develop siddhis without being awake, or vice versa, I suppose. One could be awake without having developed siddhis. Right. you can use siddhis to wake yourself up as well.

So siddhis are not an impediment or a distraction, or they could be perhaps, but they could also be an asset or an aid to awakening. Right. Well, siddhis traditionally have been discouraged because they can become very compelling and build up more ego. But that doesn't mean that's the only way they can be utilized. They can be utilized to wake up as well. Which presumably is what Patanjali was getting at when he devoted an entire chapter of a four-chapter book to talking about siddhis.

Yeah, right. That's what I always assumed. Like why would he spend so much of his book talking about them if they were just something you should avoid? Right. They certainly have helped me. Have they ever been a temptation or a distraction or an impediment? No, because I always come back to the oneness and the emptiness. true nature of being. And if you had to define awakenings in a sentence, how would you define it?

Freedom. Freedom. I'm not attached to any form. I'm not attached to this body, I'm not attached to the mind, I'm not attached to my feelings, I'm not attached to my ego, I'm not attached to a galaxy, I'm attached to the divine perception. So not being attached to that is going to not be anyway. So once I left the ego attachment, I could lose my consciousness anyway. That's freedom.

Interesting. Usually the word attachment implies a grasping or a clinging, like I'm attached to eating a certain kind of food or smoking cigarettes or to a certain person or to a certain experience and people are deeply attached if they're addicted to drugs, let's say. But you're using freedom in the sense of actually being independent of all those things, like you can function independently of your body, go anywhere. Yes, the body can be transparent and not hold my attention.

I can see through, like I can see through the wall. I can see the plans, I can be outside the plans looking at them. What do you think would happen if you took this ability to Las Vegas? I'd probably fall right back into ignorance. Yeah, you can see right through the dealer's head, cards, and stuff like that. Yeah, I think there's dangers in using your siddhis. I think the goal of being a human being is to be a full human being.

a moral, to be financially independent, to be relationally sound. So I think you don't come here to wake up, you come here to be a full human being.

Yeah, that's good. If I have to define the word awakening or enlightenment, which I tend to avoid because they have a static, superlative connotation, but if I had to, I would say what you just said, which is a holistic development in which you don't just have consciousness developed and other things are rather primitive, all the various lines of development, to use Ken Wilber's phrase, have risen to a very high level. Would you agree with that definition?

Yes, especially the moral aspect, which I think needs a lot of attention. There's moral development, financial, yeah, financial independence, so you don't succumb to using So, relational health, so that you're not bothered by emotional troubles and relational problems. Now, obviously, people can be quite moral and financially successful and have good relationships and all that, without even having an inkling of what awakening in the spiritual sense may be, and vice versa.

claim to be awakened and yet they are immoral or financially, sexually, you know, creating havoc. Unfortunately, too many examples of that. So there doesn't seem to be a tight correlation. Right. So my experience is that ego development is important, moral development before you wake

up. And I remember talking about this in the... Sorry. Waking up doesn't mean that you're a moral person. In fact, waking up has nothing to do with morality. My experience is that moral development needs to happen before you wake up, or the beginning of it.

Yeah, I have this guy that I like to take his classes, Swami Sarvapiya Nanda, I've interviewed him and I take weekly classes with him online, but he says moral development should be the first stage, it should be the foundation, and then you build the whole thing on top of that, because if you don't, you end up getting into trouble. I would agree with that.

Maybe you have some comments on this, but in the Vedic literature, and probably literature of other traditions, there are stories about people who had reached a very high level of development but then were egotistical or morally compromised or something, and they end up crashing and burning and having to retrace their steps later on. Right, yeah. So my last lifetime, which I mentioned earlier, I skipped a whole bunch of levels, which I So I think it's kind of conditional in some spiritual paths.

Move quickly from ego, sense of separate identity to waking up. So skipping the sort of psychological development of being moral, caring for others, being one with the planet, being a good human being. So I had to come back and do that. So you said a few minutes ago that you defined awakening as freedom. And so if we stick with that definition, what you're saying is one can have attained freedom and yet perhaps not have all one's chakras fully developed or certain aspects of one's personality.

One can behave harmfully. One can be attracted to indulging in harmful substances even. There have been people who claim to be awakened who do that, like Adi Da, and yet one has attained freedom. Do you agree with that? Freedom for me is the first thing, not to be attached to any form. Not to be attached to the physical body, not to be attached to the ego, not to be attached to enlightenment, not to be attached. But to be able to move your consciousness to different places.

Freedom is not about stockness, moral stockness or spiritual stockness. It's about the capacity to be not bound, be unbounded by whatever form you take. Okay, we'll probably keep touching on this point. Freedom you said, the ability to move your consciousness to different places. Now consciousness in its essential nature doesn't go to different places. all pervading, omnipresent, so there's no you that moves it to different places. It's everywhere.

And that is the essential nature of freedom, isn't it? The unbounded nature of our most fundamental. Right. So then I woke up from being psychic to being vanilla, to being everywhere, being unbounded. Right. That was in this lifetime. You're saying like five years ago or something. Right. Now I've heard you say many times in your podcasts that we all continue to be works in progress. There's no end point at which you can say, "Okay, I'm totally done. Can't grow anymore,

can't learn anymore, can't evolve anymore." I don't believe there's any end in terms of spiritual development. I haven't found that so far. In fact, it's sort of speeded up a lot lately. It's remarkable how it's grown and developed and I can't find any end to it. So what is your next horizon? My edge right now is expanding consciousness to the astral plane, to being the astral plane, mental plane, buddhi plane, arctic plane and celestial plane.

So I'm actually finding my consciousness to be one with the Creator's construction of these planes.

So in other words, you have been able for some time to dip into these planes and poke around and explore and experience, but what you're saying is you're growing in your capacity to just be multi-dimensional and to function on multiple planes simultaneously. Is that correct? Yes, so I could go and see people who passed on with them and talk to them and have them communicate with me on different levels and planes, including celestial beings.

So I've been able to do that for a while, a long time. But now this feels like my whole sense of self is one with the plane. So it's coming out of me and I'm one with it. With a subtle plane? I'm kind of identifying with the creator who created this plane. Created which plane? All the planes. All the planes. One at a time. So in other words, if you've captured that fort, the fort of the creator, then you're free to play about in the territory of this plane, that plane, the other plane. Right.

One identifies oneself as being one with the creation of the plane. One can move in certain specifics of the plane. Do you spend much of your day doing this? Like exploring and having adventures in these subtle realms? Probably about an hour a day of meditation practice. So mostly this happens when you're in a meditative state? Mostly it happens when I actually apply myself to it.

Okay, give us some examples of particular things that you have experienced, let's say in recent days, weeks, months, or whatever comes to mind as you explore these planes. Well, my mother passed away about a year and a half ago. She wasn't a good mother when I was young, much like yours. Well, my mother tried. She had a lot on her shoulders, but anyway. Yeah, mine too. She did her best.

But I found after she passed, she went beyond the astral mental, she went to the Buddhic plane, which is the heart chakra plane, which is a reasonably high level for who she was, my understanding. And in the last years of her life, she was 95 when she died, last years of her life she was very loving and very calm. So I went to go visit her recently. On the Buddhic plane. On the Buddhic plane. How vivid was that experience? Well, staying in a physical body, it was vague.

But I found my physical body emptying out, becoming transparent, and I astral projected to that plane. And that was much clearer. I could smell, I could taste, I could feel, not just the visual aspects. You know a guy named Jürgen Zeewe? No, never heard of him. He's a guy that I've interviewed and he has been astral traveling like this for decades and he's also a very gifted artist.

I'll turn you on to some of his stuff after the interview, but he is able to create these and now using AI it's gotten even better. He's able to create these amazingly clear depictions of what these different planes are like. Some of them quite hellish and others, you know, really sublime and heavenly. Right, yeah, my early days I remember reading a lot about the Madden, Blupatsky and the Ossetists who spent a lot of time on those planes. Ledbitter, I've read a lot of... Yeah, Ledbitter, yeah.

Maybe we need to define spiritual evolution, but you said that for you at this point, your leading edge, your horizon is the greater facility or familiarity with these other planes and learning how to function in them or experience in them while yet living in a human body. Is that a good summary? I would say watching the unfoldment of them as the creation happens and returns to its source as well.

Do you feel that that's not only interesting for you, but that you are serving as some kind of an instrument for the integration of those higher planes with the Earth plane, not only in your experience, but for all of us? No, I don't see myself as anything special. No, I'm not saying that, but consider somebody who everybody thinks was special, like Jesus,

for instance. I mean, he obviously had access to higher planes, and yet here he was on the Earth calling himself the Son of Man, and he had quite an impact because his embodiment of higher consciousness and the ripple effect that he had on humanity.

And he also said that everyone could achieve the state that he had, so he might have just been an outlier at that point, but maybe it's going to become more common for people to have this interdimensional way of functioning, and it will help to infuse humanity with more

of the qualities of these higher realms. I like to think that. I don't see myself as a teacher or a practitioner or somebody making money from this purely contribution. Oh yeah, no I'm not suggesting. People wouldn't need to be teachers to have this effect. They could just have it by walking down the street and going grocery shopping, but being in the world but not of it. I hope it's true. So you mentioned a few minutes ago that your mother achieved the Buddhic plane, which was

correlated with the heart chakra. Are the different planes that you're mentioning correlated with different chakras in the human anatomy? Well, the chakras are symbolic. So they appear on a etheric level. Each body has chakras. Every body, I see what you mean. Each body has chakras. It's the connection between one body and the next body. It's a nice way to talk about a certain plane or a certain consciousness, to talk about in

terms of a chakra, but it's not actually the true way of looking at it. It's symbolic. So, let's say the astral body has chakras and the gross body has chakras, although the chakras aren't gross, they're subtle. Well, first of all, let me ask this, how many layers of the subtle body do you recognize? There are different taxonomies in different traditions that recognize different stages, but in your own experience, how many Russian dolls are there, you know,

within the human makeup? Well, there's the physical, there's the etheric, there's the astral, mental, buddhic, atmic, there's the celestial, there's the divine plane. And everybody has these, even though they're not aware most of them. Right, so you take them on as you incarnate into your body. So you start off, you know, with subtle bodies and you build closer and closer forms as you get back into the physical body. I remember doing this when I came back into this lifetime.

What happened exactly? I was in Brahma Loka and I knew that I was bored. Just like a high heavenly realm, Brahma Loka. Brahma Loka is heaven as the Hindus would call it, which is constant bliss. And I remember becoming bored with it and starting to move my consciousness into looking around, finding some source, something that would move me out of this place. And I noticed my mother's energy, which was anxious and driven, which you can probably see now on the screen. I

probably appear anxious and driven. You appear anxious and driven? Do I? That was also my age that I'm working on. It was my mother's energy, because it would take me out of Brahmaloka into growth. So being driven. So I took on all the bodies one at a time. Divine body, all the way down into the physical body. You mean as you incarnated? As I incarnated. Okay, when you were in Brahmaloka, what body were you occupying then? Divine body.

Which is celestial body or something else? Yeah, it's a sinister body. So the highest

Subtlest body. Okay And so then in the process of incarnating Again using the russian dolls analogy you added one doll after another until you were ready to be born as a baby You got it And is this the process pretty much everybody goes through or but maybe not because everybody doesn't start out, you know in brahma loka Yeah, it depends where you start out For example, if you manage to reach the astral level, which most people get stuck in, or the mental level,

then that's where you're stuck until you go to sleep. And forces of karma help you to incarnate, so that you're attached to an astral body, a physical body, and a peri-body. You and I both take reincarnation for granted, in fact we're talking that way now, way now as the way life works. You know, there's this teaching in some religions that once you achieve a certain level of enlightenment or awakening, you don't reincarnate anymore. You're out of here.

And yet you said you had attained a pretty significant level of awakening in your previous life as a Brahman priest, and you went to Brahmaloka for a while, but then you reincarnated again, which would imply that not only were you bored with bliss, but that would imply that you needed to undergo some kind of development that you weren't going to get in Brahmaloka, therefore you needed to incarnate again, even though you had been awake in your previous

life. I've heard you say that you will have future lives after this one, despite whatever level of freedom or awakening you have achieved now. I think that's an illusion. I heard you say that though, that in my next life there'll be something else, blah blah. Yeah, that's the illusion that you get to a level where you don't have to take on any body or any form. I see what you mean.

I think that's an illusion, I think you get to a state where having a body becomes important, or having a rainbow body becomes important. So in other words, it's just a wistful thinking in some traditions that you're just going to be able to check out and not deal with having to be a corporeal being anymore. Yeah, it's kind of like saying, "End your suffering. If you wake up, you won't have any more suffering." These are promises that are given to people to motivate them.

Do you think that there's a certain stage at which you wouldn't reincarnate in the earth plane anymore? might just go through multiple lives in higher planes because the earth plane no longer has anything to offer you? Yeah, for example, the Swamiji that we spoke about earlier. So I connected with him, he's actually embodied on the astral plane, it's a body that is on a planet that's an astral planet. So you take on different forms depending on what your evolution is supposed to be.

And they're all forms that are outside of human development. It's possible to take on a body that allows you to expand consciousness to much higher levels than you could. Yeah. Well, there's that comment I made earlier about a celestial body having certain capabilities that a gross flesh and blood body will never have.

Another thing I heard Maharishi Mahesh Yogi say this one time, he was talking about immortality and he said, "Well, you know, after all, if we want to attain immortality, there must be much better bodies than these in which to do it." I think that's true. This stuff might seem kind of esoteric to people, but I find it fascinating because I think the universe is a multi-dimensional Disneyland of all kinds of possibilities that most of us don't even imagine.

And although you can get kind of lost in imagining all these things and dwelling on all these things and that would be taking it too far in that direction, on the other hand, just denying them or showing no interest in them whatsoever might be taking it too far in the other direction. If you can achieve a balanced relationship to all these possibilities, it

seems to me it would be a more interesting way to live life. I think that learning how the universe works and what all exists interests me in addition to the notion of liberation or oneness or freedom or realization. It's icing on the cake. It's like, okay, got that. Now, how can I use this to be an even more capable instrument of the divine and become more functional and knowledgeable of God's creation? - Sounds right. - I had to get that off my chest.

And the reason I'm dwelling on that is just, again, as I said in the beginning, some people, to my mind, they tend to dumb it down a little bit. Like, all right, you don't exist and the world is an illusion and you're done. And accept those principles and you don't have to strive anymore. Give up the search. You're done. I think that's just the beginning. Yeah, me too. So, you know, I think this whole world's possibilities, infinite possibilities. This doesn't stop with waking up.

It's just achieving some level of expanded consciousness. Right. There's always a next horizon and what we're exploring here is what those next horizons might be. And I guess they might be different for different people. We all serve different functions, but that is not to denigrate any one person's journey. Okay, a question came in. I might as well just ask this even though it's a little bit out of sync with what we're talking about, but just for fun. This is from Elizabeth Marie in the US.

I hope you don't consider this question too flippant as I'm quite serious about it. With your capacity to transcend space-time and proceed from this non-local place, can you please let us know whether the U.S. is going to survive as a democracy over the next four years or be transformed into something entirely different? I appreciate her question. I wonder the same thing. The great question, you know, has to do with the planet and our relationship with it and the societies that we live in.

Can I do that? I don't like to predict the future. It's one thing to go into the past. It's another thing to actually predict the future. I don't like to do that. But my wife often says to me, "You seem less concerned about global warming and the political situation than I am." I think that's true because I don't believe that that's really managed by the powers that be on this planet. It's really run by the devas and the gods and the celestial beings. And it's the Asuras who oppose them.

They're having a war zone. Yeah, exactly. And this is just a form that they take. I've said the very same thing to people in recent conversations, that we're just looking at the surface symptoms or manifestation of a kind of a cosmic battle going on with, as you said, Devas and Asuras and all kinds of impulses of intelligence, and it's all playing out on the surface of politics and economies and environment and stuff. Right, so identification is a problem.

This hand that moves across the screen here, in front of you. So, the ego would attach to it and say "I move this hand." But if I'm looking at it from a deeper perspective, the hand moves itself. So just like this mouth is speaking and voice is sounding, coming out of it, I'm not doing it, there's not an ego doing it, it's happening. So it's manifesting something from a subtle plane, from emptiness, from pure consciousness. It's occurring.

So the same thing with democracy. Who's to say if democracy is the best method for survival on another planet? One can be attached to it, but does it mean that that's the way it's supposed to be?

I was thinking about Lao Tzu the other day, who wrote the Tao Te Ching, and he basically says that government governs best which governs least, but he says that in order for a government to do that, the people have to be in tune with natural law, they have to be in tune with the Tao, and if they really are, as a society, then there will not need to be very much government at all, and everything will get along just fine.

But if people are way out of tune with it, then you need more laws and rules and structures to keep everybody from killing each other, ripping each other off too much. Okay, the thing about moving your hand. Or the hand moving itself. Or the hand moving itself. Can both be true? On the one hand, I'm moving the hand, but the divine is moving the hand. Each on its own level. From an ego level, I'm moving the hand. From a solar level, I'm telling the ego to move the hand.

From a cosmic level, the hand's moving itself. From a divine level, it's coming out of nothing and going back into nothing. Did you even say there's a level on which there is no hand? I mean, there's nothing, right? Yeah. There just appears to be a hand. In the level, it's all empty. So I experienced the body as being empty, thoughts as being empty. There's nobody at home. You know, the ego is empty. Even the soul is empty. So the Buddhists would like this philosophy. Is it also full?

Could you flip it and say it's all fullness? Absolutely. You know, that's the way that I originally connected with it, as being full, full of oneness. I have this ongoing, friendly debate with a friend named Susanna Marie. She's been on That Gap, and we recently taped a video about this. She says that she doesn't have a sense of personal self, and I say, "You must have a sense of personal self, but it's just taking a back seat.

The impersonal or the cosmic self must be in the driver's seat and predominant, but if you're functioning as a human being, there's still got to be some sense of personal self, otherwise you wouldn't know if you put your hand on a stove and it burned, or if I call your name and you turn your head." Do you agree with that? What's your experience? I agree with that. I think the notion of having an ego is important if you're living in the world. If you're living in a cave, you don't need an ego.

Even there you might, you know, so this cave is dripping or I'm hungry or you know something. Yeah, it's kind of like less important. Survival is less important, you know, so you could be a Ramana Maharshi and just meditate the whole day. So survival becomes less important. But If one is operating in the world, one needs an ego. So you can transcend it, it can be transparent, it can be an illusionary, but it's there. - Yeah, that's my understanding.

I mean, as I said in the beginning, I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. We have a body and maybe it ultimately isn't real. We have a mind, it ultimately isn't real. And we have a sense of self, even though ultimately it's not an ultimate, subtle impulses that don't have any verbal quality to them, but are... I've heard you say you don't have thoughts, or words just come out. In the Vedic cosmology, there's these four levels of speech.

Vaikari, Madhyama, Pashanti, and Vahk. And Vaikari is like what I'm doing now, speech you can hear. Madhyama is thoughts in your head. Pashanti is not thoughts in your head, but subtle impulses that don't have any verbal quality to them, but are seed impulses which could translate into the higher levels or into actual speech. And then Vahk is just sort of the silent, unmanifest, nothing going on level. If I've got those right, I might have screwed some of those Sanskrit names up.

But when you say you don't have any thoughts and yet you're talking to me, or you decide to go to the refrigerator and get a sandwich or something, I'm sure you're not thinking, I am going to the refrigerator to get a sandwich. It's more like there's an impulse of some kind that takes you to the refrigerator. Couldn't that be a very, very subtle level of thought, just not the customary verbal type of thought that many people think?

Right. It's not that I had no thoughts. I have no thoughts in this moment. Oh, okay. You know, I can think about things. Yeah. Shall I go on vacation or shall we... - I wouldn't be able to manage my life in this world. - Okay. - Those four levels, I can identify with it. I can identify the first as the verbal, the second as thought forms, and a way to communicate with people on the astral and the mental level, is to have a thought form, thinking. Thinking as a precursor to the verbal.

subtle impulses for the Buddhic level and above that impulse and Emptiness being part of consciousness, too So I think what I hear you saying is you have thoughts you just don't have superfluous unnecessary thoughts You know like me I'll hear a song like the other day I heard cashmere by Led Zeppelin and I'm walking around the house thinking did it did it did it did it did it Cashmere is going through my mind. I think shut up, you know, why do I have to be thinking this stupid song?

Whereas I think what you're saying is your mind. There's not a lot of extra static going on. Yeah as much less thoughts This is my experience Most thoughts are about supporting the ego Putting identity as a separate person. So when that becomes more transparent one has less thoughts both say the functional or operational It's less important to have thoughts that support the ego. Yeah, because there's no ego to support really or a very more tenuous one. More transparent.

I imagine that would give you more energy because it consumes energy to have thoughts and if they're useless then you're burning up perfectly good glucose for nothing. So I'm gonna read some notes here. I've got some titles of all of your podcast episodes. I heard you say in one episode that you didn't feel it was productive, maybe for most people, to continue with the same spiritual practice for more than a few years or something like that. Is that what you meant to say? Yes, that sounds right.

So you yourself have like switched spiritual practices every few years? Many times, many times. How about Connie? No, she's stuck with the same thing for the last 50 years. Yeah, me too. Because I enjoy it and it seems to work and I'm not close to doing other things. Would you say that Connie and I are holding ourselves back by taking that approach?

I can't say it for you or for Connie, but I'd say in general, staying with the same practice, even though it doesn't take you further, it's kind of like, it's a waste of time. I would agree, but what if you feel that you are progressing and you... Stay with it. It's working for you. If you're progressing, if you're unfolding, that's good. And of course, you never know what might happen if you did try something else. You might progress faster or in a different way.

Well, I have no problem using two techniques from different practices. It's like I've spoken to the emptiness from the Buddhist practice and the Hindu practice, the Vedic practice. Yeah, you know, there's an old saying about not digging 10 different wells, just dig one deep hole to get a well that'll actually hit water. But one way of using that metaphor is to say, well, how about using 10 different tools to dig one deep well? Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Yeah. What do you do now as a practice? You mentioned you kind of meditate and explore. I'm in bed every day, usually in the afternoon. I do inquiry practice about five times a week. And how does that work? I'm on the telephone with somebody. I speak spontaneously, exploring consciousness. Like a fellow spiritual brother? Yeah. And listen, I have presence. I'm being on the other end. So it's like a tool to help evoke this process. I explore whatever comes into the mind.

Sounds like a psychologist speaking there. That's true. It starts off with the body, physical awareness, then sort of goes to the emotional, the mental, sometimes goes very quickly through those two and such. It's about exploring those levels. And this person is a facilitator or a catalyst of some sort that you do this with? Right. This is an all-masses protocol. Okay, right. That's A.H. Almas. He's been on BatGap a couple of times. Three, I think.

Now, I heard some interesting stuff that you were saying about soul groups. For one thing,

I heard you say that the Earth is humanity's second planet, which, if I heard that correctly, I think you were saying that the soul group of humanity used to live on a different planet, and maybe that one blew up or something and now we are on this one. Is that what you said? That's correct. What happened to that other one? We left it intact, which I don't know if we'll do for this family. Why did we leave it if it was livable or wasn't?

Well, because the human soul is a unified business. It's part of creation and goes through evolutionary processes. We were finished with that evolutionary process and we came to this planet. In spaceships or by reincarnating? It's on a celestial level. So it goes through the process of moving consciousness. Imagine this planet is exploding. What's left of human consciousness is the divine consciousness and the human consciousness, one consciousness that is humanity.

And maybe some people have individual consciousnesses that are awake, but that's within the human consciousness. Well, if I understand what you're saying, so let's say a giant asteroid came and crashed into this planet and it became unlivable and we all died. I presume we would go somewhere and maybe we'd go to several different planets according to our tendencies, but let's say we all went to the same different planet, we would just

obviously these bodies would be dead and we'd have to start all over in a new place. I imagine we'd have to start out as very preliminary life forms because it's not like highly evolved human organisms are all of a sudden getting it born. From whom would they be born? Yeah, I would imagine that's true. Imagine if an asteroid hit us, this planet, and we went to the next one, I think there's five more after this.

Really? Are you saying there will be five more planets for humans to inhabit after this one? Yeah, that's my sense of knowing. Wow, that's interesting. I mean, anything could happen to this planet. In fact, there's something in 2032, there's an asteroid that has a 2% chance of hitting the Earth. I don't know if it would wipe us out, but it wouldn't be a nice day for whoever it hit. If it landed in the Pacific Ocean, Pacific Ocean, we'd probably have a mile-high tsunami come across California.

You're in the right place. Yeah. Central to the country. Right. Yeah, they haven't finished building the ocean here. Now, some people say, let's say that all kinds of highly evolved beings are being born here now, in larger numbers perhaps. Maybe they've always been, but you hear about indigo children or there's this phenomenon with the telepathy tapes, if you've heard of that, and all these autistic kids are coming

in with telepathic abilities. They say that they are kind of a harbinger of a major change that humanity is going to undergo. Which would get back to Elizabeth Marie's question, maybe you don't want to predict what's going to happen with the US government, but do you sense as many do, that humanity is in the midst of some kind of profound shift? And how do you see that playing out if you do?

That's been going on every century that somebody says is a profound shift happening true right now But maybe there finally will be one and it has been I mean if you look at the 1800s compared to now It's pretty major shift, but a major shift. That's true

Do I believe in people coming here to speed up the evolution of the planet? Yes there are Spiritual beings at the center of the planet and those at the fringes of the planet sending energy to Planet and to human humanity as in general So that does exist and that is continuing to exist do I believe that the

Massacre masters or these celestial beings are making this kind of work. I think that's sort of what you get Seeing what happens with bated breath Yeah, I mean, you were saying earlier that a lot of stuff that happens here is just the surface manifestation of much deeper forces kind of playing tug of war. And when you say, I believe this, I mean, I believe a lot of stuff too, and intuitively it feels right, but I don't claim to have any kind of cosmic insight about it.

And maybe it's just stuff I read in books that resonates with me. So when I'm asking you these questions, you say you actually travel in these realms, and so I'm saying, can you substantiate these kinds of beliefs with some kind of insight that you've gained from your ability to do so? They're available to me. I don't necessarily always go there. I believe in living in the now. That's a good idea, probably. So allowing things to unfold.

That seems to be the fastest way this evolution happens through the storm. Good answer. - You don't spend a lot of time speculating about what's gonna happen to the world. - No, it's the same thing as speculating what happens when you die. - It's gonna happen. Your clothes won't fit anymore. And of course, there were people who specialized in that kind of thing, like Nostradamus, perhaps, or others who prognosticated, and sometimes correctly.

In fact, most ancient cultures have prophecies about what they expect to happen over the next centuries or millennia. A lot of that stuff has come true. I used to do astrological charts for my patients before they came to try to figure out what was going on in their systems, what the prognosis was. So soul groups, we alluded to humanity as a soul group, but there are obviously subdivisions. There are national, maybe national groups, ethnic groups could be considered soul groups, family groups.

the soul groups within humanity that have particular purposes in being here. So maybe share to grow wisdom, to grow loving kindness, grow healing. There's soul groups that people belong to as souls.

Some people are aware of their soul groups, some people are not aware of them. Some people just know that they're influenced by them. And people know that they have a particular personality or characteristic. Are there soul groups whose mission it is to wreck havoc? Oh yeah, I think it goes both ways. The sharks and the jets. Yeah, I mean obviously there have been groups of people

who've caused a lot of trouble. The Nazis and various other groups. Yeah, I mean there's Isn't it Rishas who are awake? Rishas is... You know what Rishas is? Yeah, yeah, some kind of negative or demonic being or force. And they're awake. Some of them are awake. But it doesn't mean that the forces of creation, the forces of destruction don't coexist. They do coexist. Yeah, Ravana in the Ramayana was said to be a highly evolved being who was like on the verge of enlightenment,

but he was a Nasura. He was a negative dude. and causing a lot of trouble. And then when Rama finally killed him, then he got liberated right there. - That's a great story. - It's puzzling though, because this gets us back to the morality thing. I have this kind of quaint notion that higher evolution correlates with a kind of saintliness, you know? You become a good person, you become kind, compassionate, you don't harm people, you radiate a positive influence.

And yet you hear instances like that of some being who is very highly evolved and who is playing a destructive role even hurting and harming lots of people Waking up does not show a moral behavior. They're quite the opposite Waking up is a separate line of development Developing morality is is the legal function is based after waking up There's got to be some scenes there, but keep growing after waking up. I don't believe that morality is a function of consciousness.

More a function of personality development or something. It operates at certain stages. Learning to be a good human being is best to do before you wake up. Yeah, I've heard others say that too. Was it you whom I heard say that attaining higher levels of consciousness Magnifies both the positive and negative Qualities of your personality or did I hear that somewhere else?

That's this that's a story true. You know, that's something I learned in Judaism. You mentioned Judaism It's a he doesn't believes that there is something that sits on your shoulder Orally speaking which is the good inclination to do good now this is showing the evil inclination to do harm and These are part of your existence of a human being and that grows with greater consciousness So the more you know, so the stronger both of these little beings become correct

There's no end to the process of evil inclination It can do incredible harm as a lacking me That's very interesting. Do you think that that incredible harm if you could zoom out far enough would be in the interest of evolution of the universe Would you say that everything that happens if you could zoom out far enough is part of the evolutionary trajectory of the universe? Is astrophysicists who have predicted that the next galaxy close to the earth will collide with the

looking at galaxy. Andromeda, it's coming. It's coming in two billion years or something like that. Something like that. So I can imagine the immense catastrophic destruction. Actually there won't be. The stars are so far apart that there'll be very few collisions. There'll just be a big mushing together and it'll all get misshapen for a while and it'll eventually kind of turn into another spiral galaxy once all the gravitational forces have worked themselves

out. You know better than me. I study this stuff a little bit. Just imagine that, just level of instruction that are that significant. Yeah. It could be that significant. We're living in a small body, in a small planet, in a small part of the galaxy, as part of the

universe that's immense. So to believe that we have this sort of specialness is an illusion. Yeah, I would agree with that.

You think that the reason that what we were just talking about, the good angel and the bad angel on our shoulders, is a possible explanation for why so many gurus who appear to have pretty significant gifts, you know, highly evolved, radiate Shakti, eloquent and charismatic and so on, end up turning out to be sexual predators or scoundrels in some Is that because the bad angel has gotten strong along with the good angel and he kind of wins the day on this particular person?

This touches on moral development again, and the idea that these traditions, these Eastern traditions and Western traditions have not trained morality in certain groups. They haven't trained morality as being important. Right, they just grew up in an ashram doing spiritual practice or whatever and didn't really have a lot of temptations for one thing. Yeah, and I heard of a Buddhist monk recently talking about how in Tibet sexual activity with a young boy is very common. I've heard that too.

In Thailand also. In Thailand also. So the morality has got to be part of the teaching, you know, in the beginning. But what you're saying is that if it isn't perhaps, there's even a greater danger as you evolve. I would say don't wake up if you're evil. Yeah. Because you can become pretty nasty. It's taken me a while to accept that, but I've been pondering it for years because there are so many examples that force you to ponder it.

And it's been hard for me to give up my notion of highly evolved people just being more saintly and spontaneously losing their negative tendencies. It happens when you reach the celestial chakra, the sixth chakra. If you have a positive personality and a positive soul, and you've integrated it well, then transcending it to waking up, it becomes a force for good. But that requires an integration.

Yeah, this is from Mark in the UK. From your work as a therapist, was it your experience that mental emotional problems are always rooted in some subtle body disharmony? Or are there certain problems that are wholly physical, such as brain chemistry imbalances? Yeah, certain problems are totally physical and certain problems are based on the astral mental body, emotional thinking processes and there are some that come from

past lifetimes, some of them are imposed by rotten childhoods. So when you were a therapist, you know, working in Los Angeles and you could tell that your client who was coming in, his problem sprang from bad past lifetimes or something wrong with his astral body or things like that. How did you prescribe any kind of treatment without seeming like a nutcase? Right, so you've got to work silently. So silently is energy. One of my lifetimes was

as a healer, an energy healer in China. So I would work with moving energy through the different channels silently without talking to the person. And I would do that kind of work with clients while I'm doing therapy. So he might be lying on the couch or if you had your patients lie on the couch and spilling

his guts telling you his life story, meanwhile you're messing around with his subtle body and you know. I haven't chewed yet. That's good. They got their money's worth that they didn't know they were getting. Good comment. How would you define the soul? You said the soul is always there, it is never not there, even between lifetimes. It is always becoming, evolving, it is distinct from the being or unchanging nature of pure awareness.

So we have unchanging pure awareness, you know, universal consciousness, we all share that as our common ground, but then we have individual souls. What is that individual soul? I think I've heard you say it is the immortal or eternal, it's never going to cease to exist. No, it'll last forever. This universe will collapse and there'll be some other universe eventually. Our souls will still be kicking around. Hopefully. Yeah. So what is it?

The soul is, well you've got, it's individual, it's also collective. Not just individual, it's collective too. It's evolving and growing and unfolding, lifetime after lifetime. And it's on a guided path to being more complete. More complete, okay. More complete, more full. So is this going to end? I don't believe it ever ends. But what is this nature? It's formed between absolute consciousness and physical consciousness. It's mediating the two.

It arrives with my, I should talk for myself because talking about things like theoretically It's not going to be helpful. Talking about myself, I remember coming into this body as a soul, before birth. So after conception, but before birth. And arriving in this world as a soul, and the soul has been with me through the entire lifetime.

I remember coming into this body as a soul, and then going through the different stages of psychological development and personality development and physical development while the soul is guiding the process and still doing it. Who am I? I'm free. Soul is transparent to me. It's there for a while. So you're deeper than the soul, more fundamental than the soul? More fundamental than the soul, but individuality is indefinite. So it is unity, it's indefinite. Indefinite meaning unending.

When you think about the reincarnation process, for instance, people like Meher Baba had this whole explanation in his book God Speaks about how everything evolves up to higher and higher forms like rocks and then, you know, little amoebas and bugs and plants and lower life forms and more evolved life forms. But the problem is the math doesn't work out.

If each of those has a soul that eventually evolves up to becoming a human being, because in a spoonful of earth you have probably millions of little microbes, and yet in our yard we have trillions of them I imagine, but there's only two human beings on the property. Again, you know, maybe this is just philosophy or maybe you have some kind of cosmic insight into it. I've raised this point before in interviews.

Do all these little individual souls that these microbes and things have, if they have them conglomerate as more complex evolved beings come into form. Like a jellyfish is actually many, many, many different cells, or a human being is many, many different trillions of different cells. You know what I'm getting at? I got you. Yeah. How would I describe my experience of this? Once upon a time, elephants roamed this planet. Now there's very few left. Where have they gone?

They haven't gone into human vehicles, no. They've gone to another planetary system. Oh, okay. So, they're not ready to become humans. They have to be elephants, but there aren't enough elephant bodies, so they have to go to some other planetary system. There are some other systems that may be more advanced than human beings. It doesn't mean that they can end up as human beings.

Whereas, most cats and dogs, my experience is, they pass on, and if they're individuated than that, if they have character and personality, they might incarnate in a human form, perhaps. Or they might come back as a cat or a dog. Might come back as a cat or a dog, probably. So I'm not sure about this one garment idea. Nobody experienced that.

Yeah, okay. But actually, what your statement raises is another question, which is how much interchange do you feel there is between different other planets, different other realms, and so on and so forth. Is the Earth just one of a thousand different potential stopping places that people happen to incarnate on or not, depending on the appropriateness of the

available bodies? Well, I can talk about this from the level of knowing. Okay, that's what we like. So knowing 70% of the humans on this planet are part of humanity's consciousness. 70%? 30% are from other systems. Okay. So some of them are bringing us down, some of us are raising

up. That's the sort of balance of humanity. So when you say other systems, does that mean that they just incarnated here for the first time or have they been, they came from let's say, you know, the Pleiades or whatever and they've gone through numerous human lifetimes as Pleiadians in human bodies. Yes, some have been here for a couple of lifetimes, some are just the first lifetime. Some are going to move on quickly and some are going to stick around.

One of my dear friends said that this planet has the best food in the galaxy. Sounds like the Hitchhiker's Guide, you know, Douglas Adams, the restaurant at the end of the universe. Well, that's hard to believe, actually, considering the food that we have here, but good to know. She's a pretty wise woman. I can read you some titles of some of the episodes of your podcast. Let me do that for a few minutes. I'll just read you titles and you tell me if you'd like to delve

into the subject matter of those. Okay. It was a three-part series living as an individual, living as a soul and living as spirit. Do you remember what you talked about in those? And do you want to say anything more about that or have we covered it? I think I can talk about it. evolution, there are chakras, symbolically speaking, below the Muladhara, the chakra at the base of the spine. Those chakras are for the evolution of minerals, plants and

animal life. And then human development begins with the Muladhara chakra and moves all the way up to the Ajna, the sixth chakra. So let me interrupt. So a tree, for instance, would have a certain set of chakras that are more basic or fundamental than the seven chakras humans have. There wouldn't be any overlap. We don't have tree chakras and trees don't have human chakras. Is that correct? Trees have chakras below the human. Below the human, okay.

Except for individual trees that are ancient, very old and highly developed. Highly evolved, yeah. Yes, so I find myself talking to the tree, so to speak, as the song goes. And the tree is talking to me. There's a life in the tree and personality in the tree. But only very large and ancient trees. Beyond the human form is the divine levels of consciousness, which begins with waking up and moves through higher and higher planes.

Are you saying that there's a whole other set of chakras above the human set? Seven of them, yeah. Seven higher ones? Yes, starting with this push. There's no sharp receiver until a celestial being or something would have those chakras and Which a human would not? Unless they were aware unless they were aware. Okay, so Remaining in a human body if you get highly evolved enough. Do you begin to wake up in those higher?

post-human or above the human chakras certainly Consciousness does not stop with waking up, it just begins there. Divine consciousness. This is the realm of divinity. Divinity is consciousness. It kind of reminds me of my friend David Buckland who talks about these levels of realization of Brahman, Parabrahman, and then pure divinity. And I never know quite what he's talking about, but it sounds nice. Yeah, it kind of fits there. That's a symbolic way of understanding it.

Not to get stuck in the chakra as a body, as a vehicle. It's just an image of what is there. I get the impression that it's a kind of an energy center or a locus of intelligence.

Like for instance, the heart chakra. You might have a kind of a dead heart chakra, not much going on there, and at a certain point it opens up and you start experiencing a lot of love. It's a heart. Well, that's something you could probably elaborate on for half an hour. There's actually something going on there in the subtle body, some kind of purification or enlivenment.

Right. So the etheric body is communicating with astral bodies, meaning intelligence or growth there, and up until the Buddhic body, which operates through these systems and empties through the heart. Well, that's something you could probably elaborate on for half an hour. I should remind people that a lot of this stuff is covered in greater detail in your podcast series. So, if people are finding this interesting, you can consider this interview to be kind of a teaser for the podcast series.

Because you have a lot more time to elaborate. Must be 15 hours worth of recordings there now in your podcast. Okay. Some more podcast titles.

Into the astral plane sounds like Flash Gordon We've discussed that a bit people travel in the astral plane after dropping their bodies You'd several friends who recently died and their experiences of traveling through the bardos or planes common misunderstandings about the astral planes also The misunderstanding is then the lower forms natural planets with when you're aware of it here now What do you see there? Other beings? Yeah, lots of beings. Very clear and clean.

I think I've mentioned my physical body becoming transparent and astral projecting. So that was very clear. So into the astral plane for me was that that was the experience of astral projecting. But I'm aware of the astral plane without astral projecting. So it's here now. So what do you perceive when you're aware of it here now? What do you see there? Other beings? Yeah, lots of beings telling me what to say and tell you. Telling me to? Yeah, telling me to tell you.

In other words, they're taking an interest in our conversation and there's certain things they want communicated. Correct. Tell me about my mother, how she's doing. Tell me about my cousin. Let them know that I'm okay. There's a lot going on. So when you went there and visited your mother after she died, was it just you and your mother? Or were there a bunch of other people around and, "Hey, we got an earthling here. Let's get him to..."

No, it was just me and my mother. I just kept the focus there. Okay. Generally, I block out other beings. Are those beings, like, restless and needy? Like, they want something from you, or they're kind of attracted to somebody who can be aware of their presence? Kind of like, they heard lower astral planets came to bug me. Do you have a way of filtering that out so it's not hassling you? Yes, I just put attention elsewhere.

Similarly, let's say you go on astral travel and you're visiting some astral plane and you don't want to mess around with the people who just sort of want something from you, but you know, you might have a mission. You'd like to commune with some higher beings who you could learn something from. Like him, like Swamiji. Yeah, like him. Okay, let's use him as an example. How many times have you visited him? 20. 20. How long do you stay there and what do you talk about?

Usually it's for guidance or communing or sharing. You know, he's highly evolved except on the astral plane. That's where he was incarnated because he needs evolution there. So in other words, by the standards of the astral plane, he's not as highly evolved as he was by Earth standards. Is that what you're saying? No, that's the plane he was, he was arrogant and condescending and sexist. On the earth plane. And enlightened. Yeah. And a very high being and a very great giver of shakti and beauty.

But when he left the physical body, he left a lot of that behind.

So he wasn't sexist or condescending anymore? No. Condescending anymore. But now he's working on developing that part of himself that is astral, conscious of morality, hearing and giving. So that presumably if he came back he would be a more well-rounded human being without those negative qualities? Correct. Although one would imagine him not necessarily choosing to come back to this planet. You think he's beyond needing to. Yeah, it's a choice.

Is it always or are we compelled to come back if this is where we need to be? Whether you're compelled, if you don't finish the journey, if you don't have a choice. Yeah. The Lords of Karma have created the structure so that the human soul will incarnate, will fall asleep and then be incarnated. Involuntarily, if this is what they need to have. Yeah, but if you achieve a certain level, then you have a choice.

So what do you think about some of these so-called ascended masters like Jesus, or some people say they see Ramana Maharshi come to them, or Yogananda interacted with Sri Yukteswar after his guru Sri Yukteswar died. You know, you mentioned that the soul never dies. Do you think that that's what happens to some of these highly evolved beings? They just end up being ascended masters and work from that level, never having to come back to the earth plane?

just can kind of intervene from on high so to speak? Good question because my awareness is that sooner or later one is incarnate somewhere in the galaxy. Or in the galaxies. Somewhere. By incarnate you mean in a more concrete form? Yeah. Because you are incarnate if you're just in the astral level, you're still incarnate, you're just incarnate in an astral body. Correct, or a mental body or a buddhic body.

They are beings whose consciousness just incarnates to the mental body and then they go back up. They don't have more than that aspect to the development. But they can usually reach much higher than human evolution. And I suppose it's not only a matter of what they need, it's a matter of how they can be useful, where they may be needed. Well, we're all being used. We're all a function of consciousness operating.

Incidentally, your wife Connie wrote a book called "Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path" and there's an episode that you guys do about that. We've kind of talked about that, about shadow material stored in the subtle body and so on, about how a person can be highly evolved and yet still have a lot of darkness in their personality. Each one of the chakras is supposed to contain shadow material. Which can and should be purged or cleansed?

As long as you've lived in that body for a while and they're part of your character, you've got a connection with it. You've resolved some of the issues. You're skipping it, like a lot of people move straight from an individual to seventh chakra to the awakeness. Awakeness, and you've got all this Complex Issues in the chakras that are buggy. Yeah spiritual bypassing is sometimes called

Special bypass. Yeah to cosmic to be beyond the possibility of making mistakes Yeah beyond the evil inclination and it's interesting in that quote because barley flour would be a very fine thing So in a way he's saying you have to get more precise You know the more vast your awareness becomes the more fine-tuned you need to be very few Religious traditions emphasize that very few In them is one that I found it besides that that's good The higher you get the study which is the enlightened being

is supposed to actually have very Careful about anything that they did razor's edge razor's edge The reason I bring that point up is that I try to live by it myself to the best I can, and I just feel like it's an important point for people to understand, because everyone who listens to this show is a spiritual aspirant of some kind, and it's good to kind of drill that thought into our heads to save ourselves a lot of grief.

It's also why I helped to establish that organization, which Connie's a member of, the Association for Spiritual Integrity. It needs to be more commonly understood, I think, in contemporary spirituality for things to go more smoothly and successfully for everybody. See you on Monday. Oh yeah, you're coming on Monday? We're having a webinar tomorrow, or Monday. Okay, this is a good one. I don't think we've totally covered this. Debunking the myths of enlightenment.

We've covered some of it, but what do you see as some common myths or understandings about enlightenment which you feel are erroneous. In cosmic consciousness, God consciousness, unity consciousness, some higher level of consciousness, you automatically do right action. It's one of the most serious needs that needs to be debunked. So let's say you're in one of those states of consciousness, what is the motivator or impetus of your action? It's naturally spontaneous. What's prompting it?

What's triggering it? Your actions? Pure awareness is triggering your actions, but like I said, rakshasas can be enlightened as well. So one always needs to filter it through moral development, which is a whole separate line of development.

So it's not just that cosmic intelligence and its infinite goodness is using you as an instrument for its divine purposes, you could be in a fairly high state of consciousness and yet have all kinds of twisted wiring that is causing you to misbehave and that is garbling perhaps the impulses of cosmic intelligence. Belonging in a community of spiritual equals is good because then you have people who can check up and tell you that's wrong behavior.

Yeah, it can be handy to be married too by the same token. You got a mirror there. Yeah, marriage is probably one of the most complex spiritually developing tool that you can have. Very powerful. Yeah, I mean, I was like some kind of a monk for about 15 years before I got married and hanging around a bunch of other guys who were living that life and you could get pretty weird without anybody calling you on your stuff. You could get deep into your idiosyncrasies and your

obsessions and so on. I've seen it even in other traditions. I visited a Catholic monastery one time that the TM movement was considering buying and there were some monks there who just seemed like total oddballs. They just didn't have any kind of balancing influence on their lives. Yeah, so you know the path of the household is probably one of the best paths and Get married, you can have children, have them. They can blow your heart open. Have a calling or purpose to help humanity.

We kind of glossed over it, but that sort of saved your life when you were a lot younger. You know, you were just like a meditation fanatic and you're wasting away and getting very weak and sick. Yeah, I was meditating five or six hours a day. And I was getting sicker and sicker to the point that I went to see the spiritual master. He told me, I can get you to have sex with as many women as you like. I said, not interested. I can get you an enormous amount of power.

He said, no, I'm just saying, how about money? I said, no, I'm just saying. He said, you're going to die in four months. What I need to do is not die in four months. He said, go find a partner, have sex, follow your career, get married.

Get grounded. Get grounded. I did for 20 years. Some people say that an enlightened person feels pain but doesn't suffer. I guess they're detached. I've even heard some say that Jesus didn't suffer. His body felt pain, but he was in the realm of bliss, so he didn't suffer. Do you distinguish between pain and suffering? I do. I remember sitting in the Sessom group with you and having a migraine and concentrating my attention on getting awake with the migraine.

I hope I didn't give you that migraine. No, it took me about an hour and a half. But I woke up and the migraine was gone. Really? You had an awakening there in the Satsang group and the migraine was gone? And the migraine was gone. So, you know, I notice if I have a headache, if I put attention on the cosmos or the galaxy, then the headache's gone. I bring my attention to the body, then the headache's there. Suffering is optional. Pain is not optional, one is going to experience it.

So let's say you had a bad car accident or you suffered third degree burns for some reason or something like that. And so there was a lot of pain in your body that you weren't going to be able to skip out on. How would you deal with that? Well, probably be present with it as much as possible. Some form of good drugs like morphine. You're right. So take me out of the body awareness, help me with it. Probably be meditating a lot and moving my attention to subtle bodies.

But you know, there's that distinction. You can sit with a headache or terrible pain, be present with it and not suffer. - Yeah. - In the moment, because you're expanded enough that your consciousness is not bound by a specific point of pain. In fact, pain can actually help you to wake up like it did for me in the Satsang.

Yeah, there's a story about Sri Ramakrishna where he was dying of cancer or something and one of his disciples came to him and he said to him, "Sir, you know, everyone says you're suffering so much, but I see you, you are in bliss." And Sri Ramakrishna said, "Aha! The rascal has found me out." Oh, that's so cute. Yeah. Yeah, a nice section about service as a path, if you want to say anything about that. Yeah, I can talk about psychologists or being a psychotherapist and how it helped me to

evolve because it had a lot to do with being hundred centered. So it took my attention away from my ego and my self-preoccupation and focused the whole day on other beings, other people. It has a lot of rules, ethical rules, that are not optional. They're compulsory. Yeah, you lose your license or even go to jail if you break them.

Correct. So you learn to be compassionate and ethical in your behavior. And it's really wonderful to have a career vocation that helps you to be conscious of loving kindness and empathy and

honesty. You know, you can't charge too much money because that would be abusive to the other person. And it just doesn't matter. I mean, there's many careers and many vocations that offer this path of opening the heart, throat, and the brush of this. There are, and it's fun to be able to do that kind of thing. And of course, you could be a Walmart greeter or something and brighten people's day. You know, that could be a service role. That builds a heart, a connection. Even if you love animals.

Yeah, there's this guy named Ellie Recht whom I interviewed a couple of months ago and he's a psychotherapist down in San Diego and he charges a reasonable fee for his psychotherapy sessions and that's how he supports himself but he also does spiritual work and counseling with people all over the world especially since his Bat Cap interview. I think he gotistical and more heart-oriented and more compassionate and so on. But he gives all the money to an animal shelter.

He's like giving them $3,000 since his Bat Cap interview. It's a wonderful-- - You did a good work, Rick. - Yeah, it's a nice balance. And of course, there's so many different ways in which we can be of service. But it is a standard spiritual path, Seva, and it's highly advocated by many spiritual teachers as a way of making us less egotistical and more heart-oriented and more compassionate and so on. It's gonna be a powerful practice. - Yes, it's good to have it being large.

- Okay, here's somebody named Josh Davis from LA. I don't know if he means Louisiana or Los Angeles. The question is, what is the relationship between consciousness and the body-heart? In other words, the physical body and the emotional nature. My experience with consciousness has been mostly or only in the upper space of my head, whereas my body heart may feel afflicted. Does the body heart, he's using a slash there, body slash heart, have consciousness?

- My experience is that the body is as important as the subtle realms or as consciousness. In fact, the body is consciousness. So my body is not local, just local. It's here in this room. It's with you, Rick, in your living room. It's on the other side of the planet, it's on the other side of the galaxy. You need to develop the being grounded in the body, because it's what opens up all of these amazing experiences.

It's not essential for being awake or being enlightened, but it's essential for higher levels, or after that. - Just to make sure that's clear, it's essential that you be grounded in the physical body as you develop these subtler, subtler awarenesses, or openness to subtler bodies. Is that what you said, or did I miss it? - Yeah, no, it's more complex than that. The physical body is pure consciousness. - In the sense that everything is, right? The bed is pure consciousness.

- Everything is pure consciousness. So being aware of the physical body as pure consciousness means that you're not bound to locality. your physical body can be in another galaxy. - Your subtle body? I mean, the other galaxy is, let's say stars and planets and all that other stuff, which are essentially pure consciousness, just as your physical body is pure consciousness.

But that's like saying, okay, a grapefruit in your refrigerator is pure consciousness, so the grapefruit is also in another galaxy because it's pure consciousness, and that doesn't make sense. - No, so pure consciousness in the body. It's also personal. I have a master in another galaxy

that I commune with. He's been my guide for the last seven lifetimes. And he's not in this galaxy, so I go visit him. So is that physical? In part, it feels physical. It's not this body. This body's in the room here now while I'm with him in another galaxy.

- You've heard the term complementarity in physics where a particle or a photon can change its polarity on one side of the galaxy and its counterpart that it's split off from or something instantly changes on the other side of the galaxy and they've proven this. So there's some level which is not constrained by the speed of light and everything is correlated on that level.

So when you talk this way, it sounds to me like you're talking about that kind of thing 'cause otherwise it would be absurd to say that your flesh and blood physical body, which is here and will eventually die, is two million light years away and some other, it's the subtle level that's somehow functioning there that you can actually function through given your level of experience. - Almas talks about the vajra body, which is the-- - Diamond body.

- It's a diamond body, it's physical, but it's immortal. - But it must be subtle, it's not like liver and spleen and lungs and intestines. - It's subtle, I have this idea that maybe in the next lifetime, or when I evolve enough, that I'll be able to manifest my perception in this physical world, even though I don't have a physical body. Not my action, my perception. - In this physical world, the one you're in now? - Yeah. - Well, sure you will.

I mean, if let's say you die, like your mother did, there are a lot of people who live on some other level who can tune into what we're doing here. Is that what you mean? Right. That's what I mean. That seems fairly common, from what you hear anyway, that they're watching over us, messing with us sometimes. We've been jumping around a little bit from topic to topic, not necessarily

a perfectly logical sequence, but who cares? It's been a nice sampling, I think, of different insights that I got from listening to your podcast series and that I've been thinking about myself for a long time and it's fun to hash them out with you. Thank you. As I said in the beginning, I'll put links to your podcast series. I already have created a page for your interview on Batgap and it'll link to it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and there's other places you can get it.

If people enjoyed this interview, I encourage you to listen to that podcast if you're in the habit of listening to podcasts. Thank you. - Yeah, so thank you and Connie both. And she does an excellent job, by the way, in your podcast. I think she asks great questions and very intelligent comments and so on. It's been a lot of fun to listen to. - Thank you, I appreciate it. - So hope to see you again in person one of these days if I ever get out to Los Angeles, if you're still there.

- Yeah, come and visit. - I will. - All right, take care. - Don't crash, I'll bring the dogs. All right, thanks, Neil. Thanks everybody who's been listening or watching. And the next one will be with Diane Hennessey Powell. I interviewed her a couple of weeks ago, but we ended up not using that one. So we're gonna redo it next week. And she is the chief scientist on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, which is currently one of the most popular podcasts in the world for obvious reasons.

If you listen to it, you'll see why. So we're gonna talk about the whole science behind the Telepathy Tapes next time. Thanks everybody. (upbeat music) Thank you.