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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.
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My guest today is Vivi Jokula, and she lives in Finland.
I recently got to know about her through a mutual friend to whom we'll probably be referring in this interview because the mutual friend,
He and I have had long conversations over the past year or so about all kinds of spiritual
and philosophical things, and he's a friend of Vivi's, as I just said, and has given us
some valuable points to talk about also.
I'm not going to read a long bio of Vivi, partly because she didn't send me a long bio,
but also I'd like her to just tell her story.
She had a deep awakening to true nature in 2022, followed by what she called a strange
and at times intense acclimation, which she refers to as "no self-realization" or simply
the natural state.
She hasn't really been a spiritual teacher yet, but I think she's kind of shifting into
that and she communicates a direct approach to realization grounded on experiential insight
on the aspects of awakening and invites you to inquire into and recognize the awe-striking
immediate inherently awake radiance of your own being and of all being.
Okay, Vivi, so for starters, let's get to know you a little bit. As a child, did you have
any inklings of interest in spirituality, any kind of far-out experiences or anything
like that?
I don't have too many memories from the early childhood, and not really spiritual memories,
but I do recall a very fascinating contemplation on the infinite, and it would just be when
my, I think my dad would give me some kind of books about space, you know, or the universe
or something like that. And I would just be reading, oh, the universe is infinite. It just
never ends. It doesn't have any borders or something like that. And then I would just
start to feel into that. And it was just take me into this kind of just total state of like, wow,
or just some kind of cessation. And my mind would just be very immersed into that.
That's nice. Something like that, but it wasn't really an experience. It was more like a
contemplation. Well, contemplations can evoke experiences. I used to, you know, lie and look
at the stars when I was a kid, or my parents would take me to the planetarium in New York
for my birthday, and I still love space. My background images on my computer screen are
all pictures of galaxies that rotate every five or ten minutes. I love it. Puts things in perspective.
Yeah, but when did you first consciously and intentionally get interested in spirituality?
Like, you know, you saw an autobiography of a yogi on a bookshelf or something that first
woke you up to the possibility that there is such a thing. I think something like suffering,
because I started to suffer kind of intensely already at the early age, not in the early
childhood but somewhere I don't really know exactly what age but looking back at it there
started to happen some kind of like alienation from that direct experience and for me that was
really painful. I started to feel more and more constricting like something just didn't feel good.
I didn't feel good in my body, I didn't feel good with other people. I just started to feel more and
more kind of anxiety, I guess. I would say I had a relatively happy childhood. There wasn't really
anything that traumatic happening in my early, early childhood. So I can't really explain why
I started to suffer so much. Was it like you were losing something? I think it more started to feel
like a sense of isolation. And it started to highlight itself when I felt that I couldn't
really be part of the way that the children were connecting. When the school started to
progress to the later stages and the whole socialization, something about it just felt
weird and I couldn't really be part of it. And then that increased that sense of like
aloneness or something like that.
I've interviewed some people who felt like they were in unity when they were children
or even maybe some of them saw angels or something and then as they got into their late single
digits and early teens, it started to fade away and they went through the whole teenage
angst kind of thing.
So maybe you're referring to something like that, although obviously you didn't see angels
and you haven't said you experienced unity, but there was something you had as a young
child, it sounds like, which was fulfilling or comforting and natural.
Yeah.
And I can recall that at that time I had like a couple of friendships and they were so natural
and so easeful and it was just so amazing to spend time together and do all kinds of adventures.
And there was just this amazing ease and just thought-free quality to it. And that's the thing
that got kind of lost. Did you have a rough teenage years? I mean, I did. I mean, just got really crazy,
you know? Yeah, the teenage years were like really horrible. They were like bad. Yeah.
self-destructive perhaps. So it kind of just all really intensified and then somewhere when I was
about 19 I guess I ended up having a car accident and I had that car accident after a really really
bad day when I would reach again that type of suicidal thoughts and desire like wanting to die
and having a kind of a very weird fight with my boyfriend at the time and then I would just end
up walking straight in front of a car and a car would hit me. And yeah, and it had all kind of
complications, the healing, so I spent a lot of time in the hospital and that somehow hit me more
than just physically. And I remember that in the hospital there was a little library and in the
library there was a little book about yoga, just a tiny little thing about some sort of wisdom of
the Oriental, nothing too complicated. And then I was like, "Oh, I gotta find out more about that."
Like, right when I get out of the hospital, I gotta find out more about it because it felt like
some sort of voice of sanity inside all the craziness and suffering I was enmeshed in.
- That's great. That's quite a story. People say that, and I had something like that too,
where I just first heard some little mention of this kind of thing, you know,
enlightenment. It's like a little light bulb went off. Whoa, that sounds important. You got to check
it out. Yes. So what did you do? Start learning yoga? Yes. What happened then that the first
yoga school that I found and I got enrolled with, that ended up turning into a 10 years of journey
and it wasn't really like a normal yoga school. So it was the kind of spiritual organization that
after I left it I would find out that it was a like a cult. It's a cult that actually at the
moment it's in international court charged about human trafficking and rapes so like all kind of
heavy abuse happened there and it was a weird mixture of many many elements like
kind of Patanjali's yoga, Hatha yoga and neo-tantra and classical tantra and a lot of new age stuff
and a lot of Christian stuff, so I don't need to go into the details.
Pete No, no, we don't have to.
Anna But yeah, it was a 10-year journey, and
it kind of just, well, got me deeper and deeper and deeper into layers of conditioning, conditioning,
conditioning, and it's almost a miracle that I got out, but somehow then that happened,
like around the age of 30, I kind of left that behind.
Pete Unfortunately, it didn't disillusion you
because you continued on in your spiritual quest. Yeah. Yes, I mean, obviously you did, so you
didn't decide, "Okay, the whole thing is garbage. I'm not gonna go in that direction." You found
something else. Yeah, actually, like, right after I left, I had a very powerful Kundalini awakening,
and that's actually the first time that I ever directly had this type of non-dual opening,
and then it made such a big contrast to that whole 10 years of nonsense that I had just been through,
which was all about conceptualization, all about just increasing levers of identity fixation.
And this was what I experienced when this non-dual opening happened. It was so radically
different than anything that I've ever experienced. And at the same time, it was so familiar and it
was so clear that this is what I've always been longing for. But it was energetically very
powerful experience also, so it was hard to make sense of it. But because it, I don't know, it
charged me with so much freedom that it was so easy to leave the past behind me and just follow
that, that inwards. Did you feel that your participation in the yoga school for 10 years
had somehow contributed to the Kundalini awakening or was it unrelated?
I wouldn't say so.
So, the Kundalini happening just happened out of the blue, huh? You just had a Kundalini awakening.
I did have this orientation all my life, I would say, but it was I didn't really
understand what any of these things are like awakening or enlightenment, but the
orientation had been there, even it was very vague and weak at that time. That's what pulled me into
at yoga school in the first place. So maybe that did something, I don't know.
You were doing a lot of yoga, I guess.
Yeah.
Some kind of meditation or something.
Yeah, a lot of yoga, a lot of meditation, but very kind of progressive practice. Like,
that's what's the approach that that organization was teaching. It was a very progressive path and
like a lot of effort and a lot of this type of really like intense effort. And this was so
different because it was very clear that it was very free, it was very spontaneous and it just
didn't fit that kind of willful striving. It had a very different quality, it had a very different
fluidity to it, that energy that's always been awake inside of me, always, always from that moment
and it's like 11 years now and it never really left me. It was a very powerful impulse,
you know, I could never really forget it, even if it was a kind of opening. Yeah, it was a unity
consciousness and all of that, but it closed, of course, because it was just an experience. But
I don't know, it brought me here, wherever I'm now, whatever it is.
You remember Adyashanti's story about how he was doing all this intense practice and it was like
really pushing himself and at a certain point he was on some retreat and he got to the point
where he thought he was just going to go crazy if he kept pushing himself. So, he left and he went
home and he just had this attitude of giving up and then boom he had the big awakening, his first
big awakening. So, when I hear something like that I think, all right, well all that progressive
effort stuff probably contributed to what ended up happening but the giving up was necessary,
leaving it was necessary in order for the awakening to happen. Yeah, I love that story.
Okay, as I understand it, you went through a lot of maybe purification after this Kundalini
awakening. There was a kind of a house cleaning that took place and some very difficult adjustments.
You said intense acclimation to what had happened.
Yeah.
That was in 2020.
That was the awakening like two years ago.
Yeah, later on.
But yeah, all in all, I can't really separate the awakening from this whole process of 11
year's journey that it's been. So it didn't just come out of nowhere. So yeah, like a lot of
purification that would start quite immediately after I had that initial opening experience.
It had a kind of honeymoon after that, like amazing flow and amazing inspiration. And then when that
kind of started to cool down, then this terrifying just notingness started to like shine in the
experience I would just turn away from it. That was like the instinctual reaction and then it
kind of like depression, like a lot of depression started to surface really really intensely.
I would have really low periods of depression that were again then followed by another flow of energy
moving through the system, kind of more inspiration, more bliss energy and then it would drop
and there would be again in a period of just kind of suddenly like really intense voidness and
resistance, tremendous resistance to feel the voidness because everything inside of me just
wanted to go towards the energetic radiance or whatever it was that kundalini energy but it was
kind of pulling me all the time to the void and I did everything I could not to go there looking
back at it. At that time it didn't feel like that it was all just happening I didn't have that type
of self-reflection. The attention was more on the surface level of experience, but now I can see
what was happening underneath, something like that. So what would be your explanation or your
understanding of why you went through these cycles after you couldn't lean awakening? Why
wasn't it just smooth sailing? Why did you have to go through these dark periods? Well, there was all
that 10 years of traumatic experiences that I had behind me in that organization that I was part of,
and also the suffering from my childhood that was like still completely unprocessed because all the
practice that I had done so far had only been repressing it and pushing it down and trying to
get somewhere. So after the Kundalini awakening happened it's like the repression didn't really
work anymore so all of that started to surface but I didn't really have tools like somatic tools to be
in the physical experience to be really present and to digest emotions. I didn't really have any
tools and I still didn't really understand what awakening is. So, I think that's what made it a
little bit challenging that period of my life. My sense is that, you know, everybody has a lot
of house cleaning that really needs to be done and a kundalini awakening like that can really
kickstart it, you know, where it just the energy is flowing and it's hitting all these blocks and
and it starts to clear the blocks and so you have all these emotions. I interviewed a guy a couple
weeks ago who had this profound beautiful awakening. It was like being kissed by God. It was just
wonderful experience, but the next thing he knew he was swearing like a sailor and getting angry at
people and just all this stuff that was coming up. And there does need to be a house cleaning,
don't you think? An energetic opening like that can really get it started. And I guess one good
question is, how can we make it as smooth as possible and as efficient as possible so we
don't get stuck in that cycle for a long time?
>> Well, I think what helps a lot for someone who's going through that phase, that phase
of the journey, is to have access to, like, a really good teacher who would actually clarify
what awakening actually is about. Because that can clarify a lot of things. Because if
still searching for the experience and kind of associating, awakening the experiential qualities
that the Kundalini can bring because it has that very experiential quality to it, then that can help
a lot. Because it's like a blessing but it's a curse when we have these powerful experiences.
It's a blessing because it opens inside of us possibilities that we didn't know that exist,
But at the same time, there can be attachment to those experiences and wanting to get back to them,
wanting to make them permanent and not understanding that awakening is actually
something completely different. It's about looking into the nature of experience itself.
So there needs to be genuine curiosity about reality as it is, instead of going for those
peak experiences. Let's say you had a friend who had a Kundalini Awakening like this and they were
going through what you had gone through. What would you say to them or what would you recommend
to enable them to do what you just said, which is not be hung up on the experiences, not be
chasing experiences, but to shift to a more fundamental understanding of what's going on?
Well, this kind of natural meditation, which is sometimes called the methodless method,
which is just the practice that is not progressive, which doesn't have a goal, where you're just
being with the reality of the experience as it is, as it is arising moment by moment.
And there are many different teachers within non-duality that are teaching this practice and
it can be called in different ways, but that's like really, really great basic practice that I
think supports this type of Kundalini awakening. If you can take daily time like that, that you just
relax into the experience, like either eyes closed or eyes open, you relax to the direct experience
and you learn the difference between the direct experience and interpretation of the experience,
like mental representation of it, like the meaning and conceptualization, and you all the time bring
yourself back to the direct experience and resting that, I think that gives a really great support
for this whole process of liberation. Yeah, I think Adyashanti teaches meditation kind of that way.
Yeah, he's really good at it. Yeah, he is. I have a friend actually who has been studying various
meditation traditions and there are a bunch of them. There's a kind of Christian centering prayer
and then there's something taught by a Catholic priest, I believe his name is Lawrence Freeman,
whom I've interviewed, that is mantra-based, but the way you described where you're not trying to
make a particular experience happen, you're just settling back in and letting what happens happen,
and not holding on to any experience, not being upset if you're having thoughts,
you know, just being really natural about it. So, there are a number of traditions that teach
meditation in that way. Yeah, and I like myself a lot the Chochen type of approach to it.
So, and they call it recognition of the ground of being and then you're just abiding as that
and it's like the idea is that the goal and the ground and the paths, they are three names for
for the same thing and that's what's happening moment by moment and that's your true nature.
Do you think that a person has to have a certain degree of clarity or a certain degree of advancement
before something like that's going to work for them? After you have a genuine opening like that,
it's going to be so natural, at least for me, it's going to be so natural to just meditate.
There's something about it that just opens up in a completely different way that wasn't available
for me prior to this opening. So no, it doesn't require like any kind of level of anything. It's
so natural to who we are just to relax into the experience, to relax into the presence.
It can be difficult prior having this type of awakening experience because then we are so
tight inside of the mind and it's just the mind trying to meditate and that can be a little bit
hard then to try to create that initial, to penetrate that conceptualization. But when that
is penetrated even a tiny tiny little bit it's so powerful the reality just starts to move through
Yeah, so you had had a pretty profound opening and so it was natural for you, but I'm just
thinking of people who haven't had any kind of opening that they know about.
Maybe they need some kind of instruction that will enable them to meditate effortlessly
in the way you've described.
Like I said, that mantra meditation or there are various other kinds of meditation like
that where you have a tool that enables it to be effortless so you're not just sitting
there with your mind wandering and it's not just some imaginary thing where you're contemplating
about some state that you're not actually experiencing. So different.
Yeah, I love mantra. Yeah, I've worked a lot with mantra because it's part of the traditions that
I've been studying throughout the years. Yeah.
So I'm just saying that for the benefit of listeners, there could be different practices
that would be useful at different stages. And so if you try something and you're not
getting anywhere with it, then maybe try something else. Find what works for you.
Yeah, you should get results from the practice within a few months, and if you don't, then try
something else. I don't think it's a good idea to keep pounding on something year after year if it
doesn't generate some sort of beneficial results. I agree. And whatever that, you know, that
something like that might work for somebody, but not for somebody else. So you have to
find what works for you. Yes, exactly. In my case, I had results from day one and so I kept doing what
I was doing. Other people don't. You really have to experiment a little bit. What kind of meditation
you do? In 1968, I learned transcendental meditation and that worked for me very well
from the start. I became a teacher of it and everything. I'm not a teacher of it now, but I was.
But other people, you know, learn it and they didn't feel like anything was happening and they
stop doing it and so maybe they'd find something else that worked for them. So one size does not
fit all necessarily. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, everyone's path is so unique and I think the right
tools, they will come to us because the path is really magical like that. When we just orient
ourselves and we start to walk the path, we take one step, two step, you know, the teachers, they
will appear in our life, the practices, they will appear, but maybe in an unexpected manner. So
It's an amazing journey. I love that point. There's some saying in India, they say,
"Take one step toward God and He'll take a thousand steps toward you." Or Jesus said,
"Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else shall be added unto thee." So, you just start,
and then all kinds of opportunities come along that you would never have if you hadn't taken
the initial step. Yeah, it's a leap of courage. Good. So, let's define our terms a little bit.
we've mentioned awakening, liberation, self, no-self. Let's make sure we're all on the same
page with those kinds of terms, like enlightenment, for instance. Do you like that term or do you feel
like it's too misused? I don't like it, yeah, because it instantly gives this idea of some
sort of superhuman achievement, but at the same time there are all these non-dual traditions that
kind of talk about it and it does refer to something that is actually a possibility,
I believe for everyone, if you're into that, but there are just so much misunderstandings about
what it is that makes that term very heavy. Just like God, that also is a term that has
like such a mound of baggage in it that I don't like that one either, the G word or the E word.
Yeah, especially the E word for me. I mean, the G word is okay, but in either case,
you have to define your terms. Otherwise, you're just talking past people because they might have
a completely different understanding of the word than you do, and so the word's not helpful.
>> But enlightenment, generally, at least the way these perennial traditions are talking about it,
it refers to liberation, which again, I don't see it as some sort of state that someone achieves
because that's exactly how the self is hearing the teaching and it imagines the liberation or
enlightenment it's going to be something it will get to experience if it manages to get all the
way there. And it's always something other than what's happening right now from the perspective
of self, from the perspective of the seeking mechanism. It's always going to be something
that is not quite right now. Something needs to be a little bit different. Something is not fully
complete here. There's a truth in that. It's just being missing the credit, this whole impulse of
seeking that we go for. You know there's that saying you can get a donkey to walk by fixing
up a pole so that a carrot dangles in front of him and he keeps following the dangling carrot
but he never catches up with it. Yeah something like that. Yeah so yeah actually it is kind of
fun because the self is attracted to this whole game of enlightenment like that, that it thinks
it's going to get something out of it so it has a kind of a purpose also like that. So that's what
motivates it, so it starts to pursue it, but at some point it kind of becomes obvious that it's
actually the other way around, that something starts to pursue the self and it's like, "Oh my
god, I'm the one being highlighted here. I'm actually threatened by whatever this thing is
that is happening for me," and you know, that you could call liberation or enlightenment. It's very
threatening for self, actually, the real thing, because it's going to be-- For a small self,
you mean? For any kind of self. How is it threatening? It's the end of it. But the
But the self is really nothing other than this movement. It's very hard to explain what it
is. It's kind of a distancing movement that's creating distance somewhere where there is
no distance at all. It's like zero distance is totally indivisible. And that's the reality
for everyone already, every moment. But kind of like superimposed on top of that, there
is this, what I call the experience of self, which creates this whole interior world of
subjectivity and an exterior world of objectivity because that's what the self is. It comes with
something that is other than itself. So it's like a whole paradigm. It's not just self but
it's everything that it's in relation with that is not the self. But there's all the time this
primary reality which is what we are, what everything is and it's by its nature awake.
You could say it's underneath it but that's just the figure of speech because it's not really...
it's closer than clothes, it's closer than your breath, it's so intimately what you are.
And the self is a kind of an intermediary that's somehow in between. But the self is a very
complicated phenomenon because it can take so many forms. It can take the form of a very egoic sense
of self which is very contracted, very conceptualized, very fragmented. And then the self can also take
more boundless form, more transparent form, which is more unified and which feels a lot more
authentic than the constructed sense of self. But it's still a kind of intermediary that it's there.
So that's the way I understand it, or at least one way of trying to put it in words. It's kind of
hard to say what it is, but when it's not there, then there is just this amazing immediacy, amazing
immediacy. It's so unfiltered. So we're defining terms here a little bit and so I'm sure you're
aware that a lot of times in the spiritual literature they have self with a capital S
and self with the lowercase s and the lowercase s is supposed to be just the individuality that
everybody feels they have and then the capital S is supposed to be Brahman or Atman, you know,
universal awareness which is not individual in its nature but which is your true nature. So really if
you have a self, that's what it is, that's what you essentially are. It has this universal quality to
it. Yeah. So, are you comfortable with that terminology? Yeah, it's interesting. So, this
thing that I call no self, like I never had any intention for something like this. I remember I
heard Adyashanti once talk about it a long time ago and I was like super fascinated. I was, I never
heard anyone to say anything like that in my whole life and I was just, that's like the most interesting
thing that I ever heard but I never really thought about it after that. So I didn't really have this
sense of no self because my tradition was a tradition of non-dual Shaiva Tantra which is
a Hindu based tradition. I mean that's a tradition that I did mostly practice with.
That tradition doesn't really have this term of no self at all or this type of mode of perception or
experience. It's just not part of that view. So when this thing happened for me, it actually
took a lot of time to somehow be able to integrate that because I didn't have any context for it. It
took me at least a year to find teachers or people who would talk about it, and then I realized that
it seems to be something quite different than that universal sense of self that they talk about in the
Hindu-based traditions. Yeah, I did a whole interview with Adyashanti and Susanna Marie
about the loss of a sense of personal self. I don't know if you've seen that one. Did you see
that? Yes, and that was one of the first videos that I saw that was like so helpful and that was
about a year into this thing. It was so helpful because they were talking about it in a very
practical manner and I got a lot of practical pointers from it. Great. Frankly, when I hear this,
I try to square it with my personal experience and I was talking to our mutual friend about this and
he and I sort of agreed about the way we experience it and I wanted to bounce this off you and what
we were saying is there's kind of a multi-dimensionality to life where on one level nothing's
happening and it's impersonal and it's total silence and all that and then on other levels
it's more active and then on a certain level you kind of have a self if you bang your shin into the
coffee table, ow, that hurts. There seems to be some pain here. It's not some guy in China
experiencing it, it's this here. It's a sense of me, it doesn't like this. And you know,
in your own life, you've been going through things and dealing with psychological development issues
and all kinds of stuff like that, which we'll talk about more as we go along. And so that to me seems
like the personal dimension, which most people view as the entirety of their life, the entirety
of their experience. Like an iceberg, all they see is the tip of the iceberg above water.
And someone like yourself has opened up to the rest of the iceberg that is not ordinarily seen.
And that's their main orientation, is the 90% of the iceberg that most people don't see.
But still there is the tip. You know, you have a tip above water just like everybody else does.
It's just like you have the whole iceberg. Right. Yeah, that's a great metaphor. I love it. And
and that's a really good point. I actually don't experience it like that but that's how it can
kind of feel when we first have that very personal experience of ourself like just this persona and
individuality and then we open up to this infinite vastness like we could call this transcendental
dimension or impersonal dimension and it can feel that it's just this infinitely more
vast and deep reality that is more fundamental to what we are and then the personality is still
there but it seems not so significant compared to this which is much more foundational. But how I
actually experience and that's not even the right word to use but it's because it kind of feels like
there is not really even experience anymore. The personal and the impersonal are they are literally
not two. So I can kind of feel everything very personally but that very personal and intimate
experiencing is by its nature totally impersonal and universal but at the same time it's very
personal. So they are like in perfect balance and they kind of cancel each other out and the reality
is you could say it's neither impersonal or personal or both are neither but these are just
words. I'm trying to talk about something which is a non-conceptual moment by moment way of
experiencing reality. And for me, there is no distinction whatsoever between the personal
and impersonal. It's hard to explain because the mind cannot understand it. They seem to be like
two contradictory perspectives, but they are not. Rick: Could you say that there is the personal
and there is the impersonal, but they're both contained within a larger wholeness that is
more than the sum of its parts? Christina: It's just one indivisible whole.
Yeah, it's just one seamless whole and it has those two aspects and it has many, many,
many aspects that appear to be two, you could say complementary aspects, but they are not
two and that's why I think they came up with this term non-duality because that's what
it means. It's not two, but it's not like oneness because I wouldn't say that it's one,
it's just this paradox. It's this amazing paradox that there are all these apparent opposites
somehow are not opposites. I don't know. That's really good. There's a saying in the Brahma
Sutras which is Brahman is the eater of everything. Brahman meaning the totality. So, all the apparent
diversities are subsumed within the totality. And you know, when they describe Brahman and
Advaita Vedanta, for instance, they enumerate its attributes, you know, existence, consciousness,
bliss, some inherent quality of maya, all these different things that are supposedly contained
within this wholeness, but they're not like individual parts that are in a basket. It's
the wholeness. It's like the blind man and the elephant. You can sort of feel different qualities
of it, so to speak, depending on where you're coming from. But I think it's a kind of
misunderstanding, like when we have these powerful openings to the impersonal dimension of being,
which is again so infinitely vast, if we then take that to be more true or more real than the type of
kind of relative human experience, which is personal in a way.
You know, even there's not a person there.
I don't experience like myself as a person, but there is that, it could call dimension
of being.
In my experience, they need to come to a perfect balance, like the relative and absolute, the
human experience and the infinite, the personal and impersonal, the individual and universal.
And when they do that, then they kind of collapse into each other.
That's like dance.
That's really nice.
There was a couple of essays you sent me and I highlighted some of the things.
One was you said, "One of the classical pitfalls on the path is premature transcendence.
The immaculate nature of pure awareness transcends the body-mind condition and it may at times
feel like most of our psychological issues have magically evaporated or they simply no
no longer feel problematic.
This type of liberating disintegration could be called waking up from life and it can feel
quite peaceful.
But I think what you're saying there is that there's a kind of a hiding out in the transcendence
that's taking place where you haven't included the totality of the personal.
Like you were just saying, it's personal and impersonal, one big totality with both aspects.
It's like people are trying to sort of hang out in the transcendent and avoid the personal
qualities.
of related to what you were just saying? Yeah, and whenever we have a position, if we are attached to
that position, if we are deriving our identity from that position, then we have a fixation.
And awakening, the way I understand it, its quality is exactly that it doesn't fixate.
It doesn't have any view or perspective or position that is like the one and only and true. It doesn't
have that. It can accommodate a position or view a position for a moment if it's necessary,
you know, but it can also drop it instantly when it's not necessary. So it's very free like that.
That's what non-fixating quality is. That's the quality of freedom. There's no need to be
forever transcendent and forever unborn and undying, you know, if there's another moment
when it requires that you embody various experience in a very kind of particular and specific way so
so that it can fully assimilate, for example. And then you have to let go of that position
of vastness, but you don't really let it go because the vastness, you can find it also
right at the core of any particular sensation. It's made of the vastness, so that's the magic
of it.
It's good. It's amazing that English is not your first language because you express these
concepts very well in English. I imagine Finnish is your first language, right?
I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, it's easier to me in English than in Finnish because Finnish
tends to be a very concrete language. It's not made for these kinds of ideas. Yeah, subtle,
subtle stuff. So what you're just saying, do you actually find that even with things like
political disagreements or Gaza and Israel or, you know, the political parties in Finland or
whatever, if you talk to friends about these things, your orientation that you've just described to us
enables you to kind of see both sides more easily? I have a broader perspective that includes
all these more polarized perspectives? Kind of, like I'm not really a political person myself,
so I haven't really been in that type of situation where I would be discussing political views,
but I've had other type of situations in my life where there are conflicting perspectives
in human interactions. And yeah, that's the interesting part that I can kind of feel all
of it simultaneously, and it's sometimes very hard for me to hold my position because the empathy can
be so strong sometimes and I can't control it. And I can kind of sense how each perspective arises
but it's just, you know, it's always limited because it's just one way of seeing things.
And perspective, it's always going to be some sort of conceptualization and if there's any
tendency to kind of try to understand or try to hold on to anything, try to know anything,
then that can be frustrating. But if you just relax into that kind of baseless nature of reality that
that nothing can really be known and you can never really know what anything is.
That's just the essence of it, but it's actually amazing freedom in that because we want to
know things because we want to feel safe.
That's basically the mechanism.
Yeah, it creates a false sense of safety.
It doesn't really, really fulfill us, but that's what we are kind of trying to do when
we try to find an explanation for something that can make us feel safe, that now we understand
what's happening here, we understand what reality is.
It can feel very insecure to feel that crownless, baseless nature of reality that actually we
can't know.
We can't know what anything is.
We can only feel how everything is just kind of spontaneously happening.
Yeah, no, that's good.
It has very practical implications because these days there's so many conflicts around
the world where people are dug in to a particular position and they can't communicate with each
other anymore.
It's gotten worse with all the social media and everything.
And I think that if the kind of orientation that you're expressing became more common,
it would just neutralize a lot of this polarity.
It would dissolve a lot of these conflicts.
It's really probably ultimately the key to world peace.
being able to appreciate differences from a perspective of wholeness and not just feel
like their particular viewpoint is the only one and everybody else is wrong.
>> Exactly, and I would say that's maturity.
That's maturity to experientially be able to appreciate other person's perspective, even
if it's different from you and even if it challenges yours.
Yeah.
And you can see, you know, Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
I felt another way of interpreting that is your neighbor is yourself on some deep level.
And so, if you could love your neighbor in that sense that we are actually one person
fundamentally, one being fundamentally, then the differences are irrelevant.
They get harmonized in the unity of the ground of being.
Right, it's so interconnected, like it's this one fluid and empty and dynamic
co-arising, like what's happening all the time. So when we step into the situation from that
undivided place, yeah, I believe so, yeah, there's a possibility for like genuine meeting.
Of course, it's going to be challenging if the other person is coming from a place of division.
At least it helps if at least one person.
It helps. It helps.
Pete: All right, let's do an overview now of what we've covered and what we have,
what we want to cover in our meeting today. So, we've talked about your personal journey up to
a certain point, you know, the ten years in the yoga school and then the Kundalini awakening and
some of the developments after that, and we've defined some terms and there's more to tell about
your personal journey and there's a whole issue about ethics and appropriate behavior of a
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.
Pete: Which means it's just resolved back into such an unmanifest level that there's no
relative expression, right? Is that correct?
Anna: It's not unmanifest or manifest, it's just, there's no relationship. So,
that's the thing with the God, how people usually experience it, even if it's from the point of view
of kind of unity, that there is a kind of relationship. But when the self falls away,
that's why it feels, how it actually feels like is that God falls away if you've been having that
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.
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