That's what I'm discovering in my cancer diagnosis in the midst of me teaching has thrown me into
I can't teach without my vulnerability and my fragility and my
Emotionality and I don't have it all together anymore and not that I ever did
I'm not not pretending I did but there's something beautifully liberating for me as I'm teaching and really including
The full range of my human experience that my students are telling me is more potent and more profound than anything
I was doing beforehand
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series
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My guest today is Riyaz Motan.
Did I pronounce that right, Motan?
>>Riyaz: Yes, you got it just right.
>>Rick: Okay, good.
So you were born in Kenya, like Barack Obama.
That's a joke.
And you're of Indian ancestry.
Your family moved to Canada when you were 10.
You grew up there, moved to the US as an adult.
And you feel, I'm just kind of putting your bio here in the second person, that each of
these lands, peoples, and cultures has informed and shaped your expression and sensibilities.
You're a product of both East and West.
Most of your adult life has been devoted to the study and practice of both psychotherapy
and spirituality, and both of these disciplines have been integral to a path of healing and
awakening.
Professionally, your life's work has been to bring together Eastern wisdom with Western
science and psychology in a systematic alliance.
After 26 years of mainly practicing as a psychotherapist and many years of teaching and supervising
students and interns in a transpersonally oriented graduate school, the California Institute
of Integral Studies in San Francisco, you shifted your work in a more explicitly spiritual direction,
and you now lead individuals and groups in spiritual work and in day-long and multi-day
retreats.
So, let's see.
In 2022, you shifted your focus away from primarily being a therapist and began focusing primarily
on spiritual teaching.
And in April of '23, your teacher Adyashanti surprised you when he gave you Dharma transmission
and his blessing to teach.
And so you were feeling a tremendous wave of support and energy in this new direction.
But then in August of '23, a couple months later, you were stunned to receive a serious
cancer diagnosis, stage 4 lung cancer.
So we'll be talking about all that.
Let me ask you for starters, when Adyashanti gives you Dharma transmission, is it anything
palpable in terms of some kind of Shakti implant or is it more like, "Okay, Riyaz, go ahead
and teach.
You have my blessings."
>> Riyaz: Yeah, that's a great question.
I was wondering the same thing, honestly, as I was leading up to the weekend that we
had set aside for this, you know, and I didn't know what to expect.
In truth, what I'll tell you is it was a beautiful affair and very ritualized and very deep and
sacred, but it actually didn't have a lot of fireworks to it.
Energetically speaking, it actually just felt like a very quiet, beautiful confirmation of
something that was already happening.
You know, I'd spent the whole weekend with Adya, he's a good friend of mine, actually,
and so the weekend we did the transmission, we did it at the end of the weekend and we'd
spent probably a good 48 plus hours just hanging out, just spending time together.
And in those hanging out times, we have lots of conversations about teaching, and I had
lots of questions for him about teaching, because this is all new to me, and you know,
what an incredible resource he is.
And I actually felt like something happened in the weekend in the conversation.
Interestingly enough, like something solidified and was passed on through multiple conversations,
that by the time the ceremony happened, it was actually just a very quiet little experience,
and it didn't feel big to me in any way.
It just felt sweet.
>>Rick: Nice.
Well, Ajay's not really a fireworks-y kind of guy.
>>Riyaz: In some ways he isn't, but in some ways he is.
>>Rick: Yeah.
Yeah, I had the pleasure of visiting him at his house a couple times and stayed there
one night before doing an interview with him.
And unfortunately, the guy I was rooming with snored loudly all night, so I hardly got any
sleep.
Anyway, we're not just going to talk about cancer in this conversation.
I'm sure there's other things we'll talk about.
But we could start with that.
>> It's a big thing, though.
>> Yeah, it's a big thing.
And I want to mention that a couple of our mutual friends, Lucy Grace and Marianna Kaplan,
were your cheerleaders for getting this to happen.
They were doing backflips and cartwheels on the sidelines.
Glad they did that.
So you start, and then I'll have all kinds of questions.
But you're a healthy guy, you're a hiker, biker, things like that.
I doubt that you smoke or maybe you did when you were younger.
No, not even.
So it must have been kind of a shock.
I can think of three people who died of lung cancer who never smoked, but sometimes, you
know, non-smokers get it.
That's right.
And yeah, it was an absolute shock to me and to everybody I know.
You know, most people who said this to me afterwards, like, "You're the last person I would think
because I'm very healthy, very kind of health conscious.
I eat healthy.
I exercise.
I meditate.
I kind of try to take care of my mind, body, and spirit.
I always have.
And so when this came, it came out of the blue.
And it also, you know, it's interesting, Rick, you're reading my bio earlier, right?
And I was listening to it.
And you can kind of think about your life along a kind of a narrative or a trajectory.
And I had been feeling up until prior to my diagnosis, like, wow, things are just unfolding
so beautifully, as you were reading about it.
Like even the dharma transmission of Adi, it was just like a kind of a confirmation or
more wind at my back of, "Oh yes, you're at this other new stage and now you're stepping
into teaching and you have the blessing of your teacher."
And all the signs of the sort of universes I was reading them to were saying, "Keep
going.
This is great.
This is your dharma.
We support you in a way."
That's kind of how I was unconsciously hearing it.
And then all of a sudden, it's like, you know, the record stopped.
You know, like there's this big kind of an earthquake, you know, a tsunami, it felt like
in the middle of everything.
And it completely just blew everything apart.
It blew my narrative apart.
It blew my sense of what my life trajectory was and what my life was supposed to be.
Even threw into question the kind of sense of incredible support I've always felt and
I've been feeling.
I've had a blessed life in many ways, you know, I've had a difficult life in many ways, especially
the beginnings, but the farther and farther into my life I've gone, and as you were reading
about all the practices that I've discovered, and the teachers and the helpers, I've kind
of wound my way, gratefully, graciously, into a life I thought into a pretty happy life,
pretty fulfilling life, and it just felt like it was only getting more and more so that
way.
And then all of a sudden, everything just got blown apart.
And even that sense of support, could I trust the universe, got thrown into question.
So it really threw me into an existential morass for a while.
But I will say that this last year and a quarter since the diagnosis has been profoundly just
transformative and more difficult this year than any year of my life.
No doubt about that.
I won't sugarcoat that.
But actually, probably the most beautiful, most opening, most transformative year of
my life as well. There's been so many blessings and I have many moments where I can actually
feel grateful for cancer, for the diagnosis. I still wish it would go away. It's not like
I want it to stick around. I want to bow to this teacher, this amazing teacher and say,
"Have I learned my lessons yet, please?"
Yeah, right. Got the point.
It's not an easy relationship, but it is a profound relationship. And my practice is that
I'd been cultivating and leaning on for many years got thrown into question at the beginning.
Will they carry me?
Are they enough?
Will I still believe?
And I'm grateful to say that things have only redoubled, things have only deepened.
I'm so grateful for the spiritual understanding that I have and the practices that I have.
And that's really the thing that's allowed me to meet this crisis and to actually have
it be a gift, have it be a blessing, and not feel a victim to it, not feel cursed by it.
Pete You may remember that Ram Dass either wrote
a book or made a film, maybe both, called Fierce Grace, after he had his stroke. The
title says it all.
David It says it all, and I can very much resonate
and relate to him and his experience in that book, or movie at least, I remember the movie.
Pete Yeah. And your slogan for many years apparently
has been, "Things happen for me, not to me," right?
I've been saying that for years to myself in practicing, and life happens for me, not
to me.
Right.
I remember, actually, in those first 24 hours after my diagnosis, first 48 hours, like really
asking myself, "Can I really say that about this?
This is for me?"
And, you know, there was a period, it didn't last long actually, probably a day or two,
real wavering about that. And then something clicked back in and said, "This too. I trust this. I trust this is for me.
I don't know what it is. I don't know what the gifts are. I don't know what the learning is,
but I'm going to orient to that." And you know, I'd watched and listened to
Ram Dass talk about his orientation and the way he practiced with his stroke and his illness.
And you know, really the perspective he took was that this is part of my soul's curriculum.
Whatever it is,
Everything that happens in life, right? The positive and the negative, the most difficult and the most blessed,
are all part of the soul's journey and part of this curriculum. And
that's really been the approach. And that's kind of when I say life happens for me.
It's kind of an approach or an attitude of,
"Okay, I trust this. Whatever this is, this is meant to be here. It's been laid on my altar."
Is how I like to think about it. A friend of mine said that.
And I really like that at the beginning. "It's been laid on my altar.
and how do I bow to it? How do I learn from this? How do I let it open me and teach me? And
that attitude has allowed me to really receive tremendous blessings from this.
Pete Yeah, I think and often say that if you could
zoom out far enough and see it from a God's eye view, nothing that happens to anybody is
purposeless or arbitrary or vindictive or any of those things. It's all in the interest of evolution,
But that obviously can be a very glib thing to say when you consider how horrible
life can be for people, like telling them this is good for you, you know, being bombed in Gaza or
something. And of course, this is just really a philosophy. How do we know this? We're absolutely
sure. But, you know, if you believe that there is some all-pervading intelligence and that its
ultimate agenda, if you will, is the evolution of all souls and all beings and the whole universe
to higher and higher stages, then even the rough stuff is in the interest of that.
Yes, and I can really see that from that zoomed out perspective, and I can hold it that way.
I think, yes, as you're saying, you know, I think if you try to bring that perspective to somebody
who's right in the crux of something like that, that can feel really painful or difficult or
misattuned. But I think having that perspective personally, having access to that,
that perspective personally can allow us to relate to our experience in a much more generative
way and in a much more expansive way, in a way that allows us to not feel completely
a victim to our circumstances, to open to the possibilities that may be here, like we talk
about, like from a soul perspective or an evolutionary perspective that are really hard
to get from the personality that is really just designed and interested in pleasure and
avoiding pain. So it's really important to be able to step beyond the personality's drive
into some other motivation, if possible.
And I don't think it's useful to make up, well, maybe it can be useful for people at
times to just make up fairy tales about how the world works, but ultimately I think it
behooves us to really understand how it works, if at all possible. But I do think it makes
a big difference what our understanding is, in terms of the way we live life, and perhaps
to death. You know, if you think you're going to go to heaven, or you're going to go to hell,
or you're going to get reincarnated, or you're just going to utterly cease to exist, or all
those things, each of those perspectives would give a very different flavor to your experience,
especially your experience of impending death, don't you think?
>> Exactly. Our stories we tell ourselves impact us greatly, and the mythology that we live
and live in and live with is tremendously important.
Have you had a philosophy regarding death or are you very much don't know?
Well, both, actually.
I think ultimately, I always land in don't know.
Around death in particular, and honestly, just life in particular.
I have all sorts of stories and theories about the way things work, and they guide me, like
they're important.
But ultimately, I always come back to just the mystery, the open, allowing of things to unfold
without a story. Things are always unfolding without a story. It's just something we overlay
onto it, it can be very useful, very guiding, very comforting, very terrifying, all sorts of
things, depending upon your story. So I'll just say that, and death is the ultimate place of not
know, because I absolutely know that I don't know about that. And yes, if you ask me about my
philosophy about it. I have held a kind of more Hindu perspective on it, kind of a reincarnation
that's always just resonated for me. I've had a sense of that that's true for me in
terms of past lives, but I hold that lightly. Interestingly enough, I'm facing my mortality
in a very immediate way, more than I ever have, obviously, in my life. But for years,
The last probably six or eight years prior to my diagnosis, I was practicing with deaths
over and over again.
I would be on retreat and I would go into the woods in the middle of the night sometimes
and just face my fear of death and just watch and allow myself to feel my bodily and mental
contractions and constrictions and fears and try to work with them and breathe with them
and release them.
And I did all sorts of other meditations and practices as well.
And that was incredibly liberating for me.
And I felt like I was freeing myself to live more fully in the moment.
And I also felt like I was preparing myself for the moment of death in some ways.
And then all of a sudden, I don't need to practice anymore because every day death is
at my doorstep.
Every morning I wake up and death is my teacher.
So I've been kind of thrust into intense period of, you can call it practice.
I think Shankar said, and probably other teachers have said, that it's good to live one's life
with the understanding that you could die in your next breath, you know, you never know.
You're kind of like a bird sitting on a branch that could break at any time, which might sound
morbid if you interpret it wrong, but I think a lot of people live as though they're immortal,
especially teenagers.
They think they can do anything and it's not going to matter.
Yeah, and I think it tells us, I think there's an illusion of certainty, an illusion of a
future that we can just put off our lives and we can not be as awake to the preciousness
of this moment, this fleeting moment that is the only thing that's given.
You and I don't know.
The branch could break for either one of us at any moment, right?
I think that was Shankara's point, you know, make hay while the sun shines.
This is a precious opportunity.
Yeah.
And so that's one of the blessings, so many blessings, but one of the blessings of this
diagnosis is that my days and my moments are shining.
are alive more than ever.
There's difficult moments now that I have to face and experiences that are part of it.
But the preciousness of my life and of my loved ones and of the little simple things
like a morning in the trees and with the sun and the birds, when you think about it, like,
"Boy, do I get another one of these?" or "How many more do I get of these?"
You really pay attention, you really go, "Wow, this is a miracle.
This is a blessing."
>>Rick: On this point of not knowing, I was listening to a talk of Swami Sarvapriyananda
the other day and he told a story about Sri Ramakrishna when he was on his deathbed and
there were some people in the room and Ramakrishna overheard someone use the phrase "I know"
in the context of some sentence and he lifted his head with great effort and said, "Never
say I know, always say I'm learning."
And he said, "That applies to me too.
There's no ultimate finality or certainty.
always learning. Well that's the other thing I'll say, Rick, is that this year, a year
and a quarter, it's been tremendously humbling because I was coming, as you were describing,
coming into a period of like, "Oh, I'm starting to teach and I'm feeling called to teach."
And it wasn't coming from an arrogant place, it was actually coming from a really pure
service place, but there was a sense of, "Oh, I have some things to share now. I really
have kind of arrived at a place. I've got some things figured out." You know? I'm laughing
because it just threw me into such a kind of an upside down, like, I don't know.
I don't know anything.
I am going through so much and I am needing so much help.
I'm emotionally more labile or kind of all over the place than I ever have been.
So it just felt like I was out of control.
Perhaps that's the kind of teacher the world needs.
There aren't enough of those.
Yeah.
There's too many people who are cock sure of themselves.
Exactly.
I think this has been wonderful, and I think you're right. I think we all could use just
more humility, more openness. There's a lot of us that can be a little too set in, I know.
There's another quote I heard recently, which I've repeated several times, but I like it.
My friend Dana Sawyer used this quote in something. Aldous Huxley, he wrote a biography of Huxley.
Aldous Huxley said at one point that the greatest contribution of the scientific revolution
was the development of the working hypothesis. When we were talking a minute ago, I was thinking
that because it's okay to say, "I don't really know," but it's also okay to have working
hypotheses like maybe reincarnation is a thing. Now, what's the evidence for that? I don't
have to believe it. I don't have to disbelieve it. I'm not going to go to heaven or hell
as a consequence of my belief or disbelief, but it's an interesting hypothesis to explore.
And you can do that with virtually every idea.
I heard this morning in a talk I was listening to that you're one of these rare people who
has a particular kind of genetic thing with your cancer that is amenable to one of these
targeted therapies where they can pinpoint precisely, customize just for you a particular
kind of therapy.
I think it was like 4% of the people who have your condition have that opportunity.
So it's pretty cool that you had that.
And as of when you did that interview, I don't know when that was, you know, you started the
treatment that was good for maybe even five years, but it only lasted you six
months, and then you were going to start a new one at UC Davis. And so how's that
going? That one petered out as well. Pretty quick. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah, no, it's
been quite a rollercoaster. You know, the first couple of months of my diagnosis
was horrendous because the diagnosis was extreme. You know, the cancer had
spread to multiple places in organs and bones, and it's not looking good. It was a
a pretty dire diagnosis. And then two months later, as you mentioned, I got this seeming
reprieve. This ALK positive was the genetic marker that I had and qualified me for this
targeted medication that I started in October of 2023. And about six months, five or six
months, it seemed like a miracle. It seemed like most of my symptoms went away, my energy
came back. I was feeling pretty well. And that was supposed to probably last. Cancer
always mutates and finds its way around it and you need to go to the next generation of
the medication and the next one and you hope there's a next one.
You know, the one I was taking was the latest generation, so I was hoping that it would
last for years and there'd be another medication on the pipeline or approved by that point.
And so I've talked to mentors or friends of mine in that community that are eight, nine
years into this diagnosis and they're on their third or fourth generation of medication.
So I had that as a potential timeline for me, a hopeful timeline.
But after six months, it stopped working for me.
I won't go into the details.
My particular type has a variation that makes it harder to treat.
And so I went into the UC Davis clinical trial with the newest medication, the newest generation
that wasn't approved yet, but it was getting really good results.
Six weeks into that, they said, "I'm sorry, it's not working for you.
Your cancer is progressing.
going to have to move on to harsher treatment, which is what I did in August-September, was
I moved towards chemotherapy and radiation because it was advancing in certain areas pretty
rapidly.
I did chemo and radiation.
The radiation helped give me some relief, like with my breathing, for example, and a
couple of other things.
And then the chemo right after, it interacted with my radiation and burned my esophagus.
esophagus got burned on the inside to the point where I literally couldn't swallow
food for about five weeks or so. And so I ended up in the hospital for a few days,
they almost put a feeding tube in me, but I basically was on liquid diet for about
six weeks. Most of six weeks I lost a bunch of weight. So I really went
through it just a couple months ago and got really weak. But I came out of
that and now I'm in a different phase, Rick. I'm really throwing myself into more
alternative healing. I was doing that a little bit on the side, more complementary healing,
more spiritual healing, more energetic, but also taking other supplements and acupuncture
and things. And now that's become the main thing. Like I am fully in a new mode of healing
and I let go of the Western medicine as my main hope. It's still there, I haven't thrown
it out completely. I'm getting a radiation treatment tomorrow to help with some tumors
on my spine, they're creating some pain for me.
So I'm going to use that for palliative allopathic kind of reasons, but I'm just kind of really
throwing myself into healing on these other levels.
There's just a kind of a different mode I'm in now.
I don't have the magic pill anymore that I thought I had.
We were up in Iowa City a couple of weeks ago, an hour north of us, because Irene had a doctor's
appointment and I went into the food co-op place to pick up some sandwiches or something.
Irene stayed in the car, and as I was walking out, holding my food, going to the cash register,
this younger woman with her head shaved and Buddhist robes was walking up towards me, and
we both stopped in our tracks, and it was like this lightning bolt of synchronicity.
We kind of just stared at each other, and I said, "Are you from Fairfield?"
Which is our town.
And she said, "No, but you are."
She said, "I've been watching your interviews for years."
And I said, "Wow, you look so bright."
So we became friends, and we've had conversations and everything since then.
And it turned out she's been going through a real cancer ordeal.
It's interesting, she and also another friend of mine who went through it had an abnormally
severe reaction to conventional chemotherapy.
And so doctors were like, "Whoa, what is with this person?
They're not supposed to have this severe reaction."
But maybe it's due to the refinement and sensitivity and whatnot.
I mean, she just had come back from a year in the Himalayas in a monastery.
That's what people have been telling me as well, is that I'm very sensitive.
Yeah, I mean some people can smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and it's like no big deal.
If you smoked one cigarette, or I did, we'd be like, "Oh my God!"
Exactly.
When I had this severe reaction within days, my body was telling me, "This is not your
path.
The chemotherapy is too intense and the radiation, it's just, it's too much.
It's not going to be my path."
You know, this is interesting, you know, I have a spiritual life that's oriented me my
whole life and it feels like it's what's going to orient me here and maybe the last chapter
or chapters of my life, it's like, okay, I'm going to really trust my intuition and just
really follow the guidance of what's being presented to me.
But that Western paradigm, the medical paradigm, which has certain probabilities and possibilities
kind of defined and confined, I've stepped out of it.
I noticed that actually there's a lot of fear in there, there's a lot of anxiety in there,
And it is actually a good vibration for me.
The more I interact with oncologists and hospitals and treatments, the less vibrancy there is
here, the less hope there is here.
And when I'm in my hopeful, vibrant practices, everything feels better, everything looks
better and I'm going to give that its full course.
I'm going to see how far that takes me.
I'm doing all sorts of practices and taking supplements and different treatments that
are not met with the Western approach, but I'm kind of all in on that now.
Have you experienced what many "spiritual people" experience is that when they get sick
with something, their friends start driving them crazy, suggesting all kinds of alternative
treatments, you know?
And some people can be very harsh, "Oh, it must be your karma."
But other people will be like, "You gotta try flower essences," or, you know, this thing,
or ozone therapy, or whatever.
It's like you don't have time to do all these things.
I've got a whole folder of emails that are just all cancer resources that people have
sent to me and I haven't gone through most of them or half of them.
Yeah.
The beginning was overwhelming, but I still get a lot.
And now it's really about discernment.
Like I actually have gotten some really great things that have come through, but I also
have to filter it out and really always come back to my own knowing, which is ultimately
what we all have to do.
Yeah.
I'm going to send you one more from my Buddhist friend that I just referred to because she
She has cancer, as I said, and she has been dealing with this Tibetan Buddhist herbalist
in New Delhi or something like that, which I guess she must have seen in person, but
she can also do it long distance.
But she said she's been getting some really good results.
So, anyway, I'll send you that for what it's worth.
Okay, thank you.
You can add it to your folder.
I read about a woman, actually, who had a powerful healing with a Tibetan Buddhist healer that
was actually connected to the Dalai Lama.
This might be related to that.
I don't know.
it to you and anybody else who hears this and wants to hear what it is.
So let's see here.
I was thinking earlier as we were speaking, and we're talking about death and everything,
there's that Buddhist saying, you know, "Die before you die."
I think it's Buddhist.
And some guy interviewed me the other day, and he was primarily a near-death experiencer
interviewer, but he wanted to interview me for some reason.
And I told him I had never had a near-death experience, and it wouldn't be my chosen type
of spiritual practice, necessarily. It involves almost dying, but I have been meditating since
1968, and in a way, meditation is kind of a mini-death, because the senses are being
withdrawn from their objects, and you're totally kind of self-contained and not interacting
with the world, and I think that over time weakens the attachment to external objects.
So, if when actual death comes, it could actually just be like a profound spiritual experience,
you know, this beautiful transition as opposed to something that you would fight and struggle
against.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by near-death experiences, partly because I had one, it was quite a near-death
experience, but it was an out-of-body experience in my early 20s.
You know, I realized in retrospect, I never realized it at the time, but in retrospect
was probably my first big spiritual opening and my first glimpse and realization of I'm
not the body.
I had an experience where I was hit by a car when I was riding my bike when I was probably
20 or 21.
And I was laying on the ground, my friend had gone to get an ambulance or call for help
and I was laying there alone at midnight or something.
And I just found myself going up, up, up and looking down at my body and going farther
and farther and farther up into the heavens or the sky.
And the most peaceful, blissful experience ever.
I was completely happy to be letting go and I could see what was happening, I could see
my body and at some point, something just screamed.
It wasn't even me, but something in me screamed, "I want to live!"
And it was a scream, it was like a whole being scream.
As soon as that happened, boom, back in the body.
And I was back in the body with a complete calm and peace and sense that everything was
going to be okay. You know, it was kind of a panicked crisis situation. I didn't know
if I was going to be okay. I'd just been pretty badly hurt. But the whole evening, my friend
came back and the ambulance came back. I was laughing with people. I was joking with people,
even though I was in pain. And I was reassuring my friend who was crying hysterically that
everything was going to be okay. But that was the beginning of me kind of recognizing that
there was something, there was something beyond the body, but also became kind of fascinated
with this leaving the body or death really experience.
And I've had many more experiences similar to that.
I've interviewed quite a few near-death experience people and read books of some others that
I haven't even interviewed, and they all say pretty much the same thing, that it completely
changes their orientation to death and to life.
You know, it gives them this broader perspective where their life becomes profoundly enriched
And their fear of death, you know, becomes in a way almost an eager anticipation, although
they know they don't want to die, but they feel like when they do, it'll be great.
It'd be nice if everybody could feel that way, wouldn't it?
There's a lot to be learned from near-death experiences.
I have a client/friend of mine, former client of mine, that now has created a whole company
with his brother where they're on YouTube, they're all over the place, they're just interviewing
people who've gone through near-death experiences, and there's so much to learn from those experiences.
Yeah, I wonder if I know that person.
Who's that guy?
Elliot?
Maybe I don't.
He and his twin brother have a, it's called Coming Home.
Nice, I'll take note of that.
Coming Home.
Yeah, I would encourage people to either watch some interviews or read some books about near-death
experiences.
I started reading them back in the 80s or early 90s, long before I started doing this,
and I loved them.
It really shifted my perspective quite a bit.
Like we were saying earlier, I think one's understanding of the way life works can have
a major influence on the way we live, the way we live our life.
I remember I went through a period where I had been convinced that being a monk would
be the best thing I could do, and when I decided to get married, it took me quite a while to
convince myself that I hadn't made some terrible mistake, you know?
wasn't very conducive to a happy marriage, but once I realized that, "Oh, this is actually
much better for my evolution," then the whole thing changed.
So the way we view things can be quite influential.
Oh, dramatically so.
I can relate.
It was difficult for me to choose to get married, and then once I was on the other side of it,
it all started to shift very dramatically.
But my stories about what marriage was and what my fears were were just creating tremendous
suffering for me and for my now wife.
And you know, that lingered for a little while afterwards, but mostly the actual experience
of being married just started to take over, which was like, you know, the day to day,
the person I was with really was like, beyond the story once again, which is why I always
want to want to come back to I think, what's your lived experience?
What's your actual experience?
Because, yes, I think our stories about things can be helpful or hindering.
And I think it's always great to go beyond our stories.
Like, what's your actual felt experience?
What's your day-to-day experience of this, which is beyond a story, it's beyond your
kind of narrative, it's a, you can feel it, you can sense it, you can know it directly.
Yeah.
This might relate to a point you wrote down in the notes you sent me, which is a more
tantric understanding and expression of non-duality versus of a dantic understanding.
What were you getting at with that?
Well, there's lots of different directions I can go with that, but I would say that probably
similar to you as you were contemplating being a monk prior to getting married.
I contemplated, I did it for 15 years.
Okay, sorry.
Yes, you were committed to it.
Right.
It wasn't easy, but I did it.
I had an orientation in the first half of my life, first half of my adulthood, transcendent
orientation.
A lot of people in the spiritual world have this up and out.
It was like, how do I get out of the messiness of this human experience?
How do I get away from suffering?
There used to be a Broadway play called Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.
Yeah, and that seemed like a lot of these transcendent philosophies, Advaita and others,
were offering a way off, a way to see through the illusion or be free from the illusion
and kind of live in a more transcendent, peaceful, free place.
And a lot of my orientation was towards that.
And it was kind of in some ways I was really loving the Vedantic approach, which kind of
sees that ultimately we are this oneness and we are just this free consciousness, and that
the dance of the play of the relative is really insubstantial. In those teachings, there can
be a way to lose yourself in the oneness and the transcendence and kind of dissolve yourself
from the multiplicity and the entanglement, so to speak. So for me, at first I was really
into the transcendent. And when I met my wife, she was very much more of a pagan and a goddess
worshipping and an earth-loving kind of, her spirituality had that kind of more earthy flavor.
And we would have these incredible debates and discussions and differences and tension
between these sort of approaches. But over time, I think like in any good marriage, we've
rubbed off on each other. And for me now, my spirituality feels more what I would call
tantric in that sense, where I no longer see the goal as being rising above and seeing
through the illusion, waking up from the dream, if you will.
It's actually so much more about waking up in the dream, waking up and being lucid in
this expression, in this worldly way.
So there's a way that there's an honoring and a reverence for the material, for the body,
for form.
And it's not other than God or other than truth, it's an expression of God or an expression
of truth.
And everything then from this perspective is a way to touch God, is a way to know God,
is a way to know yourself.
And so that tantric perspective is really for me become so much more alive, the deeper my
spirituality is gone, the less free I feel from humanity, the more human I feel, but
the more free to be human I am, in a sense.
That's nice.
I think I've gone through the same journey, really.
When I was heavy into my monk phase, I would always be reading these books by these guys
who were saying, "Oh, you know, the world sucks and women are terrible," and all this
stuff.
And the emphasis was that the world is just this quagmire, it's a sea of mud and you
just want to get out of it as quickly as possible and never come back.
I felt that so strongly.
But now my attitude is, "Hey, I'll just come back as many times as you want me to,
God, you know, whatever, however I can be most useful."
It's sort of, in a way, an insult to God if we believe in God and if we define God properly,
as a sky daddy, but as an omnipresent intelligence that can be discerned in every little bit
of creation, if you look closely enough.
It's an insult to just discard that as some kind of mistake or something that is just
to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, as opposed to joining in as a participant
in the divine play that surrounds us.
David Very similar trajectory for me.
And just to come back to what we started with, the tantric approach.
What I was saying is that I think that our direct experience, for me, has become the
portal to depth, to deeper spiritual experience.
So it's like I'm constantly stepping out of my story or questioning my story and coming
into what's my direct knowing.
And often that is less, you know, the stories are in our heads often, and often it's to
come into a felt sense in the body, come into my heart, come into emotion, but even deeper
than that, to come into a visceral kind of somatic understanding.
And I actually trust my body and I trust my heart in some ways much more than my mind
in many ways.
And I trust my mind when I'm in alignment with my heart and my body.
And so there's a way that the mind is an incredible resource, especially when it's not the master,
it's not, you know, running the show or thinking it knows, it knows, we talked about.
And when we can actually rest in just our lived experience and be more connected to
the body, to our hearts, and then the mind just kind of comes in line and all of a sudden,
there's a kind of a harmonic where it's heart, mind, body, and the knowing, you know, is
so much deeper in the story, if you will, about what's happening, feels to me more trustworthy.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of examples of myself having not done that and perhaps observing
others not doing that.
There was a joke by Stephen Wright.
He said, "I broke up with my girlfriend because I wasn't really into meditation and she really
wasn't into being alive."
But...
I can't even quite get that yet, to be honest, Rick.
I'm kind of...
Like Stephen Wright, he often will just stop my mind.
Yeah, that's what he does.
He's good at that.
Anybody who hasn't heard any Stephen Wright jokes, look him up on YouTube, he's hilarious.
You know, there is this thing we've been talking about, of kind of "stop the world, I want
to get off."
Sometimes spirituality, often spirituality, is used as some kind of attempted escape mechanism
and people become very disengaged and disembodied and it usually has devastating impacts on
their daily lives.
A lot of my training has been as a therapist, and like you were saying earlier, I integrate
spirituality with psychology.
I think so much of the movement towards spiritual life or transcendence is a pure movement,
and it's a recognition of our essence, and we want to embody that or understand that
or come closer to that.
But also, that pure movement can get co-opted by the pain of being human, the trauma that
we've endured, the difficulties of childhood or just of being human in this difficult world,
and some of us are very sensitive.
So there's a way that people are trying to get off because it's too painful to be in
their bodies, it's too painful to be in their kind of nervous systems.
And I think spirituality in the past used to kind of offer a panacea or a quick exit,
you know, or a potential way to free yourself.
And we've seen so many people who will lose themselves in spirituality but have never
integrated their pain or their suffering, and so that can kind of play out in all sorts
of ways or come back to haunt them eventually.
And I love, in many ways, the maturing of what I see in the spiritual world here in
the West, where there is so much more understanding.
I know you've talked about this before and have seen this, of understanding of our psychology
and our nervous systems and trauma-informed understanding, because doing spiritual work
for trauma-related issues or emotional integration that needs to happen or psychological development
that needs to happen is not the right answer.
It actually can distort things even more so.
Unless it's spiritual work that somehow takes those things into account.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Modern spiritual work, some modern spiritual schools really bring in the body, really bring
in psychology, really learn to bring these two together because my whole life has been
about this.
They work really beautifully together.
If you can introduce people to a resource, a depth, a presence that is available to themselves
always through meditation or other practices, that's tremendous.
And if you can also help them look at and unravel and connect and heal some of their
history or lived kind of trauma that's still going on or patterning that needs attention,
that can be helpful. And if you bring those together, you can tolerate some of these difficult
spaces if you are resourced and have a depth that you know you can bring to that or you can come back
to. And so you can move in and out, like they say, sort of pendulate or titrate between the
resourced state and the more activated state. So there's a tremendous way that I think
psychological integrated work actually supports spiritual growth and, you know, spiritual growth
that is open to psychological work and, you know, and all this just supports the psychological work
as well. I was thinking about that while listening to another interview you gave, I think that might
have been prior to your cancer diagnosis because you didn't mention cancer, and you were talking
about this process you go through and perhaps help your clients go through where they can
feel into what's going on, and then various things they're feeling get dissolved in the
presence that they sink into.
And I thought of a question I might ask you about that, which is that you want to make
sure somehow that there is enough presence to dissolve the stuff, because if you take
a handful of mud and drop it in a glass of water, it's not going to go very well.
it's just going to muddy up the water, but if you can drop the mud in a lake, big lake,
it's just going to dissolve.
So you want to kind of become oceanic in some way, and then you can process or dissolve
tons of stuff, which otherwise, if your consciousness is very constricted, would just muddy it up.
That's a great analogy, and I think that's very much in line with a lot of the healing
work that I've been involved in and have taught to other healers.
And the idea is that if you can, for yourself first of all, cultivate enough presence, enough
depth of being, then psychological issues, emotional stuff can just kind of be met from
this sort of open, loving, compassionate presence.
And there's not much you need to do, it can just sort of dissolve like you're saying,
if you're just kind of unconditionally with it.
And so there's a process that I teach where you can do that with others, and you can help
them to kind of tap into their presence, their unconditional presence, and that might be
a bit of a training, like a little, almost like a meditation, like where you're helping
them find that that's beyond their mind and beyond their usual patterning that might actually
be containing for them and relaxing for them.
And then once they're developed in that or kind of established in that a little bit, you
can have them now go towards something painful or something difficult or something traumatic.
And it no longer is overwhelming and it can start to unravel or dissolve.
And there's a shared field also, right?
That's part of the beauty of working with others.
If you yourself as a practitioner are deeply coming from presence, if you will, kind of
holding a certain kind of meditative awareness, and then you're inviting your clients into
that meditative awareness, and then you're inviting some of their difficult material,
Your ocean might not be large enough to contain that in that moment, but your collective ocean
is, which is, you know, that presence is actually the same thing.
It's not yours or mine.
It's actually us dropping out of our personality into open awareness, just into shared being.
And that shared experience is something that is contagious.
You can actually, you know, that's where transmission comes in, or we listen to teachers, or, you
You know, we feel drawn to people because there's a way that our being is opened by their being.
And that shared being is a potent thing.
And so I love creating groups.
My work has gone from one on one to creating groups and circles and retreats, where we
drop into a kind of collective space and field where we really start to experience ourselves
beyond our minds and beyond our personalities, and less separate, and more whole.
And then from that space, actually, so much learning can happen, so much growth and transformation
can happen.
People have realizations about their patterning and about their lives and around things that
they couldn't have had when they were their separate little me-self trying to figure out
their lives.
It reminds me of a quote from Jesus, which was something like, "Wherever three or more
of you are gathered together in my name, there I am," or something like that.
You and I both, and probably many people listening, have experienced the power of group consciousness
if you're in a large group of people engaged in some kind of spiritual endeavor.
It's much more potent than just going at it singly.
Of course, it works the other way too.
I mean, riots and mobs and all that kind of stuff.
There's a collective consciousness that gets created, and so whether it's positive or negative,
the thing, and it can be a real boost to one's evolution to be in the company of the enlightened,
so to speak.
As a matter of fact, many scriptures say that that's one of the most powerful techniques
you can do is to hang around people who are, you know, spiritually motivated or even awake
or enlightened, whatever that means.
I agree.
You know, one of the quotes that's come back to me recently, which I really enjoy, is,
you know, if you want to travel fast, travel alone. You want to travel far, travel with others.
>> That's a good one.
>> And I like that one. And I think there's something about spiritual friends and sangha,
spiritual community that can really help us all carry, you know, as Ram Dass likes to say,
come back to him, we're just all walking each other home. I love that quote.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the next Buddha may be the sangha.
Yes, exactly. That's actually very much in line with what's alive for me, you know, as
I've been stepping towards teaching more and more, some differences with how I want to
teach and how I'm teaching from how I've seen a lot of previous teachers and previous generations.
And I think things are changing. I think that there's a much more maturity in terms of people's
spiritual understanding and orientation, where people now are looking less and less and needing
less and less the kind of expert, the kind of guru on the mountain or on the stage to
bestow them with their wisdom or their transmission, and are much more actually wanting to connect
with others or spiritually in similar places and are learning and sharing their wisdom
with each other.
And I think there's something really beautiful about the Sangha and tapping into the collective
wisdom of the Sangha.
And it helps us in many ways, I think, one, trust ourselves more deeply rather than project
our knowing onto somebody else, a guru figure.
And there's something about trusting yourself rather than projecting that out onto others.
Oh, the other pitfalls that come with all the stuff that comes with gurus and hierarchy
and yeah, right?
Yeah.
In a sense, the gurus have really helped bring about this transition that you're talking
about by being sexual predators and ripping people off and doing all this crazy stuff
is giving the whole guru thing a bad name.
And I'm sure there are good examples of gurus, but boy, they sometimes seem to be the exception
rather than the rule.
And I certainly wouldn't want to be one.
I mean, it's a very vulnerable position if you're not in a really good place in terms
of being impeccable in your thinking and behavior.
And receiving all that projection is a powerful thing and can actually, for the guru, unless
they're incredibly grounded, really pull them out of their center.
You know, Adyashanti I would consider to be an impeccable guy, and I don't know what exactly
caused all this pain and trauma and everything that caused him to stop teaching, but it could
have something to do with the dynamic of being a teacher and having everybody focusing on
him, even though he didn't let it go to his head or abuse it in any way, it could have
really taken a toll on his nervous system? I don't know.
I think it did. I think it did. I've spoken with him enough and I want to go into his business,
but I will say that I think there's something about holding the energy and being with that
many people and prolonged retreats and all of that. It's a lot of energy to run through your system
repeatedly for years and years and years.
Yeah, and I just wanted to comment on another thing you just said.
You may have heard of the Association for Spiritual Integrity. Have you heard of that?
I know that you've been involved in it, but I don't know the details of it.
Yeah, myself and actually John Prendergast was sitting there at the lunch table at S.A.N.D.
when we first came up with the idea, and Jack O'Keefe and Craig Holliday.
John didn't become one of the original founders, but we started this organization and now it's
grown to over 700 members and over 50 member organizations, and we've given presentations
at Harvard Divinity School conferences.
Right, I had no idea it's grown that much.
Yeah, yeah, it's doing well.
But one thing I often say in that context is that there's been so many examples where students
will sit there and a teacher is up on the stage.
I'm accelerating the process here, but the teacher is going more and more off the rails,
but the students lack the self-confidence.
You know, it's like the emperor's new clothes.
Nobody dared to say the emperor is naked.
So they think, "Well, this guy is supposed to be enlightened and I'm not, and so what
do I know?
Maybe this crazy behavior is crazy wisdom or something.
I should just keep sitting here."
And everybody goes along with it, and then the whole group goes off the rails.
Whereas if students were more empowered to understand what is and is not appropriate
behavior, and it's pretty much common sense in many cases, this kind of stuff wouldn't
get so out of hand.
I completely agree.
I think it's so great that you're involved in that initiative.
In these last couple of years as I've been stepping into teaching, I found myself having
lots of questions about teaching and how do I want to teach and what do I want to express
and what's true for me.
And I found myself talking to a lot of my friends and mentors and I'm lucky to have a lot of
teachers, really well-respected teachers around me.
And I would say to them often, "Why aren't teachers more transparent about their human
frailties, about their human vulnerabilities?
I know all of you.
all pretty awake, pretty enlightened, and your teachings are impeccable and beautiful, and
I don't know any of you that don't have some stuff that you're working through in your
relationships or in other things.
They're minor, but they're still human is what I'm trying to say.
And what I was saying to them, and ultimately I realized I was saying to myself, is why
Why is that not shared more transparently, more vulnerably with our students?
Because it sets up a different kind of expectation.
Our students will otherwise project onto us perfection, and they will project an idea of
enlightenment as being beyond these human tendencies or patternings.
I think we should actually teach what we teach, and the teaching is pure and beautiful and
liberating and all of that. But I think we can also be models of what it actually looks like.
Yeah, I think that's extremely important. We should spend a bunch of time today talking about it.
And interestingly enough, that's what I'm discovering in my cancer diagnosis in the
midst of me teaching has thrown me into, I can't teach without my vulnerability and my fragility
and my emotionality, and I don't have it all together anymore. And not that I ever did,
I'm not pretending I did, but there's something beautifully liberating for me as I'm teaching
and really including the full range of my human experience that my students are telling me
is more potent and more profound than anything I was doing beforehand.
I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Ken Wilber, his lines of development model,
where we have all these different lines of development, intellect, emotions, senses,
consciousness and whatever else. You know, some people think that all these things are
tightly correlated and they all develop simultaneously, but Kant emphasized that
they can get way out of sync. And so, you can have quite a lot of consciousness development,
for instance, and be really quite stunted in some of those other areas. Or, you know,
there have been great geniuses who were emotionally immature or whatever, intellectual geniuses.
Personally, my idea of enlightenment would be a holistic and very full development of
all of these things, and that is kind of rare.
But I like what you're saying about transparency and authenticity.
I think it creates a strain and a danger for teachers to try to project an image that is
not authentic to what they really are, because they have to then hold on to that image, lest
they disillusion their students by farting or something, I don't know.
And the more you strain on doing something, the greater the likelihood you're going to
snap from straining.
I've seen that so many times.
>> The thing that stood out to me was like, they don't want to disillusion their students.
In a way, what I hear you saying is they want to keep their students with an illusion.
An illusion of what enlightenment looks like or who they are, and also an illusion of what's
possible, like what we're headed towards.
And so to me, there's something beautiful about being disillusioned.
It's funny, I often say the same thing.
That word has a positive connotation.
If we want to come out of illusion, let's get disillusioned.
Exactly.
I know it's seen as such a negative word, but it's actually always about coming into truth.
It can be a painful experience to be woken up out of maybe a comfortable illusion, of
course.
But it's always a better place to go.
We want to come into reality.
And that's what all spiritual teaching is about, is coming into a more lucid, clear
understanding of reality.
To me, as teachers, that's what we're wanting to do, is not just teach a theory about reality,
also embody a certain way of living and expressing that shared understanding of it.
I think there's something so great about what I see happening actually more and more, you
know, like you see Lucy Grace, for example, or she's a friend of mine.
So many teachers that I know now, kind of like peers of mine, they're teaching in a different
way.
They're teaching in smaller circles.
They're teaching in circles.
They're not on stages.
And they're including their humanity and they're bringing in the wisdom of the students and
there's more dialogue and there's more sharing.
You know, from one perspective, you might be like, "Oh, we're diluting the teachings."
But I think in a more mature spiritual community, that's actually where it needs to go.
We need to actually be leveling the playing field and recognizing the wisdom within us
and being encouraged to bring that out and have that mirrored and seen and validated.
And then everybody can start to talk about, "Oh my God, like, I have such amazing knowledge,
and yet when I'm in my relationship, this is what happens," or, "Oh my God, I've got this
addiction to this thing," and now all of a sudden the students can kind of come out.
Yeah, they say, "Me too," you know?
"Me too," and they're like, "Me too," and they're like, "Yeah, it's freaking crazy being
human.
It's really hard."
And you might have all sorts of, like, you're talking about developmental lines, like your
spiritual understanding might be incredibly great, but your social or intimacy levels
or vocational or so many other things might be stunted.
And you need to talk about that too, because I do think about awakening in a more holistic
way kind of like you mentioned it.
I'm interested in not just people realizing the truth of who they are in some, in a really
narrow way where they can, on the cushion, be in nirvana, but then the next moment with
their partner be totally caught in whatever.
I'm interested in people being off the cushion, living that truth, expressing that.
And so how do you embody that and express that?
That's to me where the rubber hits the road, really, and where spirituality to me gets really
interesting.
Yeah.
Integration is the name of the game.
Which is not to say that nobody is qualified to be a spiritual teacher because we're all
equally stupid and we're all bozos, you know?
And you know, it could be that a teacher has a gift, and they have actually made some spiritual
progress.
It just doesn't mean they're perfect in every respect, nor should they try to convey
that impression.
And in not conveying that impression, I'm just repeating what we've just said, they'll
actually present a much more realistic picture of what spiritual development is.
And that will be of much greater service to their students, because their students won't
little themselves if they still have some hang-ups, despite their years of practice, and you know,
we can all work on that stuff together.
>> Riyaz: That's right.
And in some ways, I think students are maturing, I think teachers are maturing, and what I
mean by that is I think that these old models of what teachers are supposed to be, and who
our current teachers, maybe the older generation, are kind of following, and maybe unconsciously,
Borrowed from the East, borrowed from India and China and Japan, and a very kind of authoritarian
guru knows best and is perfect and beyond all reproach, and the students just need to
obey.
So there's a certain kind of lineage here and a certain kind of, almost like a template
that I think teachers unconsciously have been expressing, but I don't think that's necessary
anymore.
modernize all of that and make it much more democratic and egalitarian and human.
>> Probably so. And you know, that's not going to happen overnight, and maybe there's a place
for hierarchical arrangements in some cases, maybe some people are at a stage of development
where that suits them. And you know, there are spiritual teachers who literally call
their students children or babies. I'm thinking of two women saints that I've seen that both
use those phrases, but it kind of keeps people in this perpetually subservient position.
You never graduate, you're always a baby.
I like that though. I like that there's a lot of options out there. That would be nice.
You know, and different people are at different stages and different people have different
needs at different points, but that there be a variety of ways that you can be learning
and developing spiritually and have different teachers or different groups or kind of communities
that resonate for you and meet where you are.
I'm kind of thinking of a comparison between this and typical academia where you might
have a physics professor and you go to him because he knows a lot more about physics
than you do, otherwise you wouldn't bother to pay the money and go there, but it doesn't
mean that he's a well-rounded individual in every other respect.
I mean, even Einstein was said to be a bit of a womanizer, sleeping with his secretaries
and stuff.
But then with spirituality, there's a built-in assumption, and I think it probably, it should
be this way, that spirituality does imply a kind of saintliness or a full development
of all these other qualities that you wouldn't necessarily expect in a physics professor.
It's kind of a halo effect that we have around spiritual teachers, spirituality, that somehow
extends beyond what it should.
Yeah, but should it?
Maybe I'm idealistic, but I still hold forth the hope and notion that a truly mature spiritual
teacher should be quite saintly in all aspects of their lives and behavior, and that working
out all that stuff that could cause misbehavior and mistreatment of people should be part
of the spiritual development, whereas it would not necessarily be part of getting a PhD in
physics.
Because spirituality by definition is a more all-encompassing type of development, is it
not?
Yeah, I think that's true.
That's true, and so we're kind of saying both things at the same time.
Because I think there are developmental lines, multiple developmental lines.
And like, you know, I've heard you talk about this before, I think about it.
You know, in the past, in the East, you know, traditionally, before you really entered into
any real deep-depth practices, spiritually speaking, you had so many preliminary practices,
many preparatory practices. And those were kind of safeguards and kind of allowed students
to grow spiritually, but they've, because they've actually done some of the preparatory
characterological foundational work, so that spirituality could actually express probably
in a more even way, those developmental lines will all kind of be raised by the kind of
spiritual growth in a way.
Yeah.
But in the West, obviously, that doesn't work that way.
know, or there's no structure for it to set up for it to work that way. I mean, theoretically
there could be, but there hasn't been really.
>> Yeah, and that's where I think that there's models now, so many models in the West of
psycho-spiritually oriented, kind of integrated ways where students can be working on different
developmental lines simultaneously.
>> And I guess people are learning that slowly but surely. There's still some pretty sick
cults and groups like that. There's all kinds of crazy stuff out there still that people
get themselves caught up in and maybe it's a situation of live and learn. But you've
probably also heard me say many times that, you know, I'm of the opinion that spirituality
is just, it's not some cool thing that some people can get into if they want and it'll
be good for their lives. It's critical for the whole civilization, in my opinion. And
therefore, I have this strong feeling about anything which might jeopardize the enterprise,
you know, spiritual teachers giving the whole thing a bad name.
Of course, I completely agree. Now I think that all the different crises we have on our
planet are only escalating, coming to a head, and to me it feels like a big part of what
needs to shift is our consciousness and our awareness. And you know, and so I think that's
where spirituality really comes in in a big way. And to me, actually, I'll say more about
this because this is also a passion for me. I really embodied spirituality, really, kind
Kind of like we were talking about, not an up and out spirituality.
It's just like, well, it's an illusion, we're just going to wake up from this dream and
it doesn't really matter what happens to this planet or these people, it's up, they don't
really exist, or it was, you know, just kind of a flip in time.
There's something for me, and this has grown in the last probably five, six years especially,
my spirituality has grown to include the earth, and nature, and all beings, and it's only deepened
my love for, and my care for, and my connection with, and my sense of interdependence.
And to me, a spirituality that can wake us up to our essential nature, but to our essential
interconnection with nature, with wild nature, with the earth, is really necessary, is really
important.
A lot of what I've been getting in my deepest kind of openings has actually been coming through
the earth speaking to me and through kind of an understanding of we as humans need to wake up
to our interconnectedness because our separation from that, our disconnection from that is actually
what's killing not just us, but so many species. Yeah, you could say that environmental degradation,
poverty, war, hunger, all these things are symptomatic of a lack of proper spiritual
development. They're not just a function of politics or economics or education or anything
else. It goes deeper than that. That's right. You realize that you're not separate when
everything's interconnected, you know, it's kind of like if you experienced your body as
just a bunch of separate limbs, you know, some of those limbs might get sacrificed unconsciously.
You know, I'm the heart and I'm the head and I'm the shoulders and all of a sudden you're
neglecting all these parts, and eventually the whole system breaks down from that neglect.
But when you have a sense of like, the whole body is one, and you are everything, and everything
is you, you just don't make the same decisions over time that lead to this kind of degradation
and this kind of situation.
And so that's what I think we're waking up to.
And we're waking up to it in painful ways, like our body wakes us up to painful things.
of a sudden there's incredible pain or disease and you can no longer ignore that aspect of
yourself, of your body.
Yeah.
Do you think that the world might be heading into a period where the pain is amplified because
it has to be in order for people to snap out of it and do things radically differently?
I hope so.
I think that's what's happening.
I think the pain is being amplified.
I think that's happening.
You know, it's just, it's so obvious.
There's the intensification of being on this planet.
You have to be pretty unaware, or insensitive to not feel that things are really, really
difficult.
People are suffering, beings are suffering, the planet is suffering.
And we feel that in all sorts of ways, right?
In terms of, you look at the news and all of that, but you can even just see the way
people relate to each other or treat each other publicly, you know, especially online.
It's obvious.
My sense is that the disease is showing itself to us more and more pronouncedly, and so the
pain is there more and more.
Our response to it is a lot of different things, you know, like with a lot of things, you can
just go more into addiction to try to numb it out or drown it out.
But I think in the crisis of our moment, as they talk about often, I don't even know if
this is true, but I hope it's true because I like it, the Chinese characters for crisis,
right, are danger and opportunity.
And to me, it's like, yeah, there's a danger here we're in, in this crisis, and there's
an opportunity that, like you're pointing to, and I'm hopeful that the opportunity is
that we wake up.
That we wake up out of a kind of unconsciousness into a greater consciousness and into a greater
interdependent kind of awareness and compassionate action.
But that's part of being in a crisis, is you don't know if the opportunity is seized or,
you know, kind of available.
That's kind of the big experiment I think we're all living right now.
They say alcoholics often have to hit bottom before they realize that they have a serious
problem and need to get help.
Maybe humanity hasn't hit bottom yet and needs to bottom out a little bit more before we can
really undergo a shift.
I mean, not that I'm hoping for a lot of chaos and suffering, certainly not, but I'm just
kind of trying to read the tea leaves here and figure out what's going on.
Yeah, I hope we wake up sooner rather than later, but yeah, we might have a ways to go.
I'm afraid of that, too.
You might be too young to remember this, but there used to be a nice interview show on
public radio.
I think it ran nationwide called New Dimensions with Michael and Justine Toms.
Yes.
I can remember the music in the beginning and everything, but then they would start to say,
"It is only through a change in consciousness that the world will be changed."
I've always remembered that.
It has the sort of deepest leverage, consciousness, as opposed to economics, politics.
And as we know, the deeper you go, the more powerful it is.
Molecular is more powerful than, you know, just mechanical, and atomic is more powerful
than molecular, and so on.
Yeah.
The biggest shifts always come from a kind of a shift in consciousness.
And I think we need a big shift, and I think all the little things aren't quite going to
cut it.
Yeah.
maybe it's a both/and kind of a thing, but is it all this spiritual aspiration of people that is
bringing about a shift, you know, that it seems to be kind of epidemic and social media is facilitating
it, or is all this spiritual aspiration of lots of people the effect rather than the cause? It's
symptomatic of some kind of cosmic shift in consciousness that is sweeping the planet.
>> Yeah, and I think that's true for me and it's true for a lot of people I've seen,
clients of mine, students of mine, sometimes suffering is the thing that wakes us up and
makes us look deeper.
What am I?
What is this?
What's available here beyond the entanglement of the senses?
So maybe that's part of it.
When I'm at different retreats now or different events and things like that, I see 20-something
year olds, 30-something year olds, I even see teens engaged in ways that are just radical
to me, just awake.
and attuned, aware, and that brings a lot of hope for me, honestly, Rick.
Like to feel there's young people out there with a radically different consciousness and
motivated to deepen their understanding, but also to deepen their impact on the world.
So people talk about this in more New Age worlds, about just the shifting of consciousness
and the different ages and all of that.
Rick: Indigo children and all that.
and say, "Indigo children."
You know, I think there might be something to it.
I don't tend to think about that stuff
or read about that stuff,
but my actual experience is I've met some amazing
young people that actually, without even thinking about it,
just inspire hope in me.
- Yeah, I agree with you.
When I was a TM teacher back in 1970,
I became one.
We used to always think that,
"Oh, we all, all we TM teachers,
we were some kind of group, you know,
and we all decided to incarnate, to do this together."
And I think there was a bit of hubris there,
but nonetheless, I think there is something to be said about souls coming in at an appropriate
time to serve a function when they're needed, and it's kind of a traditional thing.
All traditions have stories like that, and maybe there's an influx, and maybe we're not
even aware of the extent of the influx.
We're built for these times, you know, maybe those that are coming in are kind of coming
in with a certain kind of preparation or a certain kind of capacity that hopefully will
prepare them.
going to comment on someone I interviewed a couple months ago named Melinda Edwards. You may know her.
She's a psychiatrist and she hung out with Adya quite a bit. She has an autistic daughter and she
believes that autistic children are in a way special and they have some kind of gift and some
kind of something to offer that they're not just messed up kids, that there's something special
about them and that they're playing a role to help change things in society. And I don't know whether
there's more autistic kids now than there were 20, 30 years ago?
There's definitely more awareness now of what they're calling neurodivergence.
And I love that term, actually. This comes back to your point and your friend's point, which is,
I'm starting to really understand that as well. Neurodivergence, which we're becoming more aware
of, is a way that we're honoring different ways different people are just wired. And the old
tradition was like, well, everybody needs to learn this way and act this way. And, and so if you were
neurodivergent, if you were autistic or whatever, you were even probably undiagnosed before,
you just were a misfit, and you would struggle a lot or be ostracized a lot. And now I think in the
understanding, not only do you get more resources and things, but I think we're starting to become
aware of like, oh, some people are actually tuned into frequencies and patterns, and things that
we're not tuned into, like they actually have extra sensory or extra awareness that, biologically
speaking, why do they come in those way?
Is it just a problem?
Is it just that they're maladapted?
Or is it actually that there's some way that certain animals, like dogs, we use them to
sniff bones or--
Yeah, yeah.
--cover things, because they've got extra senses beyond the frequencies that we have.
And maybe neurodivergent people actually can see and think and create in ways that we can't.
Yeah, I have this other friend who has an adopted son who was thought to be a problem
kid, you know, autistic or whatever his diagnosis was, but he sees auras and he sees subtle
beings and things like that.
He's not psychotic, I mean, he's really actually having subtle perception, but he just hasn't
been very well integrated with this world.
It's an interesting thing to contemplate.
of friends, since I'm at it, there's a friend named Sarah Taylor who's been on BatGap, and
she shifted into a unitive state of consciousness that seems to be abiding quite a few years
ago, and it has only recently come to her attention that she's neurodivergent.
And so she kind of talked about that in some interview, and all of a sudden she's getting
flooded with inquiries from people who say, "Oh my God, I didn't realize this is possible,
you can actually be awakened and yet have some autism or neurodivergent tendencies.
A lot of people are coming forward and saying it describes them.
You know, I think about this in terms of neurodivergence also.
I think that there's a neuroconvergence, and I'm going to use this play with this lightly,
where I think we've been conditioned all to kind of see reality a certain way,
and then we can only see what we've been taught to see.
And so like subtle side or other things become like,
"Oh, the special people have those."
But I actually think, and this is where spiritual work and other things do,
they just open up our senses and our perception,
so we start to see things that we never used to be able to see.
And so you have subtle sight and subtle visions,
and you can see the future, or you can kind of get intuitive senses of things.
And for me, a lot's been happening.
Now when I'm out in nature, everything's different for me.
My senses are aware of the natural world in a way they never used to be.
I've always enjoyed nature, I've been a nature lover, but I have all sorts of crazy, crazy
kind of synchronicities with animals and beings all the time.
And I have conversations with trees, and I have mystical experiences in the trees, you
know, and in the woods, and with animals that never used to happen before, very rarely would
happen, and now they happen not all the time.
And it's like some part of my being has opened up so that I'm aware of, and it's aware of,
we're interacting in ways that are so non-ordinary and don't make sense to most people. I don't
talk about it with most people. And yet, it's the things that the native peoples, the indigenous
people have been talking about for ages. Their senses were always open to that because their
culture taught them about that.
Do you think that somehow what you've been going through with cancer has cracked you
open to have that stuff, or is it unrelated?
Well, two things I'll say in response to that. One is I'd say that actually, probably, some
Some of the psychedelic work I started to do about six years ago, in particular one ayahuasca
journey was the beginning of a kind of a cracking open to nature and to plant consciousness,
but also earth consciousness.
I had a big kind of opening that happened around that on one journey.
And then I, for a couple of years after that, I would practice a little bit, very occasionally,
with mushrooms in nature, and very slow doses actually, nothing major, and then even microdosing.
And then I stopped, all of that stopped quite a few years ago.
Or mostly stopped, I can't say stopped.
But I had a period of practice where I was consciously being in nature and opening my
senses with the help of mushrooms, but mostly not, like I'd say 5% of the time with mushrooms,
the rest of the time just practicing, just being aware.
And so psychedelics opened me up to a natural, mushrooms in ayahuasca opened me up to the
natural dimension of being and the interconnectedness in a way that was radically new for me.
And so I was already having these experiences.
And then the cancer diagnosis a year and a half ago, a year and a quarter ago, blew that
open.
So now I'm having these what I'm describing as mystical experiences and profound interconnection.
So the cancer just blew me open, I mean, blew me open emotionally.
I mean, I cry now probably almost every day.
before I rarely cried. And I cry for all sorts of reasons, you know, grief or anticipatory grief
or sadness, but also just joy and gratitude and love and beauty. Like everything cracks me open
and tears kind of come. And that, what a gift that's been. What a gift to know that I could
be a human in this way and be this open. And then it's also cracked me open to all these experiences
in nature. I go out into nature every day when I can now and I feel so connected. I feel like a
child again. I feel like when you were children or when you see children, they're just like totally
in wonder and totally in... they're talking to the trees and the trees are talking to them or the birds
or whatever. It's almost like that. I feel a little foolish, but I don't mind. I let myself just be
foolishly, wondrously, innocently engaged. And it's amazing what opens up when I allow that.
I just reminded this little kid I saw in the grocery store yesterday who was
dancing and singing and he kept running down the aisles away from his father and I was worried that
he, you know, he'd get too far from his father and all this stuff. But it was just so charming
watching this little kid so full of innocence and joy. I don't see little kids that much.
Our last webinar with the ASI, the Association for Spiritual Integrity, was about psychedelics,
actually, and the whole issue of that. It's a huge thing these days, a huge industry,
a huge movement, so many people are doing them, and there are ethical issues in that field
as there are in other aspects of spirituality and religion.
We don't need to really get into the whole ethical issues thing of it right now, but
there was one guy who's been a supporter and member of the ASI who just got so upset that
we were even going to discuss the topic.
He felt like it's dangerous, it's harmful, the ASI shouldn't go anywhere near it, I'm
dropping out, I'm resigning from the organization.
And my attitude was, well, it's been around for thousands of years and all these different
cultures have found value in it, and obviously it can be very destructive if used irresponsibly
or recklessly, as I experienced during the '60s.
But you can't deny how beneficial it's been for so many people.
In terms of something sweeping the planet, maybe we need that in our toolkit as a way
of giving large numbers of people a swift kick in the pants to wake up.
>> Rick Yeah, it's part of what I got in my download that I was mentioning on the ayahuasca
retreat that I did six years ago.
It's my first experience doing ayahuasca.
I was on a track, Rick, I wouldn't have been quite like this person that you were talking
about, but I was meditation, retreats, that had been my whole life and spiritual life.
And I've done some psychedelics, but it wasn't really what I was interested in.
And my cousin, my dear cousin who's 11 years younger than me, was going through something
and she wanted to do an ayahuasca journey and she called me because she knows I'm plugged
into the Bay Area and the Caldus community and she said, "I want to do an ayahuasca retreat.
Will you find somebody really good for me?"
And I said, "Yes, I will.
I've got some connections.
I found a really amazing shaman, amazing person, found an amazing retreat center that she would
go to."
And I told her about it.
And then she said, "Well, will you go with me?
Will you do it with me?"
like, "Oh, boy, I didn't see that coming."
And at first I said to her, I said, "Well, you know, it's not really my thing.
I get so much from my meditation and from my retreats, but I could tell she really wanted
me to come."
And so I kind of came back to her and I said, "Okay, I'll do it."
And I thought I was doing it for her.
I thought I was just being her big brother.
And I'll go along with it.
You know, I'll probably get something from it, but it'll be there as a support.
Well, I won't go into the details, but I had the biggest experience.
And the first night was beautiful and amazing, and the second night was really difficult,
to be honest.
And interestingly enough, she ended up comforting me.
And the roles got reversed and we were laughing.
I was laughing, "Oh my God, I thought I was here to help you."
But anyway, what I got in that weekend, really profoundly, was the Earth, really.
Mother saying to me and to us, "We need you to wake up.
You're killing us.
You're killing everything.
You're killing yourselves."
And we are here to help you accelerate your consciousness, accelerate your evolution,
because it needs to accelerate.
You need to wake up quickly for all of us.
And that's really what I got.
And so for me, I actually felt, and that's how I've understood this big psychedelic wave,
partly, as a kind of a way that humanity is trying to wake itself up more quickly, more
necessarily.
Yeah, I believe that it did that in the 60s, and I was part of that.
It was very destructive for a lot of people, but it really helped to facilitate a dramatic shift.
Not only the drugs, but the music, the Beatles and everything is just like this huge cultural
transformation. And it seems to be happening now. And fortunately, you know, fortunately,
in a more responsible way, I'd say for the most part.
Yeah, I actually feel like nature is needing us, wanting us, helping us to wake up, you know,
and it might be through plant medicine and other psychedelics. On my retreats, I bring people
into the redwoods, I do this retreat center down in Santa Cruz in California.
And it's at a Buddhist retreat center, Land of Medicine Buddha, that's surrounded by this
incredible redwood forest.
And when I went there on solo retreat, about four years ago, just did a solo retreat there
during the pandemic, I had a profound experience in the redwoods.
And then in the quiet moments afterwards, I felt this sort of calling to like, I should
bring people back here on retreat.
I'd never done a retreat before.
This was the beginning of the shift that I was telling you about, of leading retreats
and more spiritual teaching.
And so I brought a group there, and I've continued to bring groups there.
I've done a number of retreats there, a couple every year.
And we go into the redwoods as a big part of it.
We meditate in the redwoods, and we do kind of guided silent meditation in there, and
we do some rituals even in there.
So it's a huge part of the retreat.
And I had the realization, actually, a couple of retreats ago, that, "Oh my God, the Redwoods
called all these people here.
I'm just a conduit.
I thought I'd been bringing people on retreat, and I have been, but actually I feel like
it's more true for me to say that the Redwoods have been calling people to them, and I've
just been their messenger or conduit."
Because I think that people are having these profound experiences in the Redwoods, and they
need to be.
We need to be reconnecting to our natural selves, but to the natural world, and I think that's
part of the consciousness that is needed.
Yeah.
Well, where should we go from here?
Is there anything that you feel like we should talk about?
I just feel pretty quiet, actually.
I just feel a tremendous sense of gratitude talking with you, and actually what was coming
as I was just stopping was just gratitude to my teachers, to Ajit Shanti, and to John
Prendergast in particular, I've been so blessed all along the way, and I'm just really here
to serve, and I feel like I've received so much, and I just want to share whatever I
can and whatever time I have.
This is beautiful to be a part of this interview, because this helps me share and will maybe
help others connect with me if they need to.
Yeah, in a minute we'll talk about how others can connect with you, but I remembered the
thing that I hadn't been able to remember, which was that I had heard, and I think I may
have commented on this show that Adyashanti took some psilocybin or something not too
long ago. I think he mentioned it to Sam Harris or in some interview, but I didn't actually
listen to that interview, but I wanted to make sure that was true because if it wasn't,
I didn't want to have said it. So he said that.
Oh yeah, he told me the same thing personally.
Did he describe what he got out of it?
He described kind of what he said to Sam Harris, which is that nothing really happened. He did
the Hero dose, apparently, the five grams and that he was...
It was a Neem Karoli Baba thing, huh?
It sounds like it. Sam Harris had some skepticism, I think, in response to it.
Like, I don't know if you really took the full amount or...
You know, and I trust what Adya said.
And I also trust that he could have a different experience at another time.
True. My reference to Neem Karoli Baba was Ram Dass came to Neem Karoli Baba.
Yes, I remember that story.
And Neem Karoli Baba said, you know, "Give me the pills."
like a killer dose of LSD and he probably swallowed them and nothing seemed to happen.
Yeah, I've heard that story as well.
Anyway, that's interesting.
It's a tribute to Adya.
One thing I love about Adya, which speaks to your point about transparency and sharing
of personal vulnerability, is he very much always did that in my experience.
If he had some kind of health problem like Bell's palsy, he talked about it.
He didn't try to pretend that he was invulnerable.
You know, there are other spiritual teachers who say things like, "Oh, I never get angry
and I've never had a bad day," or anything else, but then people who are hanging around
them, you know, in an inner circle, they say they, you know, they're just rageaholics sometimes.
Yeah.
I agree about Adya, and I will say this about both my teachers I've been blessed with, because
I've known them both as teachers for many years, but also now I just count them as close
friends with Jon Prendergast and with Adya Shanti, and I've said this to both of them,
I say this about them, who they are when they're being interviewed, when they're teaching,
is pretty much who they are when you're having lunch with them or going for a walk or watching
them interact with their partners.
It's a beautiful thing, like you were talking about before, like to have somebody who's,
I wouldn't use this word with each of them, but it probably does apply in some ways, samely,
but like to have their expression be kind of consistent across the board.
How they live is what they teach.
teaching is not so separate from their lived, practiced experience.
And for me, that's been an incredible blessing to see that embodied and lived, not just thought.
Yeah.
That's a wonderful example for all of us.
Exactly.
It's a wonderful aspiration for all of us and a possibility.
Well say hi to both of them for me if you're in touch with them.
And let's talk about how you interact with people.
your cancer has not stopped you from having clients and doing retreats and stuff like
that?
It has anything planned?
It slows you down a little, maybe.
It's partly stopping me.
It's slowing me down a little bit.
Just a few months ago, I stepped back from my one-to-one work.
I used to do a, you know, before I was a therapist, I had clients, and then in the last few years,
I've been more having students where I'm mentoring them spiritually.
Stepped back from the one-to-one work a few months ago so I could completely devote myself
to my healing and that's what I've been doing the last few months.
But there's still ways that people can interact with me in ways that I am active.
So I can just kind of name what those are.
Yes, please.
The first way is just to attend a retreat or an event with me.
I do these meditation retreats.
I've got one coming up in January in the Bay Area and then another one in April.
They're four-night retreats, mostly in silence, but they're meditation with a mix of a few
other things, but they're pretty much a meditation retreat.
There's stuff on my website with more information about that.
So the retreats are the main thing that I'm really doing, and then I'll occasionally do
some day-long events and things, and those will be posted for 2025 in the next few months.
In addition to that, I'm also part of a new online community, it's called Sacred Wild
Sanctuary.
This is available on my website as well, where I'm sort of a guest teacher, and I've got
different live and recorded offerings through that online platform.
So that's a second way that people can catch up with me currently and ongoing.
That's online and that's also on my website called Sacred Blood Sanctuary.
And then the last thing is I have a pre-recorded course available on my session that's at the
heart of my teachings.
It's called Healing from Presence.
So that's available online on my website.
And actually just this morning I was talking to my website person and we created a $50 discount
for BatGap people. So if you put in BatGap in the discount code, you'll get $50 off that
course.
Will that last a year from now if they go?
Yeah. It'll be ongoing. There's no time limit for that one. So those are the three most
kind of obvious ways for people to get in contact with me and work with me.
Okay. And I'll be linking to your website from your page on BatGap. And so people can
go from that link to the website and check out all the details.
And remember that backgap offer that you just mentioned.
So I guess that's just about it.
I really enjoyed talking to you.
I hope you hang in there and stick around for years to come and live a long life.
And we're all going to die sometime and if I don't meet you in person, I'll see you on
the other side.
Sounds good, Rick.
I'm hoping I stick around for a long time as well, and I'm open to every possibility.
And I'm also just one day at a time here, and I'm grateful to be here today, and we'll
see about tomorrow, but I'm really grateful for being on your show.
Thank you so much for this time.
Oh, thank you for coming on.
Okay, and thanks to those who've been listening or watching.
So I say listening or watching because this exists as an audio podcast as well as the video
thing on YouTube.
So if you're the type who likes to listen to podcasts, as I am, I can't sit in front of
my computer and watch something for two hours without jumping out of my skin, then go to
Batgap and there's a page where you can sign up for the audio podcast on Spotify or iTunes
or YouTube Music or any of these other things.
My next guest is a woman in Israel who had a near-death experience and it somehow gave
for a download of wisdom about how to raise children in a spiritual way.
And my guest following that is a woman in Ireland, I believe she's in Ireland, who routinely
all of her life has been seeing subtle beings, elves and fairies and leprechauns maybe, I
don't know, it's Ireland, but subtle perception like we were talking about earlier.
So that should be fun.
There is an upcoming interviews page on BatGap where you can see what we've got scheduled
and we usually schedule a month or two in advance.
You can sign up to be notified when new interviews are posted with the sign-up form on www.bathgap.com.
Okay, so thanks Riyaz, and thanks to everyone listening or watching.
We'll see you for the next one.
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Thank you.