ADYASHANTI & PETER KINGSLEY: A MEETING OF HEARTS

peter is actually the very first name that came to my mind when i was contemplating doing podcasts and let me just give all of you who don't know peter a little bit of an idea of him of his work peter's someone who to me has really kind of unparalleled knowledge and passion for the origins of western culture it's interesting because he's an incredible scholar of that time period but he's also a first-class mystic and those are at least in the modern day those are a kind of unusual combination i think originally thousands of years ago they were not an unusual combination they usually came together actually but now they've kind of split apart peter's also been author of i think peter five five books the latest of which is cataphal carl jung and the end of humanity i think put out in 2018. anyway that's a brief short introduction but um thank you for being with me peter i really appreciate you coming in and having a conversation with me well i appreciate you idea i appreciate you and it's it's always lovely to be with you it's always lovely to speak with you it's interesting to see the connections between us what they really are i mean you've mentioned as it were things that you're not i suppose you wouldn't identify as a scholar and so on but it's interesting to see what the connections are between us you said something a couple of years ago about how caring i remember that you felt a connection with me because we both care so much and i feel that's true but there must be a lot of people out there who really really care and i think somewhere i feel that the connection between us is that we recognize that we are willing to do anything for the sake of the truth yeah yeah that's certainly what i recognize in you and it's like a brother there you will do anything for the sake of the truth and that creates this solidarity with you that i i value and treasure so much yeah well thank you very very much and i think you really articulated that connection i remember it's on a personal note i remember the first time that i met you and you were kind enough to invite me over i think it took us to a lunch and i knocked on the door and you opened the door and i always find it an interesting thing whenever whenever i meet somebody especially somebody that i have a sort of connection with without even knowing exactly what it is or exactly why because we really didn't know each other much at all and when we met after we met and i was talking to my wife mukti and i said this is the one of the most odd encounters i've ever had and she said why is that and i said well it was so interesting when he opened the door we exchanged pleasantries he reached out and shook my hand and i said i had this visceral very visceral bodily feeling that i was surprised that there was an actual sort of solid hand at the end of his arm because i said i felt like i was just going to put my hand through something more like air or water and that that was something to do with the presence of you and i think that was the beginning of at least for me of uh i always find encounters like that just so fascinating because they're an entry point into a mystery that goes some far far beyond what we would probably conventionally call something personal but it's like a doorway into something yes but now that you're mentioning this before we move on and away from the personal before that before we met i think that my reality meant something to you and i i remember finding that odd you the zen teacher i would expect that when you were traveling around or at home you'd be carrying the sayings of the early zen patriarchs and studying the the diamond sutra but i was interested in what and i suppose i still am what it was in this book reality that was the name of the book that i wrote how many years ago what it was that drew you to it well that's an interesting question because it's a very fascinating book i've told you the surface reasons that i liked it the exquisite quality of writing which says nothing to as far as what it has to say and the to me it was almost like participating in some sort of ancient ritual or magic spell to read it and i i had to read it about the third time i started to really understand in a more visceral way not just an intellectually what was going on with that book the connection point for me peter was and this came this came years after i started to teach and i had this i guess i could say it was something that was shown to me you know i i had kind of an unusual background for a zen teacher you know my teacher she she taught out of her home and she had met and studied with some of the very best of the early wave of zen teachers that came here from japan because a lot of the early ones you know they were looking for for really sincere people that's why they fanned out and were looking around and anyway she had the good fortune to study with him but by the time i met her you know she had raised five kids she had sort of took off her zen robes and she was teaching in her living room in this very unadorned seemingly quite ordinary way anyway fast forward years later i was with her 14 years before she asked me to teach she's a little over 100 years old now and it was shown to me one day sort of what this lineage was now and then of course i make a big deal about lineage and who your teacher and your teacher's teacher and and all of that and then for for good reason and yet what i was shown that there was this almost like other lineage that i was a part of and that she was a part of and it was a lineage that had very very very ancient roots in fact so far back that i don't know where they came from they were definitely before buddhism it was this kind of this line of transmission that had very little anchors in the like tangible anchors in the world you know most traditions will have their temples and their their their writ material and their rituals and all these things that i think at least in part are ways of of anchoring the transcendent or the realization of transcendent into the world of time and space in a way and yet this lineage had had very very very very very little of that it was almost like air it was like a trend it was like a lineage of air or water and yet it was something that i felt or was shown was extraordinarily ancient and old and now getting to the book reality what i felt in that book which took me about the third reading to really start to get clear on was here was a apart from what you were seeming to write about there was something very very ancient here there was something that had to do with deep deep spiritual roots that go back who knows how far and it was more of a transmission it was a more of a feeling and that was like the brotherhood like okay there's something about what's going on in this book and being talked about and more than being talked about something that's being sort of transmitted in almost a verbally ritualistic way at least to me something about it felt extremely resonant for me and so that began the connection you know just as obscure as this sort of lineage that i intuited i don't know i just saw something of it reflected in the book reality that you'd that you'd written and then when i met you of course it was reflected even more strongly so that was sort of the ground or the the root of my sense of connection with you and your work and you're right it's very different from zen you know and zen's not particularly mystical in sort of a traditional sense of the word and so there's a lot of i guess divergence at one level of the work that you present and at least the zen side of my background and yet there's something else and it's that something else that has always felt very very resonant with you i guess that's the best way to put it well i'd like to say something reply that this airless this formless this shapeless tradition i call it the tradition behind other traditions it's the tradition that weaves in and out of other traditions and it weaves from east to west and west to east this is one of the reasons why it is for example that carl jung who i think is a great love of ours probably of both of us and that's no accident why he saw his work as being a zen for the west i find that intriguing it is problematic because people don't like a tradition behind other traditions they can feel insecure or threatened or wobbly or say that it's hype or it's imaginary or fictional and i mean i know in my case i'm not just a scholar as you said i mean the scholarship for me is a cloak that i just put on or take off at will that there's something behind the scholarship always has been for me and what it is behind people sometimes say well how can you be teaching primordial meditation as i used to and how can you be talking about an ancient lineage where you don't have a predecessor and i just have to laugh because one of the figures who traced out one of the branches of the many branches of this hidden tradition lived in the 12th century and he was put to death in his 30s for what he said it was dangerous still is dangerous to talk about these things and he talked about the levin i love this word he talked about the eternal and the eternal levant what is the point about levin it is alive it rises it is what makes bread rise it is a physical essence of life and that can be transmitted in the strangest of ways it doesn't need necessarily the physical constant generation to generation transmission yeah i love that word too it makes it sort of visceral at least for me and i've i think i've only talked about this once and it was years ago when it first came to me so it's not a subject that i that i dive in often but you're not you're not the kind of guy that i'm going to just dive into common threads of of of conversation and i think it's interesting that we get a chance here together to kind of in at least in some way clarify what seems to be a threat of connection because we've never talked about this before and and yet here we are we open up the conversation i didn't plan on speaking about it either i'm always intrigued by the plans we make and then the things that really happen i don't know i don't know well that's the joy of being with friends as well that's that's being with a real friend you come from one tradition i come from another and i love one of the sayings from the old zen tradition as far as i remember and that is the imagery of mirrors however clean we keep the mirror sometimes the rust comes on and friends are there to help to rub the rust off our mirror and maybe we can be cleaning each other's mirrors in this way through coming from different traditions and yet at the same time as we both admitted somewhere these different traditions they straddle east and west and they're not really different at all

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Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020